The Smell of Smoke

It did not seem strange that she should pee in front of him, with her underwear crumpled in a ball beside the sink. It did not seem strange to be so intimate with a twenty-one-year-old woman.

And when she had said that she would have married him, if he were twenty-one, he understood she was not being serious. Marriage was as unlikely as a visit to Mars, or a walk on the moon.

He used to have a Polaroid snapshot that showed half a dozen young people sitting on a diving board at the club. Maggie and Green were both in the Polaroid, but not sitting together, and no one, seeing the photo, would ever think of them as a couple. Green was just a boy, sunburnt and squinting; Maggie was a wry, pretty young woman. Nothing in the photo connected them, but that was the night it started, in the parking lot on the lakeside of the road.

He doesn’t know why she chose him, what role he was playing in her life that summer, if he was standing in for someone else, or representing something; or if she was just a girl who got excited breaking rules. Screwing one of the older boys around the club would have been breaking the rules, but a pretty ordinary infraction. Screwing Green was more dangerous, though it was difficult for Green to see himself in those terms. At fourteen, he was shy and polite —- “well brought up,” people at the club would say.

Perhaps she was looking for danger, but only a regulated dose of it. Danger she knew she could handle. That was Green. She could handle him perfectly.

She did try to get him to dance at the club, but he would not, afraid of looking ridiculous. Not that the club dances were extravagant, or formal, as they had been in his mother’s era. On the Lakeshore in 1968, barefoot girls and boys in madras shorts hopped and shook to the call of the record player set up on the concrete patio by the club pool. There were bowls of potato chips, hamburgers on a grill, ice chests of Cokes, and Green, who was neither young enough nor old enough to feel at ease.

Just the summer before, he had built a diorama of the Normandy invasion on the Ping-Pong table in the basement, meticulously hand-painting hundreds of miniature troops and constructing the cliffs of Normandy from bricks, screen mesh, and plaster of Paris. He used matchboxes for German pillboxes, and more plaster of Paris for the ocean. He painstakingly assembled, painted, and decaled plastic Messerschmidts and Spitfires, suspending the tiny planes on nylon thread with puffs of cotton wool to simulate an anti-aircraft barrage. He stole fine white sand from the sandboxes in the park for his invasion beaches.

He had not anticipated the power of sex, the authority it would exercise over his happiness.

Whenever they slept together, his self-consciousness eased. He felt closer to a line of balance, almost graceful. He had grown four inches during the previous year and was so unaccustomed to his height that he would sometimes trip and fall over walking on a smoothly clipped lawn. Maggie made him feel powerful. When they were sleeping together, she made him feel radiant.

“Sleeping together” —- they did not sleep much. During sex, he was always hyper-awake. Afterwards, they usually couldn’t fall asleep without the risk of getting caught. Sleeping only happened on weekends when both sets of parents were away.