Chapter 9 2

"How can we ever avoid danger if we don't know what danger is?" Mary asked.
　　"It's out there. You could trip and fall over an old log and break your leg and nobody would ever find you. Or you could be caught in a blizzard with the wind blowing every which way until you can't find your own front door, and then they'd find you the next morning, frozen like a Popsicle, not ten feet from home."
　　"Enough!" They shouted in unison and went off to watch Howdy Doody or Romper Room. I knew, however, that while I was at school or rehearsing with the band, they would ignore my cautions. They'd come home with grass stains on their knees and bottoms, ticks on their bare skin, twigs in their curls, frogs in their overalls, and the smell of danger on their breath.
　　But that night they were sleeping lambs, and two doors down my parents snored. My father called out my name in his sleep, but I dared not answer at such a late hour. The house grew preternaturally still. I had told my darkest secret with no consequences, so I went to bed, safe as ever.
　　
　　
　　They say that one never forgets one's first love, but I am chagrined to admit that I do not remember her name or much else about her—other than the fact that she was the first girl I saw naked. For the sake of the story, I'll call her Sally. Maybe that actually was her name. After the summer of my confession to Oscar, I resumed my lessons with Mr. Martin, and there she was. She had departed at the end of the school year and returned a different creature— someone to be desired, a fetish, an obsession. I am as guilty of anonymous lust as anyone, but it was she who chose me. Her affections I gratefully accepted without pause. I had been noticing her curves for months, before she gathered the courage to speak to me at the winter recital. We stood together backstage in our formal wear, enduring the wait for our individual turns at the piano. The youngest kids went first, for agony is best served as an appetizer.
　　"Where did you learn to play?" Sally whispered over an achingly slow minuet.
　　"Right here. I mean with Mr. Martin."
　　"You play out of this world." She smiled, and, buoyed by her remarks, I gave my most inspired recital. In the weeks and months that followed, we slowly got to know each other. She would hang around the studio listening to me play the same piece over and over, Mr. Martin whispering gruffly, "Adagio, adagio." We arranged to have lunch together on Saturdays. Over sandwiches spread out on waxed paper, we'd chat about that day's lessons. I usually had a few dollars in my pocket from performances, so we could go to a show or stop for an ice cream or a soda. Our conversations centered around the kinds of subjects fifteen-year-olds talk about: school, friends, unbelievable parents, and, in our case, the piano. Or rather, I talked about music: composers, Mr. Martin, records, the affinities of jazz with the classics, and all sorts of nattering theories of mine. It was not a conversation, more like a monologue. I did not know how to listen, how to draw her out, or how to be quiet and enjoy her company. She may well have been a lovely person.
　　When the sun began to heat up the spring air, we took a stroll to the park, a place I normally avoided because of its resemblance to the forest. But the daffodils were in flower, and it seemed perfectly romantic. The city had turned on the fountain, another sign of spring, and we sat by the water's edge, watching the cascade for a long time. I did not know how to do what I wanted to do, how to ask, what to say, in what manner even to broach the subject. Sally saved me.
　　"Henry?" she asked, her voice rising an octave. "Henry, we've been taking walks and having lunch together and going to the movies for over three months, and in all that time, I've wondered: Do you like me?"
　　"Of course I do."
　　"If you like me, like you say, how come you never try to hold my hand?"
　　I took her hand in mine, surprised by the heat in her fingers, the perspiration in her palm.
　　"And how come you've never tried to kiss me?"
　　For the first time, I stared her straight in the eyes. She looked as if she were trying to express some metaphysical question. Not knowing how to kiss, I did so in haste, and regret now not having lingered awhile, if only to remember the sensation. She ran her fingers through my brilliantined hair, which produced an unexpected reaction, and I copied her, but a riddle percolated through my mind. I had no idea what to do next. Without her sudden discovery of a need to catch a streetcar, we might still be sitting there, stupidly staring into each other's faces. On the way back to meet my father, I took apart my emotions. While I "loved" my family by this point in my human life, I had never "loved" a stranger. It's voluntary and a tremendous risk. The emotion is further confused by the matter of lust. I counted the hours between Saturdays, anxious to see her.
　　Thank goodness she took the initiative. While we were necking in the dark balcony of the Penn Theater, she grabbed my hand and placed it on her breast, and her whole body fluttered at my touch. She was the one who suggested everything, who thought to nibble ears, who rubbed the first thigh. We rarely spoke when we were together anymore, and I did not know what Sally was scheming or, for that matter, if she was thinking at all. No wonder I loved the girl, whatever her name was, and when she suggested that I feign an illness to get out of Mr. Martin's class, I gladly complied.
　　We rode the streetcar to her parents' home on the South Side. Climbing the hill to her house in the bright sunshine, I started to sweat, but Sally, who was used to the hike, skipped up the sidewalk, teasing that I could not keep up. Her home was a tiny perch, clinging to the side of a rock. Her parents were gone, she assured me, for the whole day on a drive out to the country.
