Virgin Territory (15 page)

And she goes back to the business with the dress as if nothing has happened, as if she hasn’t just changed my life forever.

Every morning, the hot-dog guy lugs his cart up the embankment, parks it near the entrance gate, and opens his large red-and-yellow umbrella. All day long, he fusses over a collection of dogs that bob and boil in an overheated tank. He smiles and makes change, and then when the sun goes down, he packs up his cart and trundles back to where he came from. This has been his daily ritual ever since the BVM started appearing at the golf club. I don’t think he’s getting rich from selling hot dogs, but he seems satisfied with the turnout each day and encouraged by the fact that he’s busy noon till nighttime.

“Look,” Angela says as we sit on a couple of milk crates that we’ve placed not far from the hot-dog stand. “It’s like he’s studying us. Wave.”

And we both hold up our half-eaten hot dogs for him to see; with our other hands we wave and then give him big smiles, as if we’re two all-American teens on their first date. He waves back and shows us his teeth.

“I bet he thinks we’re on a date,” she says to me.

“Aren’t we?”

“I guess that depends.”

“On what?” I ask.

She stares at me for almost a full minute and then stuffs the last of her hot dog into her mouth. She chews forever. Swallows. The whole time she’s looking at me right in the eyes. I don’t break. Neither does she. It’s a standoff. She gives her mouth a quick swipe with her crumpled-up napkin; then, without a word of warning, she leans toward me and offers me her lips. We kiss, and my stomach drops about five hundred feet in a free fall so impressive that I think I might be dying. My heart is slamming hard against my rib cage with a heavy metal beat, and I feel a fizzle of energy at the base of my spine. The inside of her mouth tastes like mustard. Her tongue feels like something wild that’s just been released into my mouth and is madly searching for an exit.

“Wow,” I remark the second our lips unlock and I can catch my breath. “That was … that was awesome.”

“I know,” she says matter-of-factly, “but we can’t let it go to our heads.”

She presses the cold can of soda to her face in an effort to cool herself down, then points to the hot-dog vender, who is busy with his next customer—a family of four in matching outfits. My head is spinning, and I can’t think of a single word that might do any good in a situation like this because I’ve never
been in a situation like this, and any movie I can think of is no help at all.

“He can’t be making that much money, that guy,” she finally says. “And it seems like a lot of trouble just for chump change.”

“Maybe he likes it?” I manage to say as I swallow my last bite of dog. “Maybe it’s fun for him.”

“What? Selling hot dogs in the baking sun? You call that fun?”

“Maybe. Maybe he’s got a wife, and he’d do anything for her. He’d even sell hot dogs in hell if it meant making her happy.”

“Love,” she adds, as though a label is required.

“Love,” I echo.

She then tells me a long and complicated story about this older guy she knew once upon a time. She says that she would’ve done anything for him. And did. I got the impression that he kind of swept her off her feet without even trying.

“Love,” I add, as though a label is required.

“Love,” she echoes.

“How much older?” I ask. I’m trying to get a clearer picture.

“Old enough,” she replies.

As it happened, the guy left town just as unexpectedly as he’d arrived, and she was devastated by the loss. She cried for days; she didn’t understand what had happened, how he could have left without her. She felt as though she couldn’t possibly go on.
“What’s the point?”
she says to describe her feelings. Shortly after that, she was at school and fell down the stairs. Soon after that, she discovered she couldn’t walk.

“So that’s why I don’t believe in love,” she says, leaning in and wiping a bit of mustard from my chin with her napkin. “It just messes everything up.”

She wants to change the subject; she doesn’t even want to think about love.

“Talking about it,” she says in a voice that is flat and hollow, “is like touching your tongue to the place where there used to be a tooth. I brought it up only because I thought you’d maybe understand. You know, because of losing your mother and all.”

