Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,35

nineteen?

This was 1974 and it had already been a strange year. Abba had won the Eurovision Song Contest but back then bad music was the least of it. Everything was crap. Bleak and corrupt. The Watergate saga had unspooled and Nixon had resigned. It was the middle of August and I had just finished my freshman year at a famous university. Here is all I will say about the school: you probably couldn’t get in. I don’t mean to sound arrogant. People have told me I can come off that way. But is it arrogance if it’s the truth? You probably couldn’t get in. Don’t kill the messenger.

I was spending that summer as a construction worker on Cape Cod. We were building condos in Hyannisport, not far from the Kennedy family compound. My job was to build forms, wooden structures into which concrete for the foundations would be poured. I was the only college kid on the crew and I spent my lunch hours sitting alone, eating bologna on white bread, and reading Atlas Shrugged. I wasn’t being a snob. I could just tell the other guys didn’t want to talk to me. Early in the summer I thought I had a friend on the crew, this guy Bob. He was around my age and had a sister. She was a couple of years younger and middling attractive. They were locals. I took her out one night, slipped something in her drink, and made it with her on the beach in Harwichport. I wasn’t sure if she remembered when she woke up. A couple of days later, Bob asked if I planned to call her, but I didn’t see the point. Although Bob and I were together at work all the time, he didn’t speak to me again until he told me she was pregnant. How was that my problem? I asked. Bob said he was going to kick my ass. I told him to try it.

Every night after work, I’d go to the beach. I’d swim out and pull off my shorts and float until the last rays of the sun disappeared over the horizon. As peaceful a scene as you could imagine, like a Winslow Homer painting that hung in the art museum at school. All this naked swimming had one profound effect: it made me incredibly horny. Nineteen-year-old boys are notorious hormonal cauldrons, but there was something about the feel of salt water against naked skin that induced a sensuality so sublime I desperately wanted someone to share it with. I already told you I wasn’t interested in Bob’s sister. So it was after one of these twilight immersions that I decided to call Margaret Shaughnessy.

Ah, Margaret, light of my life, fire of my loins! Yes, I know Nabokov wrote that in another context—we did him in freshman English—and Margaret was nineteen, not whatever age Dolores Haze was, but you get the idea. We had met two years earlier in Chamonix, France. Please don’t think I’m some jetsetting dickweed who casually wings to Europe for coke-and-champagne-fueled skiing jaunts. It was my first time in France. I was there with my suburban Connecticut high school ski club and Margaret was with her family. We met standing in line at a ski lodge where I was trying to order sausages in my eleventh grade French. We spent the rest of the day gliding down glaciers cutting S-curves in the snow. That night we got drunk on Tuborg (no one checks IDs in France) and we skied together for the rest of the week. A mane of thick, honey-blond hair cascaded over her shoulders and down to the middle of her back. The perfection of her white teeth was rendered more exquisite by virtue of being marred by the left incisor leaning slightly out of alignment. Her skin, burnished by the Alpine sun, was flawless, although now would be a good time to say I never got to lay a hand on it. Our brief European idyll ended and we both returned to our American hometowns. Her family lived in the Boston area so we found ourselves more than a hundred miles apart. A few letters were exchanged, then we promptly lost touch.

Margaret’s family had a summer house in Hyannis. She had not forgotten me and we made plans to go out. Roomful of Blues were playing at a local club called Connie’s and I was no stranger to the unlikely aphrodisiacal nature of the 1940s-style swing they purveyed. If