There was an icy insinuation in his tone. He was still angry with her, and with this seemingly unsolvable confusion into which their lives had been thrust. When he’d finally managed to close both corset and dress, his hands continued resting on her hips. “So y’ intend t’ stay with him?”
Laura closed her eyes tiredly, inhaled deeply, no closer to solutions than Rye. “For the time being.”
His warm hands slipped away. “And y’ won’t see me?”
“Not this way ... not ...” But she stammered to a halt, uncertain of her ability to resist him.
His anger was back, roiling just beneath the surface as he gritted his teeth. “We’ll see about that ... Mrs. Morgan!” Then he spun and walked into the silent fog.
Chapter 5
THE DAYS THAT followed found Laura and Dan uncomfortable and distant. Since the night of the Starbucks’ dinner, Dan had grown more and more stoical toward her, often wearing a wounded look that pricked Laura’s conscience each time she glanced up and encountered it. She had not lied when he asked if she’d been with Rye that night, but Dan had seen her red-rimmed eyes and guessed the worst hadn’t happened—not if there’d been tears. Yet those tears themselves told Dan that Laura still had feelings for Rye. And the tension grew.
On a warm golden evening in late May, when the sun hovered over the rim of the ocean like a ripe melon, Laura watched from the window above her zinc sink while Dan and Josh played together in the yard. Dan had made a pair of stilts and was patiently trying to teach Josh to walk with them. He held them upright, and Josh clambered up onto the footblocks once more while Dan supported him, keeping the sticks steady. But the minute Dan let go, Josh’s legs spread apart like two halves of a wishbone. A single halting step, then the stilts went crashing to the ground in one direction and the boy in another, rolling over and over and over, playfully exaggerating, and Dan right with him, the two of them laughing joyously. They tumbled to a halt and Dan lay flat on his back, arms outflung while Josh straddled his chest as if he had Dan pinned. Then over they went in the other direction, and this time Dan pinned Josh, whose childish giggling drifted through the spring evening ... the music of love.
The sun was behind the pair, turning their bodies to silhouette as Laura observed with a lump in her throat. Dan pulled Josh to his feet and brushed his clothes off, turning him around to tease with a playful spank on the boy’s backside. Josh whirled around to get his giggling revenge, but in the next instant Dan’s brushing slowed ... then stopped ... then his arms went around Josh and their two outlines melted into one.
Laura’s heart expanded. Quick tears stung her eyes, seeing the desperation in that sudden embrace, the way Dan laid his cheek atop Josh’s golden head, the way he hugged a little too tenaciously, and Josh squirming free, galloping toward the stilts once more while Dan knelt on the ground for a long moment, his eyes following the romping child.
He turned and looked down toward the house then, and Laura jumped back from the window, her throat constricting. Her eyes slid closed. Her fingers made a steeple before her mouth. How could I ever separate those two?
Later that night Laura and Dan made love, but she felt in his embrace that same desperation she’d seen in his clutching grasp of Josh earlier. He held her too hard. He kissed her too avidly. He apologized too profusely if he thought he’d done the smallest thing to displease her.
She wondered, after Dan at last fell into a restless sleep— would it ever be the same between them again? As long as Rye lived within touching distance, how could it be? Whether she saw Rye or not, kissed him or not, made love with him or not, he was there again, accessible, and this fact alone thwarted her and Dan’s relationship.
Conscience-torn, Laura lay in the dark, the back of one wrist draped across her forehead, mouth dry, palms damp, willing her thoughts to take the straight and narrow.
But her reflections had a will of their own and would plague her with comparisons she had no right to be making. For what did it matter, the proportions of a man’s body, the turn of his shoulder, the texture of his palm, the shape of his lips? None of this mattered. What mattered were his inner qualities, a man’s values, the way he cared for a woman, worked for her, respected her, loved her.
