Hey, Kid! Does She Love Me?

1

Jeff made a tunnel of his hands, turned himself into a camera’s eye, and ‘shot’ his friend, Danny Belco, as he knelt to weld the pan of a ’62 VW Bug. Danny turned the brim of his cap around a couple of times. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Watching you.’

‘You’re always watching.’

‘You’re always doing.’

Danny put on his welding hood. ‘Guess who’s back in town?’

‘Who?’ Jeff said.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘What is this, a quiz?’

‘Come on, guess.’

It was hot, summer hot. Jeff felt loose limbed, limp, and heavy. Outside the intense light bounced off the side of Danny’s house and across the chewed-up lawn and over the woodpile and the dented green van with the four flat tyres where Danny stored spare parts.

Jeff watched the play of muscles across Danny’s bare back, the way they jumped and swelled as he worked. Jeff was taller than Danny, with longer arms and legs, but he was also softer. There was a little bulge in the middle when he belted his pants. The muscles were there, but they didn’t advertise themselves.

But then, everything about Danny was more defined. From the cars he worked on – only vintage VWs, circa 1960 to 1970 – to the kind of girls he liked. ‘She has to be five feet five, exactly two inches shorter than me, have good legs, a small can, and a pair of grapefruit-sized tits that I can hold comfortably.’ He’d found her, too. Tracy Stauffer. (Jeff didn’t know about the grapefruit part.)

And Jeff? His future was like a cloud that he couldn’t grab hold of. It kept changing shape and direction. He’d graduated. Big deal. Now I am a high school graduate. He couldn’t even say it without mocking himself. You are a high school graduate. The world beckons. Time to go, time to fly, time to do. Do what?

Who was he? What was his identity? Director Orloff? Or Jeff Orloff? Jeff Orloff was a slob, wore sweaters with the elbows out, no shirts, never a tie. The knees of his jeans sagged. Ah, but Director Orloff! He wore white turtleneck sweaters, tweed jackets with leather elbows, he had a notebook in one pocket, a copy of Variety in the other and his horn-rimmed glasses dangling from his teeth.

Let me introduce myself, Jeff Orloff, World-famous Movie Director. And why not? He was as unqualified as the next guy. Think big. Everyone else did. Weren’t the guys who tripped over their own feet all going to be quarterbacks for the Dallas Cowboys, and guys who couldn’t do math without counting on their fingers going to be astronauts?

He loved movies. He was a movie freak. He was always making movies in his head and scribbling down ideas for other movies. He’d even shot a couple of videos at school in a course he’d taken. A ghost movie everyone liked. His family, anyway. Last summer he’d taken a job as usher at the Penn Can Mall, just so he could see movies. For one week he tore tickets in half and ogled the girls and swept up the popcorn containers and made the little kids sit down. Good job until the air conditioning activated an allergic coughing attack and ruined a promising career.

Danny’s welding arc threw up long, crooked shadows. Through his cupped hands Jeff panned across the high roof. Long shot: The inside of the barn, open space, dusty beams. Angle shot from above: Circle of light centred on the figure below.

Danny popped up. ‘Did you guess yet?’ A smile trembled under his newly planted moustache. Danny, when he was younger, had had a big head and straw-coloured hair. Now that he was older, he had the same hair, the same big, cheerful, teasing face. ‘This girl I’m talking about, she’s a friend of yours.’

‘Which one? Tracy?’ asked Jeff with a smile.

‘No, not Tracy.’ Danny tossed a clamp at Jeff’s foot. ‘I’m talking about Mary Silver.’

Jeff picked up the clamp and wound it into his hand. Mary Silver. What did Danny know? There was nothing to know. Mary Silver had been a girl in school who went off to college. That’s all.

‘Mary Silver, Mary Silver,’ Danny said. ‘Don’t look so dumb. You remember her. You have her pictures all over your wall.’

The pictures were from a school production of Cyrano de Bergerac. Mary had been Roxanne, and in his fantasy Jeff had been Cyrano, big nose and all.

