Preface
MY BEST FRIEND was my imaginary friend, a boy named Rod, short for Rodney, friend of my own invention. I based him on a boy that I met by chance one day, a runaway boy who was passing through Babbington on his way to somewhere else, anywhere, nowhere, who-knows-where. I brought him to meet my great-grandmother Leroy, because I happened to be on my way to see her, and later, long after the runaway boy had left town, one day when Great-grandmother and I were trading secrets, I confessed to her that I considered him my best friend.
“What was his name again?” she asked.
When Great-grandmother asked me a question, I was never quite sure whether she was testing me or simply wanted to know something. Did she know that I didn’t really know the boy’s name? Did she suppose that I would have made one up?
“Rodney,” I said. “Rod.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember. And what was his last name?”
I was ready for this. I had a last name for him. It had been given to me, gratis, one day in the schoolyard. I had witnessed the taunting of a sullen, dark-haired girl by a group of other, livelier girls. Over and over they repeated, in singsong voices, something that may have been “Koochie-koochie-koochie-koo. Would she take it off for you?” The lively girls laughed. The sullen girl stared at the ground and turned and walked away. As she passed a line of boys leaning against the schoolyard fence, they took up the chant, too. I had no idea what all of this might have been about. I was seven, and the actors in the little drama might have been thirteen. On the way home, however, I found myself repeating the chant, as well as I remembered it. The distortions of memory and repetition twisted it into something like “Koochie Koochikoff,” and, eventually, in the days that followed, into what I used for Rodney’s last name.
“Lodkochnikov,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“Lodkochnikov,” I said again, slowly.
“Hmm,” she said. She stared at me long and hard, then gave a little shudder and said, “Well, we’ll see.”
After that day she asked me about my friend Rod Lodkochnikov often, and when I described the imaginary adventures we had, the games we played, and so on, she always seemed relieved, as if she feared that he would be an unsuitable companion for me. She never got his name quite right. She was convinced that he was called Raskolnikov, and that’s the name that stuck as a nickname, Raskol for short. When I was little, I thought of this Raskol as a wanderer, sent by luck or fate to be my friend, but as I aged, or, possibly, as I matured, I came to see that he hadn’t come from anywhere; he had been with me all the time. Although I had made the shell of this friend from bits and pieces of other people—scraps, used parts that I’d picked up here and there from the junkyard of my memory and imagination—his head and his heart were mine from the start, and that’s why we got along so well.
Most children give their imaginary friends up after a while, ignore them, send them away, or let them go, but I kept mine, and along with him I kept his entire family: his enormous half-witted brothers, his sturdy and long-suffering mother, his violent father—a battered, belabored, and disappointed man—and his sultry sister, Ariane. When I was a boy, I was in love with Ariane. She was fascinating, dark and shapely, luscious as a ripe plum, and if she were here now, looking over my shoulder as I write these words, she’d be likely to say, “Take it easy, there, boy. Don’t spread it on quite so thick. Control yourself.”
For a few months when I was eleven, Ariane and I spent our afternoons together, afternoons that seem incredible to me now, the two of us alone in a dark little room at her parents’ house, watching movies on television. She allowed me, now and then, to brush against her, to lean against her, or even to give her a fleeting caress, if I disguised it as an accidental blunder, and she allowed me, with no restrictions at all, to look at her. I was allowed, even invited, to enjoy the sight of her, to appreciate the way she looked. In that sense and that sense alone she gave herself to me, and I took what she offered—regarding her, considering her, contemplating her for hours. The television set was always on during our afternoons together, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I spent my time watching Ariane. A work of art needs a viewer.
I entertained—and endured—uncontrollable fantasies about her. I imagined a reciprocal affection and even—I’ll be delicate—a consummation of that affection, but I was just a boy, six very significant years younger than she. I was disheveled and ignorant, sweaty, loud, half-baked. Still, I like to think that she recognized my childish love for her and understood it, and that it pleased her.
A COUPLE OF YEARS later, when I was beginning to escape my childishness, I began to flirt with Ariane in a more overt way that she couldn’t have failed to recognize. I began to try to tell her what I felt for her, but my complex, fragile feelings were drowned out by the thunder of my roaring, snorting, charging adolescent lust, and the stammered protestations of affection that I managed to get out always wound up coming out as the sort of thing that made her say, “Take it easy, there, boy. Don’t spread it on quite so thick. Control yourself.”
At about that time, Ariane got a job at a resort, though “resort” is really too grand a term for the place. It was a motel with pretensions. She worked there for about a year and a half, as a maid, a waitress, and hostess—and then something happened to her, something that I didn’t understand. She distanced herself from everyone—her family, her school friends, me.
I blamed myself, of course. I accused myself of having gone too far with her. I must have said the wrong thing, something that made her draw a curtain. She seemed to turn inward, but she moved outward, leaving home and moving into an odd house of her own down in the scruffiest part of town, the shadowy warehouse area near the docks. I visited her down there, now and then, passing an evening with her at her place, but I found the surroundings and her circumstances unsettling. Paradoxically (but she would disapprove of my use of that word), although she was living by herself, I no longer felt the splendid isolation from the prying world that had made our earlier afternoons so sweet, and I felt none of the old privileged freedom to view her without shame or self-consciousness. In fact, I felt almost nothing but self-consciousness when I visited her there, and that self-consciousness dulled my senses, muffled me. We still enjoyed each other’s company in a shallow way, but often when we spoke she seemed to be thinking about something entirely different from what she was saying, and no matter how many hours we might chat, there were still so many things deliberately left unsaid that they made an insulating hollow between us, like the dead air in an outside wall. The evenings we spent together ended alike: the silences would lengthen and finally I would say that I had to go. She would show me to the door, and after I heard it close behind me I would walk away with my head down until I was out of sight, in the shadows.
Sometimes, I would walk to her part of town without telling her that I was coming. I’d find a spot where I could see her, and I would watch her for a while, just watch her sitting in her living room or puttering in her kitchen. I might watch her for an hour or so, but after a while, when I had decided that I wasn’t going to walk around to her kitchen door and knock, I’d give up and go home.
[to be continued]
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