Free The Summer Invitation by Charlotte Silver Page A

roof-deck during intermission and took her in his arms and kissed her all of a sudden , with a view of the whole skyline winking behind them, she just couldn’t resist.
    I thought that Clover might object to this—Val letting herself be kissed on the first date. I thought back to how she had said, “Why not try to place something of a value on yourself, Valentine?”—a question that I’d been thinking about ever since then and planned to bring up with my friends back in San Francisco. So I was surprised when Clover exclaimed, “So you let him kiss you! How romantic.”
    Val just had this silly melting look on her face and couldn’t even say anything. Now you know Val is ordinarily very talkative and opinionated, so that just shows you: love does extraordinary things to a woman.
    Finally, she found her voice and admitted: “It wasn’t my first kiss, actually. But it was so romantic, it felt like it, you know? Like the beginning of something. There was this boy at music camp—well actually, there have been a couple of boys at music camp…” She blushed. But then as if she had gone too far, she explained: “All we did was make out.”
    “Quite all right, Valentine,” said Clover smoothly.
    But I was thinking I’d never been kissed yet, myself. There’d never been any “boys at music camp” for me.
     
     
    And I can’t help but notice, the more time that Val spends with Julian, that she isn’t quite so interested in spying on that couple on the other roof-deck anymore. Maybe she doesn’t need to figure out what they were doing, now that she’s doing the same things herself: they don’t hold quite the same mystery anymore.
    Now whenever Valentine has a date with Julian, Clover lets her upstairs to use her bathroom, Theo’s bathroom , to get ready. She emerges wearing light makeup—Clover insists on light makeup only—and smelling of lavender, and with this kind of glow.
    Meanwhile, I still have to use the bathroom downstairs.
    One night Clover was brushing Valentine’s hair out with a marble-backed Italian hairbrush in front of one of Theo’s antique mirrors.
    “I once read,” she remarked, “that women’s hair is at its thickest at the age of fifteen. Your hair certainly is plenty thick. Do you think it’s true?”
    “Oh, no,” Valentine said, in real despair. “But I’m seventeen already. Does that mean mine is thinning?”
    Clover laughed as she gathered Valentine’s red curls up in a twist.
    “There,” she announced.
    When Valentine had gone, I asked Clover, “Why do you think that is?”
    “What?”
    “Why do you think they say women’s hair is the thickest at the age of fifteen?”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” said Clover casually. “I suppose it must have something or other to do with youth.”
     
     
    I finally met Julian, the famous Julian of the deep blue eyes and wavy dark hair, one afternoon when I went with him and Valentine to see a movie at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. The movie was Claire’s Knee , and it was French.
    “They’re doing this retrospective of some French director,” she told me. “Julian knows I speak French, so he suggested it. Wasn’t that sweet of him?”
    “He won’t mind me coming along?”
    “Oh, no. It’s time you meet him anyway. It’s getting serious. And I guess it’s some famous film. We can tell Dad we went to see it at Lincoln Center. He’ll like that.”
    Valentine was right: Julian was cute, though she had neglected to mention he wore glasses, which rather obscured those famous deep blue eyes. Big black-framed glasses that were a little too low on his nose. But actually I thought they were just perfect for a cellist, a serious artist , as I thought of him. Julian, I could tell right away, was just that, serious. Which was funny, because Val had never much struck me as being a serious person at all …
    Julian offered to buy us both something from the concessions stand. When Val and I used to go to movies