He searched out the dark corners of the barn, his eyes veering back and forth like a camera. That was the way he used to follow Mary Silver in school, when he was a sophomore and she was a senior – stare after her, watching, watching … He’d had a thousand imaginary conversations with her – a thousand clever-stupid ways he’d start talking to her. Maybe tackle her in a football uniform. He was never on any team, but in his head he was on every team. Fielding a baseball, one handed, right in her lap. Oh, excuse me!… His ideas were all a little lascivious.

Once, coming out of school, he’d seen her drop her notebook and all the jerks standing around laughed. He was one of the jerks, but in his mind he was down there helping her. Another time, by the lake during the regatta, he saw her standing near the water and imagined her falling in, clinging to an overturned canoe, white water raging below and he there at the last moment, leaping, flying, snatching her away to a safe place where they would be alone and … These scenarios never needed words. They went back to the days of the old silent movies. He was Hairbreadth Harry, In-the-Nick-of-Time Jones, Jeff Hopalong Orloff to the rescue.

He imagined calling her.

MARY: I think you have the wrong number.

JEFF: Oh, sorry, but your voice (beat) it’s so (beat) how should I say it? (beat) so special.

MARY: Who is this?

JEFF: An admirer.

MARY: I know who this is. Don’t I know you from school?

JEFF: (modestly) You may have heard of me. This is Jeff Orloff. (Music rising: ‘The Grand Canyon Suite.’)

MARY: Jeff Orloff, the movie director? The kid from North High who made it big in Hollywood? (Fanfare in brass.)

JEFF: Just call me Jeff. (Famous, but unspoiled.)

He’d actually called her once. Called his own bluff. He’d written the whole dialogue out in his looseleaf notebook. Hi, Mary? This is Jeff Orloff, I’ve seen you around school, would you like to go to a movie Saturday? You would? Great! See you then.

When she actually answered the phone, he froze. ‘Hello?’ she said. He forgot his dialogue. He stood there, gripping the phone, dripping sweat, squeezing the handle into a fruity pulp. ‘Hello?’ He couldn’t hang up, couldn’t speak. He was like an insect pinned in space, suspended between heaven and hell. He tried not to breathe. Did she guess it was him? Jeff Orloff, the heavy-breathing pervert. Finally, she hung up. Afterward, for a long time he was afraid to look her way even for a second, for fear that she’d catch a whiff of his pervert breath.

After Mary graduated and went away to college, he was aware of her without thinking about her, without hope or anything like that. She became part of a vague wanting, a hidden part of himself he didn’t talk about to anyone. Things that were gone, things that were lost, things that would never be. What a great athlete he’d be. How much money he’d make – a million before he was twenty. Kid thoughts, kid desires. The sort of things that made people laugh. Desires that he kept out of sight in some attic of his mind, like toys he no longer played with but still wished he could.

‘It’s summer,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t Mary Silver be here? She lives here, doesn’t she?’

‘You don’t know anything, do you? Her family moved to Florida last year.’

How did Danny know that? Why was he bringing up Mary? ‘Maybe she’s visiting. She’s probably visiting friends.’

‘Yeah.’ Danny gave Jeff his big homely smile. ‘Visiting.’ He pulled the welding lines around the pan. ‘With her baby.’

Jeff shielded his eyes against the sparking electric arc.

‘Baby,’ Danny repeated. ‘B-A-B-Y. Baby.’

‘Is she married?’

‘Do you need a licence to do it? She was here yesterday, talking to Mom. She’s going to live here.’

Jeff spun the clamp in his hand. That was the first thing he’d heard that he could understand. The Belcos rented rooms.

‘I told Mom, Mary could have my room. With me in it.’

Jeff tossed the clamp at Danny.

‘Hey! Where are you going?’ Danny called. ‘Jeff, you idiot, you just got here. What difference does it make to you, anyway?’

2

The first time Jeff saw Mary Silver was in a school play three years ago. He was a sophomore, she was a senior. He couldn’t remember the name of the play, but he never forgot Mary. On the stage, something extraordinary happened – it had to do with her face, her eyes, the way she moved, the natural way she acted. She wasn’t acting. She was the character. Nobody else on that stage came near her. She was in a class by herself.

