The Smallest Boys Must Tell the Biggest Stories

First Love by Paul Theroux

Say good night to Grandpa,” Jack said.

The boy murmured, “Good night,” in a shy breathy singsong. “Good night what?”

“Good night, Grandpa.” Corrected, the boy looked miserable, mounting the stairs slowly, as though slightly lame, while I watched his small scuffing feet in sympathy, helpless to ease his awkwardness.

I was surprised a moment later when Jack said, “We need to talk, Dad,” sounding severe in his demand, because I was thinking of the boy.

“Lovely kid,” I said.

“He’s got a lot on his mind.”

“I was eleven once.” I wanted to say more when Jack interrupted. “He doesn’t need to be told he’s grown a lot since you last saw him.”

“It was meant as a compliment. And that was not exactly what I said.” I was about to say I hate to be misquoted, when Jack spoke again.

“You make these disownable assertions and you always avoid the point.”

I knew I was being scolded, yet I couldn’t help admiring Jack’s precision, especially that neat smack with the back of his hand, disownable.

“He has no control over his height,” Jack was saying. “It’s not a compliment. He’s the smallest boy in his class, and in case you’re interested he’s having a tough time at his new school.”

“I could sense that,” I said, beginning to rise from my chair, gripping the arms, thinking how, in old age, just getting up from a damn chair required a plan in advance for a sequence of moves.

“I’m not through, Dad.”

Feeling scolded again, I sat heavily in protest and held my knees, noticing in my resentful scrutiny that my son’s hair was going gray just above his ears, and that seemed to add to his air of severity.

“It’s your absurd church story.”

I said nothing but found more to criticize in my son’s appearance—the uncombed hair, the sweater pulled out of shape, his expensive but unpolished shoes. Surely such negligence was unacceptable in (as Jack once described himself) a customer care coordinator, who needed to be a convincing authority figure and communicator. Or was he scruffy because his wife was away?

“Absurd how?”

“That you went to church with your old granny as a five-year-old. The long walk through the woods—miles apparently. And then you came to the river . . .”

“I know the story,” I said. “Why are you rehashing it?”

“To emphasize how preposterous it is,” Jack said. “How, at the river your old granny . . .”

“Please.” I raised my hand and wagged my finger like a wiper blade before him, but he persisted.

“. . . put you on her shoulder and waded across the river, until the water brimmed chest high.”

Now I smiled, seeing it clearly—the old granny, the brown river, the small boy braced on her shoulder borne forth in the swift current to the far bank of tall reeds, the church steeple in the distance, like a pepper mill upright in torn clouds, the boy bright-eyed in the purple dawn, clinging to the white frizz on the old woman’s head.

“I was trying to inspire him. It’s about piety. Filial piety and spiritual piety.”

“But it never happened,” Jack said coldly.

“It most certainly happened.” Then I smiled again. “Just not to me.”

“He’s not one of your readers, Dad. He’s a small boy. He’s struggling at school. And he’s impressionable.”

I said, “I never scolded you as you are doing to me now.” I expected Jack to admit this, but instead he shook his head peevishly, looking more aged and careworn, while I sat and twinkled, as though defying him to reply.

“Maybe I never gave you cause to scold me.” Jack had been standing all this time, and now he folded his arms and looked down at me, seated, still defiantly twinkling. “One more thing, Dad. Imagine how much richer your life would be if you listened.”

“I have spent my whole life listening.” And I folded my arms, in mimicry of my son, as though to signal I was about to change the subject. “Some grandparents sell their house and relocate. So that they can be near their grandchildren.”

I saw the eager, futile, clumsy oldies, hovering, babysitting, twitching at the margins of the marriage, cheering the grandchildren’s sports events, reading to them, taking them for ice cream, panting and stumbling to keep up with them, foolishly looking for praise.

“At least I’ve spared you that.”

“Oh, yes, I just remembered. ‘I loathe great acting.’ ‘I hate vacations.’ ‘Politics is choosing the tallest dwarf.’”

I had reddened as my son spoke, mimicking my voice. I said, “He told you, did he?”

