Dangerous Laughter Read online

  It was about this time that I noticed a little change in Isabel. She was growing restless—or perhaps she was only searching for a new game. Now when I arrived she was almost never in bed, but was somewhere else in the room, standing or moving about. One afternoon when I entered the dark I could hear her in an unfamiliar place. “Where are you?” I said. “Over here. Be done in a sec.” I heard a wooden sliding, a creak, a rustling, a slide and thump, as of a closed drawer. There was a ripply, cloth-y sound, a snap, more rustling. “There!” Isabel said. “You can come over now.” I advanced slowly, holding out an arm. “Sorry!” I said, and snatched my hand away. “Fresh!” said Isabel. “So! How do you like it?” She seized my wrist and placed my hand on her upper arm and then for a moment on her hip. “It’s a new dress,” she said. “Stockings, too. Or scarves, according to some people.” I heard scritch-scratchy sounds, as if she were rubbing her knees together. “So! Can you dance?” A hand grasped my hand and set it on her waist. On the fingers of my other hand I felt the grope of a closing hand. Fingers seized my waist. “One two three one two three!” she chanted, as she began to waltz in the dark—and I, who had taken dance lessons in the eighth grade, led her round and round as she hummed “The Vienna Waltz,” till she smacked into something and cried, “Don’t stop!”—and as I turned round and round in that room, knocking into things that fell over, I felt her hair tickling my face, I smelled a faint perfume that made me think of oboes and bassoons, I pressed my fingers against the hard, rippling small of her back as she hummed louder and louder and something went rolling across the room and burst against a wall.

  Because the bed was almost always empty, I no longer hesitated by the chair. Instead I went straight past it and lay down on my back with my head on a pillow and waited for her to present herself. After a while she would greet me and sit down on the chair with her feet on the bed. Then she would talk to me about her plans for the future—she wanted to be a doctor, she wanted to help people, she wanted to travel—while I lay in the dark and tried to imagine Isabel stepping from an airplane, in some bright airport, somewhere.

  It was during one of these afternoons in early August, when she sat in the chair with her bare feet resting near my lower leg, that she told me about an idea she’d been turning over in her mind. She’d been thinking about it, actually, for a long time, though she hadn’t been ready to face it, really. But now, thanks to me, she felt she had the courage to do it. Of course, it wasn’t the sort of thing you would just go ahead and do without giving it a whole lot of thought—you had to sort of sneak up on it, in your mind. And that’s just what she’d been doing, over these last weeks, and it felt right, so right, it really did. And so, to make a long story short, or a short story long, she was going to break out of the dark—let in the light—before the month was over.

  A moment later she said, “You’re not saying anything.”

  I said, “Are you really sure you—”

  “Absolutely,” Isabel said.

  Now whenever I entered she was full of plans. At first she’d thought to change things gradually—a dim candle at one end of the room, then on my next visit a lamp on the bed table, and finally the opened curtains—but the more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea of announcing the new era dramatically. A complete break—that was the way to go. And once the darkness was gone, why, she could do anything—anything. She felt it in her bones. She’d always wanted to learn how to play tennis, for example, and had foolishly put it off. She wanted to see people, do things. She missed her aunt in Maine. She and I could go rowing together—there must be lakes around here. We could go swimming at that beach of mine. And as I lay back against the pillows, listening to her as she sat on the chair with her legs on the bed, I could feel her kicking her heels in excitement.

  One afternoon as I climbed the carpeted stairs, on my way to the wooden stairs that led to the attic, it struck me that I hadn’t seen Wolf for quite some time. I had visited him occasionally, on the way to Isabel’s room, but not for the past few weeks or so, and I felt a sudden desire to see him now. I knocked on his door with a single knuckle—two light raps—and after a pause I heard the word “Enter,” uttered in a tone of mock solemnity.

