American Stranger Read online

  The telephone rang while she was drying herself, and she wrapped the large towel loosely about herself to go answer it. Manos invited her to a party that evening.

  “I’m not going to give up on you,” he said.

  “Let’s face it,” she said, “you only want us to be friends because you feel guilty about our not being lovers. And I’m fine with it, believe me.”

  “That’s not true, that’s not at all true. I don’t in the least feel guilty, not in the least. I just think that the best of our relationship was in the good times we had together.”

  “Meaning what? Not the good times we had in bed together?”

  “Come on, Nancy, come on. My parents feel awful that you don’t come, and are beginning to wonder if they’re the reason why. They really like you. Come on.”

  “Maybe they’d like me more if I were Greek. Maybe you’d like me more if I were Greek.”

  “Let’s not get into that, Nancy. If they were concerned that I was getting a little bit too serious with you, it wasn’t because you’re not Greek, but because they know I’ve got a long haul ahead of me at medical school that will need all the attention I can give it. And you know your not being Greek was never an issue for me.”

  “Nor, I suppose, my being a Jew was.”

  “You’re offending me, Nan. You’re really offending me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So you’ll come to the party,” he said.

  In fact, she did want to go to a party, so she said, “All right, all right, all right, have it your way.”

  “I’m inviting some interesting guys you’ve never met before.”

  Even though she had a paper due, Nancy spent most of the late early winter afternoon, the trees along the curbs now bare of leaves, shopping in Back Bay. She bought a long black sheath, sleeveless and without a waistline, that clung to her pelvis. She brushed her hair so it floated about her, and she wore no makeup on her thin, pale face except black eyeliner. Looking at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of her bathroom door, she thought she looked great.

  She left her apartment to find that snow was falling, covering the steep sidewalks and streets of Beacon Hill. Her car was covered, and she had to brush off the windshield.

  Driving to Brookline, Nancy told herself that, as a matter of fact, she really wasn’t interested in Manos. And really never had been.

  She parked the car behind a row of others along the curb and sat for a while to watch the snow drift down onto the windshield, and she thought of a forest filling with snow, no one there.

  Her young body warm, she felt light walking over the snow-covered path to the front door. Manos opened the door and gave her a quick kiss. She put her hand on Manos’s nape and squeezed it, drawing his head towards her, and kissed him more fully, to show him that she had gotten over him. This made him smile.

  Abruptly, she went ahead of him into the entry hall, its floor covered with Oriental rugs, and as she went along the long, narrow hall she saw, through an arch, the living room, where more rugs, with red and dark blue and black geometrical designs and long fringes, overlapped one another.

  “Where are your parents?” Nancy asked.

  “Visiting relatives in Toronto.”

  “I thought they’d be waiting to welcome me with hugs and kisses.”

  “I’m sure they’d do just that if they were here, but they had to go visit family.”

  “Your people,” Nancy said, “you’re all over the world and all you ever see is one another.”

  The door to the rumpus room in the cellar was open, and from below voices swelled up.

  “Am I the last one?” Nancy asked, descending.

  “You wanted to be the last one.”

  “I did.”

  The low ceiling of the rumpus room was tiled in beige squares, the floor in brown and yellow squares, and in between the ceiling and the floor was a dark, cacophonous mass of people; around them were flashes of light. Nancy couldn’t see into the mass, and she went to the bar, where Pam, whom she knew from college, and Pam’s new boyfriend were sitting on bar stools.

  Pam said, “I wish my folks would let me have a party when they go away.”

  “Why won’t they?” Manos asked.

  “Because they’re Irish,” Pam said, and hit her head; “Irish from Revere, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

  “Are you Irish?” Nancy asked Pam’s new boyfriend, whose name was Tony, and Nancy didn’t know if that was Irish or not.

  “I’m Italian,” he said, “from Revere, which we pronounce Reveah.”

  “You look Irish.”

  Pam said, “If he was Irish, I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  Shaking the ice cubes in her glass, Nancy winked at Manos to thank him for the drink he’d given her, then wandered into the crowd. She’d spend as little time with Manos as possible.

  Beyond a post, she saw Harry Stewart, a tall, lanky, black friend from BU, talking with a guy she didn’t know.

  The stranger she didn’t know was wearing a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his fingers were pressed to his chest. It was his hands that Nancy noticed—they were large, with long fingers and big knuckles, and they had small knobs at the base of the thumbs. Very masculine hands. But the guy’s neck, revealed by his open collar, which looked too big for him, was slender, and he looked as though he’d hardly begun to shave.

  For all her forwardness, Nancy was in fact shy, or so she told herself. She looked at the guy with the man’s hands and the boy’s face for a moment, then went back to Manos and, indicating the guy with her glass, asked, “Who’s he?”

  She remembered that she’d asked Vinnie the same thing about Aaron.

  “Yvon.”

  “Yvon?

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “ Gendreau.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “French.”

  “He’s from France?”

  “No, he’s American. French-American.”

  “I’ve never met a French-American.”

  “Now’s your chance.”

  Nancy wrinkled her nose at Manos, as if to reproach him for the liberty he was giving her to take up with anyone she wanted to.

