25
IF THINGS HAD BEEN just a little different—if the Glynn twins had been younger, or if all of us had been several years older, if we had understood more, or less, of the world, we would have left the theater and walked along Main Street under the movie’s melancholy spell, wary of Babbington at night, when the familiar shops were closed and dark, a little awed by the oddness of the town in this altered state, and we would have said nothing for a long while. The moonlight through the tricky, shifting clouds, the neon signs we didn’t ordinarily see, would have made a new light, and we would have seen ourselves, and the village, and ourselves in the village, in a new light, anew, and in that altered state, we would certainly have thought about the war, and of the people we had lost to it, when we were children, for we were born just as the Second World War was coming to an end, and that would have lent a poignancy to our parting when we reached the five-way light, the intersection where our routes diverged, and while we continued on our separate ways with melancholy hearts and war on our minds, the distant thud of thunder would have been enough to make us think of the Bomb, of Babbington destroyed in an instant, of the likelihood that at any time we and everything we knew might be vaporized in a blinding flash, might vanish on the wind, settling eventually somewhere else, dropping to earth as irradiated dust.
Under such conditions, our little minds, as we walked home in the threatening dark, would have been full of la guerre et la poussière, with hardly a thought for l’amour.
However, matters were as they were, and the movie had inspired the Glynns to play. We had walked no more than a few yards from the theater when Margot turned suddenly and looked behind us and announced in a voice trembling with barely controlled terror: “There’s a car coming.”
“Quick,” said Martha. “In here.”
They pulled me into the shadowy recesses of a doorway.
“What kind is it?” asked Margot. “Can you see it, Peter?”
She was clinging to me in a manner that made me wonder whether she might be wearing fishnet stockings.
“In the dark, I can’t—oh, yeah—it’s a Commander.”
“Don’t let them see you,” said Martha.
We pressed ourselves into the shadows.
“It’s all right,” I said when the car had passed. “They’re gone.”
“They may be back,” said Margot.
“You’re right,” said Martha. “Let’s cut through this lot. Where do you think we’ll come out, Peter?”
“Probably behind the Department of Motor Vehicles—”
“That’s sure to be crawling with guards at this time of night,” said Margot.
“I think they close at five,” I said.
“We’d better head through this alley,” said Margot.
“That’s the way we came,” I pointed out.
“It’ll have to do. Come on.”
We had come nearly to the other end of the alley, where it opened onto Main Street, when Margot pressed her hand against my mouth and pushed me against the wall.
“Silence!” she hissed. “Someone’s coming.”
A couple was walking past.
“Merde,” she said. “They’re sure to see us.”
“Oh!” said Martha. “We’re finished.”
She slumped against the wall and seemed about to faint.
I glanced in the direction of the passing couple for an instant, but then Margot tightened her grip on my chin and twisted my head away from them.
“I have an idea,” she said. “It may seem crazy, but it just might work.”
Suddenly her little face was close to mine, and then her mouth was on mine, and she was kissing me in a highly dramatic way, with the same accompanying sounds, “Mmmm, ummm, mmmm,” that Lola had murmured when she kissed Rocky in the movie—apparently the lingua franca of passion.
I was amazed. Margot and Martha and I were pals—no less, but no more. Kissing didn’t play a part in our relationship. When we had first met, years before, we had gone for a memorable moonlit swim in the nude, in the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy River, but we were just kids then. As the girls had grown up, they had become more distant, they tended to keep their clothes on, their attitudes changed, and I understood that they weren’t the kids they had been. With this kiss came the first inkling—and it was only an inkling, since for the moment we were only actors in an imaginary movie, after all—that things might have changed again.
I opened my eyes and glanced at the passing couple. I saw that Margot’s ruse had worked. The man and woman were grinning at us in a benevolent way, and the man put his arm around the woman’s shoulders.
The kiss ended. I felt Margot pull away. I grinned at the couple, with the hope that I would reinforce their impression of us as giddy little puppy-lovers and prevent them from reporting us to the authorities, bringing down on us any carloads of fascist goons that might be cruising nighttime Babbington. To my surprise, I saw their expressions change. A note of shock and disapproval crept in.
The man tightened his grip on the woman’s shoulders and pulled her away. He seemed to think that what was happening in the alley was something that she shouldn’t see.
I felt lips on mine again and immediately lost interest in the passing couple and closed my eyes and turned my attention to the kiss, but I found that although it was every bit as enjoyable as the first one, there was a different quality to it this time, something I couldn’t pin down, until I opened my eyes and found that it was Martha kissing me.
[to be continued]
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