CHAPTER 17
“Do you want me to make you come again?”
She holds my tumescent cock in her hand. The Sandman has thrown a blanket over my eyes with such comforting heaviness that her question swims to me on the music’s rhythm. My brain is caught in a frizzle; the thought of another orgasm makes my loins shudder. With this last come, I have experienced two fatally beautiful orgasms within thirty minutes. On my mind most is sleep. I’ve sandwiched her shoulders, along with half her body, between my thighs in that last orgasmic flurry. My heartbeat flutters below brassy Jazz notes sluicing from a tabletop radio near the open window. There’s nothing to hear from outside (and no one to hear us) because we’re in the middle of a forest.
I try to answer. My mouth moves, my eyelids flutter. It’s no use. Belinda takes pity on me; she was the aggressor this morning. She had had her share last night, and this morning, a half hour ago, she wanted “just to play.” So there’s only happiness on this four-poster bed in some stranger’s Poconos cabin, west of the Penn-Jersey border.
Playtime over, Belinda slides her hand from my aching cock, where it rests like a wounded sea cucumber, washed onto the beach after a storm. She gives the little creature a kiss before she releases herself from my legs, and saunters bare-ass into the bathroom. Behind the closed door, I hear her laugh with devilish glee. Suddenly the sleepiness of those moments when she had me in hand, so to speak, lifts as quickly as it had descended. I take in a long, chesty breath and let it rush out. Not a bad life, I think.
My Mythos are alive. I’ve nearly decided on a title for the cycle: The Age of the Mythos; Mythos Aged; The Mythos. Something like that. Belinda has ideas, too. She’s filling her diary with marketing ideas, appointments to view my archived pieces, and sample price lists. I’ve agreed to “talks” that I’ll have about the Mythos cycle with interested collectors, but have promised her I won’t reveal much. She’ll have to be content. I won’t talk about something that continues to gestate while the plaster on the early sculptures has gotten their coat of shellac.
Plaster was my cleverness for this project. All the changes of texture I’m looking for to replicate aging — in skin’s depleted elasticity, and brittle hair and knobby joints, and diminished muscle tone — can best be made in plaster. In the brevity of time available to sculpt before its moisture sweats out and the material becomes brittle, I’ve created faces and bodies of the immortals that look more authentically used than if I had taken months chiseling marble. Next time this may be different, but now is my moment to feel humanness from the heart outwards, leaving the head to wrestle with craft and dimension.
Yet here I sit, in the Pennsylvanian woods, surrounded by tick-infested maples and sumacs. There’s a stream close by that won’t shut up. Our cabin sits on the side of a hill, two of its corners held aloft and level by cylindrical concrete posts, painted to resemble tree trunks. The lower brook babbles with such proximity to the sounds of a mud slide that at any moment I’m aware of this cabin’s potential to toboggan down the steep hill. We’d be trapped inside, like a pair of dice in a cup. I’m almost afraid to walk the trail (its precipitate drop scares the bejesus out of me) leading from the wooden porch to the stream bank. As I stood on the deck yesterday, after we’d arrived at dusk, I imagined the crest of a hydroelectric dam, with nothing but air between my leap and its consequences a quarter mile below the free fall, although nothing like that threatens me here. Only my imagination. We’ve rented the cottage for three nights; I have two days to survive.
Belinda pokes her head around the bathroom door. “Minus, let’s walk down the trail today. Get out of bed, you big wussie. Put on your hiking boots and find a walking stick. I saw some leaning in the corner of the closet. Let’s get outside, for Christ’s sake. This is your vacation!”
“Maybe I don’t want a vacation!”
“I can’t believe you don’t hear train whistles in your head from all the tension of working so hard.”
“That would be Count Basie tuning up the band.” Basie is on the radio. I lie in bed. My leg sticks out the side of the sheet and hangs to the floor. The room temperature is wonderfully cool, and I could lounge in bed all day, if I were allowed.
Belinda doesn’t realize that the work is what has made me happy, and that it was her stress we needed to escape. I won’t say anything. There are sacrifices one makes in a relationship that are obvious and not worth mentioning. I don’t consider my orgasms a sacrifice, so there’s another reason to shut up and enjoy the ride. I pull the pillow from behind my head and debate the pitfalls of ticks, splints, abrasions, wet feet, sprained ankles and wrists, even the hunger built up on a long walk. Is there a hotdog stand somewhere close? Belinda amuses me with “wussie pouts” that are supposed to demonstrate “tough love” and get me off my ass. In the end, her laugh is irresistible when I finally overtake my inner bitchiness and look over my shoulder into the mirror to see how painfully bratty I’ve become in only twelve hours. “Jesus, you must hate me!” I say, hearing my voice soar to an octave below a child’s whine. “No, no,” Belinda says in her typical soothing Nebraska twang. “You’re worrying about not working. I get it. I half agree, but you have to relax your mind occasionally. Besides, you can’t work at the Beehive while Al and Binny are fumigating the place. Let all that fertility build, Minus Mouse. Try tantric imagery.” This is our “phrase of the week” to suggest chilling out without the emotional dart of hearing that you’re being a pain in the ass.
