“You don’t have to know what I mean,” she told him, and then, completely out of character, she moved toward him and raised her face to him and saw him begin to believe her.
Now it was more or less accepted that they were a couple, although she could tell that their friends were surprised. She didn’t explain herself to them. She became, in a way, a little like Dane; she grew cagey and evasive. She began to notice how stodgy their friends were, and although she had assumed, till now, that her ultimate goal in life was a husband and four children and a comfortable house with a yard, all at once she began biting off the words “domestic” and “suburban” with her eyebrows raised and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Who wants to go to the Club for dinner?” someone would say, and Dane would say, “Gosh, the Club, what an unspeakable thrill.” Everybody would look sideways at Abby, but she would just smile tolerantly and take another sip of her Coke. She was the only one who knew him, she was saying—who divined that he was nowhere near as bad as he pretended to be.
Although every now and then, for a flash of a second, she wondered if his badness was precisely what attracted her. Not that he was really bad, but there was something risky about him, something contrary and outrageous. After he was fired, for instance, he had left the building with twenty-four boxes of staples. Fifty-seven thousand six hundred staples; later he’d done the math. (His glee when he told her this had made her smile.) And he didn’t even own a stapler! He had once driven out to where his mother was living with Horse Guy, as Dane called him, and duct-taped all the doors shut in the middle of the night. That escapade had made Abby laugh aloud. “Why in the world …?” she had asked, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain; it was almost the only time he had let the word “mother” cross his lips, and maybe he already regretted it.
Also his drinking, while it was deplorable, lent him a certain shambling, reckless, juvenile-delinquent quality that touched her heart even while she was shaking her head over him. You could see this boy coming half a block away and know him by his rolling walk, his hands jammed in his pockets, his face half hidden by his shank of hair and his back a brooding C shape. Oh, it wasn’t only the disadvantaged who needed compassion! He was leading a life just as hard, in some ways, as the lives of those poor little Negro children she was tutoring this summer. He could shoot a splinter of sadness straight through her.
She looked over at his profile, the slant of his cheek below the dark glasses, and sent him a small, warm smile even though he didn’t see it.
“But. So. Anyhow. I was saying,” he said, lifting his arm to signal a turn. “About my cousin.”
“Your cousin,” she repeated.
“George. The one I’m staying with.”
“Oh, have I met him?”
“No, he’s older. He’s got a career and all. He’s going away next weekend to visit his girlfriend in Boston.”
The Buick tilted slightly as it swerved onto Bouton Road, and Abby grabbed her purse before it could slide off the seat.
“I’ll have the place to myself,” Dane said. He parked in front of the Whitshanks’ and took his key from the ignition. The music stopped short but he went on sitting there, gazing through the windshield. “I was thinking you could come over Friday evening. Maybe tell your mom you were spending the night with a friend.”
She had foreseen that something like this would arise, sooner or later. It was where they’d been heading all along. It was where she wanted to head.
So she couldn’t explain what she said next. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know,” she said.
He turned and looked at her, although his expression was still a blank behind the dark glasses. “Don’t know what?” he asked her.
“I’m not sure what friend I could tell her, and besides, I might be busy that night, I might have to do something with my parents; I’m not sure.”
She wasn’t handling this very smoothly. She was cross with herself for sounding so flustered. “I’ll have to see,” she told him, and she yanked open her door and all but fell out of the car in her haste to leave the moment behind.
Walking in front of him toward the house, though, she was conscious of her slim waist, and the sway of her skirt, and the swing of her hair down her back. He must have been thinking about this ahead of time. He must have consciously decided he wanted her, and imagined how it would be. The knowledge made her feel mysterious and desirable and grown-up.