Free The Palace Thief by Ethan Canin Page A

elegy of a zinfandel,” he said, deepening his voice, “a nearly human longing in a grape.” He chuckled and filled the glasses. Then, while the Cubanos and the Goldmans laughed, raised their glasses of wine, and leaned back in their chairs, I told a story about how my friend Billy DeSalz had sent the same love letter to three different girls from three different schools. Mr. Cubano laughed aloud suddenly, and his wife, who I thought was exquisitely beautiful, glanced at him. I went on: But these girls, it turned out, happened to attend the same church. Now Mrs. Cubano laughed out loud, and the story began to take shape in my mind. I lifted my glass of apple juice, leaned forward over the table, and went further and further with my tale, searching for a plot that would take me to the end, turning alternately to the Goldmans and then the Cubanos, and every now and then to my brother, who was silently eating his roast.
    Later, after everyone had gone home, our mother sat on my bed and asked me questions about Clive. She asked me why he was always silent at dinner and what the girls at Taft thought of a boy who knew why mica acted as an electric diode; she asked me if at school he and Elliot ever spoke the strange language they spoke in our house. Then, touching her temple, she asked me to multiply 3,768, our address on Throckmorton, by 216, our area code. “You can’t do that, right?” she said, her eyebrows raised, as if there were a real possibility I could. “It’s not normal to be able to do that without pencil and paper, is it?” She tilted her head to look at me, and when I shook my own, she smiled.
    “Mom,” I said, “I made up most of that business about Billy DeSalz.”
    She looked at me, quizzically. “I know that, honey,” she whispered. “But at least
you
talk to girls in English.”
    It was not that Clive was mean, or dangerous, or particularly delinquent; it was just that he didn’t know how to act like the other kids. As a junior, he had scored two 800s on his SAT’s, while as a senior, when it counted, Mr. Sherwood called to say that he had scored two 200s. “It takes a profusion of intelligence to answer every question
in
correctly,” Clive said that night to our father, who stood in the kitchen slapping the Educational Testing Service envelope against the counter. By then our parents had become used to calls from the principal. One day that year, Clive had stood still in the hamburger line at William Howard Taft, weeping, while the crowd of students parted around him.
    The next night, while I was working on a plaster-of-Paris replica of Michelangelo’s “Pieta” for my honors history class, I discovered Clive’s secret. I was in the basement, molding my statuette on a piece of plywood behind our father’s ping-pong table, copying the form from
Art Through the Ages
, when I looked up and noticed a sliver of light behind the Philco refrigerator box next to the furnace. When I looked up again the light was gone. I wet down the furled skirts of my Mary, walked to the corner, pulled back the box, and found, in the small space behind it, a cot and a candle and, dangling from hangers on the electrical conduit, girls’ clothing. The box from our old TV moved, and Sandra Sorento stepped out from behind it. “Quiet,” she whispered.
    She stood before me in a yellow halter top and a spangled, maroon skirt that went to the floor, narrowing at the knees and spreading again at the ankles so that it looked like the bottomhalf of a mermaid; the halter showed a cream-colored slice of her waist. Things were wrong at her house, I knew.
    “Well, nosy,” she said, “now you know.” She sat down on the cot.
    “Were you watching me?” I asked.
    “A little.”
    “I didn’t do anything weird, did I?”
    “Nope.”
    “Sometimes I do,” I said.
    “Well, you didn’t this time.” She smiled. “You’re so cute,” she said finally. “You’re so serious.” She touched her earrings, one, then the