RETURN TO SWAN LAKE

a novel by Gary Canup

Chapter 4

Next day he admitted her to his well-to-do but considerably more modest middle-class home. She was dressed to meet his mother, wearing a black silk blouse over a light-gray skirt, and her long raven tresses were smoothly brushed. Mother entered the living room wiping her hands on an apron and wearing a welcoming smile. Davy had warned his mom not only that he would be bringing home a new friend today but also that the new friend was a girl, so that Mother would not enter the room and stop in her tracks with astonishment; but the woman was quite unprepared for the degree of Jan's beauty and more or less stopped in her tracks anyway.

"Well, good afternoon, young lady! Welcome to our home. You must be Jan. My, how very pretty you are!"

"Thank you, Mrs. Longley."

"You and Davy come into the kitchen. I've baked a platter of Davy's favorite: chocolate chip cookies."

Ordinarily this announcement would have set Davy to jumping up and down with uninhibited glee, but today he restrained himself. "Chocolate chip cookies?" he said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Yeah, they're okay."

"I hope a snack of cookies and milk won't ruin your appetite for supper," Mother said to Jan as she led them into the dining room.

"No, ma'am," Jan replied. "We ordinarily don't eat until seven or eight."

"Davy's father typically gets home from his dentist's office rather late himself. Not quite that late, but late enough to suit us."

The two children seated themselves on high stools at the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room and Mother came up with a tray containing a plate of freshly baked cookies and two tall tumblers of milk and placed the tray on the counter, and Davy lost all pretense at restraint and grabbed a handful of cookies.

"Not too many of those, Davy. Supper's not that far away."

She removed her oven mitts and apron and perched on a stool opposite them.

"You have a lovely home, Mrs. Longley. And these cookies are delicious. You really know how to bake."

"Thank you, dear. It comes from long experience. Plus my mother was an excellent cook who taught me a great deal. Does your mom do any baking?"

"None at all," Jan admitted with a blush. "We have a chef."

Davy grinned to himself as he pictured her frilly pompous mother trying to operate an oven.

While Mother and Jan fell into adultlike conversation, the boy occupied his mouth chewing cookies and guzzling milk. For the most part he abstained from participation in the chat until a question from Mother or a comment from Jan briefly lured him in. Davy listened to the girl converse. She spoke as well as any adult, he thought, very grown-up and articulate, and the boy could tell that his mother was impressed. Holding his tumbler with both hands he sipped his milk, and each time the tumbler came away he lapped off a mustache of milk. What the girl was saying was rather interesting, he had to admit. She and Mother were discussing a framed print of a Van Gogh painting that hung on the dining room wall. Jan said that she and her mother had once viewed the original in a Paris museum. The painting was so yellow and bright that it nearly hurt the eyes.

"The trouble with Van Gogh," Jan was saying, while maintaining a completely deadpan expression, "was that, after he had cut off his ear and sent it to that woman, he could no longer hear the loudness of his colors."

For some reason Davy thought the remark so funny that he nearly choked on a cookie. Both Jan and Mother had to pat his back.

After the snack, Mother told them that it was all right if they ran up to Davy's room to play.

"May I help you clean up, Mrs. Longley?" Jan offered.

"Thank you, dear, but no, I can manage."

Swiping at his mouth with a napkin, Davy leaped from his stool and raced to the staircase with Jan in close pursuit. They pounded up the stairs, at the top of which Jan overtook him, tickling his ribs. They ran into his room and she lifted the sash and stuck her head out the window and filled her nostrils with the lovely summer fragrances rising from Mother's garden below, the garden in full bloom, resplendent with hyacinth and tulip and daffodil. She closed her eyes and let her head loll sensuously in the sunlight, then flipped her hair over her shoulders and presented her face to the sun, felt the radiance warm on her eyelids, the contours of her neck graceful and smooth. Father Sun caressed the beautiful face of this his pampered child, old Sun a fond and doting parent.

Afterwards she joyfully whirled around and sat back against the windowsill to gaze into the room, letting her eyes adjust to the relatively shadowy conditions. And that was when she saw what Davy was doing.

He was sitting on the floor Indian-style. He was gravely setting up the board and pieces for a game of Monopoly.

She watched a bit longer. Then she sat on the floor on the other side of the board.

"You have a nice room," she told him.

"Thanks," Davy said without looking up. He was busy seriously setting up the plastic pieces.

"Nice and cosy," she added.

The boy said nothing. He was engrossed in counting out the paper money.

She looked up at a shelf on the wall. "Did you assemble all those airplanes and ships yourself?"

"Uh-huh," Davy said with abstraction.

Jan nodded slowly to herself as she admired all the ships and planes. She looked at him again. "You have a very nice mother," she told him. "I really like her a lot."

"Thanks," Davy said.