  I pushed open the door and saw in the mildly sunny room a big new desk against one wall. Wolf was sitting at it with his back to me, bent over a notebook. The shades had been replaced by white blinds, and through the open slats I saw sun-struck green leaves and bits of blue sky. The tall narrow bookcase was still there, fastened upright against the wall, but the stray piles of books were gone, in place of the sunken chair stood a red leather armchair with a red leather hassock, the room had an air of studious neatness.

  Wolf turned to glance over his shoulder. When he saw me he frowned and then slowly began to smile; as his smile became fixed, his frown gradually lessened without disappearing entirely. With a flourish he indicated the red leather armchair.

  As I walked over to it, he jerked his thumb at the desk. “The new dispensation.” He shrugged. “It’s very interesting. They want me to do well in school, but they think I read too much. Books as the enemy. Hence our new friend here. I call him Fred.” He patted the desk as if it were a big, friendly dog. “They think it’s good for my—what was that word they used? Oh yes: character.”

  I sat down in the new chair, placing one leg on the hassock, while Wolf half rose and swung around in his wooden chair so that he straddled it, facing me. His crossed forearms rested on the back. On the bed I noticed a new plaid spread.

  “And what have you been up to, David Dave?” he asked, looking at me with his air of amusement.

  “Oh, you know. The library. Ping-pong. Nothing much. You?”

  He shrugged a single shoulder. “The salt mines.” He nodded toward the desk. “Summer school. Punishment for dereliction of duty. Have I mentioned that I flunked three subjects? A family secret.”

  I lowered my eyes.

  “And look at this neat little number.” He swung an arm back to the desk and held up a booklet. “Driver’s manual. From the Department of Motor Vehicles, with love.” He tossed it back. “My father was very clear. Failure will no longer be tolerated.” He shrugged again. “They think I’m a bad influence on myself.” Wolf smiled. “They want me to be more like—well, like you.”

  “Me!”

  “Sure, why not? Straight A’s, the good life, all that jazz. A solid citizen.”

  “They’re wrong,” I said quietly, and then: “Don’t be like me!” It came out like a cry.

  “If you say so,” he said, after a pause.

  We sat for a while in silence. I looked at the big pale desk, with its shiny black fluorescent light and its green blotter in a dark leatherish frame, at the new plaid bedspread, at the clean bright blinds.” Well then,” I said, “I guess—” and rose to go. Wolf said nothing. At the door I turned to look back at him, and he gave me that slow lazy smile, with its little touch of mockery.

  In the darkness of Isabel’s chamber her plans were taking shape. The great event would take place on the last day of August, three days before the start of school. I lay on the bed remembering the first time I had entered the room; it seemed a long time ago. “Isabel,” I said, “do you remember—” “Are you listening?” she said sharply, and for a moment I did not know what she was talking about.

  One night I woke and saw Isabel very clearly. She was wearing white shorts and a bright red short-sleeved blouse. She was leaning back on both hands, with her legs stretched out and her face tilted back, her hair bound in a ponytail and her mouth radiantly smiling. Her face was vague, except for the smile, with its perfectly shaped small white teeth and its thin line of glistening pink between the bright teeth and the upper lip. I fell asleep, and when I woke again I saw the same image, sharp and bright, and understood instantly where it had come from: I saw the dentist’s waiting room, the sunny glass table with the magazines, the glossy page advertising a special brand of toothpaste that whitened as it cleaned. />
  In the last days of August I had the sense of a distant brightness advancing, like an ancient army in a movie epic, the sun flashing on the polished helmets and on the tips of the upraised swords.

  On the day before the final day, I said to Isabel, “Come over here.” My voice startled me with its harshness, its tone of aggrieved authority. There was silence in the dark. Then I felt, in the mattress, the pressure of a form, as she climbed onto the bed and settled down beside me. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered. “You’ll see.” I could feel her like a heat along my side. My cheek itched, as if tickled by Isabel’s hair or perhaps by a high ripple in the rumpled spread. My eyes were wide open. Images rose up and drifted away: a Chinese sage reading a book, bursts of sunlight on shady clapboards, a gray jacket hanging on a hook.

