Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

classmates. Neither of us said that, but I think it was true. I wanted her to myself, and I think that she wanted me to herself, as a friend. That’s all, just a friend. Damn it.

I suppose it was because Patti and I were friends and because Malt’s offered the security of relative solitude that I brought up the question of my bastardy on one of our afternoons there. I didn’t do it to try to seduce her. Honest.

“This is really inflated, our coming here,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“My mother used to come here.”

“Did she?”

“Uh-huh. Everybody used to come here, all the high-school kids. That’s what she says.” I looked around. The shop was still, hushed, and almost empty except for us and the leering soda jerk. “You know,” I said, “back then, bringing a girl to Malt’s was a date.”

“It was?”

“Under the right circumstances, at the right time of day.”

“Your mother told you that?”

“Mm,” I said, distractedly. I was wondering how often my mother had come to Malt’s and who had brought her there.

“Is something bothering you?” Patti asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Something.”

“What?”

“Something — personal.”

She touched my arm and said, “Tell me.”

Clasping, but not actually wringing, my hands, I said, “I’ve started wondering whether my mother — ”

“What?” Patti asked after I had allowed a moment to pass in silence. “Is she sick?”

“No. Nothing like that. I — I’ve begun to wonder what my mother — and boys — men — ”

“Oh,” she said. “I know what you mean. It’s a real shock, isn’t it?”

“A shock?” Did she know something?

“When you first think about your mother that way. It’s a shock, right?”

She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows. I would have agreed with anything she said.

“It sure is,” I said. “It’s a shock.”

She giggled and shook her head in wonder and said, “Just think about the things that you want to do with me — ”

“What?” I said. “What things? I — ”

She leaned toward me and gave me both the knowing wink and the provocative pout. The soda jerk dropped a glass.

“Just think about the things you want to do with me,” she repeated.

“Uh-huh,” I said, doing precisely as she asked.

“Now think about the possibility that your mother was sitting right here where I’m sitting, and some boy was sitting right where you’re sitting, and that boy wanted to do with your mother what you want to do with me — ”

“Huh,” I said, exhaling as if I’d been punched.

“ — and maybe he did.”

This was a way of considering my mother’s past that I hadn’t previously tried, but now that Patti had introduced it into my thoughts, I found that I could easily imagine how Dudley Beaker had felt about my mother. All I had to do was look at Patti and I knew with unsettling vividness. But what about my mother? What had she felt for Dudley? An idea came to me so suddenly that I announced its arrival as if I’d won a prize.

“I’ve got an idea!”

“Good for you,” she said. “What is it?”

“I’m going to take a trip into the past.”

“You’ve got a time machine?”

“No,” I said, modestly, as if it were possible that I might have built a time machine (and for a moment, I wondered whether I could). “This will be an imaginary trip, like a play. I want to look around and see what I can find out about whether my mother — if she might have had — that is, if my father — might not be my father.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is all about.”

“I want you to come with me — and play the part of my mother.”

“Your mother? And what part are you going to play?”

“Dudley Beaker, who might be my father.”

“You are a little pervert, you know that?”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure how to take the remark, but she pouted the provocative pout, so I took it as assent. “So you’ll do it?” I said.

“Sure,” she said, winking the knowing wink. “We’re friends. Anything you want, just ask.”

Chapter 9

An Aside (Afflatus, Part 1)

THE IDEA that I reported on the preceding page came to me not on that sunny afternoon in Babbington but on a nasty night in Newark, Delaware, a night when rain was falling in sheets and a blustery wind made umbrellas useless. In a back corner of a bookstore there, I had, earlier, read some passages from my “modified memoirs” and was now delivering a response to a question on the subject of inspiration.

“What we call inspiration is really just chance,” I was saying, trotting along on one of my favorite hobbyhorses, “the chance conjunction of events and the random association of memories and ideas,” but I could see that their minds were wandering, worries about the weather leading them anxiously into the night, to their cars, and out along their several wet ways home.

I glanced at Albertine, who was sitting in the audience, and gave her the wink that we know means, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Paris.”

There, in Montparnasse on a windy, rain-soaked afternoon at the midpoint of a week-long symposium on the very large contribution that even the smallest details, tous les petits, make to the texture of reconstructed time, I sat listening to the participants in a panel discussion called “De Doo-Wop à Hip-Hop: la musique qu’on apprends dans l’ascenseur de la mémoire,” but I was elsewhere. I was in the auditorium of Babbington High School, cupping Patti Fiorenza’s tight little buttocks in my trembling hands.

A moment earlier I had been standing outside the auditorium, looking through the oval window set into one of the doors. After a period of indecision, I pushed the door open, quickly, so that no one would notice, trotted down the aisle, and sidled up to Patti, who was waiting while dapper Mr. Cantrell examined a note excusing her tardiness. (The note was a forgery; Patti had been in the girls’ room, smoking, gossiping, and fussing with her hair. Mr. Cantrell was not fooled.)

In an aisle