Not Exactly a Love Story (15 page)

I said, “I guess so,” but what I wanted to say, the way she said it to me, she must be counting on a lot of calls. “You know”—I walked over to the fridge—“the Italian alphabet doesn’t have as many letters as we do.”

“What do you mean?”

“The
H
is silent, so it’s …” I reached into the fridge for a bottle of wine. Taboo, but I was showing off. Patsy didn’t comment, but her eyes were wide open when I looked at her over my shoulder. “Um, Henry becomes Enrico.” I rolled the
r
and put the swing in the “rico.”

“Really.”

I hesitated to offer further illumination. After all, how much should I know? And I thought Vinnie ought to be a little less, well, verbal than Vincenzo. But willing to talk, because who wouldn’t be?

“How do you know that?” I saw a flash of hunger in her eyes.

“I asked when I heard it. I’m curious.”

“So,” she said.
“J?”

I shook my head. “An Italian name would start with a G.” I’d hit a pedantic note, and it was just right. Italian-name nerd.

“Are any other letters missing?” she asked.

“
K
,
W
,
X
, and
Y
.”

“W? I never noticed.”

“Elmer Fudd probably didn’t have an Italian heritage.” I grinned. “You know, ‘wascally wabbit’?”

She laughed. We were having a nice little conversation here. Which was what I wanted, after all. But now I was afraid she’d somehow leap to asking what names start with
V
, the way people in the same room sometimes come up with the same thought. I knew this was crazy, but I started to want her to leave.

“Thanks.” She turned on her brilliant response-to-applause smile, the kind of smile she used for peons who only wanted to pick up her books when she dropped them. I didn’t like feeling like a peon. I winked in a friendly way, hoping to set us back on even ground. But her smile faltered, then flattened to a phony paste-on as she let herself out. “Bye, Vinnie.”

I took a deep breath, letting the tension go.

I tried to sort through the ups and downs of this episode. I hadn’t offered her much of myself at all. Except for a moment there that I could be proud of, I was doing a bit, like
Dad sometimes pulls out of the air. It could have been a limp, a stutter, anything. This was a superior, holier-than-thou attitude that outdid Patsy’s own natural self-love.

In fact, I didn’t know why I wanted to do that. I had finally made contact, real face-to-face contact with her, and did I try to put in a good word for myself?

No.

I crossed the kitchen in two steps and yanked the door open. She was just standing in the driveway, arms crossed against the cold. Her house was dark except for the front light. “Hey,” I called. “You hungry?”

She turned and came back fast, saying, “
Cold
and hungry. Are you feeding strays?”

I didn’t have a comeback. I just grinned and shut the door behind her.

“You cooked this?” She sidled up to the table and looked at it from a funny angle, sort of down her nose. She was nervous—I got that—but she was hungry, too.

“Sautéed matchsticks of zucchini and linguini blanketed in a creamy tomato sauce,” I said in a rough impersonation of Julia Child.

“What’s creamy tomato sauce?”

“Southern Italian specialty.”

“Your dad taught you?”

“Just so we’re clear, Mr. B is not my dad.” She watched as I poured two inches of wine into glasses.

“Mr. B, then. Who taught you how to cook an Italian dish?” Patsy asked a tad too casually.

“You think they’re keeping it a national secret? We all like good food. Plates in the cabinet behind you. So what do you need these names for?”

“Oh, it’s a long story,” she said, setting the plates on the table. “Too long. Boring.”

I started loading on the spaghetti. I let her lack of explanation hang between us. Her face grew rosy.

I sat. And I let her off the hook. “You going to eat or you going to let it get cold?”

Dinner was easy. We started to talk about the class we shared.

And we decided to watch a movie after we did the dishes.
Love Story
was on TV. For a minute I let myself bask in the warmth of life’s little gifts—a good movie and I’m alone with Patsy.

I spent some time wondering whether it would be construed as a pass if I just let my arm fall along the back of the sofa. I wondered if she’d freak out after last night’s date with Biff. I doubted it; she wasn’t sitting all that close anyway. But she didn’t know that’s the way I sit most of the time. It really is.

We’d just about gotten to the really sad part when Patsy complained about her foot. Loudly.

“What is it?”

“Asleep. It’s gone to sleep,” she moaned, lifting it off the floor. The movement seemed to be painful.

“Shake it. Rub it.”

“No,” she yelled. “Don’t touch it.”

Too late. I pulled off her sneaker, which was the first shock, feeling her shoe so small in my hand. It should have prepared me for the warmth of her foot. But it didn’t. It didn’t. I understood in a flash all that I was meant to know the night of the junior dance. I told myself that was a silly notion. I gave her foot a hard rub, trying to dispel the sense of falling backward, of falling under a spell.

“Ow, ow, ow,” Patsy was yelling.

“You have to get the blood to circulate. Let’s get it moving,” I said unsympathetically, and gave it another vigorous rub.

“Ow, stop. It’ll get better on its own.”

I slid into the space beside her as she turned to put her foot on the floor. I had just a glimpse of the surprise on her face as I used my knee to adjust her position to suit mine and settled back into the film. Or appeared to.

What I was doing, while my heart was beating a mile a minute, was thinking about how easy it had been to get an arm behind her, to be practically wrapped around her although we weren’t actually touching anywhere now, and, after all the agony, how comfortable it was to be sitting that way. No sweaty palms, no awkward glances to check whether it was okay.

Vinnie Gold could be suave.

I couldn’t help thinking how un-Patsy she had become for a moment there and how unexpected it was. I had been
fooled by her once, believing she was as sure of herself as she looked. I knew now how carefully she presented herself to the world, and I knew that she was more afraid than Vincenzo had ever been.

