The Virgin Suicides Page 6

  Dr. Becker declined to give Mary Lisbon an estimate. “Bring your mother in and we’ll talk about it,” he said. In fact, the process would have been extensive, as Mary, like her sisters, appeared to have two extra canine teeth. Disappointed, she lay back in the dentist’s chair, her feet raised, while a silver tube chirred water into a sucking cup. “I had to leave her sitting in the chair,” Dr. Becker said. “I had five other kids waiting. Later my nurse told me she heard the girl crying.”

  The girls didn’t appear as a group until Convocation. On September 7, a day whose coolness dampened hopes for an Indian summer, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Therese came to school as though nothing had happened. Once again, despite their closed ranks, we could see the new differences among them, and we felt that if we kept looking hard enough we might begin to understand what they were feeling and who they were. Mrs. Lisbon hadn’t taken the girls to buy new school clothes, so they wore last year’s. Their prim dresses were too tight (despite everything, the girls had continued to develop) and they looked uncomfortable. Mary had spruced up her outfit with accessories: a bracelet bunch of wooden cherries the same bright red as her scarf. Lux’s school tartan, too short by now, exposed her naked knees and an inch of thigh. Bonnie wore a tent-like something, with meandering trim. Therese had on a white dress that looked like a lab coat. Nevertheless, the girls filed in with an unexpected dignity as a hush fell over the auditorium. Bonnie had picked a simple bouquet of late-season dandelions from the school green. She held them under Lux’s chin to see if she liked butter. Their recent shock was undetectable, but sitting down they left a folding seat empty as though saving it for Cecilia.

  The girls didn’t miss a single day of classes, nor did Mr. Lisbon, who taught with his usual enthusiasm. He continued to pump students for answers by pretending to strangle them, and scratched out equations in a cloud of chalk dust. At lunchtime, however, rather than going to the teachers’ lounge, he began to eat in his classroom, bringing a cafeteria apple and plate of cottage cheese back to his desk. He showed other odd behavior. We saw him walking along the Science Wing, conversing with spider plants hanging from the geodesic panes. After the first week, he taught from his swivel chair, wheeling back and forth to the blackboard and never standing up, explaining that this was because of his blood-sugar level. After school, as assistant soccer coach, he stood behind the goal, listlessly calling out the score, and when practice finished, wandered the chalk-dusted field, collecting soccer balls in a soiled canvas bag.

  He drove to school alone, an hour earlier than his late-sleeping, bused-in daughters. Entering the main door, past the suit of armor (our athletic teams were called the Knights), he went straight into his classroom where the nine planets of our solar system hung from perforated ceiling panels (sixty-six holes in each square, according to Joe Hill Conley, who counted them during class). Nearly invisible white strings attached the planets to a track. Each day they rotated and revolved, the whole cosmos controlled by Mr. Lisbon, who consulted an astronomy chart and turned a crank next to the pencil sharpener. Beneath the planets hung black-and-white triangles, orange helices, blue cones with detachable noses. On his desk Mr. Lisbon displayed a Soma cube, solved for all time in a ribbon of Scotch tape. Beside the blackboard a wire clamp held five sticks of chalk so that he could draw sheet music for his male singing group. He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room.

  The girls, on the other hand, entered through the side door, past the bed of dormant daffodils tended each spring by the headmaster’s slim, industrious wife. Scattering to separate lockers, they reunited in the cafeteria during juice break. Julie Freeman had been Mary Lisbon’s best friend, but after the suicide they stopped talking. “She was a neat kid, but I just couldn’t deal with it. She sort of freaked me out. Also I was starting to go out with Todd by then.” The sisters walked with poise down the halls, carrying books over their chests and staring at a fixed point in space we couldn’t see. They were like Aeneas, who (as we translated him into existence amid the cloud of Dr. Timmerman’s B.O.) had gone down to the underworld, seen the dead, and returned, weeping on the inside.

  Who knew what they were thinking or feeling? Lux still giggled stupidly, Bonnie fingered the rosary deep in the pocket of her corduroy skirt, Mary wore her suits that made her resemble the First Lady, Therese kept her protective goggles on in the halls—but they receded from us, from the other girls, from their father, and we caught sight of them standing in the courtyard, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut, looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched.

  We spoke to them in snatches, each of us adding a sentence to a communal conversation. Mike Orriyo was first. His locker was next to Mary’s, and one day he peeked over its rim and said, “How’s it going?” Her head was bent forward, throwing her hair over her face, and he wasn’t sure she’d heard him until she mumbled, “Not bad.” Without turning to meet his eyes, she slammed the metal locker shut and moved away, clutching her books. After a few steps she tugged down the back of her skirt.