“Look, I’m glad you’re here, Dad, even if it’s only a week. Obviously Ben looks up to you. He found you on the internet. He says he wants to read your books.”

“I told him not to. That would spoil things,” I said. Softening my tone, I said, “Does this mean I can’t take him to school anymore?”

“No. I need you to. Laura won’t be back for days. I have to go to work. You came at a good time. Just”—he raised his hand and lowered it like a hatchet to mean Enough. No more.

---

“I thought we had an understanding,” I said the next day as we walked to school, the boy’s short legs scissoring beside my loping legs. I remembered what Jack had said about Ben being the smallest boy in the class. But he was a beautiful boy, his hair silken, gray-blue eyes, long lashes, pale cheeks; his thin legs, his trousers stylishly tight. Yet even with his quickened stride he could not keep up with me.

Feeling the necessity to explain, but hating having to, I said, “My story about going to church, being carried across the river on my granny’s shoulder—that was supposed to be our secret.”

“Dad asked,” the boy said, his voice hoarse with reluctance.

“Asked what?”

“If you were telling me stories.”

“You could have said, ‘I don’t know.’”

“That wouldn’t be true.”

I saw that the boy was scrupulously honest—how awkward and inconvenient: he will never understand the irony and impressionism in my fiction.

“Right. So if I asked you, ‘Do they talk about me?’ would you tell me?”

“I guess so.”

“What do they say?”

The child’s face tightened, his eyes narrowing, as though looking at something in the distance. He’s trying to remember, I thought at first. But something in the boy’s posture, seeming to duck, making himself small, told me the boy was trying to forget.

“‘He goes on and on about his new book.’” In that believable sentence the boy lapsed into a new voice, which I took to be not Jack’s but Laura’s.

“Heigh-ho,” I said, with a wave of my hand, as though undoing a curse. Then, softly, “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you any more stories.”

The boy was silent but his face contorted for a second with a noticeable twitch, as though an insect had hit his cheek.

“Unless you want me to.”

From the way Ben slowed and trudged I could tell he was pondering this, thinking hard, each footstep like a sudden shifting thought, and I remembered, He’s got a lot on his mind, so I didn’t press him.

At the school gate, he said, “Are you coming to the soccer game this afternoon?” and added, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“Dad never comes—he’s always working.”

‘He’s a customer care coordinator,’ I said, trying not to sound satirical.

“He’s a customer care coordinator,” I said, trying not to sound satirical. But the boy hadn’t heard. He’d sprinted into the schoolyard, in the direction of a dark girl in a blue beret, bigger than he, who smiled when she saw him.

---

I spent the rest of the day recopying a story I’d written in longhand, thinking, I must remember to tell the boy this. My method was to write a draft in ballpoint, but instead of correcting it line by line I set the pages before me and copied them, correcting as I went, and always the story was enlarged, the dialogue crisper, the descriptions denser. But the light was bad, the chair was wrong, I missed my own desk, and at last I left the house, walking by a longer route to the delicatessen, disliking the idea that I was killing time, and hating the useless hours afterward on a park bench, looking like a futile old man, waiting for the school day to end.

The game had started by the time I got to it. I watched with the mothers, surprised by their youth, admiring how lovely they looked in their enthusiasm. I caught Ben’s eye and waved to him, but I lost interest in the game and turned to the people in the stands, the mothers near me, the students sitting apart—girls and boys together, all races, confident, casually dressed, and I saw among the other spectators the dark girl in the blue beret, her chin in her hands, and now I saw her eager eyes, her pretty lips, her face brightened by her glee watching the game. She stood out from all the others, but she was too young to know how lovely she was, and that her life would be both blessed and cursed by her beauty.

Then, distracted, I grew sad seeing a boy in a necktie and long-sleeved shirt, with spiky hair, sitting apart from the others—the boy I had been, even to the chewed tie; tense, unathletic, puny, hoping not to be noticed. I spent the rest of the game glancing at the dark girl, grieving for the geeky loner.

“When I was eleven,” I said on the walk home, “that was a big year. I fell in love.”

I saw Ben look away, and he began to walk faster.