I understand, but all I can think about is the fact that I’m on my first date. And the kiss. The kiss is major. I’ve never kissed a girl, not in my whole life, and certainly not on the lips. How can I think of anything else? Why should I? I’m amazed to find that I’m pretty good at it, too. Even without any training or prep time, I knew exactly where to move my head, and how to get the best possible effect with my tongue, and when enough was, as they say, enough. Is it possible that our DNA is encoded with instructions for this sort of thing, and the moment love kicks in we know instinctively what to do, how to behave, and when to bust a move?
When will there be more kissing?
That’s what I’m thinking.
When? When?
I feel as though my mouth has just found its true and original purpose, and anything less than kissing is a waste of time. Does she feel the same as I do? I have an overwhelming urge to tell her everything. I want to tell her about New York, about the buildings and the bustle of it all, the subways and the thin sliver of blue overhead that we came to
know as sky. Even the smells seem like something that should be talked about. I should also mention my mother. I should tell her about the empty place inside of me.

Just then, I notice a piece of string tangled in a nearby bush, just some forgotten bit of flotsam that found its way there and took hold; it’s about six inches long and looks as though it’s been there for quite a while. Angela watches me as I get up, walk toward the bush, and carefully liberate the string.

“What’s this?” she asks as I offer her the tattered and bedraggled thing. She takes it from me, and, judging from her expression as she turns it over and over in her hands, she doesn’t think much of it as a gift. It’s just some limp bit of balloon string that never made it out of Jupiter.

“My mom,” I say as a way of explaining. “She had a small business once upon a time making wearable art. She used to collect string and yarn and ribbon and bits of wire that she found on the streets of Manhattan. I helped her. We’d go out together, looking for stuff that got stuck in a hedge or on a fence. Stuff like that string.”

Angela holds up the string and winds it delicately around her fingers. She’s looking at it closely, and I think maybe now it’s turning into something valuable to her. I realize, in that moment, that I just might know how to do this: I know how to make that string more than it is. I can tell the story of Kat after all.

“She knitted and crocheted and somehow stitched the stuff together to make this collection of skirts and dresses. Eventually,
she had a whole line of clothing. She called it String Theory. She made little labels and then sold some of the clothes to this trendy SoHo boutique for, like, maybe two seasons. The stuff was pretty cool, but it didn’t really catch on. She gave some of the dresses away, then packed the leftovers into these enormous cardboard boxes and stored them at the back of our loft.”

“What was her name?” Angela asks.

“Kat,” I tell her, and then I continue with the story, because I haven’t gotten to the good part yet, and I’m on a roll. “But then one day Kat had this idea. She wanted to throw a party in our loft. But not like a normal party. She called it a Dream Workshop. It was like an adult sleepover. She had the whole thing figured out. There was going to be dream food, dream readings, dream music, and in the morning, when everyone woke up, they would all share their dreams and write poems.”

“For real?” Angela asks.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Would I make something like this up? Anyway, I watched her buzz around the loft for weeks, making the invitations and a background sound track. She was kind of crazed by the whole thing. Obsessed, really. And I helped out. I was just a kid, so I didn’t realize how nutty the whole thing was. For me, it was fun and a chance to hang out with my mom.

“Then one afternoon, she starts tearing into the boxes of clothing. She pulls out every last item from her String Theory collection, and she starts decorating the loft with the clothes.
She hangs them all over the place and turns the whole loft into something like out of a dream. Even Doug, who could sometimes get a little freaked by Kat’s crazy ideas, had to admit that it was kind of genius. We never took it down. Ever.”

Angela is staring at the string, and though I wouldn’t swear to it, I’m pretty sure that she sees it the way I do, the way Kat did. She holds it up and offers it to me like it’s a hundred-dollar bill that rightfully belongs to me, because I found it in the first place. I take the string and tie it around her wrist, knotting it just tight enough so that it won’t slip off.

Then I kneel down and lean in close so that I can cut off the straggly ends with my teeth. Tenderly, she puts her hand on my hair. I snap off the end of the string, then rest my head in her lap. It’s a perfect moment, and I find that I’m trying to remember it as it is happening.

Then she says to me, “So you might as well know, the guy was my father.”

I look up at her, but she’s busy gazing off into the distance.

“The guy?” I say to her stupidly.

“Yeah, the guy. The one I was talking about. The one who left and broke my heart. My dad. He collected things, too. But not string. Stuff. It wasn’t like we stole from anyone in particular. We just took stuff that no one would miss. From stores. Anyway, he ran off before they arrested him. And I didn’t actually steal stuff. I was the lookout.”