  The next day he waited for her and, when she opened her locker, added a new phrase: “I’m Mike.” This time Mary said something distinct through her hair: “I know who you are. I’ve only been at this school for like my whole life.” Mike Orriyo wanted to say something more, but when she finally turned to face him, he went mute. He stood staring at her, opening his mouth uselessly, until she said, “You don’t have to talk to me.”

  Other guys were more successful. Chip Willard, the detention king, walked up to Lux as she was sitting in a pool of sunshine—it was one of the last warm days of the year—and while we watched from a second-story dormer, he sat down beside her. Lux was wearing her school tartan and white kneesocks. Her Top-Siders looked new. Before Willard had walked up, she’d been idly rubbing them in the dirt. Then she spread her legs out, propped her hands behind her back, and turned her face toward the last rays of the season. Willard moved into her sun and spoke. She brought her legs together, scratched one knee, and drew them apart. Willard settled his bulk on the soft ground. He leaned toward her, grinning, and even though he had never said anything intelligent within our hearing, he made Lux laugh. He seemed to know what he was doing, and we were astounded at the knowledge he had gained in the basements and bleachers of his delinquency. He crumpled a dead leaf over Lux’s head. Bits fell down the back of her shirt and she hit him. The next thing we knew, they were walking together around back of the school, out past the tennis courts, through the row of memorial elms, and to the towering fence that marked the property of the mansions on the private drive beyond.

  It wasn’t only Willard. Paul Wanamaker, Kurt Siles, Peter McGuire, Tom Sellers, and Jim Czeslawski all had their few days of going steady with Lux. It was well known that Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon didn’t allow their daughters to date, and that Mrs. Lisbon in particular disapproved of dances, proms, and the general expectation that teenagers should be allowed to paw one another in backseats. Lux’s brief unions were clandestine. They sprouted in the dead time of study halls, bloomed on the way to the drinking fountain, and were consummated in the hot box above the auditorium, amid uncomfortable theatrical lights and cables. The boys met Lux in transit on sanctioned errands, in the aisle of the pharmacy while Mrs. Lisbon waited outside in the car, and once, in the most daring rendezvous, in the station wagon itself, for the fifteen minutes Mrs. Lisbon stood in line at the bank. But the boys who snuck off with Lux were always the stupidest boys, the most selfish and abused at home, and they made terrible sources of information. No matter what we asked, they responded with lewd assertions such as, “Squeezebox is all right. Let me tell you,” or, “You want to know what happened? Smell my fingers, man.” That Lux consented to meet them in the dells and thickets of our school grounds only showed too well her disequilibrium. We asked whether she spoke about Cecilia, but the boys always said they’d hadn’t exactly been talking if you know what I mean.

  The only reliable boy who got to know Lux during
that time was Trip Fontaine, but his sense of honor kept us in the dark for years. Only eighteen months before the suicides, Trip Fontaine had emerged from baby fat to the delight of girls and women alike. Because we had known him as a pudgy boy whose teeth slanted out of his open, trolling mouth like those of a deep-sea fish, we had been slow to recognize his transformation. In addition, our fathers and older brothers, our decrepit uncles, had assured us that looks didn’t matter if you were a boy. We weren’t on the lookout for handsomeness appearing in our midst, and believed it counted for little until the girls we knew, along with their mothers, fell in love with Trip Fontaine. Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun. At first we hardly noticed the wadded notes dropped through the grating of Trip’s locker, nor the equatorial breezes pursuing him down the hall from so much heated blood; but finally, confronted with clusters of clever girls blushing at Trip’s approach, or yanking their braids to keep from smiling too much, we realized that our fathers, brothers, and uncles had been lying, and that no one was ever going to love us because of our good grades. Years later, from the one-horse detoxification ranch where Trip Fontaine had gone to dry out on the last of his ex-wife’s savings, he recalled the red-hot passions that had erupted at a time when he was growing his first chest hair. It began during a trip to Acapulco, when his father and his father’s boyfriend went for a stroll on the beach, leaving Trip to fend for himself on the hotel grounds. (Exhibit #7, a snapshot taken during that trip, shows a bronzed Mr. Fontaine posing with Donald, the two of them squeezed thigh-to-thigh within the palmy Montezuma throne of a hotel patio chair.) At the no-drinking-age bar, Trip met Gina Desander, recently divorced, who ordered him his first piña colada. Always a gentleman, Trip Fontaine imparted to us upon his return only the most proper details of Gina Desander’s life, that she was a dealer in Las Vegas and taught him to win at blackjack, that she wrote poetry and ate raw coconut with a Swiss Army knife. Only years later, looking over the desert with ruined eyes, his chivalry no longer able to protect a woman by that time in her fifties, did Trip confess that Gina Desander had been “my first lay.”