  Adding to the reproach, she said, “He’s sort of sexy.”

  “That’s for you to say,” Manos said, “not me.”

  “You don’t think he’s sexy?”

  “If I were a woman, I suppose I’d have some fantasies about his big-man hands.” This sounded like something Vinnie would say.

  “I’m a woman, and, you know what, I think it’s not just his big masculine hands, it’s his hands and his boy’s face that give me a little turn.”

  Manos put his arms around Nancy’s waist and drew her to him to hug her closely, but she pushed him away, pressing her glass against his chest.

  “You’re jealous,” she said.

  “Sure I am.”

  She said, “Take me over to Yvon and introduce me; you bragged to me about inviting interesting guys.”

  “You go,” Manos said.

  “But I’m shy.”

  “Overcoming your shyness makes you the most forward person in the world. You go.”

  Nancy pressed her glass harder against his chest. “I’m telling you, you don’t want to introduce me to him because you are jealous.”

  Manos grabbed the glass pressed to his chest, drank from it, and gave it back to her. “Go,” he said, “go try to find out if any guy can be better than I am. Go see if Yvon’s the guy.” Manos turned away.

  But she was shy, and her shyness, she thought, made her conscious of herself as she moved toward Harry and Yvon, feeling the cloth of her dress cling to her hips. She tried to look as
if she was wandering; as she approached she exclaimed, “Hey, Harry,” and she quickly reached for one of Harry’s hands and swung it so he laughed and said, “Nancy,” and he added, “babe,” and she smiled and said, “Babe to you, but only to you.” Then she turned to Yvon and said “Sorry, I interrupted what you were saying.”

  Before Yvon could speak, Harry said, “This guy here was trying to tell me I’m wrong.”

  Nancy asked Yvon, “How is Harry wrong?”

  And Yvon, confronted, stepped back. “I didn’t say he’s wrong. I wouldn’t say that.”

  It was not very original of him, Nancy thought, and her first impression of Yvon was that he was not very original, but it didn’t matter.

  Harry said, “Look, a president points at me and tells me not to ask what the country can do for me, but what I can do for the country. You tell me, what have I ever gotten from a country where I have to think of myself first, because the country is out to defeat me in everything I do? This guy doesn’t understand that.”

  Nancy said to Yvon, “So?”

  “I was trying to say that we’re all Americans,” Yvon said, his blue eyes wide.

  “Sure, sure,” Harry said, “we’re all Americans,” and he moved his neck back and forth, and his shoulders, hips, knees, and feet moved as if he were doing a little dance, and he danced away from Nancy and Yvon.

  Yvon stood still, embarrassed, and Nancy, too, was embarrassed, though she didn’t know why. She noted the way Yvon’s sideburns ended not at a razor-sharp edge but in fine points, and his round, smooth jaw. She was shy about looking at him in the eyes, but she did to ask, abruptly, “Manos told me your last name, but I forgot it.”

  He said, “Gendreau. Yvon Gendreau.”

  “So where do you live, Yvon Gendreau?”

  “I’m sharing a room in BU housing near the campus.”

  “An undergraduate?” she asked, and she thought: a boy.

  “Yes, I’m an undergraduate, a senior,” establishing credentials for being at a party of graduate students.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “My roommate has a car.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He left.” Yvon frowned to check a smile. By the way he tried to check his smile, she knew he had come to this party to pick someone up. “And he has the car.”

  “Nice guy, your roommate.”

  “He left with somebody.”

  Stepping away from him, Nancy said, “When you want to leave, let me know and I’ll give you a lift,” and she turned away.

  Couples were dancing. Manos was dancing with a coed, and as Nancy passed them, Manos lifted his cheek from the coed’s cheek and winked at her. On the other side of the dance floor, she saw, through the dancing couples, Yvon Gendreau, where she had left him.

  He appeared to be staring, unblinking, at no one. He’s a loner, Nancy thought, oh yes, a lonely loner.

  This came to her: she’d offer to leave now. The thought—more a sensation—roused in her a sense of daring.

  When the record ended and the couples stopped dancing, she went right to Yvon Gendreau and said, “Look, I’m going. If you want to go, too, I’ll give you that lift I promised.”

  He looked beyond her, just for a moment, then looked at her, and said, “Thanks.”

  She drew back, momentarily unsure whether she should invite him into her car, but she said, “My name’s Nancy, Nancy Green.”

  He nodded.

  And she heard herself say, “So, do you want a ride?”

  “You want to give me a ride?”

  “I wouldn’t have offered a ride if I didn’t.”

  It was as if they were alone, the two of them, and the party disappeared. With a sudden, unexpected, wide smile, Yvon Gendreau said, “I’d like to come with you.”

  And now she felt that he all too easily said he’d go with her, as if he expected something that she, after all, wasn’t sure she wanted to give to this unknown loner.

  He followed her upstairs to the entry where the coats were piled on the floor, and after he politely helped her on with hers, he put on his parka. Snow was still falling, and they stood on the flagstone stoop looking at it.

  She said, “Come on.”

