Part Twelve

The last Ocean City thing, I promise.

If you left our place in OC and walked directly toward Spain you would, after a very short walk, run out of 96th Street and into a sand dune. You would go past a couple of houses first, and then Ocean Highway, and then The Pancake Place, and then a parking lot, and then a small condo, and then you would be standing in sand looking across maybe 30 yards of beach, followed by 3,500 miles of Atlantic. Followed by… looks like Lisbon.

We never got that far.

The condo that squatted at the east end of 96th Street was saddled with the unwieldy name of The Dunewinds. It was three stories high, six units per story, nine facing the ocean and nine facing the Pancake Place.

Because our most direct path to the beach led us right beside it, we got to know a lot of that summer’s residents. At least by sight. Preacher played Frisbee with them and walked into their pickup volleyball games and flirted with their teenaged daughters. I mostly tried to catch up on sleep, although once I plucked a two-year-old out of the surf.

His Mom didn’t even say thank you.

For two weeks in August Apartment 3C – the upper north ocean-facing apartment – was occupied by Janet Davis and April Snow.

(Yes, her parents, the Snows, named her April. And yes, Haywood felt obligated to sing us a few bars of the song “April Snow” when he learned this. Just as he’d sung a few bars of “Deck The Halls” when he met a Sea Monkeys waitress named Holly.)

And we met them their first day there, and we were, all four of us, best friends for two weeks.

It was the damnedest thing. There was this tension there, funny, quick, flirtatious, and somehow it worked just right – perfect equilibrium. Nobody wanted to pair off – rather, we all wanted to pair off, but nobody wanted to step forward and make a specific pair, so we remained suspended in equipoise and had a really good time doing it.

Janet and April. They grew up across the street from one another in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson. They both recalled being too young to cross the road unattended and so stood at the edges of their lawns talking loudly to one another. So you would think that after going to kindergarten and elementary school and junior high school and high school together they would be ready for a little separation. But instead they both decided to go to the University of Michigan together, where Janet was a European Lit major and April was pre-med.

They were a year ahead of us, I think.

April was the cute bubbly funny one and Janet was the smart, quiet, self-confident one. April had darkly blonde hair she wore in a ponytail and gray eyes and tended to hide behind jokes and a ditzy blonde persona. Janet was tall and slim with thick, curly dark hair and brown eyes that missed absolutely nothing.

April made you laugh and Janet made you think. You noticed April first but you thought about Janet longer.

(I would like to see Janet write the same sort of summary of her impressions of the two of us. But I doubt that’s going to happen, for reasons that will become obvious.)

If you had asked me which one I preferred – if you put a gun to my head – I would have gone with Janet. It was a close call. Janet could be… intimidating. She had a sort of regal bearing and unlike April she didn’t care if you knew she was smarter than you. For that reason I also would have guessed that if Preacher preferred one, he would have picked Janet. Preacher tended to be drawn to the women other men called “bitches.” Like Monica. The smart, confident, assertive ones didn’t intimidate him in the slightest.

Because they weren’t used to guys who neither chased them nor ran from them, he got further with them than most. And he was constitutionally immune from being pushed around; he didn’t push back, he didn’t lose his temper, he just gently and politely continued on his merry way, immune from both threats and blandishments.

Anyhow, that was never an issue. As I said, equipoise.

For their last Saturday night in OC Preacher and I promised to take them to a better dinner than usual. A place where they seated you and the menus weren’t laminated. Then the guys who lived next door to us were having a big luau party. So we arranged to meet them in the snowball shop in the bottom of their building. We combed our hair. We made efforts to smell good. We arrived. We waited.

They came in from the outside, not from the back door of the shop that led upstairs to the other apartments. Wearing shorts and t-shirts and giggling about something.

Preacher and I looked at one another.

What’s up, I said, or words to that effect.

The dumb blonde just pulled a dumb blonde move, April replied, and Janet smiled. April was holding onto two bags, a small brown paper one and a larger plastic one. In the larger plastic one was something yellow.

It wasn’t dumb, Janet said, it was on sale.

But we’re leaving the beach tomorrow, April countered.

What are we talking about? Preacher asked gently.

When I got here, April said, I was going to buy this really cute two-piece I saw down at Sunshine House. It was the sort of bathing suit that would get my father’s eye twitching. It was also really expensive. But today we were shopping and Sunshine House is having a big end-of-season sale and… and I bought it.