  It explained a lot. It explained why he never took off the puka-shell necklace she’d given him. It explained the travel poster over his bed showing a man soaring over Acapulco Bay on a kite pulled by a speedboat. It explained why he changed his manner of dress the year before the suicides, going from schoolboy shirts and pants to Western outfits, shirts with pearl buttons, decorative pocket flaps and shoulder stitching, every item chosen in order to resemble the Las Vegas men who stood arm in arm with Gina Desander in the wallet photographs she showed Trip during their seven-days-and-six-nights package tour together. At thirty-seven, Gina Desander had envisioned the hunk of masculinity latent in Trip Fontaine’s chubby Speedoed form, and during her week with him in Mexico, she chiseled him into the shape of a man. We could only imagine what went on in her hotel room, with Trip drunk on spiked pineapple juice, watching Gina Desander deal rapid-fire in the middle of her stripped bed. The sliding door to the small concrete balcony had come off its track. Trip, being the man, had tried to fix it. The dressers and bedside tables were littered with the detritus of last night’s room party—empty glasses, tropical swizzle sticks, washed-up orange rinds. With his vacation tan Trip must have looked much as he did in late summer, circulating in his swimming pool, his nipples like two pink cherries embedded in brown sugar. Gina Desander’s reddish, slightly creased skin flamed in age like leaves. Ace of hearts. Ten of clubs. Twenty-one. You win. She stroked his hair, dealt again. He never told us any details, not even later, when we were all adult enough to understand. But we looked on it as a wonderful initiation by a merciful mother, and though it remained a secret, the night conveyed on Trip the mantle of a lover. When he returned we heard his new deep voice sounding a foot above our heads, apprehended without understanding the tight seat of his jeans, smelled his cologne and compared our own cheese-colored skin to his. But his musky scent, the coconut-oil smoothness of his face, the golden grains of intractable sand still glittering in his eyebrows didn’t affect us as it did the girls who, one by one, and then in groups, swooned.

  He received letters emblazoned with ten different sets of lips (the lines of each pucker distinct as a fingerprint). He stopped studying for tests because of all the girls who came over to cram with him in bed. He spent his time keeping up his tan, floating on an air mattress around his bathtub-size swimming pool. The girls were right in choosing to love Trip, because he was the only boy who could keep his mouth shut. By nature Trip Fontaine possessed the discretion of the world’s great lovers, seducers greater than Casanova because they didn’t leave behind twelve volumes of memoirs and we don’t even know who they were. On the football field, or naked in the locker room, Trip Fontaine never spoke of the pieces of pie, carefully wrapped in tinfoil, that showed up inside his locker, nor of the hair ribbons gartered to his car antenna, nor even of the tennis sneaker dangling by one seamy lace from his rearview mirror, in the toe of which a sweaty note read, “The score is love: love. Your serve, Trip.”

  The halls began to reverberate with his whispered name. While we called him “the Tripster” or “Fountainhead,” the girls spoke only of Trip, Trip, that was the whole conversation, and when he was chosen “Best-looking,” “Best Dressed,” “Best Personality,” and “Best Athlete” (even though none of us had voted for him out of spite and he wasn’t even that coordinated), we realized the extent of the girls’ infatuation. Even our own mothers spoke of his good looks, inviting him to stay for dinner, disregarding his longish oily hair. Before long he lived like a pasha, accepting tribute at the court of his synthetic coverlet: small bills filched from mothers’ purses, bags of dope, graduation rings, Rice Krispie treats wrapped in wax paper, vials of amyl nitrite, Asti Spumante bottles, assorted cheeses from the Netherlands, occasionally the odd chunk of hash. The girls came bearing typed and footnoted term papers, “Chick Notes” they’d compiled so that Trip could read a single page on each book. Over time, from the bounty of their offerings he compiled his museum display of “Great Reefers of the World,” each sample housed in an empty spice jar lined along his bookshelf, from “Blue Hawaiian” to “Panama Red,” with many stops in the brownish territories between, one of which looked and smelled like carpet. We didn’t know much about the girls who went to Trip Fontaine’s, only that they drove their own cars and always took in something from the trunk. They were the jangly-earring type, with hair bleached at the fringes and cork-heeled shoes that tied around their ankles. Carrying salad bowls covered with printed dish towels, they walked bowleggedly over the lawn, snapping gum and smiling. Upstairs, in bed, they spoon-fed Trip, wiping his mouth with the bedsheet before tossing the bowls onto the floor and melting in his arms. From time to time Mr. Fontaine passed by, on his way to or from Donald’s room, but the iffiness of his own conduct prevented him from questioning the susurrations coming from under his son’s door. The two of them, father and son, lived like roommates, stumbling upon each other in their matching peacock robes, bitching over who used up the coffee, but by afternoon they drifted in the pool together, bumping the sides, compatriots in the search for a little passion on earth.

