Page 16 of The Life of Chuck

Chuck and Cat walked out together. “We should do it at the Fling,” she said.

Chuck, who hadn’t been planning on going, stopped and looked at her with his eyebrows raised.

“Not as a date or anything,” Cat hastened on, “I’m going out with Dougie Wentworth—” This Chuck knew. “—but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t show them some cool moves. I want to, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck said. “I’m a lot shorter. I think people would laugh.”

“Got you covered,” Cat said. “My brother’s got a pair of Cuban heels, and I think they’d fit you. You’ve got big feet for a little kid.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Chuck said.

She laughed and gave him a sisterly hug.

At the next meeting of Twirlers and Spinners, Cat McCoy brought her brother’s Cubans. Chuck, who had already endured slights to his manhood for being in the dance club, was prepared to hate them, but it was love at first sight. The heels were high, the toes were pointed, and they were as black as midnight in Moscow. They looked a lot like the ones Bo Diddley wore back in the day. So okay,theywerea little big, but toilet paper stuffed into those pointy toes took care of that. Best of all… man, they wereslick.During freestyle, when Miss Rohrbacher put on “Caribbean Queen,” the gym floor felt like ice.

“You put scratches on that floor, the janitors will beat your butt,” Tammy Underwood said. She was probably right, but there were no scratches. He was too light on his feet to leave any.

8

Chuck went stag to the Fall Fling, which turned out just fine, because all the girls from Twirlers and Spinners wanted to dance with him. Especially Cat, because her boyfriend, Dougie Wentworth, had two left feet and spent most of the evening slouched against the wall with his buddies, all of them sucking up punch and watching the dancers with lordly sneers.

Cat kept asking him when they were going to do their stuff, and Chuck kept putting her off. He saidhe’d know the right tune when he heard it. It was his bubbie he was thinking of.

Around nine o’clock, half an hour or so before the dance was scheduled to end, the right tune came up. It was Jackie Wilson, singing “Higher and Higher.” Chuck strutted to Cat with his hands out. She kicked off her shoes, and with Chuck in her brother’s Cubans, they were at least close to the same height. They went out on the floor, and when they did a double moonwalk, they cleared it. The kids made a circle around them and began clapping. Miss Rohrbacher, one of the chaperones, was among them, clapping along with the rest and shouting “Go, go, go!”

They did. As Jackie Wilson shouted that happy, gospel-tinged tune, they danced like Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, and Jennifer Beals all rolled up into one. They finished with Cat spinning first one way, then the other, then collapsing backward into Chuck’s arms with her own held out in a dying swan. He went down in a split that miraculously didn’t rip the crotch out of his pants. Two hundred kids cheered when Cat turned her head and put a kiss on the corner of Chuck’s mouth.

“One more time!” some kid shouted, but Chuck and Cat shook their heads. They were young, but smart enough to know when to quit. The best cannot be topped.

9

Six months before he died of a brain tumor (at the unfair age of thirty-nine), and while his mind was still working (mostly), Chuck told his wife the truth about the scar on the back of his hand. It wasn’t a big deal and hadn’t been a big lie, but he’d reached a time in his rapidly diminishing life when it seemed important to clear the books. The only time she’d asked about it (it really was a very small scar), he told her that he had gotten it from a boy named Doug Wentworth, who was pissed about him cavorting with his girlfriend at a middle school dance and pushed him into a chainlink fence outside the gymnasium.

“What actually happened?” Ginny asked, not because it was important to her but because it seemed to be important to him. She didn’t care much aboutwhatever had happened to him in middle school. The doctors said he would probably be dead before Christmas. That was what mattered to her.

When their fabulous dance was over and the DJ put on another, more recent tune, Cat McCoy had run to her girlfriends, who giggled and shrieked and hugged her with a fervency of which only thirteen-year-old girls may be capable. Chuck was sweaty and so hot his cheeks felt on the verge of catching fire. He was also euphoric. All he wanted in that moment was darkness, cool air, and to be by himself.

He walked past Dougie and his friends (who paid absolutely no attention to him) like a boy in a dream, pushed through the door at the back of the gym, and walked out into the paved half-court. The cool fall air doused the fire in his cheeks, but not the euphoria. He looked up, saw a million stars, and understood that for each one of those million, there was another million behind it.

The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also containsme, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.

He moonwalked under the basketball hoop,moving to the music inside (when he made his little confession to Ginny he could no longer remember what that music had been, but for the record it was the Steve Miller Band, “Jet Airliner”), and then twirled, his arms outstretched. As if to embrace everything.

There was pain in his right hand. Not big pain, just your basic ouch, but it was enough to bring him out of his joyous elevation of spirit and back to earth. He saw that the back of his hand was bleeding. While he was doing his whirling dervish bit under the stars, his outflung hand had struck the chainlink fence and a protruding jut of wire had cut him. It was a superficial wound, hardly enough to merit a Band-Aid. It left a scar, though. A tiny white crescent scar.

“Why would you lie about that?” Ginny asked. She was smiling as she picked up his hand and kissed the scar. “I could understand it if you’d gone on to tell me how you beat the big bully to a pulp, but you never said that.”

No, he’d never said that, and he’d never had a bit of trouble with Dougie Wentworth. For one thing, he was a cheerful enough galoot. For another, ChuckKrantz was a seventh-grade midget unworthy of notice.

Whyhadhe told the lie, then, if not to cast himself as the hero of a fictional story? Because the scar was important for another reason. Because it was part of a story he couldn’t tell, even though there was now an apartment building standing on the site of the Victorian house where he had done most of his growing up. ThehauntedVictorian house.

The scar meant more, so he hadmadeit more. He just couldn’t make it as much more as it really was. That made little sense, but as the glioblastoma continued its blitzkrieg, it was the best his disintegrating mind could manage. He had finally told her the truth of how the scar actually happened, and that would have to do.

10

Chuck’s grandpa, his zaydee, died of a heart attack four years after the Fall Fling dance. It happened while Albie was climbing the steps of the public library toreturn a copy ofThe Grapes of Wrath—which, he said, was every bit as good as he remembered. Chuck was a junior in high school, singing in a band and dancing like Jagger during the instrumental breaks.

Grandpa left him everything. The estate, once quite large, had shrunk considerably over the years since Grandpa’s early retirement, but there was still enough to pay for Chuck’s college education. Later on, the sale of the Victorian paid for the house (small but in a good neighborhood, with a lovely back room for a nursery) he and Virginia moved into after their honeymoon in the Catskills. As a new hire at Midwest Trust—a humble teller—he never could have bought the place without Grandpa’s inheritance.

---