  On the morning of the last day of August I woke unusually early. Even my parents were still asleep. I drank a glass of orange juice in the bright kitchen, tried to read on the back porch, and at last decided to go to the beach. As I stepped onto the sand I was surprised to see a scattering of people, standing about or lying on towels, and I wondered whether they were there because they had stayed all night. The tide was in. Over the water the sky was so blue that it reminded me of an expensive shirt I had seen in a department store. I laid out my towel, with my bottle of suntan lotion in one corner and my book in another, and then I set off on a walk along the wet sand by the low waves. Farther out the water solidified into patches of deep purplish blue and streaks of silver. In the shiny dark sand I saw my footprints, which stood out pale for a moment before the dark wetness soaked back. I tried to imagine a second pair of footprints walking beside mine, first pale and then dark, vanishing in the frilly-edged sheets of water thrown forward by the breaking waves. People were arriving at the beach, carrying towels and radios. Far up on the sand, a girl sat up, poured lotion into her hand, and began caressing her arm slowly, stretching it out and turning it back and forth. When I reached the jetty I walked out onto the rocks, sat for a while on the warm stone with my legs in the water, then swam out until I was tired. Back on my towel I lay down and felt the sun burning off the waterdrops. A girl from my French class waved to me and I waved back. Families with beach umbrellas were coming over the crest of sand by the parking lot. The beach was filling up.

  I arrived at Isabel’s house toward three in the afternoon. At the door Wolf’s mother appeared in green shorts and a yellow halter, with a pocketbook over her shoulder and car keys hanging from her hand. “Go on in,” she said, “I’m in a rush,” and hurried down the steps. In the driveway she turned and called, “John’s out. She’s expecting you.” I passed through the cool dim living room, climbed the carpeted steps to the second floor, and looked at the familiar hall with its closed doors before climbing into the attic. At the top of the stairs I passed through the sun-striped darkness into the second hall and quietly entered Isabel’s chamber.

  “Oh there you are,” she said, with a mixture of impatience and excitement.

  “I went to the beach,” I said, looking around at the dark. Parts of it were more familiar than others—the part that held the chair, the part that held the bed—and I wondered if I could memorize the different parts by concentrating my attention.

  “I’m very excited!” cried Isabel, and I heard her do a little dance-step on the carpet.

  Slowly I walked over to the bed and lay down.

  “What are you doing, what are you doing?” Isabel said, stamping her foot.

  “Doing? Just lying here, Isabel, thinking how peaceful it is. You know, I went for a swim this morning and I’m—”

  “You’re such a tease!” she cried. “You can’t just lie there,” she said, much closer, and I felt a tug at my sleeve. “You have to get up.”

  “Isabel, listen. Do you really—”

  “Oh what are you talking about? Come on! Come on!” She tugged again and I followed her into the dark. I could feel her excitement like a wind. She drew me across the room and abruptly stopped. I could hear her patting the curtains, groping for the drawstrings. The curtains sounded thick and softly solid, like the side of an immense animal. I imagined the brilliant light outside, raised like a sword. “There!” Isabel said. I heard her tugging, jerking stubbornly, moving her hand about, like a maddened bird trapped in the folds. Something gave way, the top of the curtains began to pull apart, sunlight burst through like a shout, for an instant I saw the slowly separating dark-blue folds, a swirl of glowing golden dust, an edge of raised sleeve, before I flung a hand over my eyes. Thrusting out the other hand, I made my way blindly across the room toward the door as she shouted, “Hey, where’re you—” Behind me I heard the curtains scraping back, through my fingers I could feel the room filling with light as if a fire had broken out. I pulled open the door and did not look back. As I fled through the attic and down the first flight of stairs, I saw, beyond the edge of my vision, in that instant before I covered my eyes with my hand, a raised reddish sleeve with a slight sheen to it, slipping down along a ghostly shimmer of sunlit forearm, vague as an agitation of air. At the bottom of the second stairway I waved to Wolf’s mother, who turned out to be a jacket on the back of a shadowy chair, hurried through the living room, and escaped through the front door. Only when my bicycle was speeding down the curving drive between the high fence and the hedge did I turn to look back at the house, forgetting that, from this angle, I could see only the pines, the maples, the sunny and shady driveway turning out of sight.