“She was the new girl in the class, from Holland, amazingly enough. ‘Our Dutch girl’ the teacher called her. She was a bit bigger than me and she had a beautiful face. Marta van de Velde. It was my first experience of love.”

I looked at the boy for a reaction. Still silent, Ben shifted his gym bag from one shoulder to the other. He said, “Did you see my header? Did you see us score that goal at the end?”

“Of course—that was outstanding.”

But I hadn’t seen. I had been thinking of Marta van der Velde, her smooth face and blue eyes, her small prim lips, the way she sat, her twitching lashes when she looked down, her hands clasped on the desktop. What was it that attracted me? Her beauty, certainly, but something else—a suggestion of humor in her watchfulness, and a gentle manner. And her flesh. She was someone I wanted to touch, someone I wished to hold. That was it—to hold her, and be held. I was, at that age, innocent of anything more.

She sat across the aisle, the new girl Marta, in her white blouse with the lace collar and the bunchy skirt and black buckled shoes. And I stared, twisting my chewed tie in my bitten fingers and wishing to hold her—somehow, to lie next to her, as I imagined later, my eyes shut tight, before I went to sleep.

“Why did you like her?”

“Good question!” I said, “It was her smile, her smooth cheeks, her eyes, her pretty fingers. She was sweet. She wasn’t a tease.”

“Is that all?”

“She didn’t look like any of the other girls. And she was nicer than me.”

“In what way?”

“I love these questions, Ben. She was happier. She was better in most ways. She had unusual handwriting—upright and strong. I liked seeing her holding the thick pen in her delicate fingers.”

“There’s a girl in my class, Brady—she’s like that.”

I had been thinking of Marta. I said, “I didn’t know what to say to her.”

“Brady smiles a lot, but she never talks to me. She’s bigger than me. She plays volleyball.” Seeing that I was not responding, he narrowed his eyes and went silent.

But the boy’s silence provoked me, and in some small corner of my brain I recaptured the boy’s words as a whispered echo, the name of the girl.

“Her first name is Brady?”

The boy nodded and said, “But she has her own friends.”

“All I wanted to do was look at her, stare endlessly at her, as you would a work of art. What would you say to a work of art? You’d just stand there like a goofball and admire it and feel small, lost in your fascination.”

Ben said, “We’ve got another game on Friday,” and quickly, “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “Maybe Brady will be there.”

The boy shrugged, hunching his shoulders, looking smaller.

“I followed her home,” I said.

The boy was trudging again, each slapping footfall like an arrested thought. “I loved her,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do.” The memory possessed me, induced a reverie, and in my concentration I forgot where I was until I got to the walkway of my son’s house. I said, “This is between us.”

“What is?”

“What I just told you.”

“I didn’t understand what you were saying.”

I patted the boy’s smooth cheek, my hand lingering on its warmth.

I counted on seeing Ben: by concentrating on him I understood myself at that age. I had not realized how small I’d been at eleven, and—though I’d also played on the soccer team and competed with the rest of the boys in the gym in phys ed—how puny.

So I grieved for my younger self, but I knew that boy better—the boy I’d been—and I marveled that I’d been so bold as to declare my love for Marta van der Velde. I remembered it: the small brown paper bag of fresh fudge, and the note inside, I love you. I’d covertly raised the lid on her desk before school and left it inside, next to her fat pen, and her pencils and ruler.

Had she known it was from me? I hoped so.

“Do you want to impress Brady?” I asked Ben after school the day before the game. “By playing well? Maybe scoring a goal?”

“I’m a wing,” Ben said. “I pass the ball to the striker.”

“But are you happy to see Brady in the stands?”

“I don’t think about it.”

I nodded—it was just what I would have said, and I was glad once again to be reminded of the habitual evasions of my younger self.

“Of course not, why should you? You’ve got other things to think about,” I said. “Tell me about your English teacher.”

“Mr. Bowlus. He has hairy ears.”

I laughed out loud and began to cough and staggered a little. “Are you all right, Grandpa?”

Too moved to answer, I hugged the boy and then realized that he was trying to twist free.

