A Leak In The Safe

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.

She Walks on Glass

A spotlight appears around Brooke Shields, who is dressed in mock-Arab style, with a jeweled halter and a long sequined skirt, gold bracelets on her wrists and arms. The spotlight widens to show a large rectangle on the floor, and I see what I had taken to be some kind of bad taste mosaic is really a large box, like a long sandbox, filled with pieces of broken glass.

Teary-eyed, she pauses halfway across the glass, a jewel stuck somehow in the middle of her forehead, her hair longer than I’ve seen it, layered softly over her shoulders. She moves her hands to draw attention to her red fingernails, and from them also to her red toenails, poised above the red labels of the broken bottles, all that red supposed to make the red blood on her foot seem like an illusion, but I see it, spreading under the skin the way blood does, as she concentrates on each step, each motion of her hip, her final step off the glass as deliberate as all the others. She makes the same measured gesture with her hand and then runs off the floor, skipping a little on her bad foot.

Bethany: Part X

I realized then that among the many things I didn’t know about Bethany was exactly where she lived. Last year, I’d roamed the amoeba shaped maze that was Fox Chapel with Heather many nights in many states of consciousness, but back then we were just cruising, letting chance set our agenda, and most of it was a blur now – except the locations of the houses and hangouts of a few of the most notable trust fund druggies. Not surprisingly, however, Bethany was a very competent guide, able, unlike Heather, to tell me to turn before we’d passed an intersection. We pulled onto one of the streets that uncoils into a hydra’s head of roundabouts and dead ends and slowly wended our way left and right until we reached the driveway of her showcase home.

Heather lived in what was an authentic Fox Chapel mansion, a decaying relic of the old days, but Bethany’s house was something different, not the old Fox Chapel, but an incredible simulation, a modern pastiche that suggested old money and a huge lot while actually being fabricated with new materials and sitting within a few hundred yards of the neighbors. The driveway was short but seemed long, with an unnecessary dogleg and a line of short, bushy trees.

"Go all the way over," Bethany said. "By the garage." It seemed unnecessarily far from the front door I was ostensibly delivering her to, but I’d grown used to following her directions and pulled over.

At the end of a first date there’s always a moment of truth, a rapidly approaching finish line, a deadline really, and I approached it apprehensively, especially since I’d so carefully framed our encounter as an exploratory meeting between two new friends without any romantic overtones, and yet was feeling, almost despite myself, the first strong stirrings of desire.

"Come on," she said as I sat there numbly, still working things out. "You can walk me to the door."

"Sure, sure," I said, getting out, then actually having the presence of mind to open her door for her when I noticed she wasn’t following.

"Thanks." When we reached the corner of the garage she stopped and touched my arm. "Hold on." I realized later that this was the last place where we still couldn’t be seen from the house.

You don’t have to be enlightened to know when a woman wants to kiss you, and there’s something there, in that pregnant moment of silence when your eyes meet and that magnetic pull grows, that seems to contain in embryo everything, everything the two of you will know or have together. I wasn’t surprised when she came to me enthusiastically, but I was somewhat taken aback when she immediately thrust her tongue into my mouth and even more so when she firmly grabbed my wrists and took the hands I’d tentatively laid on her hips and lifted them to her breasts.

Obligingly, I squeezed and she made no demur. I was truly shocked at the turn of events, but, fortunately, my body seemed to know what to do, and returned her eager but awkward caresses, until, abruptly, she broke away.

"Wow…" I said. "Bethany, I didn’t…"

"Let’s go," she said. "They’ll be wondering what happened to us."

We walked up to the door again. "So, I take it we can go out again."

"I don’t know," she said, smiling. "What do you think?"

"I think yes."

"Me too. Good night." She leaned forward for a conventionally chaste kiss and went quickly through the door.

I stood there numbly until I noticed a small blond child staring at me from the picture window, and then made my way back to the car, not thinking about anything but the mechanics of starting the car, turning it around, and getting it rolling back down the driveway. I slowed to a stop at the end, though, overwhelmed, holding my hands out in front of me, the warm press of her still weighing on my palms.

What had just happened?