Lemme see, I asked.

She started to hold up the plastic bag. There didn’t seem to be enough fabric in it to constitute a mitten, let alone a bathing suit. Then she lowered it. Except I can’t wear it yet, she said. I’ll wear it tomorrow. But I need your help with something first.

She was looking right at Preacher when she said it.

You want me to call your father and describe it? he said.

I noticed that Janet was looking at me. At the same time I was utterly bewildered.

No, April said, there’s something else I need your help with. And she tipped the paper bag toward him so he could see what was in it. I noticed that she was blushing from head to toe. And that – holy crap – Preacher suddenly got a little red, too, and just looked up and laughed.

What? I said. But she closed the bag up and looked at him with a very clumsily managed leer. She wasn’t used to leering, I could tell. Then without a word she started walking toward the back door.

I had never seen Preacher dumbstruck before, but there he was, speechless and slightly embarrassed. He watched her walk to the door leading up to their apartment and he fished in his pocket absently and handed me the keys to his Jeep. Enjoy dinner, he said. Maybe we’ll see you at the luau. But don’t wait up. He dropped the keys on the table without looking at anything but her, and followed her through the door. I heard her give a squealing laugh as the door closed behind them.

When I looked at Janet she was looking at me with a wry, bemused smile on her face.

What the hell just happened, I asked.

She needs his help… with the bathing suit… she said, slowly.

I got that, but what the hell was in the bag? I demanded. I had no clue.

A little can of shaving cream and a package of disposable razors, she said.

A little… I started, and then stopped. It slowly dawned on me. Oh, I said. Oh… and then, a third time, in case I hadn’t underscored my stupidity the first two times – oh.

So where are we going to dinner? she said.

For the first ten minutes or so things were unusually quiet. I drove us to Harpoon Hannah’s and we each sat in the Jeep wondering if the dynamic that had been so easy and fun for the past two weeks was now wrecked. But luckily as we arrived the fattest couple we had ever seen were emerging from the restaurant, and we sat in the parking lot and watched them in amazement, and then everything was fine.

Do you think there’s any food left? she said.

We scarfed down the fresh bread and ate some seafood and laughed and talked and everything was fine. We never mentioned the two of them at all. It was… it was having a first date with someone, only you’d already reached the tenth date comfort level. Before the banter had been quick and flirty and superficial because to go any deeper would be to risk the dreaded Pairing Off. But now that had been taken care of by a package of Lady Gillettes and a travel-size can of shaving cream.

So we could say things that weren’t supposed to make anyone laugh. And we could look at each other as long as we wanted.

Then back to the luau. Do you think our roomies will make it? Janet asked, the first time they’d been mentioned.

I doubted it. I didn’t really know the reason behind it then (I do now), but I knew he took a long, long time.

(There’s no mystery to it, really. It was that weird photographic muscle-memory of his. He spent a long time sort of… mapping. Creating this perfect, mil-spec 3-D topographical image in his mind. So that in complete darkness from any angle with any part of him he could find the exact right spot on hers…)

We got fake plastic leis and they were blasting Don Ho music and serving something with rum and fruit they called “grog.” We both got a little buzzed and had a good time and all of the sudden she was kissing me. The first time I didn’t know what to do. So I started to say something, which in retrospect would have been a big mistake. Luckily Janet was smarter than me and so she kissed me again to keep me from talking. After that one I just stood there with my mouth slightly ajar and so she kissed me a third time and I managed to kiss her back.

And she took my hand and started walking across the back yard to our place.

She stayed all night, showered and borrowed shorts and a t-shirt from me the next morning, and we met Preacher and April at the Pancake Place the next morning. I suppose we had the same dazed, goofy, happy, contented, slightly embarrassed looks on our faces, too.

When we walked in April jumped up from the booth and the two of them raced, laughing, to the ladies room, running their mouths a mile a minute between giggles.

I sat down across from Preacher.

Hey, I said.

Hey, he said.

How was the luau, he said after a long pause. (We knew each other too well for the pause to be awkward. It was just… a pause.)

You know, I said. Very… Polynesian.

And breakfast… breakfast was as if nothing had ever happened. It was like any other day we met them for breakfast. The waitress I’d made out with at that other party glowered a little bit more than usual, I suppose. We were loud and laughed a lot. Later in the day we met them again, on the beach, and April was wearing the bikini. I’m assuming that Preacher’s was as good at that bit of feminine beauty management as he was with Monica’s toenails.