I rise from bed and go stand at the window. The tabletop radio is too loud, its dual speakers pumping out deep bass and high treble. It’s an old Philco model, designed as a ‘57 Chevy front grill, with the speakers in place of its headlamps. The hood is magenta, the grill and bumper chrome. The metal construction gives it a real-deal replication in miniature, not the cheap plastic found in ‘90’s reproductions. It’s a great piece for the room and the cabin. I told Belinda we should buy one, or just steal this one and let the owners keep our deposit. She ignored my larcenous suggestion.
I turn down the volume and hear Chet Baker’s horn smooth out the day’s rising tempo. The windows have been slid back to let in last night’s cooler air, and now, outside, the sounds of birds and bugs fighting for mating space back up Chet. Sunlight plays hide’n’seek through the trees, making everything green and yellow checkerboard. “Okay,” I say. “I’m ready.” I take the time to shower, and then dress hurriedly.
We step outside onto the deck and nature awakens us that even Central Park’s woodsy Bramble can’t touch. Belinda leads us down the long wooden stairway and steps gingerly onto the path, a mixture of loose earth, leaves, roots, and granite stones. “Careful,” we say simultaneously, and hold out a hand to grasp each other. I slip two fingers through her belt loop for added safety.
The slope is not so steep as my mind had imagined yesterday evening looking down from the balcony. I’ve dressed for this. Jeans, a yellow T-shirt with a “Dickies” logo, wool socks to fit snugly inside my high-top hiking boots, and a straw hat (ticks!). Okay, I say, we can do this, and Belinda takes two steps when suddenly her feet slide out from under her, pitching me forward, down, down on my knees. They hit slick dirt and my elbows scuff along the ground, fingers still caught in her pants loops, and suddenly we’re sliding forward like we’re on an amusement park ride. The sound of the bugs and birds and the babbling brook come over us in stereo, our cries of “Ahhhhh!!!” singing lead. Belinda’s Roughneck jeans prove rough enough and stop her momentum, which stops me when my shoulder collides against her back. My arms end up wrapped around her, like Buster Keaton hanging from the clock tower’s minute hand. The straw hat rolls down the trail in front of us, like a happy puppy leading us toward paradise.
“Ouch,” Belinda says.
“If you’ll notice,” I say, using my scraped elbows to push up from the dirt and back onto my knees, “in the movies we would have slid all the way down the hill, into the water, come up with makeup still on, clothes dripping with spring wat
er, and laughter bursting from our brook-refreshed lungs. Then we’d have a splash fight, your top might get wet and become see-through, from which my initial arousal would find us making love on a grassy deer bed behind tall bushes and, later, we’d pick a basketful of wild berries you’d carry back to the country kitchen to make a pie. It’s the typical romantic comedy, where having once hated each other, this endearing show of humility, suffering, and togetherness logically transforms us into the loving couple as the credits roll.” I show her my scraped elbows, streams of blood running over the raw skin, and dirt and leaf bits and granite pebbles imbedded in the flesh. “Of course, this isn’t the movies.”
“Looks more like Greek tragedy,” says Belinda. She stands and brushes her ass. Dirt and dust drop away. Then she kneels to examine my injuries, over which she makes hush-hush sounds, presumably to ward off tears I might shed like a six-year-old. When she blows on the wounds I wince. She tells me she saw some antiseptic spray in the bathroom. I’m down here though, I declare, and the babbling brook is within sight, which will be antiseptic enough. I test my elbows for ambulation. No more hand holding on hills, Belinda declares. Good timing, I say. We walk down the rest of the hill separately, to the water. On the way, I pick up my hat that has stuck itself to a thorn bush.
“Tragedy is hardly the word for scraped elbows,” I say, opting to over-think the experience. It’s my adult method to cope. “People misuse the word. They claim a child’s death is tragic when it falls from a window because a negligent nanny has left it open, or at the hands of a drunken father. Tragedy, in fact — and by tradition — happens when the fallen hero or anti-hero discovers that it’s his (or her) own fault for their destruction. In other words, self-knowledge of your downfall brings about tragedy. That child’s death? A simple case of coincidental happenstance.”
