Sunset Park - By Paul Auster Page 0,38

to run away from her only once, only once with any lasting consequences. The ballad of Benjamin Samuels dates back to the summer of 2000, eight years ago, eight and a half years ago to be exact, which means that close to one-third of her life has been lived since then, and still it remains with her, she has never stopped listening to the song in her mind, and as she stands on the porch this foggy Sunday morning, she wonders if anything as momentous will ever happen to her again. She was twenty years old and had just finished her sophomore year at Smith. Alice was going back to Wisconsin to work as head counselor at a summer camp near Lake Oconomowoc, and she asked her if she wanted a job there as well, which was something she could easily arrange. No, she wasn’t interested in summer camps, she said, she’d had an unhappy experience at camp when she was eleven, and so she wound up taking another job closer to home, for Professor Samuels and his wife, who had rented a place in southern Vermont for two and a half months and needed someone to look after their kids—Bea, Cora, and Ben, girls of five and seven and a boy of sixteen. The boy was too old to require looking after, but he had messed up in school that year, barely passing several of his courses, and she was supposed to tutor him in English, American history, and algebra. He was in a foul temper when the summer began—barred from attending his beloved soccer camp in Northampton and faced with the prospect of eleven weeks of excruciating exile with his parents and sisters in the middle of nowhere. But she was beautiful then, never more beautiful than she was that summer, so much rounder and softer than the scrawny creature she has turned into now, and why would a sixteen-year-old boy complain about having to take lessons from an enticing young woman in sleeveless tank tops and black spandex shorts? By the beginning of the second week they were friends, and by the beginning of the third week they were spending most of their evenings together in the pavilion, a small outbuilding about fifty yards from the main house, where they watched the films she would pick up from Al’s Video Store on her shopping excursions to Brattleboro. The girls and their parents were always asleep by then. Professor Samuels and his wife were both writing books that summer, and they kept to a rigid schedule, up at five-thirty every morning and lights out by nine-thirty or ten. They weren’t the least bit concerned that she and their son were spending so much time together in the pavilion. She was Ellen Brice, after all, the soft-spoken, dependable girl who had done so well in Professor Samuels’s art history class, and they could count on her to behave responsibly in all situations.

Having sex with Ben wasn’t her idea—at least not at first. She loved looking at him, the strength and leanness of his soccer player’s body often aroused her, but he was still just a boy, less than six months ago he had been fifteen, and however attractive she might have found him, she had no intention of doing anything about it. But one month into the two and a half months she stayed there, on a warm July night filled with the sounds of tree frogs and a million cicadas, the boy made the first move. They were sitting in their usual positions at opposite ends of the small sofa, the moths were banging against the screen windows as usual, the night air smelled of pines and damp earth as usual, a dumb comedy or western was playing as usual (the selection at Al’s was limited), and she was beginning to feel drowsy, drowsy enough to lean back her head and close her eyes for a few seconds, perhaps ten seconds, perhaps twenty seconds, and before she was able to open them again, young Mr. Samuels had moved over to her side of the sofa and was kissing her on the mouth. She should have pushed him away, or turned her head away, or stood up and walked away, but she couldn’t think fast enough to do any of those things, and so she remained where she was, sitting on the sofa with her eyes closed, and allowed him to go on kissing her.

They were never caught. For