The Jane Austen Book Club Part 10

Naturally he was excited. Bianca and Cat said how glad they were not to be going. Even though they were hard-core outdoorswomen who had no trouble putting hooks right through worms so that their guts spilled out, and Bianca had once shot a c.o.ke can off a fence with a BB gun. Even though Grigg would probably have nightmares like a baby and have to come home. Amelia had started a program to become an X-ray technician and was too grown-up to care who got to go camping and who didn't.

This was the seventies. Grigg's father had developed an obses-sion with the Heinlein bookStranger in a Strange Land. He took it out of the library and then told the librarian he'd lost it. For a couple of months now, it had been the only thing he read. When he wasn't reading it, he was hiding it somewhere. Grigg would have liked to take a look, but he couldn't find it. The library wouldn't allow him to check it out, even when they had a copy, which now they didn't.

The Harris men loaded the car with sleeping bags and gro-ceries and headed north along 99 for Yosemite. Three hours later they picked up two girls at a gas station. "How far are you go-ing?" Grigg's father asked them, and they said they were on their way to Bel Air, which was, of course, the wrong way and farther the wrong way than simply going back home would have been. So Grigg was astonished to hear his father agree to take them. What about no girls allowed?

Grigg's father was very chatty, and his language changed, so that suddenly he was using words like "far out" and "heavy." "Your old man's pretty cool," one of the girls told Grigg. She had a bandanna tied over her hair and a sunburnt nose. The other girl's hair was clipped close to her head-you could see the shape of her skull, and you could also see the shape of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s through the thin cotton of her blouse.

She was black-skinned, but light, and with freckles. They were headed for a very mellow scene, they said, one that Grigg and his dad would probably dig.

"We're going camping," Grigg told them.

His father frowned and dropped his voice so that only Grigg would hear. It wouldn't be cool to leave two pretty girls. .h.i.tching, he said. Someone not right might pick them up next. Grigg wouldn't want to read that in the papers the next day! Suppose it was Bianca and Cat? Wouldn't Grigg want someone to take care of them? A real man looked out for women. Besides, if they got to Yosemite a day late, what was the big deal with that?

By the time his father had finished, Grigg felt small and self-ish. At the next stop his father bought dinner for everybody. Afterward Grigg found himself in the backseat with the girl with the bandanna. Her name was Hillary. The girl with the b.r.e.a.s.t.s was in the front. Her name was Roxanne.

There were some cosmic forces coming together, Hillary told them. The car windows were open; she had to talk very loud.

Grigg watched the landscape pa.s.s. He saw straight rows of al-mond trees that seemed to curve as they went by, roadside stands selling lemons and avocadoes. It had been a long time since the last rain. Little clouds of dust spun above the fields. "He Is Com-ing," one billboard announced. "Are You Ready?"

Grigg pretended he was running alongside the car, leaping the drainage ditches and overpa.s.ses. He was as fast as the car, and as tireless. He swung arm over arm down the telephone wires.

If you knew anything about ancient texts, Hillary said, Nos-tradama and the like, then you knew some major karma was coming due. It was going to be intense, but it was going to be beautiful. Grigg's dad said he'd suspected as much.

Roxanne changed the radio station from the one they'd been listening to.

They stopped often at gas stations so the girls could pee. Grigg's sisters never asked to stop the car to pee.

By the time they made it to the Grapevine, the sky was dark. The freeway was crowded. A river of red lights flowed in one di-rection, one of white in the other. Cat had once made up a game called Ghosts and Demons, based on car lights, but you couldn't play it when there were so many of them. Anyway, Cat was the only one who could make it fun; without her it was a pretty bor-ing game.

It was around nine o'clock when they drove through the gates to Bel Air. Hillary directed them to a ma.s.sive house with a wrought-iron fence of metal leaves and vines on which actual leaves and vines had been trained. Grigg's father said he needed a rest from the driving, so they all went inside.

The house was enormous. The entryway was mirrored and marbled, and opened into a dining room whose gla.s.s-topped table had chairs for ten. Hillary showed them how there was a b.u.t.ton on the floor beneath the table so the hostess could sum-mon the help without leaving her seat. This seemed unnecessary to Grigg, as the room where the bell would ring, the kitchen, was only a few steps away.