I reached to switch the movie off, but she put a hand on my arm to stop me. “Let’s read the names. Maybe some are Italian.”

So I waited through the credits, she did the reading. “Is this for a book report?” I asked as the screen went to commercial. “Or maybe you’re a movie snob.”

She poked me with an elbow and made me grin. Latent violence. But I didn’t say anything. I was keeping my thumb on old Vincenzo.

“Can I see your house?” she asked then. “I mean, can I look around?”

“Sure.” Full of surprises, that Patsy. But what could I say? She strolled around the living room, touching the pottery and reading the book titles. “I’ll dig up something for dessert” was what I came up with while she was riffling through Mr. B’s collection of tapes.

I forgot about her for two or three minutes, searching for my mother’s private stash of brownies. Just before I found them, I’d convinced myself that Mom had left this habit behind with the apartment. But she’d simply found the ironing closet made a good hiding place.

“I’m going upstairs, okay?” Patsy called.

“Go ahead, I can eat all this by myself,” I said, believing she’d come into the kitchen.

But she didn’t.

I dished up some ice cream and put a brownie in each bowl. I tried to play it cool and dropped into place on the sofa, but I was up again like it was spring-loaded. Who was I kidding? Had I left that T-shirt next to the phone on my bedside table?

I followed Patsy up the stairs, skipping steps but trying to look
casual. Even the sound of my feet was casual.

The lights were on everywhere. She was coming out of the bathroom. “Check the medicine cabinet?” I said. But Patsy was cool.

“Yeah. Nothing incriminating there. I’m on my way to your room.”

I went in first, and maybe because she was getting to me, I don’t know, I went over and shut the blinds.

“Oh,” Patsy said, her tone suggestive. “He likes his privacy.” I stayed by the window.

“How about you?” I asked. She let her hand drift over my bookcase, then stopped to play with the photo cube on my desk, turning it over and over to peer at the snapshots.

“Is this you?” she asked, holding the photo cube out to me.

“That’s me.”

“You were a nerdy-looking little kid.”

“That’s me.”

She laughed, really laughed, and I realized I’d never heard her laugh in person, not this laugh that I’d heard come across the phone wires every so often. It changed her face in a way I liked, made her seem so much more approachable.

She put down the cube, saying, “Me too. Braces, glasses, the works.”

“Glasses?”

“I wear contacts. You get good grades, Gold,” she said, making one of her lightning-swift shifts to distract me. “You know that, of course.”

I didn’t say anything about studying to get them. All my better instincts were working overtime, and I let them. For once, thank God, I let them.

She picked up the homework laying on my desk. My strategy for this new English class was to rewrite the essays I’d already gotten good grades on in Queens. But her interest was obviously a ruse to gloss over a moment of vulnerability. Patsy, slightly less than perfect.

“This is pretty interesting. No wonder the teachers are happy about you.”

What teachers? I hadn’t noticed. “What’s so interesting?”

Her eyes narrowed, detecting a whiff of what’s-so-interesting-about-me? Patsy turned around to give me the first sheet of several that were paper-clipped together. It read:

“In all fairness,” I said—sounding very nearly normal, considering that I had no idea what lie I was about to tell—“the subject was suggested to me. I didn’t come up with it by myself.”

“You have your own phone?” Patsy said, playing it cool. “A private number, I mean.”

I understood the question. The thing was, I didn’t want to answer it. I think I was grinning inanely, trying to think of what I could say that would distract her completely. But my mind was a blank. A blank.

Patsy hadn’t moved a muscle. Her cheeks pinked up. And then she blushed from the neckline of her sweater right up to the roots of her hair. “You worried about something?” I asked her.

“No.” Defensively. She doesn’t put up with teasing. Not from Vincenzo. Not from Vinnie Gold.

“My mistake. I thought you looked a little nervous.”

She didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “If I was
nervous, and I’m not saying I am, what would I have to be nervous about?” Her defenses were fast on their feet and not at all inclined to make mistakes. I wished I could say the same for mine.

“Maybe you aren’t used to hanging around a guy’s bedroom.” I leaned back on the bed, propped myself up on an elbow.

“Maybe I’m not,” she said in a casual tone that lost a couple of points for breathlessness. “Maybe I am,” she said playfully. Her voice failed on “I am,” and ruined the effect. She knew it. I saw it in her eyes.

“Maybe you’re not. Maybe that’s why you ask so many questions.” We were both silent then, but the room was filled with energy. War was being waged.

Her mother’s car purred through the driveway at just that moment, declaring a truce. “Aren’t you serving dessert, Gold?” Patsy said, and turned on her heel.

I followed her downstairs.

Not more than half a dozen words passed between us as we spooned up the softened ice cream. I don’t know what she was thinking about. But I knew she was thinking. I also knew it was hopeless to try to second-guess her. I would just have to be ready for her.

But when the ice cream and brownies were gone, it seemed neither of us could think of anything to say. Which made it a good time to say good night. We gravitated to the back door and stood in the charged place where the warm and cold air exchanged greetings. It wasn’t all that late, but
it was dark. And really cold. We didn’t hurry ourselves, though, there was a funny little gap that needed to be filled.

I said, “Want to go to a movie with me? Say, Wednesday night?”

“Wednesday?”

“The teachers have an administration day on Thursday, remember?”

“No school. I know.” Patsy gave me one of those size-you-up looks. “I like that.”

“What?”

“You’re not playing it cool.”

“By Wednesday you could be going with somebody else,” I said. Like Biff.

She said, “So. Wednesday. A movie.”