  In the car, she didn’t ask where he wanted her to give him a lift to, and he didn’t say. She drove into Boston along Commonwealth Avenue. It was by now a dark winter Saturday morning and she drove around the center of the city, stopping at red lights in streets with no traffic but her car, and she parked on Beacon Street by the Common.

  The illuminated lamps on posts in the snow-covered Common looked like bare trees in a landscape of low hills. The falling snow was visible in the light of the lamps, but not in the darkness beyond the light.

  Nancy opened her door and got out. Yvon hesitated before he got out on his side. He followed her into the Common. Snow-filled wind blew about them. They walked under bare trees, the branches shining white in the lamps that cast their shadows on the ground. Along the path were fence-high iron posts with chains slung between them. Beyond the chains was the bank-side of a hill, and in the snow on the bank was a bunch of roses. Yvon reached over the chain and picked them up by the green tissue paper wrapped round the stems, and, holding the bouquet high, said, “Look, how beautiful.” This unexpected remark struck her as odd, and odd, too, was the pleasure she took from its very oddity. Bowing from the waist, he chivalrously held the bouquet out to her, and she, smiling with pleasure, took it. He didn’t smile.

  Seeming ready to go wherever she went, he walked behind Nancy as she led him from Beacon Street up Beacon Hill to the old brick building where she lived. Petals dropped from the roses as she took Yvon up dim stairs, unlocked her door, and led him now into the large room with a double bed. The old-fashioned gas streetlamp outside the wide, many-paned, curtain-less window lit the room. Nancy did not turn on a light inside. She placed the roses on the mantelpiece.

  Yvon removed his parka and sat on the edge of the bed on the far side from her. She let her coat drop to the floor, kicked off her shoes, and lay on the bed. Lying full length and combing out her damp hair with her fingers, Nancy watched him lie down beside her.

  Placing her hand lightly across his throat, she said, “So you’re French-American.”

  “We say Franco, Franco-American.”

  “What’s it like to be Franco-American?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Won’t you tell me?” she asked.

  His lips expanded into a smile, as if his lips were always about to expand into a smile.

  Though she wanted to make love with him, it would be all right if they didn’t, if they just lay together on the bed. And if he did want to, she wouldn’t be the one to start, she wouldn’t try to get him to do something he didn’t want to do. She even wished he’d continue simply to lie beside her on the bed.

  Slowly, he took her hand in his and brought it, palm down, to cover his smile, and as he pressed it to his lips he licked her palm. A little shock went through her, and, laughing, she tried to pull her hand away. But he held it more tightly to lick her palm again, while she, laughing from the shock, again tried to yank her hand away. He held her wrist in both his hands and she now felt that her entire body was in his hand, and when he bit her on the pad below her thumb she yelled and laughed. Then she saw him staring up at her from the side of her hand, his eyes shining, and she stopped laughing. He let go of her to reach out, with his wide-open palms, for her head, which he held tightly.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  He didn’t kiss her, but, holding her head more tightly, brought his lips close to hers, and when she strained forward to kiss him he held her head back, and stared at her.

  “What do you want?” she asked again.

  “I want to make love with you,” he said.

  She tried to dra
w back, but he held her. “What love?”

  “The most wonderful.” He brushed his lips against her, lightly, and whispered, “Oh, the most wonderful.”

  But his intensity shocked her. “Let me go,” she insisted.

  He did and again they lay side by side.

  She should tell him to leave, but she didn’t. She asked, “And why do you think making love with me would be so wonderful?”

  He suddenly jumped up and off the bed, his body against the dim light from the window like a shadow, and he raised his arms high and said, “Because I want all that’s most wonderful in the world.”

  She studied him, then said, “Well, okay,” because for him making wonderful love was a boy’s fantasy, and she’d allow him his fantasy.

  She had never before made love as she did now with Yvon, never before. The bedclothes were twisted about them by their twisting and turning, and nighttime cold drafts blew cold against their bodies in their, to her, wonderful love making.

  The central heating came on, and the cast-iron radiator in the corner of the room hissed. Lying propped up side by side with pillows against the headboard of the bed, he, his arm behind her back, played with her hair, twirling strands together, curling it round his fingers, gathering it up loosely and letting it drop on her bare shoulders.

  “Are all Franco-Americans like you?”

  “All.”

  “Take your pillow away and lie back,” Nancy said, and when he did she rose and straddled him and began to massage his shoulders. His body seemed to be in part that of a boy, in part that of a man. His delicate clavicles were a boy’s, his shoulders a man’s. His man’s chest was as hairless as a boy’s. His thighs were a boy’s, as were the smooth grooves of his groin, but the rest of him there was certainly a man. She told him to turn over onto his stomach, and she pressed her fingers into his nape, over his shoulders, along his spine. He became so still, so still and so silent, she asked, “Are you all right?” He remained still and silent, and then, laughing, he turned over to face her.

  He ran his hands over her back, her thighs, her buttocks, and, again, the shock occurred: never before had she made love as she did with this man. They lay together wrapped in sheets and blankets, the darkness about them filled with dawn light, and in it the snow falling outside appeared to be falling in the room.