　　"We have the place to ourselves. Would you like a lemonade?"
　　She might as well have been wearing an apron, and I smoking a pipe. She brought the drinks and sat on the couch. I drank mine in a single swig and sat on her father's easy chair. We sat; we waited. I heard a crash of cymbals in my mind's ear.
　　"Why don't you come sit beside me, Henry?"
　　Obedient pup, I trotted over with a wagging tail and lolling tongue. Our fingers interlocked. I smiled. She smiled. A long kiss—how long can you kiss? My hand on her bare stomach beneath her blouse triggered a pent-up primal urge. I circled my way north. She grabbed my wrist.
　　"Henry, Henry. This is all too much." Sally panted and fanned herself with her fluttering hands. I rolled away, pursed my lips, and blew. How could I have misinterpreted her signals?
　　Sally undressed so quickly that I almost failed to notice the transition. As if pushing a button, off came her blouse and bra, her skirt, slip, socks, and underwear. Through the whole act, she brazenly faced me, smiling beatifically. I did love her. Of course, I had seen pictures in the museum, Bettie Page pinups and French postcards, but images lack breadth and depth, and art isn't life. Part of me pulled forward, desperate to lay my hands upon her skin, but the mere possibility held me back. I took a step in her direction.
　　"No, no, no. I've showed you mine; now you have to show me yours."
　　Not since a young boy at the swimming hole had I taken off my clothes in front of anyone else, much less a stranger, and I was embarrassed at the prospect. But it is hard to refuse when a naked girl makes the request. So I stripped, the whole time watching her watching me. I had progressed as far as my boxers when I noticed that she had a small triangle of hair at the notch of her, and I was completely bare. Hoping that this condition was peculiar to the female species, I pulled down my shorts, and a look of horror and dismay crossed her face. She gasped and put her hand in front of her mouth. I looked down and then looked back up at her, deeply perplexed.
　　"Oh my God, Henry," she said, "you look like a little boy."
　　I covered up.
　　"That's the smallest one I've ever seen."
　　I angrily retrieved my clothes from the floor.
　　"I'm sorry but you look like my eight-year-old cousin." Sally began to pick up her clothes off the floor. "Henry, don't be mad."
　　But I was mad, not so much at her as at myself. I knew from the moment she spoke what I had forgotten. In most respects, I appeared all of fifteen, but I had neglected one of the more important parts. As I dressed, humiliated, I thought of all the pain and suffering of the past few years. The baby teeth I wrenched out of my mouth, the stretching and pulling and pushing of bones and muscle and skin to grow into adolescence. But I had forgotten about puberty. She pleaded with me to stay, apologized for laughing at me, even saying at one point that size didn't matter, that it was actually kind of cute, but nothing she could have said or done would have relieved my shame. I never spoke to her again, except for the most basic greetings. She disappeared from my life, as if stolen away, and I wonder now if she ever forgave me or forgot that afternoon.
　　Stretching remedied my situation, but the exercise pained me and caused unexpected consequences. The first was the curious sensation that typically ended in the same messy way, but, more interestingly, I found that by imagining Sally or any other alluring thing, the results were a foregone conclusion. But thinking on unpleasant things—the forest, baseball, arpeggios—I could postpone, or avoid altogether, the denouement. The second outcome is somewhat more disconcerting to report. Maybe because the squeaking bedsprings were beginning to annoy him, my father burst into my room and caught me one night, red-handed so to speak, although I was completely under cover. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.
　　"Henry, what are you doing?"
　　I stopped. There was an innocent explanation, which I could not reveal.
　　"Don't think I don't know."
　　Know what? I wanted to ask.
　　"You will go blind if you keep at it."
　　I blinked my eyes.
　　He left the room and I rolled over, pressing my face against the cool pillow. My powers were diminishing over time. Farsightedness, distance hearing, speed of foot—all had virtually disappeared, and my ability to manipulate my appearance had deteriorated. More and more, I was becoming the human I had wanted to be, but instead of rejoicing in the situation, I sagged into the mattress, hid beneath the sheets. I punched my pillow and tortured the coven in a vain effort to get comfortable. Any hopes for pleasure subsided along with my erection. In pleasure's place, a ragged loneliness ebbed. I felt stuck in a never-ending childhood, doomed to living under their control, a dozen suspicious scowls each day from my false parents. In the forest, I had to mark time and take my turn as a changeling, but the years had seemed like days. In the anxiety of adolescence, the days were like years. And nights could be endless.
　　Several hours later, I woke in a sweat and threw off the covers. Going to the window to let in the fresh air, I spotted out on the lawn, in the dead of night, the red ash of a cigarette, and picked out the dark figure of my father, staring into the dark wood, as if waiting for something to spring out from the shadows between trees. When he turned to come back inside, Dad looked up at my room and saw me framed in the windowpanes, watching him, but he never said a word about it.