A Leak In The Safe

Bethany: Part XII

Sex is a part of nature, after all, so I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising that its consummation often depends on the weather. Bethany and I had gone about as far as two people could without progressing to the actual act, more out of problematic logistics than any reluctance on either of our parts. Even in a house as enormous as Bethany’s, it’s hard to find privacy when surrounded by nine inquisitive siblings and two protective parents. As for my place, the family may have been far smaller but the house was too. I’d discovered in the past that my parents’ Ford LTD was roomy enough to accommodate most anything, but I think Bethany and I both felt that such a setting lacked the gravitas her long deferred defloration demanded.

But I needn’t have worried because, as usual, Bethany had planned everything out. One evening she suggested that, rather than embarking on our usual cross-cultural field trip, we head over to Pitt Prep. We snuck into the girls dorm to "party" with a couple of her boarder friends, a less than decadent event which featured Cheez Whiz on crackers and a lot of giggling. We didn’t stay that long, and soon crept back down the fire escape and into a fine spring night, alive with the budding charms of our sylvan campus, which for once looked very like the one pictured in the brochures.

"I thought maybe we could have a – uh – picnic," Bethany said as she retrieved the large canvas bag she’d stowed in the trunk of my car.

"Sure, sure, great idea." We walked hand in hand in silence, slowly descending the long hill that led to the gym.

"D – d – do you . . . " she finally stuttered, "know some place we could be, ah, alone?"

"Ah . . . " I said, almost blurting out Oh, I get it. "Yeah, yeah, I know just the place."

She was asking the right guy. I’ve always had a knack for finding what I call the empty places. Anywhere that retains even the slightest trace of wildness contains hidden spaces obscured from the view of formal society, pockets of freedom, gaps in the landscape where people go to do all the things that our culture doesn’t like to admit people do – the ancient remedies of drink, drugs and sex. In a primitive society the universal urge to break taboos was recognized by having certain sacred times and places where proscribed, antisocial activities were permitted and even sacralized. Today they’re pushed to the fringes, to the empty places. Even as a boy in an unfamiliar park I could unerringly push my way through a seemingly impassable path to discover a secluded spot of tramped down dirt, littered with cigarette butts, empty beer cans and used rubbers, somewhere where teenagers and other outlaws had celebrated their bacchanals for generations, an ability that came in handy when I, under the tutelage of that Maenad Heather, started attending the rites myself.

On our campus the prime empty space was in the middle of the cross country course. The course was a long strip of land between Fox Chapel Road and the golf course with a line of trees down the center, the idea being that the runners would run up one side, around the far end and continue back on the other side. At Spartan Pitt Prep running the cross country course was considered an extremely salutary activity for any young person, and since involvement in athletics was mandatory it was every student’s fate to spend large portions of their life chugging up and down that damn path.

But, of course, there are ways in the world to get around, or in this case though most everything. The tree line was thick enough, a strip of the old forest that hadn’t been cleared, but it wasn’t impenetrable, and since our musclebound gym teachers didn’t care to undertake the beneficial exercise themselves, the wily and daring malcontent would duck in among the trunks and linger there until the pack finally returned in the other direction, conveniently enough in about the time it took to share a joint, certainly raising spirits for the brief sprint back to the gym. The best place for this respite was a propitious bulge in the tree line, far enough to avoid casual monitoring but close enough to make the most burdensome portion of the running unnecessary.

Located within this bulge was the primo Pitt Prep empty space, maintained by the stoners and malcontents with a vigor they applied to little else. Within a natural enclosure ringed by thick undergrowth and sheltered by hanging boughs were a couple of those chairs with desks on the arms from the classrooms, a few folding chairs from the gym bleachers, a vinyl gymnastics mat, an official Pitt Prep trash can and even, for mood lighting, an assortment of candles in glass holders liberated from many of Pittsburgh’s finest restaurants. Over time the place had grown from a casual rest stop into a general sanctuary, availably day and night to those wishing to escape the censorious gaze of our overseers and their fellow traveling student Quislings.

"Wow." Of course Bethany, ever dedicated to staying the course, saw it for the first time that night. "So this is where you guys go."

"Yes."

"And you’ve been here before."

"Yes, many times," I said unthinkingly before catching the stern flash of her eyes. "But never like this. Never with a girl."

"Really? Not even Heather?" It was the first time she’d mentioned Heather, or indeed any of the others, including our one mutual friend, Virginia.

"No. Hanging out with other people, maybe, but not like this," I lied. "Not just the two of us."

"Hmmm." She hummed doubtfully, but her plan was already too far advanced, and she busied herself with emptying the bag of its contents – a large plaid blanket, a bottle of Hungarian Tokay and a single rubber.

"You underestimate me, my dear," I said. "You’re lucky I brought reinforcements."

"What?" she asked coloring. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No, not at all, everything’s great, it’s wonderful." I picked up the bottle. "I don’t suppose you brought a corkscrew?"

"No, darn it, I didn’t think of it." And how could she, unfamiliar as she was with stimulants – I’d never even seen a sip of coffee pass her lips much less alcohol. But she was deeply embarrassed at the failure of her fabled competence, blushing even more deeply, her long, crooked nose staying inexplicably pale.