But Laura wasn’t fooling herself one bit. The physical comparisons were the ones that now brought her the most discontent. The undeniable truth was that Rye was the better lover and had the more desirable body. Deep in her heart she had recognized this during her years of marriage to Dan, but she had effectively suppressed the thought whenever they made love. But now Rye was back, and his superiority as a lover plagued her, causing great guilt each time she let the fact intrude between herself and the man to whom she was still wed.
Dan had always approached her almost as a supplicant approaches an altar, whereas she and Rye had always met on equal terms. She was no goddess, but a woman. She didn’t want adulation, but reciprocation. Yes, there was a vast difference between making love with Dan and making love with Rye. With Dan it was sobering, with Rye intoxicating; with Dan it was mechanical, with Rye shattering; with Dan a ceremony; with Rye a celebration.
How could this be, and why should it matter? Yet it was ... it did. Laura felt her body—only now, after Dan had left it—growing aroused at the memory of herself and Rye in the orchard with fog tendrils binding them closer and the scent of spring ripening in the damp night about them.
Oh, Rye, Rye, she despaired, you know me so well. We taught each other too well, you and I, to be able to live in the same town together and not be tempted.
Her hand rested on her stomach. She raised it to her breasts, finding them hard, tight peaks at the very thought of him. She pictured his lips, remembered that first time he’d kissed her ... out in the bayberry patch up on Saul’s Hill ... and the first time he’d touched her here ... and here. First times, first times ... when they’d been trembling and afraid but burgeoning with sexuality as they treaded that fine line between adolescence and adulthood. It had begun with that innocent touch on his bare back ...
***
They’d been swimming along the sandy beach at the head of the harbor near Wauwinet, ending, as always, by trudging along the place called the Haulover—a narrow stretch of sand separating the calm waters of the harbor from the pounding Atlantic, where fishermen often hauled over their dories from one side to the other.
She followed Rye through the reedy yellow-green beach grass that swept the strand and barred the intrusion of the mighty ocean from the quiet bay. To their left swept Great Point, crooking its narrow finger as if beckoning the ocean waves against it. But Rye gave it only a cursory glance before squatting in his customary way on the sand, hunching forward with his arms wrapped around his knees, searching the Atlantic for sails.
Grains of sand clung to his back, so Laura reached out and did as she’d done a hundred times before, whisking them off.
Only, this time he flinched and whirled around and shouted, “Don’t!” Then he stared at her as if she’d committed some horrendous crime, while Laura gawked at him in owl-eyed amazement.
“All I did was brush the sand off.”
He glowered at her silently for several seconds, then abruptly jumped to his feet and ran as hard as he could across the beach toward the Coskata cedars while she watched him disappear and hugged her stomach, where a queer light feeling had settled.
It had never been the same after that. They were no longer three—Rye and Laura and Dan—but two plus one.
As children they’d played whaler the way mainland children play house. Laura was always the wife, Rye the husband, and Dan the child. Rye would plop a dry peck on her sunburned lips and stride off across the strand to his “whaleship”—a beached skeleton of a rowboat that would never again split the brine—while she’d take Dan’s hand and the two of them would wave goodbye, pretending that five minutes were five years, before Rye came striding back, some driftwood over his shoulder, the sailor home from the sea.
But those
kisses didn’t count.
The first time Rye really kissed Laura was long after those garnish pecks. Kissless years had gone by between then and the afternoon she’d brushed the sand from his back, but since that day, neither had thought of anything else.
Dan was with them, as usual, the next time they met to go clamming over at the creeks in the salt marsh at the harbor. They divided their catch, but Laura and Rye made excuses to linger together after Dan trudged off up the road past Consue Spring. Rye said he was going to help Laura carry her clams home, but when Dan was gone, he just stood there with his rake in his hand, nudging a buried shell up from the sand with his toe.
After a long silence, Laura asked, “Wanna walk home along the road or on the commons?”
He looked up. The wind blew skeins of nutmeg-colored hair across her mouth, and he seemed to stare at it a long time before swallowing hard and answering in a falsetto, “The commons.”