Watching her, he was awed and inspired. It was just a high school play and she was just a student who went to good old North High, an ordinary school like ten thousand others. This wasn’t New York or Hollywood High. This was nowhere. But there was Mary, like a star in that dumb little play. He’d see her in the halls, watch her with her friends, and think a queen was passing by with her retinue.

It wasn’t that she was beautiful – she was short and slight and her mouth was wide, her nose was just a nose, and her hair hung the way most hair does. But her eyes – ah, her eyes! They were large, like two fat eggs … Cut! Can’t you say it better than that, Orloff? Two dark pools … Cut! In writing movie dialogue, less is more, Orloff.

JEFF: Your eyes …

MARY: My eyes?

JEFF: Your eyes … Ahhh …

When he learned her name, Silver, and that she lived over on Rugby Road, he thought she was English. She had that smooth creamy colour, those expressive eyes. Maybe Irish. He never guessed Jewish.

Mary’s father was a doctor. The Silvers lived in a brick and timber Tudor-style house across from the cemetery. After he saw her in the play, he remembered that her father, Dr. Silver, had come to the school once in junior high and talked to them about the Holocaust. What Jeff remembered was the part where her father said that, during the Second World War in Poland, he and his sister hid behind a false partition in back of a pantry in a Christian home.

Because of Mary, Jeff joined the Drama Club. They should have tossed him out. He was the worst actor in the club, and he was always arguing with Mr. Farah. Plays were so talky, unlike movies. He wanted more action, more tension, more visual stuff. Anything Mr. Farah did, Jeff had another idea. ‘I need to make a statement,’ he said one day. That’s the kind of pompous ass he was, but Mr. Farah never laughed. ‘This is the way I see the part,’ Jeff would say. ‘Let the character show himself more in action and less in talk.’

‘Interesting point of view, Orloff,’ Mr. Farah would say, ‘but it’s not the way I see it.’ When Jeff was carrying on, the other kids stood around giving him the gong sign. He didn’t dare look at Mary. Never spoke to her. He, whose mouth runneth over, couldn’t say a word to her. When they passed in the hall, she smiled. But then, she was the star. She probably smiled at everyone.

Mary. Mary Silver. Mary Silver back in town? Mary Silver, with a baby? He couldn’t make the connection, but connections were all he thought about. To make a baby, there had to be a connection – two people, a man and a woman. Sex, that was the connection he was stuck on. Sex, Mary, and this guy who gave her the baby.

He told himself to raise his horizons, get his mind out of the gutter. What business was it of his if Mary Silver had a baby? She didn’t owe him any explanations. Whatever she did, she did. Butt out, Orloff, back off. But his mind had a mind of its own.

The next day, he was almost at Danny’s house when he remembered what Danny had said. Mary was moving into the Belco house. Was she there now? He walked down Spring Street, imagining her at the window, behind the curtains, watching him. He kept going, went by the house like he was on a stage, walking tall and straight, ass tight, swinging along, getting that rhythm, that jive into his shoulders.

He crossed Carbon with its crowded little houses and went past the dark, half-abandoned factories along Wolf, then down Park Street under the highway and the new construction, past the dust-covered car lots and the mud and flowers where the sidewalk ended. He walked along the shoulder of the parkway with the lake on his left till he got to the hill above the French Fort, where he sat and peered through the circle of his fingers. Framed, focused, concentrated. Blotting out the rusting railroad bridge, the polluted lake, and the hokey-looking little fort that not even the tourists came to.

There was another world here once before the chimneys and gas tanks. Trees once surrounded the lake, and huge fish swam in its waters – salmon and sturgeon and trout. He saw it all, his eye at the centre, a darting brown eye, moving here and here and here – a director’s eye.

Ancient smoke rose from the stone chimneys. He smelled the wood fires and heard the hubbub – pigs and dogs, the tumult inside. Canoes approached. Indian canoes bringing furs for barter and a white woman and her baby.