She laughed at this but shook her pretty head, a little reproachfully. “That’s no excuse. All my brothers played, and they’re still sharp guys.”
The conversation moved on from there to her interests and comparisons of our respective schools and upbringings. I studied her when she spoke, noting how hers was a vacant yet categorical sort of beauty that might have been a projection of her mind. She knew she was beautiful, yet this knowledge seemed to make her sad. Despite my odd wariness toward dark-haired girls in those days, I decided I liked her—more than liked her really, under the circumstances, and suddenly—pressure in my head deepening—I felt as though I knew everything about her: her religious conviction (or lack thereof), her sexual history (adventurous within certain bounds), and her great life aspiration (to be envied and adored by great hordes of her peers).
I saw in my mind, too, in that moment—by way of a certain form of foreseeing, right or wrong, accurate or not—that she probably never would be truly satisfied; that she would serve as bridesmaid more than a dozen times before she reached thirty; that she would have affairs only with married men; that she would frequently be gossiped about and despised by lesser females. All this revealed itself to me as one glimpses an expanse of rugged terrain in a flash of lightning. But being a fatalistic loner I knew I would never get to know her better. “There is this night,” I thought. “There is this night only.” I grinned and, bending to swipe a can from a lonely unattended cooler at my feet, offered her a beer.
Just then a heavily hair-sprayed blonde ran past us, Guy in close pursuit, casting a sleazy drunken smile my way as he pressed past.
“Stop it, Guy! Stop it!” we heard in another part of the house a couple moments later.
The girl I’d been talking to looked troubled, but I smiled, retrieved the beer I had given her, and popped it open for her before handing it back.
“That happens most every time those two come here,” I said with a bemused shake of the head—lying, smiling, vaguely worried about Guy’s girl on account of what I knew of him.
But when the girl at my side smiled I knew the comment had done its work and saved the awkward moment, much to my relief and satisfaction. It humored me to believe I was something more than the meaty, insipid stud-males like Guy that the stupid randy girls seemed to fall for so often, but then, at other times, I wasn’t so certain.
And this girl was no fool, for suddenly her smile had disappeared, replaced, it seemed, by some wondrous intuition that if she came to know me better I would needlessly complicate her life. It was as if in that moment she saw directly into the shallow portion of my mind possessed of that simplicity which could not realize there were certain perfectly obvious things you could not do without involving yourself in more trouble than they are worth.
An awkward silence ensued and we averted our eyes from one another, glancing around, taking in the magnificent revel. I tried absently to gauge how drunk I was, yet this proved impossible since everyone around us was drunk too.
Just then something struck me near the top of the back, forcing me to take an involuntary step forward. I turned to discover an inebriated boy, much larger than me, laughing in the wake of the shove he had just delivered, though his eyes remained hard and refrained from participating in his guffaws. I noted, too, the girl I had been talking to had vanished into the crowd.