---

I was at first puzzled by the smell of bacon the next morning, the clank of a kettle, the bubbling of eggs frying in fat—odors and sounds from the kitchen that seemed intrusive because I was unused to them. Laura, busy at the stove, kept her back turned when I greeted her, saying I was glad to see her. But I was dismayed, because her showing up meant an interruption of my routine with Ben.

Laura said, “Hi!” calling out to me over her shoulder, while shoveling in the skillet with her spatula and whacking it once.

Seeing Jack opening his car door, I hurried to the driveway and said, “I had no idea Laura was coming back so soon.”

“She lives here, Dad. She’s my wife.”

“Maybe I should go.”

I wanted him to protest: No, stay. It’s great having you here.

But he said, “It’s up to you.”

That left me without a reply, and after Jack had gone to work, hearing Laura in the kitchen, talking on the phone as she chopped—What? Onions, carrots—on the butcher block, holding the phone in the crook of her shoulder and ear as she worked, slashing (it seemed to me) harder than necessary, I felt excluded, and superfluous, the chopping sounds like a severe warning.

I had apologized to them for this visit as an interruption, yet I knew they did not allow themselves to be interrupted. They were in motion when I arrived, and they stayed in motion. They did not break their stride. They worked, they went out. We’re seeing friends—wasn’t I a friend?—You have a chance to bond with Ben.

I’d saved them the cost of a babysitter, yet being with Ben was what I wanted. And there was the game.

---

Searching the stands for the girl I’d seen smiling at Ben that first day in the schoolyard, and at the previous game, I spotted her easily, the blue beret, the cheeks the shade of milky coffee, and bright eyes, the glint of green, dark eyebrows, full lips—a beauty. Her loose tracksuit bulked on her but her hands and wrists were slender. She was smallish, the size of Marta van der Velde—but bigger than Ben; not a woman yet but a girl, unformed, a luminous child, concentrating on the game that had just begun.

She was smallish, the size of Marta van der Velde—but bigger than Ben; not a woman yet but a girl, unformed, a luminous child, concentrating on the game that had just begun.

I followed the game through Brady’s gestures and expressions, the way she clapped when the ball was kicked, her hands over her face, peering through her parted fingers at tense moments, clawing at her beret at the sound of a whistle. She sat with other girls but she seemed oblivious of them, until one of them tapped her arm and pointed behind her. A tall smiling boy dropped beside her and, using his elbow, rocked her sideways, her whole body swaying, as he laughed.

She didn’t object, neither did she speak to him. Her fingers laced together, she averted her eyes, as—I saw—Ben labored to keep the ball between his feet, dancing around it, causing the opposing player to lurch and stumble. But Brady didn’t see Ben’s nimble move. She was distracted, looking down, her hands over her ears. With the tall boy beside her, she’d lost her smile and had stiffened.

Marta in her strange upright handwriting had eventually thanked me for the fudge, but she had never mentioned the note, the words of which now embarrassed me again, more acutely than the first time when, waiting to follow her home, she was nowhere to be seen.

Preoccupied with this memory, my back to the stands, I did not see Brady leave, and the tall boy was gone, too, though I had no way of telling whether they’d left together.

“That’s our first loss,” Ben said afterward. Had there been a scoreboard? I hadn’t noticed.

“I was sitting near Brady,” I said. “She was watching you.”

“Okay,” the boy said without emphasis.

“Isn’t that what you want?”

He was silent, his gym bag bumping his leg. After five steps he said, “I don’t know.”

I was sorry we were nearing the house, where I couldn’t speak to him as I wished. But passing the park bench where I’d killed time two days ago I suggested we sit for a while.

“Marta van der Velde had a friend,” I said, as I sat. “One of the bigger boys. A seventh grader.”

“Did you know him?”

“We didn’t know any of the older boys—not their names. They never spoke to us. Seventh graders were thirteen.”

“We’re all on the playground together,” Ben said.

“I don’t even think he was in our school.”

“Did she like him?”

“I think she was afraid of him. He was big. He made me feel small.”

Saying that I seized the boy’s attention. And I remembered Jack saying, He’s small for his age.