Belinda shakes her head, incredulous. “Well, thanks for the lecture, Peter Ustinov. Didn’t think I was on a PBS documentary.”
“Just thought I’d clear up any questions, confusion, or misapplication. And PBS has great nature programs.”
“Jesus Mary and Joseph, will you shut up already?”
At the brook, which is a good ten yards across but barely eight inches deep, lots of water flows over softball-size rocks. The swift water illustrates the brook as an Ogden Nash postcard. I kneel at water’s edge and dip my elbows and forearms in the water, first letting its force flake away the dirt and debris. The water gives a nice sting before its icy temperature soothes and then deadens the sting. I know I’m going to feel this later.
“You’re really going to feel that sting later, Minus,” Belinda says. She kneels beside me and takes my arm for a look at the wounds, twisting it around to get a look.
“Ouch!”
“We should go back and wash those scrapes,” she says. She twists the other elbow, bringing from me another yelp. “Don’t fight! Hey, I can wrap these with clean underwear if we can’t find gauze or bandages.”
“Not on my life,” I say. I take back my arms from her Devil Nurse treatment. “I was a rough-and-tumble kid once upon a time, and this Pennsylvania dirt can’t be any worse than Illinois dirt. I’ll be cleaned up in a second. Besides, can you see me walking into town with women’s underwear wrapped around my elbows?” She grimaces. “Don’t for a second think I’d use my underwear, chickadee,” I say.
The brook follows the ravine’s contours, nestled in a forest whose trees must all be at least thirty feet tall. Yet, in their abundance and density, each trunk is but the diameter of a fire log because of their fight for sunlight. Overhead, the canopy glows blue around the leaf edges, suffusing emerald tints through the air all the way to the forest floor. Downstream, the brook turns left and disappears around a sweeping bend. Belinda notices the far bank has a flattened path along its edge, and upstream twenty yards is a stepping-stone bridge made by kids or the surrounding neighborhood cabin owners. We make our way through the undergrowth of thorn bushes, dead leaves, and knotty grasses. We step carefully across the double-width bridge of flat stones, and safely onto the opposite bank. Here there is clear walking along the brook. Now this is nice, I whisper, and Belinda looks over her shoulder with a brief smile.
In ten minutes, our little hike takes us out to the brook’s inlet at the wide end of a lake. It’s twenty degrees warmer in the open air. The sun is up high, but short of its zenith. The lake smells sour and of gasoline. Three fishing boats idle at various distances from shore. Along the sides of the outlet, the banks are beaver brown and cracked from summer sun and drought. Last spring’s thaw has left its erosion scars. A bouquet of white and cream butterflies, little nervous creatures, move like mist across the banks and erosion runnels. Youth and age, I notice, in contrast between earth and insect.
“This nature reminds me of another character,” I say. “I won’t be sculpting this myth figure, but here in the wilds –”
“The wilds?” Belinda rolls her eyes. “We’re two miles from the highway, Daniel Boone.”
“Yeah, yeah, you wait,” I say. “When the biting flies and the ticks nest in your hair, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
She kisses me. “Okay. Tell me.”
“So I was thinking one afternoon, how we all speak of having a nemesis but do we know where that word comes from. It’s frightening how much the gods and sub-gods and all their minions of ancient lore have added to our language. So what’s the story behind the name? I told myself, ‘If you present him as an aging prankster, like a grandfather who asks his grandson to pull his finger, the effect will be disarming of … I don’t know, of knowledge maybe.’ Or the way we see the world, maybe their own history. Then I look up Nemesis in my Greek book and do you know what I find out? It’s the strangest thing, and –”
Belinda is looking at me with such curiosity that I stop talking; a first this week, maybe, because once I get going on the Mythos I’m hard to control. She’s so beautiful and normal — not controlling or bitchy or high strung — that I wonder what has possessed me not to ask her to marry me. I don’t know if her trust in me is justified, though. I’m a flake, I don’t have a career or a job (dog walking for hourly wages, even NY wages, doesn’t exactly count for much, not even in my well-worn book; it’s a job for a near-do-well awaiting daddy’s slap upside his head as a wake-up to the reality of life) … I need to stop this self-abasement.
“Look,” Belinda says, and points over my shoulder. There’s a strange overhang along the right edge of the lake, away from the water. Footholds have been dug out of the earth, and thick tufts of grass grow over the top like hair out of an old man’s ear. Belinda looks at me. We nod. This time I stand behind her and help her climb up the embankment, her feet pressed into the holds. With a little boost from my palms cupped on her ass cheeks, she easily takes the ledge. She giggles through this operation, letting me hang onto her a bit longer than necessary for the job — good boy-girl fun — and then she’s standing on the ledge looking all around.