The house belonged to some friends of hers, Hillary said, but they were out of town.

The dining room ran into the kitchen, and across the back of both rooms was an atrium with a palm tree and three shelves of orchids. Past the gla.s.s of the atrium, Grigg could see the neon-blue water of a swimming pool, lit up and filled with people. Later, when he tried to remember this, Grigg asked himself how old these people had been. About Amelia's age. Maybe Bianca's. Certainly not his dad's.

In the kitchen, three kids were seated at the counter. Hillary got Grigg's dad a beer from the refrigerator.

There was the smell of pot in the air. Grigg could recognize the smell of pot. He'd seen2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey six times, and two of those screenings had been on a university campus.

His dad began talking to a young man with long hair and a messianic face. His dad asked the young man whether he'd ever read Heinlein (he hadn't) and the young man asked whether Grigg's dad had ever read Hesse (he hadn't). Things were chang-ing, they a.s.sured each other. The world was in spin. "It's a great time to be young," Grigg's dad said, which he clearly wasn't, Grigg hoped he knew.

Something about his dad's part of the conversation embar-ra.s.sed Grigg. He excused himself to the bathroom (as if he would ever really need to go again!-all those stops on the road) and went to explore the house. He thought he might be running a slight fever. He had that magical, made-of-gla.s.s feeling and he moved through room after room, bedrooms and studies and li-braries and TV rooms, as if in a dream.

The house had rooms with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a billiard table, and a wet bar. There was a girl's bedroom with a canopy bed and a Princess phone. Cat would die for a phone like that. Grigg made a collect call home.

Amelia answered. "How's the camping?" she said. "I didn't know there were phones in the high country."

"We're not camping. We're in Bel Air."

"This is costing a fortune. Give me your number and we'll call you right back," Amelia said. Grigg read the number off the dial. He lay on the bed under the canopy, pretending it was the jungle, mosquito nets, tribal drums, until the phone rang. "Hey there." It was his mother. "How's the camping?"

"We're in a house in Bel Air," Grigg said. "We're not going camping until tomorrow."

"Okay," his mother said. "Are you having a good time? Are you enjoying being with your dad?"

"I guess."

"Thanks for calling," his mom said. And then she hung up. She was going with the girls to a movie.

Nothing he would like, she had a.s.sured him. Something girly.

Grigg went to open the girl's closet. He wasn't allowed in the girls' closets at home. There were sc.r.a.pbooks in there, and shoe boxes full of secret s.h.i.t. Once he'd opened Cat's secret-s.h.i.t shoe box, and she screamed at him for half an hour even though all he'd seen was some inexplicable buckeye nuts in a little plastic candy dish she'd lined with red velvet.

The only shoe boxes in this girl's closet had shoes in them. She also had a shoe tree. She had, in fact, more shoes than his three sisters put together.

Another place for secrets was under the folded clothes in the bureau. Grigg looked but again came up empty. There was a vanity table with a locked drawer, which he worked on for a while, but he needed fingernails or a credit card. Or a key. He found some keys on a chain slung over the bedpost. None of them fit.

A boy and a girl came into the bedroom. They were halfway out of their clothes before they even saw Grigg. The boy's p.e.n.i.s bloomed through the slit in his shorts like a mushroom after a rain. Grigg put the keys on the vanity. The girl screamed when he moved, then laughed. "Do you mind, man?" the boy asked. "We'll only be a minute." The girl laughed again and hit him in the arm.

Grigg went back to the kitchen. His dad was still talking to the messiah. Grigg hovered in the doorway at just that spot where the sounds from the pool were as loud as his father's voice. "You go the same places, see the same people. Have the same conversa-tions. It takes like half your brain. Less," Grigg's dad said.

"Jeez," the boy said.

"Half a life."

"Jeez."

"It's like a cage and you don't even know when the door closed."

The boy became more animated. "Feel around you." He demonstrated. "No bars, man. No cage.

You're just as free as you think you are. n.o.body makes you do it, man. n.o.body makes you set the alarm, get up in the morning. n.o.body but you."

Grigg went outside to the pool. Someone threw a towel at him. It was Hillary, and she was wearing nothing but the rubber bands in her braids. She laughed when she saw that he was look-ing at her.

