Page 120 - What They Did to the Kid

108 Jack Fritscher

“You don’t live around here.”
I prayed, wondering if male seed in the water could get inside
their bodies.
“Tourist?” she asked. She was Sandra Dee. I was Troy Donahue.
The lake was a summer place. Life was a movie. With dialog.
“Like...,” I said, “...another tourist.” I swam off in a fast Aus-
tralian crawl, never looking back, hearing echoes of Rip’s biblical
“helpmate.” Being set aside from sexual desire truly was difficult,
though in a way Rip and Kenny would never guess. Not because
desire was physical, but because it was mysterious.
I won dered, I really wondered, treading water, warm on the sur-
face, cool around my feet, what she looked like, the girl I could love
and take for my wife. Perhaps my surrender to celibacy would make
it easier to give her up if I could lessen the mystery, actually see her, if
I could know what my flesh was losing, like Grace Kelly, blonde, not
Marilyn Monroe, peroxide. This was harder, not knowing, because
the mystery of her never appearing visible, incarnate, was so great. To
see her swimming in the water, face and body and hair, and still be
able to say, “No, my dear, we mustn’t,” must be easier than fighting
off the fantasy of what might be.
I turned to look for her, but she was gone. A vocation has its
price. The priests always said that. But what of the girls men who
become priests did not marry? What happened to them?
I wanted to leave the beach. I was vexed with, not temptation
exactly, but with unfocused sexual unrest, and Dempsey dropping
out, and all those beer bottles. I swam back to shore. Rip and Kenny,
towels around their necks, sat with Mike on a bench near the bath-
house, talking to the blonde girls who smiled, and sing-song said,
“Bye-bye-eye, Ripley.”
“God, Ryan. Where were you?” Mike said. “Get changed so
we can lose these two characters. My parents expect us home for
supper.”
“I’ll go like this if it’s all the same. Let’s leave.”
In my VW, Rip and Kenny sat in back. I was in no humor to
talk.
Mike pulled his old Ford out of the parking lot, still in the blue
mood that had sent him to the middle of the lake alone.

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