She watched him shuffle the pack of special cards. Finally she slowly pushed the board aside.

Davy looked up at her with surprise.

"I'm sorry, Davy, but do we have to play this game?"

"You don't like Monopoly?" Davy said in bewilderment. He and his chums played Monopoly all the time, with great enjoyment.

"It's just that my father, during his rare times at home, is always trying to get me to play this wretched money game, and I thought we might try a game my mother once taught me."

"What sort of game?" Davy asked suspiciously.

"Well, it's actually less a game, I suppose, than an exercise. A sensitivity exercise. Mother learned it during a group therapy session in Vienna. The idea is to sit facing your partner with eyes closed and to take turns exploring each other's face with your hands, letting images arise that correspond to what you're feeling."

Davy looked at her as though she had just stepped out of a space ship.

"Here, I'll show you." She scooted up close to him, so close that their knees touched, and her skirt rode a little ways up her legs. She closed her eyes and raised her hands to his face.

Davy recoiled. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going to explore your face. The feel of your face alone will awaken certain poetic impressions in my mind."

"You mean . . . you mean you're going to touch me?"

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. "Well, of course, silly. Don't look so panicked, people do it all the time. Come on, just relax."

Eyes closed again, lips slightly parted, she pressed her fingertips gently to his forehead, began moving them down to the eyebrows, across the eyebrows to the temples and around the corners of his flickering eyelids and softly below the eyes to the nose, then down to the softness of his quivering lips. Davy put down the deck of cards. He was starting to feel very odd inside. It was as though her fingers were touching off little sparks of electricity that thrilled his skin and tingled up and down his spine. He had never been touched like this before — slugged, plenty of times after a tease or a prank — but never touched. The truth was that, for all his nervousness, he was rather starting to enjoy this game. She continued her soft and tender exploration along the contours of his cheeks to his chin, then back along the lines of his jaw to his earlobes. When she withdrew her hands, she looked at him in a strangely affecting way, and reported having received images of delicate freshness and purity, like moisture on a rose petal, or like the downy flanks of a frightened fawn.

"Now you do me," she said, closing her eyes and proffering her beautiful face.

"Huh? What do you mean? What do I do?"

"Just close your eyes. Explore my face the way I just explored yours. Report what images you receive."

"You mean . . . now? You want me to do it now?"

"Whenever you're ready."

Davy sat chewing his lip and wiping his sweaty palms on his shirt, as if nerving himself for a fearful ordeal. He closed his eyes and clumsily put his hands to her face, briefly ran them down her face then took them away again.

Her eyes popped open. "Done already? What do you report?"

Davy told her that he had received images of a movie star.

Jan fell back laughing against the bed and there was a flash of white underpants. Davy wondered if the flash had been deliberate.

In the days that followed, neighbors who saw them riding their bikes down the street together used to joke that the dark-haired gypsy would someday land their little Davy for a husband, so happy with each other did they seem. Davy indeed was so happy with this girl that it astonished him; the transition between the exclusive company of boys and the company of this girl had been an abrupt and colorful one, like Dorothy opening the door on the land of Oz. He didn't miss the boys as much as he had thought he would and found that, in many ways, he actually preferred the company of this girl. She was not as limited or as limiting as the boys. She could be rough and rowdy like a boy, but most of the time she was sensitive and caring, traits which Davy secretly valued most and knew he had harbored within him all along. Only with her he was free to express those traits without fear of ridicule; he could confide to her what he was really thinking and what he was really feeling without fear of being labeled a sissy. In short, with Jan he was free to be his complete self. The reason he preferred the company of this girl was the same reason he suspected that many boys secretly preferred mothers over fathers: with mothers they could be sensitive and soft and even weep if they wanted to; with mothers they could be little boys, instead of little men. The games this girl taught him had nothing to do with competition of the sort that suffused the games he used to play with the boys, football and baseball and soccer. Her games instead were rooted in a kind of cooperation that made Davy feel more a part of the world than apart from it.

One day they were up in his room sitting on the floor and he was doing a far more satisfactory job of exploring her face when he happened to open one eye and see his mother watching them from the doorway and he leaped to his feet at once with his eyes darting this way and that. Mother told him no, just to ignore her, she was merely interested in watching this game and learning it and perhaps even someday teaching it to her husband, who, she told Jan in a tone of mild complaint, if he wasn't at his office drilling teeth was engaged in some other sensitive activity like throwing darts at the local tavern with his beer buddies. Mother chuckled with embarrassment. Jan smiled sympathetically, and Davy quickly asked Jan if she wanted to play darts. His eyes still shifted this way and that like those of a puppy caught in naughty behaviour with a pillow. Jan and Mother laughed, urged Davy to sit back down and resume the game, which he eventually did, with reluctance, though he felt pretty stupid with his mother watching.