They headed west, across the sweep of land between Orange and Copper streets, toward the undulating terrain beside First Mile Stone, through the low hills toward the shearing pens at Miacomet. Fall had swept the island with her paintbrush, and they walked through gay patches of sweet fern, huckleberry, and trailing arbutus that covered the moorlands like a blazing carpet. Rutted footpaths led them through fragrant thickets of bayberry whose scent was heady when crushed beneath their soles. As if by mutual consent, they veered off the trail into a thick patch of the berries, to lend excuse for that which really needed no excuse.
Neither of them had a container for carrying berries, anyway.
Once off the path, Laura wondered how to get Rye to make the first move, for though they were in the concealing underbrush, he seemed to have lost his nerve. So she spilled her basket of clams, and when he knelt down to help her scoop them up, she managed to nudge his arm, and the touch of her autumn-warmed skin on his was all it took.
Their eyes met, wide and wondering and uncertain, fingers still trailing in the clams before finally touching, and clinging. They held their breaths while each leaned forward haltingly. Their noses bumped, then their heads tipped just enough, and it happened! Childish, dry, tongueless first kiss. But expertise lacking, emotion was not.
And that kiss led the way to others, kisses for the sake of which they filled that colorful autumn with countless walks through the bayberries, each kissing session growing more bold, until the touch of tongue upon tongue no longer sufficed.
But winter came, stripping the heath of color and cover. They lost their camouflage and found fewer times together. Miserably, they waited out the icy months until, in March, the mackerel started running and they at last found a place, an excuse.
That first time Rye touched Laura’s breast she had not been wearing whalebones, for she yet had some growing to do. And neither had his hand grown to its full man’s-width, nor had the blond hair sprouted on the back of it.
They’d been sitting in the dory facing each other, with their knees almost touching, pretending they were enjoying fishing when actually it was only keeping them from doing what they’d both thought about all winter.
Laura pulled her line in and dried her hands on her skirt, looking up to find Rye staring at her, his Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively, as if he had a popcorn husk stuck on his tongue.
“I don’t feel much like fishing,” she admitted.
“Neither do I.”
He licked his lips and swallowed once more, and without a word, she edged over and made room for him on her seat.
The boat rocked while he moved toward her and sat down without taking his eyes from her face. Her hands were freezing, clenched tightly between her knees.
When at last he kissed her, his nose and cheeks were cold, but his lips were as warm as that autumn day they’d first bumped noses on the blazing heath amid its scented colors. While his lips lingered on hers, Laura clamped her knees tighter upon the backs of her hands, wondering if Rye felt as grown-up as she did since the passing of winter. A moment later the touch of his tongue confirmed it, for it sought hers with a new insistence that made her turn on the seat and put both arms around him while she told him with her kiss how long the wait had been for her, too.
She felt Rye shiver, though he wore a bulky wool jacket to ward off the stiff March breeze. The dory rocked, swaying their bodies while their lips remained locked, bumping them first against each other, then tugging them apart.
At first she wasn’t sure what Rye was doing, for her jacket was as bulky and cumbersome as his. But a moment later she realized his fingers were loosening the buttons. She jerked back, staring into his eyes.
“M ... my hand is cold,” he choked, voicing the first excuse he could think of.
“Oh.” She gulped and let the rocking of the boat sway her against him, waiting, waiting for that first adult touch with the breathless eagerness of untutored youth. Then his hand slipped inside, where it was warm and secret and forbidden, and she knew they were doing wrong.
“Rye, we shouldn’t,” she protested.
“No, we shouldn’t,” he agreed hoarsely. But that didn’t stop his hand from knowing its first of her, from learning the shape of her budding breasts through her dress, from discovering the way a woman’s nipples grow rigid as they plead for more. As with all first times, it was more exploration than caress, a search for the differences that were making her woman, him man.
Laura’s breath came jerky and fast. Her heart thumped madly beneath Rye’s hand.