OK, OK, yes, I know, I just told the story of How I Lost My Virginity, which has got to be the most nauseating fucking thing a human being can put into print. But there’s a method to my self-indulgent madness. Because all of the above is really just backstory.

The real story is that I couldn’t bring myself to interview Janet. I met all of these other people we knew from back then and they gave me their business cards and we caught up a little and we reminisced and I tried, as much as possible, to keep my biases out of it. Except of course those people knew we were friends and so some of them at least probably gave me a slightly sugar-coated version of their memories, despite my urging to the contrary. (This is why I told the Worshippers that I was the wrong man for this job). But how could I do that with Janet? How could I take a business card from her? I remembered how unspeakably soft her mouth was, the scent of the powder-soft skin between her breasts, that feeling… that feeling of her hand cupping the back of my head. How can I sit in front of her and talk about her job as an editor at BMG? How can I click on the tape recorder and ask for her unvarnished memories about Preacher Haywood? How can I ask her if she’s a Worshipper?

The real story is that I tracked down April instead. She’s an obstetrician in Buffalo. She looked… exactly the same, to me. A few streaks of gray, maybe, in that ponytail. The same quick laugh, though. If there were lines around her eyes, they could be from that. And she told what she remembered from those two weeks. Yes, she considered herself a functional Worshipper – she didn’t follow any of the rites or rituals, but she had read the book and tried to apply it in her everyday life. It made her happier, she said. It made her a better doctor, a better wife, a better mother. It even made me a better cook, she laughed.

“I have to say,” I told her – and I use quotation marks advisedly, because it’s all on the tape – “that your little stunt with the shaving cream… classic. It was the only time in my life I saw Preacher tongue-tied.”

She laughed again. “I can’t believe I had the nerve to do it,” she said, blushing a little.

“Did you ever use that again?”

“No!” she exclaimed. “No way. I only had the nerve to do it that time because Janet was egging me on.

“She was good at talking you into things,” I recalled.

“Oh, that whole thing, well, you know,” she replied.

“What whole thing?” I said.

“That was all Janet’s idea.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean Janet knew – even if you two didn’t – that I’d had the urge to rip Preacher’s shirt off with my teeth since about the first day we met you. But I would never have had the guts to… to, you know, force the issue like that. I mean it was so great the way the four of us were. And I knew that he liked Janet a little better than me anyhow. You both did.”

“I…” I started, and she held up her hand.

“It’s OK. It was OK then, and it’s really OK eighteen years later. My point is, if Janet hadn’t been desperate to think of a way to get you alone, I never would have come up with that on my own.”

I looked at her in stunned silence.

“You mean you didn’t… oh, come on, you had to have… Preacher didn’t?”

I continued to stare at her as my brain tried to grapple with this.

“Oh, please,” she said. “Janet would never have done that herself in a million years, and I would never have thought of it myself in a million years. It took two of us. And even if she had been the sort of person who could actually go through with it, what would you reaction have been? Preacher turned red and didn’t know what to say. What would you have done?”

“Swallowed my tongue. No, wait, first hysterical blindness, and then choked on my own tongue.”

“My point exactly,” she said. “So we figured, this would kill two birds with one stone. Janet said kill two guys with one bikini wax, but same difference. I got Preacher alone for the night and she got you.”

“And Preacher knew this?”

“Oh, much later that night, when some of the blood flow returned to his big head,” she laughed. “He figured it out. He was fine with it. Happy about it. Told me he was impressed by my courage. And my willingness to… how did he put it? Take one for the team.”

“Take one for the team.”

“It sounded cuter when he said it.”

She and Janet were still friends. They got together once every few months. Janet was divorced and living in Manhattan. She told me I should look her up.

I was still trying to grapple with the fact that twenty years of history (ALMOST twenty years, April reminded me) had just been turned on its head. All this time I thought that April had picked Preacher and I was just sort of the consolation prize. That the whole thing with Janet was just… luck. And then to find out that I was the target all along… that Preacher was just a wingman who had to be distracted…

I can say with some assurance that neither Preacher nor Janet have any real light to shed on Preacher Haywood, messianic figure. He was just a good-natured, slightly promiscuous college boy when they knew him, and it was only for two weeks one summer. The absence of Janet’s interview is not significant in the scheme of things.

I might send someone else to do it.