  School began three days later. Wolf was in none of my classes and I couldn’t find him in the halls. I had never called his house before—somehow our friendship had nothing to do with telephones—but that afternoon I dialed his number. The phone rang fourteen times before I hung up. I imagined the house in ruins, ravaged by sunlight. I looked for Wolf in school the next day, but he wasn’t there. No one knew anything about him. That afternoon after school I called in sick at the library and rode over to Wolf’s house on my bike. At the top of the curving drive it was still standing there, in shade broken by brilliant points of light. Wolf’s mother, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and holding a pair of pliers in one hand, answered the door. In the darkish living room she sat on the couch and I sat in an armchair, holding a glass of iced tea that I forgot to drink, as she told me that Wolf was attending a special boarding school in Massachusetts. Hadn’t he mentioned it? A liberal curriculum—a very liberal curriculum. As for Isabel, she’d gone to live for a while with her aunt in Maine, where she usually spent her summers and where she was now attending the public high school. Her year off had done her a world of good. Wolf’s mother thanked me for being so nice to Isabel, during her convalescence. At the front door she looked at me fondly. “Thank you for everything, David,” she said, and reached out her hand. She gave my hand a vigorous shake and stood watching me from the doorway as I rode off on my bike.

  That fall I threw myself into my classes, but all I could think of was the room in the attic. It was as if I were missing some part of myself that I had to have but couldn’t find anywhere. In mid-October I got my driver’s license and began driving around on the weekends in my father’s car. I took up with my semiofficial girlfriend and went to dances and football games. One Saturday afternoon I drove into Wolf’s neighborhood, but though I slowed down at his driveway, with its scattering of yellow leaves, I passed it without going in. Often I wondered what would have happened if I had turned to look at her, the day the curtains parted. And I saw it clearly: the sun-filled air, the dust swirling in shafts of light, the bright empty room. No, far better to have turned away, to have understood that, for me, Isabel existed only in the dark. Like a ghost at dawn—like the princess of a magic realm—she had to vanish at the first touch of light. So I drove around in my father’s car, waiting for something that never came. By spring of senior year I was caught up in so many things that I had trouble remembering what had happened, exactly, in that dark room, in that vague house, on that winding road on the other side of town
. Only now and then an image would rise up out of nowhere and make me thoughtful for a while—an ivory sage bent over his book, a furry earmuff, and that slow, lazy smile, with its little touch of mockery.

  DANGEROUS LAUGHTER

  FEW OF US now recall that perilous summer. What began as a game, a harmless pastime, quickly took a turn toward the serious and obsessive, which none of us tried to resist. After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live—to die—to burst into flame—to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny. By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning—and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them.

  In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

  The game began innocently and spread like a dark rumor. In cool playrooms with parallelograms of sunlight pouring through cellar windows, at ping-pong tables in hot, open garages, around yellow and blue beach towels lying on bright sand above the tide line, you would hear the quiet words, the sharp bursts of laughter. The idea had the simplicity of all inspired things. A word, any word, uttered in a certain solemn tone, could be compelled to reveal its inner stupidity. “Cheese,” someone would say, with an air of somber concentration, and again, slowly: “Cheese.” Someone would laugh; it was inevitable; the laughter would spread; gusts of hilarity would sweep through the group; and just as things were about to die down, someone would cry out “Elbow!” or “Dirigible!” and bursts of laughter would be set off again. What drew us wasn’t so much the hidden absurdity of words, which we’d always suspected, as the sharp heaves and gasps of laughter itself. Deep in our inner dark, we had discovered a startling power. We became fanatics of laughter, devotees of eruption, as if these upheavals were something we hadn’t known before, something that would take us where we needed to go.