Twice, page 7
“When was your first time?” I asked.
She hesitated.
“When I was ten, just after my father passed away.”
“What caused it?”
“There was this old man in our neighborhood. Always wore a brown suit and hat. One day, when my mother went to the grocery store, he came by the house. I was alone. He asked if I liked chocolate cake. He said he would give me some if I did something for him.”
“What?”
“Something a young girl should never be asked to do.”
“Oh, no.”
She looked down. “Before he could touch me, I ran out the door. I hid in the trees all day, crying and wishing I had gone with my mother. I fell asleep on the ground. When I woke up, it was morning again and I was back in bed. Same clothes. Same breakfast. I thought I was dreaming. This time I went to the store and held my mother’s arm. I screamed when she tried to let go.”
“Did you ever see that man again?”
“Once, a few years later. I was with my friends at the boardwalk. He walked by in his brown suit and I pointed and started yelling, ‘Creeper! Creeper!’ He ran away.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And after that, did you start time jumping?”
“Oh, eventually, yes. I did many things over. Not so much anymore.”
She leaned in. Her voice lowered.
“Alfie?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Have you told your father?”
“No.”
She leaned back. “Better that way.”
“I guess.”
We sat there in the hung silence that follows a confession. I suddenly felt so connected to my grandmother. I also realized I had just taken part in one of her time jumps, and had no idea what had happened the first go-around, except that she’d yelled at my father. So this was what it felt like for everyone I had affected that way. It felt like . . . nothing.
She tried to change the mood. She tapped my thigh.
“So. You got a girlfriend?”
“Not really . . . There’s this one girl.”
“Tell me.”
“Not much to tell.”
“You love her?”
“Come on, Yaya.”
“What?”
“We haven’t even gone out yet.”
“Well.” She straightened her dress in her lap. “Just be careful.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your power. It’s very tempting with love. You’ll think you can make everything perfect.” She grabbed my hand. “You can’t, OK? You understand?”
“Yes, Yaya.”
She released her grip. Her shoulders drooped.
“I’m tired, Alfie. I didn’t know you were coming. You should call next time, so I can drink some coffee before you get here.” She looked toward the door. “Call for the nurse. I want to get back into bed.”
“Wait, Yaya—”
There was so much more I wanted to know.
“Why do we only get to go back once?” I asked.
She scratched her head, then looked at her fingers.
“I really wish I had a cigarette.”
“Yaya, did you hear me? Why do we only get to go back once?”
She sighed, as if it were obvious.
“Alfie, if you keep getting second chances, you won’t learn a damn thing.”
Nassau
“Miss me?” LaPorta said, reentering the room.
“Everything all right?” Alfie said.
“Yep. Had to pee, that’s all.”
LaPorta had actually been checking with his partners. The results were not promising. The croupier, under questioning, had denied any involvement. And the video of Alfie’s winnings only showed him sitting down at the roulette table and stacking his chips early on those single numbers. A cheat wouldn’t do that. He would more likely wait until late in the roll, lay several bets, or skip a roll to throw off suspicion. Alfie had looked relaxed, casual. Only on the third number did he seem to hesitate, before pushing all his chips on 28 black. Since he’d been building his stack with each success, that was the biggest payout. More than two million dollars. He gathered his winnings, rose from his chair, and cashed out.
LaPorta was certain others were in on it. But the croupier insisted he’d never seen Alfie before. His colleagues from the casino were now being questioned. Meanwhile, LaPorta had only Alfie’s wild notebook story to work with. Keep him talking. Maybe he’ll slip up.
“So where were we?”
“Gianna Rule,” Alfie said.
“Right. Your beneficiary.”
“Excuse me?”
“The bank transfer? The money?”
“Ah. Yes. The money.”
“Ah, yes, the money,” LaPorta mocked. “What’d you think I was talking about?”
The Composition Book
Things my mother said she loved about me:
“The way you get down on the floor to explore the small things.”
I went to college for love. That’s the truth of it. Every step at Boston University, from picking my classes to moving into the dormitories to buying the books to waiting in line at the dining halls, was all in hopes of being with Gianna. Our reunion at the zoo had sparked an attraction I’d never felt before. I needed to see where it went.
Of course, she didn’t know any of this. And with almost twenty thousand undergraduates milling about, finding her took some effort. The student directory had only her photo, no housing information. She wasn’t at the orientation events. I even went to the first meeting of the photography club, hoping she’d show up.
It would have been easier—much easier—if I’d traveled back to that day in Miami and asked Gianna for a phone number, which I’d stupidly neglected to do. But that encounter was one of my favorite memories, and I didn’t want to risk changing any of it.
So I spent mornings hanging outside dormitories and afternoons walking laps in the cafeterias. I even snuck into freshman literature classes to search for her. Some of those lecture halls were so large that I just walked to the front of the room and shouted, “Excuse me! Is Gianna Rule in here?” Everyone stared, but what did I care? Once I saw she wasn’t, I tapped out and tried another class. I even thumbtacked large notes with my dorm phone number on the community poster boards, under the words: gianna rule: call alfie. Still no luck.