  They had the most lustrous father-and-son tans in the city. Even Italian contractors, working in the sun day after day, couldn’t achieve their mahogany hue. At dusk, Mr. Fontaine’s and Trip’s skins appeared almost bluish, and, putting on their towel turbans, they looked like twin Krishnas. The small, circular, aboveground pool abutted the backyard fence, its swells sometimes dousing the neighbors’ dog. Marinated in baby oil, Mr. Fontaine and Trip boarded their air mattresses equipped with backrests and drink holders, and drifted beneath our tepid northern sky as though it were the Costa del Sol. We watched them, in stages, turning the color of shoe polish. We suspected Mr. Fontaine of lightening his hair, and the brightness of their teeth grew painful to look at. At parties, wild-eyed girls would clutch us j
ust because we knew Trip, and after a while we saw that they were as distraught at the hands of love as we were. Mark Peters, going out to his car one night, felt someone grab his leg. Looking down, he saw Sarah Sheed, who confessed she had such a huge crush on Trip she couldn’t walk. He still remembers the panic-stricken way she looked up at him, a big healthy girl renowned for her chest size, lying lame as a cripple in the dewy grass.

  No one knew how Trip and Lux had met, or what they had said to each other, or whether the attraction was mutual. Even years later, Trip was reticent on the subject, in accord with his vows of faithfulness to the four hundred and eighteen girls and women he had made love to during his long career. He would only tell us, “I’ve never gotten over that girl, man. Never.” In the desert, with the shakes, he had sickly-looking wads of yellow skin under his eyes, but the eyes themselves clearly looked back to a verdant time. Gradually, through incessant coaxing, and owing in large part to the recovering substance abuser’s need to talk nonstop, we managed to cobble together the story of their love.

  It began on a day when Trip Fontaine attended the wrong history class. During fifth-period study hall, as was his custom, Trip Fontaine had gone out to his car to smoke the marijuana he took as regularly as Peter Petrovich, the diabetic kid, took insulin. Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse’s office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius. Likewise, Trip Fontaine went to his car three times a day, at ten-fifteen, twelve-fifteen, and three-fifteen, as though he wore a wristwatch like Petrovich’s that beeped at dose time. He always parked his Trans Am at the lot’s far end, facing the school to spot any approaching teachers. The car’s raked hood, sleek roof, and sloping rear end gave it the look of an aerodynamic scarab. Though signs of age had begun to mar its golden finish, Trip had repainted the black racing stripes and shined the spiky hubcaps that looked like weapons. Inside, the leather bucket seats retained idiosyncratic perspiration marks—you could see where Mr. Fontaine had rested his head in traffic jams, the chemicals in his hair spray turning the brown leather a light purple. The faint aroma of his “Boots and Saddle” air freshener still clung to the air, though by that time the car was permeated more with the smell of Trip’s musk and reefer. The racing-car doors shut with a hermetic seal, and Trip used to say you could get higher in his car than anywhere because you kept breathing in the captured smoke. Every juice break, lunch, and study hall, Trip Fontaine sauntered out to his car and submerged himself in the steam bath. Fifteen minutes later, when he opened the door, the smoke would churn out as though from a chimney, dispersing and curling to the music—usually Pink Floyd or Yes—which Trip kept playing as he went about checking his engine and polishing his hood (the ostensible reasons for his trips to the parking lot). After shutting up his car, Trip walked behind the school to air out his clothes. He kept a spare box of mints hidden in the knothole of one memorial tree (planted for Samuel O. Hastings, graduate of the class of 1918). From classroom windows girls watched him, out under the trees, alone and irresistible, sitting cross-legged like an Indian, and even before he got up they could picture the light dirt stains on each buttock. It was always the same: Trip Fontaine rose to full height, adjusted the frames of his aviator sunglasses, flicked back his hair, zipped the breast pocket of his brown leather jacket, and started forward on the juggernaut of his boots. He came down the corridor of memorial trees, across the back green, past the beds of ivy, and into the school’s rear door.