18
“REMEMBER THIS,” she said, and she tapped me on the chest to make sure that I was listening. “Love, like other intoxicants, alters your perceptions. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“I was walking home after work one night, no more than a couple of weeks after I had met Guy, and I had the sudden, giddy feeling that the world had changed.”
“Everything was covered with a sparkling film, there was music in the air, and the scent of flowers.”
“When I recognized the feeling for what it was, I really got into it. I was feeling all the clichés of happiness, the entire catalogue, including the lift I felt in my spirits, the lightness in my step. And at the same time, I could see myself, as if I had been loitering along the docks, just standing there, and saw myself coming along, and shook my head, an older and wiser me, and said, as if I were diagnosing a disease, ‘That girl’s in love.’ ”
SHE THOUGHT of turning around, running back to the resort, tracking Guy down, and throwing herself into his arms, but when she actually turned to do so, she was surprised to discover that there was another impulse, stronger than her wanting to run back to the resort and tap at Guy’s door. It was the desire to tell someone about what she felt. She wanted a witness to her happy delirium. She thought of her mother, but she wouldn’t do. Her mother seemed to her a great many years removed from the sort of thing she was feeling now. She needed someone who could get as giddy on this intoxicant as she was. She needed one of her girlfriends. Tina lived nearby. Old reliable. Tina was a bit awed by Ariane. She was a plain girl who envied Ariane’s looks and her sexuality and her boyfriends. She had been listening avidly to Ariane’s accounts of her romantic entanglements for years. Most of the time, it seemed like a symbiotic relationship, but sometimes Ariane had the feeling that she was using the other girl, and sometimes when she was telling her the details of an encounter in the moonlight, she would look hard at Tina, illuminated by the moonlight herself, where they sat in her darkened room, telling their secrets, and see a fat girl, who was listening to Ariane out of the morbid conviction that she was never going to experience what Ariane was describing. She saw the avidity in Tina’s eyes, her hunger for the experience of love, her greedy eagerness for it, even secondhand from Ariane.
Once, when Ariane was describing how her heart leaped when one boy or another held her and said to her the same things all the other boys had said to her, she saw the possibility of tears in Tina’s eyes.
For a moment, Ariane was puzzled. There didn’t seem to be any particular reason for Tina to react more strongly to this story than to any of the others Ariane had told her.
Ariane went on, tentatively, as if there were more to tell than she could bring herself to tell. Tina swallowed.
Ariane dropped her voice to a hush and spoke more slowly. Tears welled into trembling crescents in Tina’s eyes.
Ariane finished in a whisper and the tears rolled down Tina’s cheeks. Ariane turned her head away for a moment, to hide her satisfaction with her performance, and Tina threw her arms around her and held her for a long while, until she had to blow her nose.
Tina would do.
But Tina wasn’t home, or she was asleep. The house was dark and silent. Ariane turned toward home, with her head down, disappointed. There was a light on in another of the houses along the street, my grandparents’ house, right next door. The light attracted her, and she turned to look through the window. Standing at the window was a man, a large man, lean but sturdy: my grandfather. He was looking out into the night, and at first she thought that he must have seen her. Maybe he was worried that she was a prowler or a burglar. Light of heart, impulsive, she danced a step in the circle of the street-lamp light, spun around, and blew him a kiss, then disappeared into the shadows.
[to be continued]
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