Then one night I went for a swim at the university’s indoor pool. About twenty minutes into it, I noticed a woman doing laps alongside me. I thought I saw her look at me and wave, but it happened so fast that I couldn’t be sure.
I tried to keep up, but she was a much faster swimmer, so I waited until she passed me going the other direction. Sure enough, she waved again. She was Gianna’s size and shape. But because she wore a bathing cap and goggles, I barely got a glimpse of her face. Still, it had to be her. Who else would be signaling me?
I made the turn, flipped around, and anticipated her coming my way. But the lane was suddenly empty.
I rose to the surface, gasping air, and spotted her walking toward the locker rooms. I slapped through several lanes, nearly smashing into a guy doing the backstroke, and yanked myself out of the pool. From behind, her body looked more curvy than I remembered it. Just before I caught up, she pulled her swim cap off to reveal a mop of red hair. Then, whoever this woman was looked at me and shook her head, as if I were pathetic. She disappeared into the women’s locker room.
I turned to go, dripping, totally embarrassed, when I heard a familiar voice.
“I was right. A guy will follow any girl who waves at him.”
I spun to see Gianna, in a green bathing suit and shower togs. The redhead stepped out behind her. They both grinned.
“This is my friend, Laura,” Gianna said. She put her hands on her hips. “So. I hear you’ve been looking for me.”
✶
You know that expression “bowled over”? That’s how I constantly felt around Gianna back then. From that moment at the pool onward, every encounter, every brief conversation, left me off-balance. Being able to do things twice may have sharpened my confidence with other people, but around her I felt awkward in how I stood, how I slouched, even where I put my arms. It was as if my body were constantly auditioning. They say the strongest kinds of love make you feel that way, right? Sort of dizzy? I was dizzy around Gianna all the time.
Still we never started a relationship. Quite the opposite. A few weeks later, I saw her on the campus lawn, lying on a blanket, reading a book. She wore a cropped blue top and tight yellow shorts. Some shirtless guys were playing soccer on the nearby grass, and Gianna was watching as I stepped up behind her. I couldn’t help but stare at her bare, tanned legs as she loosely kicked them up and down, her small feet moving like flippers.
“You know it’s creepy to stare at a girl’s butt,” she said. She spun her head around. “You’re not a creep, are you, Alfie?”
I felt a flame of embarrassment shoot up my spine. As her eyes locked on mine, I actually yelled the word “Twice!” and was instantly back in my earlier class, breathing so hard, the guy next to me whispered, “Hey, man, are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Fine.”
When class ended, I exited the building and reminded myself that Gianna knew none of my previous behavior. I saw her again on the lawn. I took a deep breath. This time I approached from the front, determined to be aloof. I stared at a book as I passed by her.
“Hey, Alfie,” she yelled. “What are you reading?”
I looked up as innocently as I could fake it.
“Oh. Hey, Gianna.”
“What’s the book?”
I had to flip it over. I didn’t even know.
“The Divided Self.”
“Any good?”
“You know. So-so. It’s for sociology so I—”
She turned away to smile at someone, one of the shirtless soccer players who was jogging her way. He had thick black hair and dark stubble on his cheeks. He dropped to his knees and kissed Gianna on the forehead while resting a hand on the small of her back, just above the yellow shorts that had gotten me in trouble minutes earlier.
“Hey, Alfie, do you know Mike?” Gianna said.
“Hey, man,” Mike said, smiling. His teeth were perfect.
“Twice,” I mumbled under my breath. “Twice . . . Twice . . .”
But I had already redone this moment. There was no going back again.
“Hey, man,” I finally croaked back, a weaker version of Mike’s words, befitting a man who was obviously, to Gianna, a weaker suitor.
✶
For the rest of our freshman year, I got no closer than friendship would allow. Gianna was popular with a wide swath of people who all seemed to adore her. I’d see her laughing in the student lounge with a group of Filipino classmates, or doing morning exercises with a tai chi club, or working in the cafeteria where she had a part-time job, chatting up some older kitchen staff who seemed to treat her like a peer. Whenever there were others around us, she would introduce me as “Alfie, a guy I used to ride elephants with in Africa.”
Now and then, I would see her arm in arm with Mike, whose last name was Kurtz, and who, it turns out, was a star goalie on the university’s soccer team. And a senior. This made me feel young and clumsy around them, and I found myself undoing so many moments—times I said something lame, or she caught me staring—that I must have added a semester’s worth of second tries.
One time I was playing piano in a practice room (despite my dad’s objections, I was majoring in music) and Gianna passed by the open door and saw me. I was in the middle of singing “Try Me” by James Brown, a wailing, plaintive ballad that my mother used to play on her old turntable.
“Try me, try me,
Darling tell me, ‘I need you.’”
“Alfie?”
I stopped playing. My face went red.
“Wow, Alfie. You’re really good.”
I shrugged. But inside, I was happy with the compliment. I’d gotten to sing those words to Gianna without having to say them. Maybe she’d take a hint.
“Do you want to hear a song?” I asked. Then I added, “Any song?”
“You can play any song?”