“Put your hand inside my jacket, Laura,” he ordered, and she did his bidding for the first of many times to follow. She slipped her hand between jacket and sweater, and felt his ribs rising like sea swells, he was breathing so hard.
“Ouch! Not so hard!” she exclaimed when his exploration of her nipple grew a little too insistent.
From that moment on they remained open and vocal about their sexuality.
When the weave of her linen chemise abraded her tender breast, she reached and pushed his exploring hand to her other breast, saying against his lips, “That one’s sore.”
Laura and Rye used the excuse of going mackerel fishing again two days later, but not until just before they made for shore did their lines get wet. They sat in the vast privacy of the open water, surrounded by Nantucket Bay, while the boat bobbed up and down and the sun came skipping up at them from the rippling sea. Only the inquisitive gulls observed the first time Laura followed Rye’s instructions and slid her hands beneath his sweater to feel his warm, bare skin underneath.
There followed an excruciating week during which Josiah commanded all of Rye’s time, for Rye was already a four-year apprentice and was nearly as adept at coopering as his father.
By the time Sunday came and Rye was free to be with Laura again, they both felt tense and desperate. Rye had planned all week where they would go to be alone. Old man Hardesty had a boathouse on the waterfront near Easy Street where he kept old lobster traps and seines. He’d given Rye free use of any of the abandoned equipment anytime Rye wanted it.
“Ma wants me to get her a couple lobsters for tomorrow,” Rye said when he came to fetch Laura. “Wanna come along with me over to old man Hardesty’s and pick up a trap?”
“I suppose.”
They didn’t look at each other along the way. Rye stalked with his hands in his pockets, whistling, while Laura watched her toes and tried to match her stride to his—impossible to do anymore since his legs had grown so long.
They climbed the steps of the silvery old boathouse, and at the top Rye stood back, holding the door open for her. She stopped with her hand on the rail, staring up at him: Rye had never bothered with courtesies in all his sixteen years! He looked up and nervously scanned the waterfront, then he shifted his feet, and she hurried up the steps.
Inside it was dry and dusty, cobwebs lacing the corners and junk everywhere. Coils of old rope lay on the floor, along with buckets of rusty clews, battered oars, and lanterns with missing side glass; trennels and tar pots, pig
gins and barrel rings. While Laura stood taking it all in, a calico cat jumped out of nowhere, startling her into a shriek.
Rye laughed and picked his way across the littered floor to pluck the cat from an old nail keg and bring her back to Laura. Standing close together, they scratched the cat, who purred contentedly between them as if happy that company had come to call. Both Laura and Rye studied the creature as she stretched her neck and squinted her eyes closed in ecstasy while their fingers moved on her fur but itched to move over each other.
Laced over the cat’s back, their fingers touched, warm fur and warm flesh blending as they raised their eyes. For a long moment they stood still, the only movement the hammering of their hearts and the drifting of dust motes in the dry old loft. Rye leaned forward and Laura raised her lips, the kiss a gentle thing at first, until they lunged together and the cat squawked, making them leap apart and laugh self-consciously.
The cat took up her post on a barrel. She began to give herself a bath while Rye scanned the floor. He found an old mainsail rolled up and abandoned years earlier to mice and dust, and he tugged Laura’s hand, leading her to it.
They knelt down, one on either side of the brittle, gray canvas, and together began smoothing it out. Sunlight slanted in through a single window, falling across their sail bed in an oblique slash of gold, while from below the lap and swash of waves continued lazily nudging the pilings of the building.
Rye looked down at the waiting canvas, then up at Laura. They were both on their knees, facing each other, afraid now, and hesitant. From outside came the cry of gulls, wheeling lazily above the wharf. On his knees, Rye moved to the center of the canvas, and after a moment Laura followed suit. She watched the sunlight play across his beautiful arched eyebrows and light the tips of his eyelashes to gold as they slid closed and he leaned forward to kiss her. He found her fingers and clasped them tightly, as if for courage. When the kiss ended, he sat back on his haunches, searching her eyes while he squeezed her fingers till she thought the bones would crack.