"You're not such a little boy, after all," she said. "But no clothes allowed out here. You want to look, yougot to be looked at. Them's the rules. Otherwise"-she leaned in and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swung toward him-"we'll think you're a little pervert."

Grigg went back inside. His face was burning, and the most familiar part of the strange stew of things he was feeling was hu-miliation. He focused his attention on that part simply because he recognized it. In the study he found another phone and called home again. He didn't expect anyone to answer-he thought they'd all be at the movies-but Amelia picked up. She told the operator she wouldn't accept the charges, and then, less than a minute after he had hung up, the phone rang and it was Grigg's mom again.

"We're on the way out the door," she said. She sounded cross. "Whatis it?"

"I want to come home," Grigg said.

"You always want to come home early. Cub Scout camp? Every sleepover since you were three? I always have to make you stay, and you always end up having a fabulous time. You havegot to toughen up." Her voice was louder. "I'm coming," she called. And then, to Grigg again, "Be fair to your dad.

He's been really looking forward to this time with you."

Grigg put the receiver down and went to the kitchen. "I'm so unhappy," his father was saying. He pa.s.sed a hand over his eyes as if he might have been crying.

Grigg would rather have taken all his clothes off and stayed at the pool to be laughed at than hear his father say this. He tried to figure out ways to make his father happy. He tried to figure out the ways he was making his father unhappy.

He made up his mind to leave. If his father wouldn't take him, he'd go alone. He'd walk. The days would pa.s.s; he'd eat oranges off the trees. Maybe find a dog to walk with him, keep him com-pany.

n.o.body would force him to get rid of a dog that had brought him all the way home. Maybe he'd hitch and maybe someone not right would pick him up and that would be the end of that. He heard the sound of breaking gla.s.s and laughter from the pool. Doors slamming. The phone ringing, deep in the house. I'm so unhappy, he thought. He went to the room with the canopy bed and fell asleep.

He woke to the sound of rain. It took him a moment to re-member where he was. Los Angeles. Not rain, then-he was hearing the sound of sprinklers on the lawn. The white curtains swelled and dropped at the open window. He'd drooled on the bedspread. He tried to dry it with his hand.

He went looking for his father again to ask when they were going camping. The kitchen was empty. The door to the pool stood open and Grigg went to close it. He was careful not to look out. He smelled chlorine and beer and maybe vomit.

Grigg sat on his father's stool at the kitchen counter with his back to the door. He put his hands tight over his ears and listened to his heart beating. He pressed on his eyelids until colours ap-peared like fireworks.

The doorbell rang. It rang again and again and again, as if someone were leaning on it with an elbow, and then stopped. There were noises in the hall, someone was making a commo-tion. Someone tapped him on his shoulder. Amelia was standing behind him; Bianca was behind her, and behind Bianca was Cat.

Each of them wore an expression Grigg knew well, as though someone had tried to mess with them and no one was going to make that mistake again. "We're here to take you home," Amelia said.

Grigg burst into racking, snot-producing sobs, and she put her arms around him. "It's okay," she said.

"I'll just get Dad. Where is he?"

Grigg pointed toward the pool.

Amelia went out. Bianca moved into her place beside him.

"Mom said I had to stay," Grigg told her. There was no harm in saying so. Obviously Mom had been overruled.

Bianca shook her head. "Amelia called back here and asked for Grigg, and no one knew who that was or would even try to find out, they thought Grigg was such a funny name. But they gave her the address and she told Mom we were coming whether Mom liked it or not. She said you sounded weird on the phone."

Amelia came back inside. Her face was grim. "Dad's not ready to leave yet." She put her arm around Grigg, and her hair fell on his neck. His sisters used White Rain shampoo, because it was cheap, but Grigg thought it had a romantic name. He could take the cap off the bottle in the shower and smell Amelia's hair, and also Bianca's, and also Cat's. For a while he drew a comic with a superwoman in it named White Rain. She controlled weather systems, which was something he'd made up all by him-self, but he later learned that someone else had had the idea first.

As Grigg stood in the kitchen of that Bel Air mansion with his sisters around him, he knew that his whole life, whenever he needed rescuing, he could call them and they would come. Junior high school held no more terrors. In fact, Grigg felt sorry for all the boys and girls who were going to tease him once he got there.