“Try me.”
She smiled. “You were just singing that. ‘Try me.’ ”
“Yeah.”
She made a deep-thought face. “OK. You’ll never know this one. It’s called ‘Blue Room.’ Ella Fitzgerald sang it. My father used to play that for my mother.”
I’d never heard of it. But I zapped myself back two days, found it, studied it, and had it ready to play the second time she came down the hall and caught me singing.
“Wow, Alfie. You’re really good.”
“Do you want to hear a song? Any song?”
“You can play any song?”
“Try me.”
“You were just singing that. ‘Try me.’ ”
“Yeah.”
“OK. You’ll never know this one. It’s called ‘Blue Room’—”
“By Ella Fitzgerald?” I interrupted.
“Wow. Yeah. You’ve heard of it?”
“Uh-huh. I think it goes like . . .”
Just as I put my hands on the keys, Gianna turned her head and yelled, “Mike! Hey! Down here!”
I swallowed. Suddenly Mike appeared in the doorway. He was carrying a guitar.
“Alfie is going to play this great old song,” Gianna said.
Mike smiled. “Oh yeah? Which one?”
“ ‘Blue Room.’ I love it. Go ahead, Alfie.”
I looked at their happy, waiting faces. My shoulders slumped.
“I don’t really know it, to be honest. I thought I did.”
They stared with pasted smiles.
“Sorry,” I added.
“That’s OK,” Gianna said. “It’s really old.”
A pause.
“Well. See ya later.”
Off they went.
✶
There were so many incidents like this that my composition book was full of dates and scribbles, a zigzag record of our encounters and reencounters. (My notebook collection was now so huge that I kept the ones from childhood at home, in boxes in the basement. I started anew at college.)
Sometimes I leafed through the pages and was taken aback at how many moments I had repeated with Gianna. I remembered what Yaya had said about love: You’ll think you can make everything perfect. You can’t. I wondered if this was what she meant.
I tried getting to know other girls, Boss. I had two roommates. One of them, Elliot, was a good-looking guy in the theater program who felt sorry for me and would drag me to parties where he chatted up women, then brought me into the conversation. I tried to engage with them. I really did. But within minutes I would start comparing them to Gianna, and they always fell short. No chemistry. Not as funny. Not as compelling. It seems silly, I know, dismissing potential romances because they didn’t match a fantasy. What was I saving myself for? Gianna didn’t even like me that much.
Then, one night during finals week of my freshman year, I was heading up the library steps when I saw Gianna curled on a bench. Her arms were wrapped around her knees, as if she were trying to make herself as small as possible.
“Hey, are you OK?” I said.
She glanced up quickly. Her face was tear-stained.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing.”
“What does nothing look like?”
Even crying, she managed to throw me.
“Can I help?” I asked. “I mean . . . I want to help . . . if there’s something I can . . . you know . . .”
“I’m fine, Alfie.” She sniffed. “Oh, God. This is something I swore I would never do.”
“What’s that?”
“Cry over a guy.”
I figured she meant Mike. But I didn’t want to say his name.
“Yeah. OK. Well, I guess—”
“He’s graduating,” she blurted out. “So he decided we should break up. Just like that. He said he ‘doesn’t see any future in it.’ Like I’m a stock or something.”
She lifted her shirt collar and wiped tears off her cheek. “How does anyone know what the future is anyhow?”
I resisted the urge to tell her it was easy.
“You should leave me alone, Alfie,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m embarrassed.”
Embarrassed? I wanted to tell her how embarrassed I felt around her constantly. How embarrassed I was that her green eyes, even crying, froze me when they flashed my way. How embarrassed I was that her voice right now, hoarse from crying, sounded so seductive I wanted to lose myself inside it.
I couldn’t verbalize such thoughts. Instead, I said the only thing that would come out of my mouth:
“He’s a fool.”
She tilted her head and squinted, as if not sure what she just heard, and for a moment I thought, You have to undo that, right now, go back, say twice. But before I could, her expression melted into a soft smile, and I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that I felt the earth shift.
“Alfie,” she said, lightly touching my hand, “you’re sweet.”
And that was the start of everything.
✶
As I read this over, Boss, I realize how chaste it seems. Young people today think nothing of jumping into bed the first time they meet. All those movie scenes where the couple bursts through the apartment door and slams against the wall, undressing each other in mad abandon. I’m sure it happened back in the ’70s, too. But not to me. Not when I was nineteen, anyhow. Things went slower. And deep down, I sensed that when it came to Gianna, her affection would need to be earned, deliberately, meritoriously. Maybe I was just too scared to go faster.
In any case, summer came and we both went home, me to Philadelphia and Gianna to San Francisco, her father’s latest transfer. But we spoke on the phone a few times, and after a month she told me she was coming to visit her roommate, who, lucky for me, lived in New Jersey, just over the bridge.
“Maybe we can hang out?” I said.
“Yeah, that would be cool,” she replied.
The week she arrived, we agreed to meet on a Saturday afternoon and go to the Philadelphia Zoo. I figured that was innocent enough. And zoos seemed to work for us.