“He met her after school,” I said. “When we came out to the street he was there, waiting. She walked quickly over to him, being obedient, and she seemed afraid of him. He took charge of her, standing so close to her that when I walked by I could barely see her. His arms were around her, as though he was folded over her.”

“Did you say anything?”

“At first I didn’t know what to say.” I was looking closely at Ben. “Then the next day in class I said, ‘I’m going to California. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.’”

The boy squinted and looked doubtful, unprepared for “California.”

“It was a sunny, far-off place—palm trees, and heat, and the Pacific Ocean.”

“It was a lie.”

“It was a hope, Benny. It was a wish.”

I remembered more, another dream, of Africa: I wanted to know what no one else knew. I wanted to go where no one had ever gone. I did not want to be told anything; I wanted to be the teller.

“I felt small,” I said. “I wanted to impress her.”

The boy looked doubtful again, shaking his head slightly, with uncertain eyes.

“I loved her,” I said. “That was my way of telling her.”

And my belief was that if I am prevented from doing what I want to do, I will be unhappy. I knew I needed to be original in order to exist; to distinguish myself in some way to Marta and everyone else, to defend myself in doing this thing, whatever it might be, in art, or writing, or travel, and I knew nothing of any of those things, but if I dared and took a risk I might find out.

“Did you tell anyone?” Ben asked—he was thinking of I loved her.

“I couldn’t,” I said, and I now realized why: because I wanted to keep the secret in my heart. No one knew what it was. If I told anyone they’d tease me and tell me it was a weakness, and try to thwart me, because in the past whenever I revealed something I felt deeply about I was mocked.

“You could have told the girl.”

“Marta van der Velde,” I said. “I wanted her so badly.” I resisted saying that I hated that seventh grader who’d put his arms around her. “For a long time I didn’t want to think about it. I’m thinking about it now in a new way, and it’s very awkward. Do you understand?”

“You’re thinking about it now,” the boy stated plainly, and it seemed in his repeating it that it was proof of his understanding.

“It’s like this,” I said. “You receive something special in a big box. It’s very well packed—a painting, a lamp, a vase—and you unpack it carefully, saving all the wrapping. And when the object is unpacked and looking very small and delicate, you put it aside and take all the tissue, the padding and the Bubble Wrap, the straw and Styrofoam beads and put them all back in the box. But it won’t fit. A third of the stuff lies at your feet.” I found myself giggling sadly. “It just will not fit.”

The boy drew back, looking alarmed, and lifted his gym bag to his thighs as though to protect himself.

“How is it that you can take more out of a box than you can fit back in?” I said, my voice rising.

Clutching his gym bag, the boy looked as though he was going to cry.

“Memories are like that,” I said. “You’ve taken too much out. And you’re stuck with it.” Seeing that the boy seemed frightened and tearful, I said, “But I’m lucky. I became a writer. A writer can always dispose of those extra memories.”

“Where have you been?” Jack said, greeting us at the door, when we got to the house.

“We lost the game,” Ben said.

---

“Remember when I asked you what your parents said about me?” I asked Ben the next day on the way to school. I had stewed miserably in the night, and slept badly, recalling Marta van der Velde and I’m going to California.

The boy nodded, his face tightening, looking accused.

“‘He goes on and on about his new books,’ you said.”

“They said it,” the boy was swift in his rebuttal.

“It’s true—and you know why?”

He made a face, twisting it, to indicate he didn’t know or didn’t want to venture a guess.

“Because no one else does, Benny,” I said. “I need to keep the thought of my work alive in my mind, and sometimes talk about it, because I’m not sure it’s alive in anyone else’s mind.”

We continued to walk, Ben beside me, trudging again, as always his bewilderment evident in the way his feet moved.

“What else did they say?”

In a reciting voice, the boy said, “‘Writers are never satisfied with their books. But Andre is.’”

I was stung, but I laughed, admiring my son again. So it seemed I had fathered a wit, even if the wit was used against me.

“‘He’s arrogant’; I suppose they say that.”

Ben said, “No—they don’t.”

