Beautiful Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

her mother probably does, that Bab’s white shorts are too short, that she is too dressed up in her pink silk shirt for camp, or to be pleased at the novel sort of attention she gets from Babs, who said last night at dinner, “You know, Avery, when you’re a little older you should have an evening dress this color,” and pointed to the flame-gold gladioli on the table, in a gray stone crock.
    “Her shorts are too short,” says Devlin.
    “What do you know about clothes? They’re supposed to be short—
shorts.
” Saying this, for a moment Avery feels that she
is
Babs, who wears lipstick and anything she wants to, whom everyone looks at.
    “Mother doesn’t wear shorts, ever.”
    “So what? You think she’s well dressed?”
    Devlin is appalled; he has no idea what to make of what she has said. “I’ll tell!” He is desperate. “I’ll tell her what you said.”
    “Just try, you silly little sissy. Come on, I’ll race you to the lodge.”
    Both children scramble up, Avery first, of course, and run across the slippery pines, their skinny brown legs flashingbetween the trees, and arrive at the house together and slam open the screen door and tear down the length of the porch to the cluster of grown-ups.
    “Mother, do you know what Avery said?”
    “No, darling, but please don’t tell me unless it was something very amusing.” This is out of character for Jessica, and Devlin stares at his mother, who strokes his light hair, and says, “Now, let’s all be quiet. Barbara is going to play a song.”
    Babs picks up her ukulele and looks down at it as she begins her song, which turns out to be a long ballad about a lonely cowboy and a pretty city girl. She has an attractive, controlled alto voice. She becomes more and more sure of herself as she goes along, and sometimes looks up and smiles around at the group—at Tom—as she sings.
    Tom has an exceptional ear, as well as a memory for words; somewhere, sometime, he has heard that ballad before, so that by the time she reaches the end he is singing with her, and they reach the last line together, looking into each other’s eyes with a great stagy show of exaggeration; they sing together, “And they loved forevermore.”
    But they are not, that night, lying hotly together on the cold beach, furiously kissing, wildly touching everywhere. That happens only in Tom’s mind as he lies next to Jessica and hears her soft sad snores. In her cot, in the tent, Babs sleeps very soundly, as she always does, and she dreams of the first boy she ever kissed, whose name was not Tom.
    Some years later, almost the same group gathers for dinner around a large white restaurant table, the Buon Gusto, in San Francisco. There are Tom and Jessica, and Babs, but she is without Wilfred, whom she has just divorced in Reno.Devlin is there. Devlin grown plump and sleek, smug with his new job of supervising widow display at the City of Paris. Avery is there, with her second husband, Stanley.
    Tom and Barbara have spent the afternoon in bed together, in her hotel room—that old love finally consummated. They are both violently aware of the afternoon behind them; they are partly still there, together in the tangled sea-smelling sheets. Barbara presses her legs close. Tom wonders if there is any smell of her on him that anyone could notice.
    No one notices anything; they all have problems of their own.
    In the more than ten years since they were all in Maine, Jessica has sunk further into her own painful and very private despair. She is not fatter, but her body has lost all definition, and her clothes are deliberately middle-aged, as though she were eager to be done with being a sexual woman. Her melancholy eyes are large, terribly dark; below them her cheeks sag, and the corners of her mouth have a small sad downward turn. Tom is always carrying on—the phrase she uses to herself—with someone or other; she has little energy left with which to care. But sometimes, still, a lively