Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

Afterwards, I send Hadley back with the truck. Me and Joellen, a math teacher at the school and my first girlfriend, go out on the town. There’s a Chinese place we like; I don’t get to eat too much of that in Stow. I order her a Mai Tai, which comes in a porcelain coconut with two pink umbrellas, and I get a Suffering Bastard myself. When Joellen gets a little drunk, she forgets that she hates me for some reason or another, and like last year we will probably wind up in the back seat of her Ford Escort, on top of textbooks and abacuses, clawing at each other and bringing back the past.

  I do not love Joellen. I never have, I think, which may be the reason she thinks she hates me.

  “So what you been up to, Sam?” she says, leaning across the Peking fried chicken wings. She is a year younger than me but she’s looked thirty for as long as I can remember.

  “Pruning, pretty much. Getting ready for the troops in the fall.” In late September we open the orchard up to the public. Sometimes I can gross over a thousand dollars in one Sunday, between bushels of apples and fresh-pressed cider and retail-pricing wholesale Vermont cheddar cheese.

  Joellen grew up in Concord, one of three or four fairly poor families living in a trailer park, and she came to Minuteman Tech to be a beauty stylist. She has a reputation for doing nails. “Find your own variety yet?”

  For years I have been working in a greenhouse, grafting and splitting buds in hopes of coming up with something really incredible, some apple that will set the world on edge. My own form of genetic engineering, I’m trying to bring back a Spitzenburg, or something like it that is easier to grow and more adaptable to our climate, so that this time it won’t die out quite so fast. I can’t tell if Joellen is interested, or mocking me. I have always been a lousy judge of character.

  Joellen dips her finger into the duck sauce and deliberately sucks it clean between her lips. She holds her hands out to me. “Notice anything?”

  Her nails, which are what I have been trained to look at first, are covered-with tiny caricatures of Sesame Street characters. Big Bird, Ernie, Snuffelupagus, Oscar the Grouch. “That’s good. Where’d you learn that?”

  “Kids’ Band-Aids,” she sighs, exasperated. “I can copy pretty good. But that’s not it. Look again.” She wiggles her fingers, so I start to look for new creases in her skin, cuticle damage, anything. “The ring,” she says finally. “For God’s sake.”

  Christ, she’s engaged. “Well, that’s great, Joellen. I’m happy for you.” I don’t know if I really am, but I know it is what I am supposed to say. “Who is it?”

  “You don’t know him. He’s a Marine. Doesn’t look a thing like you, either. We’re getting married in September, and of course you’ll be invited to the wedding.”

  “Oh,” I say, making a mental note not to come. I resist the urge to check if she is pregnant. “What’s his name?”

  While Joellen tells me the life history of Edwin Cubbles, hailing from Chevy Chase, Maryland, I finish the food on the table, my drink and Joellen’s drink. I order two more drinks and finish those too. While she is telling me the story of how they met at a costume party on the fourth of July (he was a walrus, and she was Scarlett O’Hara) I try to make the umbrellas stand upright in the thick and seeded duck sauce.

  Last year when I came to speak at the high school we drove to the place where we both lost our virginity-a field in some conservation land that turns purple with fireweed at the end of the summer. We sat on the hood of her little car and drank Yoo-Hoo from a convenience store and then I lay down in the grass to watch the night come. Joellen sat between my legs, using my bent knees as a kind of armchair, and she leaned back against me so that I could feel the hooks of her bra through her shirt and mine. She told me again how sorry she was that she had broken up with me, and I reminded her that it was me who did it-one day I had just realized I didn’t feel the way I used to. Like barbecue coals, I said, you know the way they’re orange one minute and then you turn around they’ve just become grey dust? As I told her this I cupped my hands around her breasts; she didn’t stop me. Then she flipped herself over and began to kiss me, and rub her hands up and down the legs of my good khaki pants, and as I got hard she said to me, “Now Sam, I thought you didn’t feel the same way.”

  Joellen is still going on about Edwin. I interrupt her. “You’re the only girlfriend I’ve ever had who’s gotten married.”

  Joellen looks at me and she is truly surprised. “You’ve had other girlfriends?”

  Although we haven’t had our main course yet I signal for the check. I’ll pick it up as an engagement present; we usually go dutch. She doesn’t seem to notice that the lo mein and the beef with pea pods haven’t come, but then again she hasn’t really eaten much of anything. “Don’t worry about driving me home,” I tell her, feeling my face turn red. “I can get Joley or Hadley to take a run out here.”

  The waiter, I notice, is a hunchback, and because I feel bad I take a couple of dollars extra out of my wallet. He has brought pineapple spears and fortune cookies with the check. Joellen looks at me and I realize she is waiting for me to pick a cookie. “After you,” I say.

  Like a kid, she dives into the puddle of pineapple juice and uses her nail as a chisel to crack it. “Great beauty and fortune dwell in your smile,” she reads, pleased with the outcome. “What’s yours?”

  I break my cookie in half. “You will find success at every turn,” I read, lying through my teeth. Really, it says something dumb about visitors from afar.

  As we walk out the restaurant Joellen takes my arm.

  “Edwin is lucky,” I say.

  “I call him Eddie.” And then, “You really think so?”

  She insists on driving me back to Stow; she says it could be the last time she sees me as a single woman, and I can’t argue with her there. About halfway, in Maynard, she pulls into the parking lot of a church, an old New England white clapboard church with pillars and a steeple, you name it. Joellen reclines her seat all the way and rolls back the moonroof in the car.

  I get the feeling I have to leave. Fidgeting, I open the glove compartment and riffle through the contents. A map of Maine, lipstick, two rulers, a tire gauge and three Trojans. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Jeez, Sam. I’m doing all the driving. Can’t I take a little rest?”

  “Why don’t I drive? You get out and sit over here and I’ll drive. You’ve got the whole way back to drive, anyhow.”

  Joellen’s hand wanders across the console, like a crab, and comes to rest on my thigh. “Oh, I’m not in a hurry.” She stretches, deliberately, so that her ribs rise and her breasts get flat under her blouse.

  “Look, I can’t do this.”

  “Do what,” Joellen says. “I don’t know what we’re doing.” She reaches across to loosen my tie and unbutton my shirt. Pulling the tie through the buttoned collar, she wraps it like cord around her hands, and slips it over my head to rest on the back of my neck. Then, drawing me in, she kisses me.

  God can she kiss. “You’re engaged,” I say, and when my lips move hers move with me, pressed on mine, like an echo.

  “But I’m not married.” With amazing skill she swings her leg over the center console, pivoting, coming to sit spread-eagled on my lap.

  I am losing control, I think, and I try not to touch her. I wrap my fingers-around the plastic fixtures of the seat belt until she takes my hands and holds them up to her chest. “What’s stopping you, Sam? It’s the same old me.”

  What’s stopping you? Her words stay, frosted on the window. Morals, maybe. Idiocy? There is a buzzing in my ears, fueled by the way she is rubbing against me. She slides her hand down my shorts and I can feel her nails.

  There is this buzzing and what is stopping you? My head keeps ringing and at some point I realize that I cannot be held accountable for what is happening, for my hands ripping at her and the taste of the skin on her nipples, and she closes on me, closes and holds from the inside. Remember when it was you and me, baby, in this field, at fifteen, with life laid out in front of us like a treasure chest; and love was something to breathe in your girl’s ear. Do you remember how easy it was to say forever?

  When it is over her ha