“Oh, my God,
there
you are!” Desirée yells, running up to us
in a state so extreme it eclipses everything else. Suddenly, she’s the thing that is happening, our date is over, and any further discussion about moms or dads is out the window. “I thought I’d lost you, and I can’t afford to lose you. Either of you. Not now. Not as we’re about to face our biggest challenge ever. Where’ve you been? Never mind. Come, come. You have to come now. I just had the most brilliant idea about the contest!”

She pulls us along, and the whole time she’s talking, but I don’t know what she’s saying. I’m not listening because I’m too wrapped up in thoughts of Angela and her dad. As we approach the BVM tree, I can see Crispy sitting on a sheet on the green. He sees us coming, and he’s shaking his head like I’m a hopeless case infected with some kind of deadly disease that I went and caught all by myself, despite his warnings.

“You have to ask your dad,” Desirée says to me as she gives my arm a yank. “You have to.”

“My dad?” I ask dully as I shake myself into the present tense. “Ask him what?”

Next thing I know, Crispy has joined us, and the four of us are scrambling through the crowd in search of Doug. The plan is to enroll him in the business of making the video for Desirée.

“Doug is the answer to our prayers,” Desirée tells us all. “Why didn’t we think of it before? It was so obvious!”

“You realize that you’ve lost your mind,” Crispy says, but whether he’s addressing his comment to me or to Desirée or to Angela is not that clear. I can’t see his eyeballs through the dark
of his sunglasses and his assessment could be applied to any one of us, to all of us.

Crispy’s been looking at me strangely for days. He knows or thinks he knows that something’s up between Angela and me. We’re just best buds—that’s what I keep telling him. Best buds, that’s all. But he doesn’t believe it. Not for a second. And the fact that I asked her out on a date the night before is proof that I’ve been lying to him all along. He’s just jealous. Now he rushes at me, grabs my arm, and pulls me aside.

“Dude,” he whispers into my ear. “Get a grip.”

“What’re you talking about?” I reply as I yank my arm back from him. I give him my most vacant and uncomprehending stare.

“I’m talking about the fact you don’t stand a chance with her, and she’s sucking you in big-time. You’ve got to watch yourself. She’s not who you think she is. Believe me. And you’ve got lip gloss on your chin.”

By the time I’ve wiped away the lip gloss, we’ve caught up with Doug. He’s just finishing up an interview with a Latino family of five who are dressed in matching summer ponchos. I’m wondering,
What’s with all the matching outfits? Is it so that the families and spouses can find one another in the crowd? Is it because they see themselves in one another?
We wait patiently on the sidelines while the family members say their good-byes to Doug and then, at the first opportunity, we move in.

“What’s up, sport?” Doug asks.

Sport?

“Go on,” Des says, pushing me forward. “Ask him.”

I present Desirée’s case as though her whole life depends on it, which in a way it does, and then I plead with him to help us make the video. I pour it on thicker than usual because I want Doug to understand that he
has
to do this for me. Doug knows exactly what’s going on. He understands that my goal is to impress the hell out of Angela by proving to her that I am the go-to guy who can make things happen.

Doug is, of course, very interested in the change that’s recently come over me, and as long as it doesn’t involve breaking and entering, he says he wants to encourage it. But he also has his own stuff going on.

“They’re going to open the gates,” Doug informs us. It’s 99 percent for sure, and he has to be there to film the people when they first lay eyes on that tree.

The fact that Jack Felder is about to give in and let people trample the grounds of his golf course was unthinkable only a week ago, but the Holy Rollers never doubted, not for a minute. According to them, Felder had no choice but to give in because there is and always has been a Higher Authority at work; it was just a matter of time before things were made clear and the way was opened, of that they were sure. Think of the parting of the Red Sea, they tell one another and else anyone who will listen, and you will get the picture. So when word arrives via text from Boca that the gates can be opened and the people will now be
allowed to go across the grass toward the third hole, none of the faithful are all that surprised: excited, but not surprised. Maybe this is what faith is all about—the certainty that things will turn out well, even if they don’t turn out quite as we expect.