The Perfect Order of Things Read Free Page A

other nights. Drifting in and out of the mob, fifty yards ahead of us, was Clarissa’s old boyfriend, Bill Cardelle, coming this way.
    I didn’t know if they’d seen each other since he dumped her, but she wouldn’t look at him, kept looking around the crowd as if she was expecting someone. But Bill, being Bill, eased his way through it, wasn’t put off by her one-word answers, his hair falling just so over his forehead, his white chinos fashionably high up on the ankle and a pink shirt which, on anyone else, would have looked, well, you know. And after a while they fell into a conversation, friends in common, other couples, and the three of us, at my suggestion, made our way over to the Ferris wheel.
    There was a messy lineup, couples changing their mind amidst a great deal of hilarity, teenagers butting in. I struck up a conversation with a grey-haired man and his wife. I did it, I think, to show Clarissa how easy, how confident I was with people, my gift of the gab. But it was my undoing, this gift of the gab, because while I was talking, Clarissa and Bill somehow got onto the Ferris wheel before me; down went the bar, clank , and the wheel moved up a notch. I got on. Clank . Then behind me the grey-haired man and his wife, who seemed not so interesting after all.
    The ride started. Up, up, up we went; all the way to the top, where you could see the yellow clock tower of my school, like an owl’s eye, staring at me. And then with a rush of screams and exploding lights, down we went, around and around and around. I could see in the chair just above me that their heads, Bill’s and Clarissa’s, were bent close together, as if to hear better; she was asking him questions; he’d answer and then pull his head back to see her reaction and then she’d look at him, not saying anything. I sensed that I was in terrible danger; panic whipped through my body like a pinball. Around and around and around we went. It went on forever, this infernal ride, and with every revolution I could feel her moving away from me.
    They got off first, and when I joined them, staggering a little theatrically, I could see that they were waiting on something, she looking at him, Bill looking down at his loafers. And my mouth went completely dry.
    Bill was dim but he wasn’t vicious, and so he stood off at a decent distance while she told me. “I want to be with Bill now,” she said, and there was, Clarissa being Clarissa, a hint of impatience, the same I’d heard in her voice when she asked me, Was I coming down to see her in the city, as if, in this case, she wanted to get this part of the evening over with (me) and “get on with things.”
    Bill drove me home to my uncle’s. Just the two of us sitting in the car, driving up the same big street I’d walked down only a few hours earlier. How could everything have changed, my whole life, in so brief a time?
    “Is this your car?” I said.
    “My dad’s.”
    “It smells new. Is it new?”
    “Is what new?” he said.
    “The car. Is it a new car?”
    “I think it is.”
    “I like the smell of a new car,” I said.
    We drove over the train yards, up through Chinatown, the moon in the rear-view mirror. A streetcar rattled by, empty now.
    “Hard to believe it’s already August,” I said. I don’t think Bill found much of anything hard to believe. But he nodded cooperatively. He took his right hand off the wheel and rested it on the seat between us. His “petting” hand, it occurred to me.
    “I always like the idea of summer,” I said. “But somehow it always ends up sort of a disappointment.”
    Pulling to a graceful stop in front of my uncle’s house, Bill turned his handsome, almost feminine features to me. Even in the light from the street lamps, I could see the splash of blood in his cheeks. ( My blood, it seemed to me.)
    “I’m sorry about all this,” he said. And in his way, he was. I got out of the car, ran up the flagstone steps, made a small theatrical production of