“Hey, there’s an old railroad track up here,” she tells me. “It leads into the trees– Hey, there’s a tunnel over there! Come up and see.”
I fit my toes into the holds and hand-scramble up the wall, where Belinda clasps my outstretched hand for that last bit of help. She shows her strength and leverages me until I take the crest with a knee.
We walk over to the tracks and stand on the ties between the rails.
I say, “These tracks look ancient,” and I realize how silly this sounds. “Correction. Railroads were laid sometime in the early eighteen-hundreds, so maybe they’re only antique.”
“Success,” Belinda chides, and winks at me with her undying love (I know it’s somewhere in there). I spank her ass twice, once for the sass and another for the wink. She yelps but playfully refuses to resist.
The rails are rust red, seated on gnarly, pitted wooden ties crawling with ants and centipedes. They must have been laid when only pine tar was used for wood preservation, and long-since flushed by r
ain and the harsh Eastern Pennsylvania winters. A quarter mile off, we get a glimpse of the distant tunnel’s brick mouth behind overgrown trees and brush. I suggest we explore. Belinda is game, and we walk along the tracks and listen to the cicadas rasp in the trees while our feet rustle the tie stones. We act like kids and easily become our childhood selves. We walk a rail, arms stretched level for balance. And when we falter we link arms to march atop the ties in a three-legged lock step. We name the ties according to the states (alphabetized, naturally) as our third leg tags its center line. Our day is all laughter and freedom.
The tunnel mouth appears to gape at us once we step under the trees, which have arched high across the tracks. This is no secret place, just a neglected, cast-aside rail spur from the time before trucks took over hauling goods to the cities and towns across the valleys, or just because people moved to the cities — Jersey City on the Hudson, or Philadelphia to the southeast, or even west, to Pittsburgh. “Another relic of our civilization,” Belinda says. I grunt. We’re near enough to the tunnel that our voices echo against the high, steep wall of the hill that’s made this tunnel a necessity for the rail line. The stone blocks make the entrance concave up along the keystone. Belinda lets loose a blood-curdling scream — I jump away, horrified — and the sound echoes with vile resonance. She smiles and claps her hands. I sigh my adult’s exasperation to the youngster’s hijinks. We walk toward the shadow of the hill and feel the cooler air at its dark hole, which wants to swallow us.
The tunnel looms, twenty feet at least from tracks to the keystone. The daylight stretches inside, ambient against the brickwork to maybe forty paces, and then blackness. The construction is all brickwork inside, not the cut stone used only for the entrance. I wonder and marvel at the engineering behind this site. How many men worked, and for how long? Who died? How many bricks were used? Where had they carried the materials from? Belinda says, “I bet someone could be living in there. A band of hobos, maybe.” “Hobos ride the rails,” I say, “they don’t live inside abandoned tunnels.” “Yeah, well hobos take vacations, too, you know. Who cares? They always lived beside the railroad tracks.”
She launches into a story her grandfather told her over and over when she was a tyke, about the hobos riding atop rail cars — near empty because of the Depression — going from city and town clear across the country in search of work. Her grandfather, Paul, had hired a few of the rail riders for day labor on his grain farm in central Nebraska, small things to do that needed doing while he tended the crops, and didn’t cost but pennies to hire someone — clean out the barns and pig sties, repair barbed-wire fences, bale hay in June’s hellish heat, tassel corn in July’s stifling humidity — and perhaps Grandpa Paul would give one or two guys a spot in the barn to sleep after a day’s work, and an egg and healthy rip off a bread loaf in the morning (under glaring, shocked eyes from Grandma Jane) along with their few pennies of pay before they lighted out again for the yards to catch another rusty west-bound freight, tipping their hats — “they always wore hats” — to her grandma Jane. I can see from her description that those men had done what was possible to survive, and I pictured sandy-haired men whose families awaited money sent by Western Union as jobs were taken, worked, and lost; these men had cracked faces from too much worry and harsh, outdoor labor in all weather; their muscles ached continually or they walked irregularly with some long-paid-for injury; men that would die early compared to our times, but not so to their own ancestors, who had it much worse, with war and pestilence a constant enemy.