"Let's go, then," said Amelia.

"As if you don't always sound weird," said Cat.

The saddest thing of all was that when Grigg finally readStranger in a Strange Land, he thought it was kind of silly. He was in his late twenties at the time, because he'd promised his mother never to read it and he kept the promise as long as he could. There was a lot of s.e.x in the book, for sure. But a leering sort of s.e.x that was painful to a.s.sociate with his father. Grigg readThe Fountainhead next, which he'd promised Amelia never to read, and that turned out to be kind of a silly book, too.

This was the third story we didn't hear. Grigg didn't tell it to us because we'd already gone home by the time he remembered it, and anyway none of us had readStranger in a Strange Land and we were way too snotty about science fiction for him to criticize Heinlein in our chilly company. Nor did he want todescribe the s.e.x to us.

But this was a story we would have liked, especially the rescue at the end. We would have been sad for Grigg's father, but we would have liked the White Rain girls. From the sound of it, no one who'd known Grigg since infancy could have doubted he was born to be a heroine.

FromThe Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe

"Bring the light forward," said Emily, "we may possibly find our way through these rooms.

Annette stood at the door, in an att.i.tude of hesitation, with the light held up to show the chamber, but the feeble rays spread through not half of it. "Why do you hesitate?" said Emily, "let me see whither this room leads."

Annette advanced reluctantly. It opened into a suit of s.p.a.cious and ancient apartments, some of which were hung with tapestry, and others wainscoted with cedar and black larch-wood. What furniture there was, seemed to be almost as old as the rooms, and retained an appearance of grandeur, though covered with dust, and dropping to pieces with the damps, and with age.

"How cold these rooms are, Ma'amselle!" said Annette: "n.o.body has lived in them for many, many years, they say. Do let us go."

"They may open upon the great staircase, perhaps," said Emily, pa.s.sing on till she came to a chamber, hung with pic-tures, and took the light to examine that of a soldier on horse-back in a field of battle.

-He was darting his spear upon a man, who lay under the feet of the horse, and who held up one hand in a supplicating att.i.tude. The soldier, whose beaver was up, regarded him with a look of vengeance; and the counte-nance, with that expression, struck Emily as resembling Mon-toni. She shuddered, and turned from it. Pa.s.sing the light hastily over several other pictures, she came to one concealed by a veil of black silk. The singularity of the circ.u.mstance struck her, and she stopped before it, wishing to remove the veil, and examine what could thus carefully be concealed, but somewhat wanting courage. "Holy Virgin! what can this mean?" ex-claimed Annette. "This is surely the picture they told me of at Venice."

"What picture?" said Emily. "Why a picture," replied An-nette, hesitatingly- "but I never could make out exactly what it was about, either."

"Remove the veil, Annette."

"What! I, Ma'amselle!-I! not for the world!" Emily, turn-ing round, saw Annette's countenance grow pale. "And pray what have you heard of this picture, to terrify you so, my good girl?" said she. "Nothing,Ma'amselle: I have heard nothing, only let us find our way out."

"Certainly: but I wish first to examine the picture; take the light, Annette, while I lift the veil." Annette took the light, and immediately walked away with it, disregarding Emily's calls to stay, who, not choosing to be left alone in the dark chamber, at length followed her. "What is the reason of this, Annette?" said Emily, when she overtook her; "what have you heard concerning that picture, which makes you so unwilling to stay when I bid you?"

"I don't know what is the reason, Ma'amselle," replied An-nette, "nor any thing about the picture, only I have heard there is something very dreadful belonging to it-and that it has been covered up in blackever since-andthat n.o.body has looked at it for a great many years-and it somehow has to do with the owner of this castle before Signor Montoni came to the posses-sion of it-and-"

"Well, Annette, "said Emily, smiling, "I perceive it is as you say-that you know nothing about the picture."

"No, nothing, indeed, Ma'amselle, for they made me prom-ise never to tell:-but-"

"Well," rejoined Emily, who observed that she was strug-gling between her inclination to reveal a secret, and her appre-hension for the consequence, "I will inquire no further-"

"No, pray, Ma'am, do not."

"Lest you should tell all," interrupted Emily.

July