I made a fire between the insides of my knees. I thought of the word fucking. I wrote it inside my skull in Lite-Brite.
The man was close enough to talk to me from the bar. He waited until the bartender made drinks from his gun at the other end. I heard the man clearly over the splashing water and the summertime songs on the speaker.
He engaged me, to begin with, about Stephen King. He said he admired a young woman reading such a big book. That he called me a young woman was both tantalizing and repulsive. He told me his name was Wilt and that he was from Boise, Idaho. He was getting his parents’ place ready to sell. They had just died, his dad of emphysema and his mom of suicide by cancer shortly thereafter. He laughed and I laughed, too, as though I knew what he meant.
—Joan, he said. I’ve never met a woman under the age of forty with the name Joan. Isn’t that funny?
I didn’t smile or nod. I’d learned that from my mother. Men go wild for a woman who is quiet like a cat. A woman who doesn’t always approve.
—Joan likes mystery and horror and long walks on the beach.
—I don’t like the beach, I said.
—She doesn’t like the beach because it’s very sandy. The sand is insidious. The sand makes her skin crawl.
—Well, I like the beach in Italy.
—Ah. Joan makes an exception for the Mediterranean. The sand there is more like pebbles. Less insidious. She enjoys fruit cups on the blue and white hotel towels.
I smiled. In the water a girl about my age was tossing a penny and diving for it. She was pale and wore goggles.
I knew what rape meant but only vaguely. I knew it meant sex against one’s will, but sex to me was what I saw on HBO. Soft-core hydraulics. Fit bodies moving against each other. Very involved French kissing. So that when I pictured my grandmother being raped, she was one of those HBO women, only older, and her rapist was one of those men, only rougher. I pictured my grandmother openmouthed kissing during her rape. Accepting a tongue into her mouth but with a look of dismay on her wrinkled, rouged face.
—Are you here with anybody, Joan?
—My daughter is playing in the pool right there, I said, pointing at the diving girl.
Now it was the man’s turn to laugh.
—Joan of Snark, he said. When you’re ready to move on from Stephen King, I think you should like Henry Miller. Have you heard of him?
I didn’t say anything.
—No? What a shame. What do they teach in those schools nowadays? Compound interest and fractions and pi. Let me tell you, Joan, you will never need to know pi in your life. School is only good for making other people believe you’re smart. School doesn’t make you smart.
—What makes you smart?
—Reading Henry Miller, for one. D. H. Lawrence a close second. Nabokov ahead of Miller, come to think of it. Have you heard of Lolita?
—No.
—Heavens! But I suppose you can name all six continents.
—There’s seven.
—Aha.
The bartender returned to the man—Wilt’s—corner of the bar and asked if he would like a refill. Wilt said yes and asked for a cup of water as well. I liked the way he spoke to the bartender. He was genteel like my father but a little more authoritative. He was even a little rude.
When the bartender disappeared again, Wilt poured the water out at his feet and filled the plastic cup with some of his drink and then, in one deft movement, placed it on the ground beside my chair.
—Some geographers would say there are six, he said, not missing a beat, if you combine Europe and Asia, to make Eurasia.
I picked up the drink and sipped it. It was sweet and tart at once. I looked across the lounge deck at the mostly female bathers. Holding books or magazines and wearing big sunglasses. Taking the sun, my mother called it, with her accent. It sounded spoiled, the way she said it. But she took the sun, too. She undid the strings of her bathing suit so she wouldn’t get tan lines. She’d drink water from a tumbler and the SPF cream from her lips would melt onto the rim of the glass. Why did I always want to be around my mother? She didn’t make me feel terribly loved. She didn’t give herself up for me, the way many mothers did for their children. At the same time, besides taking the sun and eating chicken wings, she also wasn’t living for herself.
—In Idaho, Wilt said, we don’t traffic much in municipal pools, or association pools. We don’t have any tiki bars.
—I’ve never been to Idaho, I said. Which was such a stupid thing to say because I’d never really been anywhere. My parents didn’t travel much beyond the Poconos and Italy. That went for everything else, too. We ate Chinese on Sunday nights. Otherwise we had steak or pasta. For lunch nearly every day my mother made pastina.
—Idaho is the most beautiful state. I don’t say that because I live there. Pennsylvania, he said, well. I’m from here. In Pennsylvania they grow a lot of bad apples.
—Are you a bad apple? I asked. I don’t believe the words came out of my mouth in a sultry tone, but some lines can’t be anything but sexual.
He laughed and winked.
—New Mexico, he said, is number two. The second most beautiful state in the union.
—Our next vacation is going to be to the American West, I said, echoing my father.
—You and your little girl?
—Yes, I said. Me and Lulu.
—Lulu, what a nice name. How old is Lulu?
—Hmm, seven, I said. She’ll be eight next week.
—Well, happy birthday, Lulu. What does she want for her birthday?
—Damned if I know.
He laughed heartily at that. I spoke like the characters in the adult books I was reading. He swished his drink around in his cup. I drank the rest of what he’d given me. I’d had only one hard-boiled egg that morning because I’d been nervous about when my father would come home. Now I felt the liquid, cool, in the floor of my belly. My head felt like there were star-shaped bubbles inside of it, lifting my skull up from my neck.
—Joan, I need to get out of this heat now, Wilt said rather abruptly. I’m going up to my room for some shade.
I nodded, heartbroken. My hair felt too short and dry. My book seemed like the biggest waste of time and I never wanted to swim like a child again.
—Catch you around sometime.
He rose and I saw how tall he was. I wondered if my mother would find him attractive. His legs were very dark with curls of hair. He wore fine leather shoes, the kind you wouldn’t wear to a swimming pool. I watched him walk up the steps to the clubhouse.
I looked back at the bar and saw a black leather wallet on the bamboo bar. The bartender noticed it at the same time.
—I know him, I told the bartender, I’ll catch up.
The bartender nodded carelessly. I grabbed the wallet off the bar and ran after him, barefoot, in my two-piece. He’d already made it to the upper-level parking lot by the time I got there.
—Wilt, I said breathlessly.
He was opening the door to a big black car when he turned to look at me. He smiled wide and his teeth were very white in a way that was frightening. I was holding the wallet out and hopping from one foot to the other because of the burning macadam.
—Jesus! he said. Get in for a second, will you?
I slid into the passenger side and he got into the driver’s side and started the car and lowered all the windows and blasted the air-conditioning. The front seat was one long black leather bench. It smelled so foreign in the car, like snakeskin and old people.