"Oh, Bethany, that doesn’t matter either. Come on, just relax, we don’t need all that. Come here, everything’s going to be all right." I took her in my arms and very soon we’d left all embarrassment behind.

Although at the time it was the farthest thing from my mind, due to the Arcadian nature of the proceedings, years later when I came across these lines from Guido Cavalcanti’s In a Small Grove I met a Little Shepherdess I immediately thought of Bethany and that night:

That the god of Love – I seemed to see.

Two Pictures of Ellen

In the first picture Ellen’s self-sufficient, alone – one of only two new members, she’s younger than the rest and where they’re close, shoulders touching, she’s sitting apart, legs crossed, hands intertwined over one knee. The girl behind her, the Leader, is sitting on the old chair that’s always on the porch of the Craft Center, her leg sticking out so that there’s literally a foot between Ellen and the person next to her. Even though she’s at the far end of the bottom row, she steals the scene like she always does, and even with Annie Cutter leaning toward the camera, smiling with real Annie Cutter joy, your eye goes straight to Ellen with her sly grin, bare shoulders above a yellow sun dress, and brown feet in wooden Dr. Scholl’s sandals.

When the picture was taken, she must have already known she’d be the new Leader, but you can also see her sadness, lightly masked, to be so soon losing so many of the friends around her to graduation.

In the second picture what she’d imagined has become concrete – she’s physically and metaphysically at the center. Even though she’s the shortest, she dominates the photo, again in a sun dress and Dr. Scholl’s, her violet faced watch calling attention to the flawless skin of her arm and from there to the flawless skin all over her, the great gift of her smile at once warm and the most deadly deadpan, her short, fine black hair parted precisely in the middle of her forehead, shadowing her high, round cheekbones and those (half) Japanese eyes, her face almost that of a conventional American brunette beauty, but edged with the delicacy and exotic scale of the Japanese. Everyone around her looks so comfortable – there’s something about Ellen that makes the people she’s with feel like they’re part of a group, and not just any group but the right group – maybe that’s why she’s always surrounded by so many friends.

Bethany: Part XI

Things didn’t play out the usual way after our clinch – Bethany and I didn’t go on to become one of those 24/7 couples, never more than a foot away from each other, who clotted the campus, and in fact in school we were friendly but stayed within out own rarely intersecting circles, barely acknowledging our newfound intimacy. Even on our weekly dates we’d begin as no more than affectionate lab partners, studiously exploring each other’s environments, only later moving on to continue our serious experimentation in the science of making out. We avoided the usual going out itineraries of movies and parties to alternate playing tour guide and tourist, as Bethany revealed to me her Fox Chapel and I showed her my Squirrel Hill, getting to know each other through the formative landscapes of our youth before, inevitably, becoming familiar with the still forming landscapes of each other’s bodies,

And Fox Chapel was like a foreign country to me. Even though I’d gone to school for almost four years there and cruised its lower depths with Heather, the straight side of things was as alien to me as the moon. I wasn’t used to a place that had no sidewalks and no place to walk except through the hedges to the neighbor’s for a glass of white wine or an affair, where the driveways were fancier than the roads and cars were as necessary as legs. In my neighborhood the little old ladies could pull their two wheeled carts up Murray Avenue and find all of life’s necessities, with only occasional bus trips downtown to supply the luxuries.

Bethany was just as wide eyes at all the pedestrians in Squirrel Hill, not just in the stores, but between the stores, the stores themselves not in a strip mall but right on the street, a great many with apartments above in which people (gasp) actually lived. I took her to the bookstores, newsstands and variety stores I’d haunted ever since I could walk, places with who knew what piled in bins or tacked up to the walls. And, of course, the farther down Murray you got the more yarmulkes there were, the more side curls, bagel shops, mezuzahs and kosher food signs appeared – for Bethany it was like the National Geographic. As a Hungarian Catholic she was considered somewhat exotic in Fox Chapel, but in Squirrel Hill she was just another goy

For my part, I appreciated the inevitable cruises through the Fox Chapel’s sylvan beauty, and the disingenuous street names – White Faun Lane, Hickory Hill Road, Nantucket Drive – many of them only big enough for one house, thereby doing away with the need for house numbers, which in any case seldom got into three figures. I appreciated the Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor and the Hallmark shops that were Bethany’s favorite childhood destinations, but they usual didn’t seem worth the trip, and the whole time I couldn’t help thinking that living in a suburb, wealthy or not, would quickly drive me batty.

I even dipped a reluctant toe into the world of school spirit, participating in the decoration of one of Bethany’s beloved floats in the company of several enthusiastic, giggling girls and a few forever panting nerds, but found my more creative decorative suggestions declined, if not derided.

We shared the landmarks of our brief lives, the grade schools and churches we’d both grown up in, all in all making a very sober, serious and by and large successful attempt to do exactly what I’d proposed in the beginning – to get to know each other. But there was another shadow agenda, one that emerged only in the dark when it was almost time to take Bethany home. Her caresses and kisses were fervent then, much more fervent than our mutual affection warranted, an affection that neither of us pretended was more than friendship, and I slowly realized that she was trying to provide herself with the one part of her education that she’d neglected – the physical grammar of love. In the same way she was determined to take in the parts of Pittsburgh she’d missed before leaving town for college, she seemed equally committed to losing her virginity before becoming a freshman again.