"Every second is eternal," Trip told us...
... describing how as he sat in his desk the girl in front of him, for no apparent reason, had turned around and looked at him. He couldn't say she was beautiful because all he could see were her eyes. The rest of her face--the pulpy lips, the blonde sideburn fuzz, the nose with its candy-pink translucent nostrils--registered dimly as the two blue eyes lifed him on a sea wave and held him suspended. "She was the still point of the turning world," he told us, quoting Eliot, whose Collected Poems he later found on the shelf of the detoxification center. For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at the moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. "You never know what'll set the memory off," he told us. "A baby's face. A bell on a cat's collar. Anything."
They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped seam showing underarm hair. She cared her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils looked as temporary as Cinderella's broom. When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.
He didn't know the first step in pursuing her because he'd always been the one pursued. Little by little, from the girls who came up to his bedroom, he learned where Lux lived, though he had to be discreet in his questions in order to avoid provoking their jealousy. He began driving by the Lisbon house in hopes of getting a glimpse of her, or the consolation prize of a sister. Unlike us, Trip Fontaine never mixed up the Lisbon girls, but from the outset saw Lux as their shining pinnicle. He opened the windows of his Trans Am as he drove by, turning up his eight-track so that she might hear his favorite song in her bedroom. Other times, unable to control the riot in his gut, he floored the accelerator, leaving behind as a love token only the smell of burning rubber.
They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped seam showing underarm hair. She cared her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils looked as temporary as Cinderella's broom. When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.
He didn't know the first step in pursuing her because he'd always been the one pursued. Little by little, from the girls who came up to his bedroom, he learned where Lux lived, though he had to be discreet in his questions in order to avoid provoking their jealousy. He began driving by the Lisbon house in hopes of getting a glimpse of her, or the consolation prize of a sister. Unlike us, Trip Fontaine never mixed up the Lisbon girls, but from the outset saw Lux as their shining pinnicle. He opened the windows of his Trans Am as he drove by, turning up his eight-track so that she might hear his favorite song in her bedroom. Other times, unable to control the riot in his gut, he floored the accelerator, leaving behind as a love token only the smell of burning rubber.