“But people do. It’s not arrogance—it’s a survival skill.” I thought again of Marta van der Velde. I said, “Do people say to you, ‘I know what you want, little boy!’”

“Sometimes.”

“But they never do. They never know. They used to say that to me. They thought they knew. But they had no idea, because they didn’t know me.” I lowered my head and looked at the boy. “You’re wondering what I wanted.”

The question startled him. He said, “I guess so.”

“I wanted to go where no one else went,” I said. “I wanted to know what no one else knew. I wanted to do what no one else did.”

“How do you do that?”

“By becoming a hero,” I said. “That’s what Marta van der Velde gave me. A wish to be bold. A determination to excel.”

“Action hero,” Ben said.

“I didn’t know that expression.” Then I covered my face. “Oh god, I’ve talked too much. Are you going to tell them? Promise me you won’t.”

“I promise,” he said, looking terrified.

That evening, Jack said, “We’ve got a dinner tonight. Some friends.”

Saying that always sounded to me as though my son was hinting that I was not a friend.

“I’m glad to babysit.”

“No. They’re coming here. They’re expecting you to be here.”

I relaxed at the thought of meeting new people—they might be readers. They were the Strawsons, Jack said: he in marketing, she a teacher. Their son was in Ben’s class.

“I’ll need to get ready,” I said and went up to my room and poured myself a large whiskey. Hearing the doorbell ring I waited until I heard greetings, then drank the last of my whiskey and joined my son and his friends.

“This is my father,” Jack said.

“Andre Parent,” I said and looked closely for any sign of recognition.

We ate, I listened, no questions were directed my way, I smiled and responded at the right moments, and toward the end of the meal Jack said across the table, “I’ve been meaning to ask you guys about your trip.”

“India.” And the man turned to me. “Have you been to India?”

“Many times. All over,” I said. “Wrote about it.”

But the man was still talking, describing his impressions of India, the poor people, the noise, the food, his wife chipping in with, “The crowds, the dust, the heat—you wouldn’t believe the squalor.”

“I just remembered,” I said. “I promised to tell Ben a story.”

“We’ll save you some dessert.”

The boy was too sleepy to listen. I sat by the bed, seeing myself in the boy, conjuring up the image of Marta van der Velde, whom I had not thought of for sixty-five years. Yet it was she who had aroused the desire in me that I took to be love—and it must have been love, because it had inspired my chivalrous wish to be a hero. The inspiration not a book, not a great historical figure, not a rousing speech by a teacher; but a shy pretty Dutch girl, newly arrived, with a smooth face and gray-blue eyes, a compact figure at the desk beside me, who had been claimed by an older boy. She had given me something else to love and long for.

I dozed, and when I woke, Jack was beside me, his hand on my shoulder.

“I must have nodded off.”

I tottered to my room yawning, but, having been abruptly awakened, could not get to sleep for a while. I remembered that Marta van der Velde had the beginnings of a figure—and I smiled in the dark. It was the purest love; nothing had preceded it, nor had I told anyone in my life. But my life is my response to that first love.

---

I woke late, Ben had gone to school. I regretted that I had missed him, the morning walk, the conversation with the boy that provoked memories.

They had finished breakfast. Laura was tidying. Fussing, putting things in order seemed to be her way of ignoring me, because in the act of tidying she could always blamelessly turn her back to me.

“Did you tell him?” she said.

Jack cleared his throat. “Laura has some friends coming later today. We’ll need your room.”

“Later today” meant I’d have to leave soon. But this sort of rudeness had the effect of making me excessively polite and accommodating, to remove the curse. I became hearty, I said I understood. I went upstairs to my room and gathered my clothes and my whiskey bottle and packed my bag. Then I sat in the parlor with my hands in my lap. I didn’t want to face them. What was there to say? I was being expelled.

“I got your car out of the garage,” Jack said. “It’s a tricky driveway.”

“That was thoughtful.”

“Benny will be sorry he missed you,” Laura called from the next room. I could see she was sorting magazines, flipping them, kneeling, facing away.

“Tell him something for me,” I said. “Tell him I’m going to California. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

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