We stand at the tunnel’s entrance and look tentatively into the deepening shadows. The light at the other end is a doughnut hole, far away and creepy in its steady shine at us, like a planet in the midnight sky. “I’ll give you a buck for every ten feet you walk down that tunnel,” I dare Belinda. She sticks her tongue out at me. A breeze comes through the long hole in the earth. Cool and damp, it smells of oil and moss, both tepid odors. “Go ahead,” I say, my face a bully’s dare. She thrusts her chest at me — “You first, chicken lips!” — breasts perky beneath a white tee, the hint of her bellybutton peeking between the shirt hem and the top of her faded jeans. I take a first step and stare back at her on the second and third. “The hobos will snatch you when I disappear in the darkness,” I tease. She bolts after me, and then we’re walking together, or nearly so, because Belinda is a step behind, using my body to block whatever might fly out — bat, werewolf, pterodactyl, or hobo’s hat. The ceiling covers us and I feel we’ve crossed through to another world, a different time. It’s no longer a tunnel to me but a cave, deep and strange and holding the elements of fable and heresy, unfamiliar and become unknown to modern humans raised on television entertainment. This tunnel-cave is where mythological beasts live and collect the bones of wayfaring travelers, stupid schmucks like me and my fright-shaken, maiden-like girlfriend.
With the light behind us, we see well enough as we reach a hundred feet inside. The far light hasn’t grown any larger, though. The air has cooled, but is now steady and close; no breeze pushes its atmosphere on us, which makes me think this would be a great place for a wine cellar. The iron tracks between which we walk are intact, and no longer red with rust like those back along the embankment, but black with damp, a permanent sweat on their pitted surfaces. “This is getting eerie,” Belinda whispers. She skips up beside me, crunching the rocks underfoot, and takes my hand. “You can use this, Minus. Lots of oddball gods and goddesses lived in caves. They must not have known practical skills, like carpentry.” “Yeah, yeah,” I say, “This is good.” Our voices echo against the brick walls; I look up to try to make out the ceiling, but the light is only ink up there. We halt and look back the way we came. That white hole is still large, but far enough to make us take a deep look into each other’s eyes, gauging our courage to walk further away from escape and freedom. I can’t resist myself, and take a sinister tone with my whisper, “If the hobo bandits have heard us, they could be circling around to block off our escape.” “Shut up, Minus!” She gives my shoulder a gentle but determined shove. I close my trap when the change in air pressure dumps a fat breeze from the far end, and it pulls at our clothing with a force. I feel goose bumps rise along my arms. When the pressure changes again, we’re hit from the other direction with the hot moisture of the lakeside air. Its fishy odor is evident even this deep in the tunnel.
Since I’ve begun to tease, I take it a step further.
“They’ll want to make us run deeper, Belinda. Right into a trap. We’ll be strung up in a net and sold as slaves to the Pennsylvania Quakers, and made to work in the oatmeal factory. Or else to the Mennonite Amish as barn raisers. Never able to listen to the radio again. Punished for dancing in our slave quarters.”
She folds her arms against the next shift in the breeze, and says, “Keep talking, chisel man, and I’ll surrender to them.”
A loud crack sounds from within, at the darkest stretch somewhere at the middle. Before the echo dies we’re headed backwards. We spin around to run, heads down and charging toward the light. The stones grind beneath our pounding feet like the demented laughter of cave ghouls. I feel my skin crawl because I want to turn around but fear what I might find behind us, in hot pursuit. When the sensation of a hand snatches at my shoulder, just catching the fabric, we burst from the tunnel and into bright light, birdsong, cicada mating calls, and the warm sweat of freedom. The compression of the cave is long behind us when we stop. We turn to face our tormentor and find nothing but an old tunnel with rusted rails and cracked, black bricks set by men long dead and forgotten. The leaves on the tall plane trees rustle in a fresh wind, giving their own version of laughter at our fright. The air is suddenly sticky with summer’s heat.
From inside the tunnel we hear movement, then obvious footsteps on the stones. “Hey, there is someone in there,” Belinda says. “Or something,” I mumble. We can easily take off now in several directions, or separate paths. We hold our ground, because the light at the far end winks a
t us once, twice. The soft grinding sound, like slow turns of a pepper mill, grow louder. Then, when we don’t expect it, there appears a shape in the darkness. A woman comes forward into the gloaming. We’re twenty yards outside the tunnel. She stops at its edge, the daylight making her dirt-smudged skin look like tarnished silver. She is all of sixteen, I think, as I see her in fresh light, gaunt in her malnourished state. Her short hair sticks out like a cartoon character that has stuck its finger in an electrical outlet. She has the look of a rat who has taken a jittery peek from the safety of its hole. Her face is pulled back in fear, but but there’s menace in the eyes and across her lips.
“Hey, mister,” the girl says, “can you spare some change?”
I pat my jeans pockets, but of course I haven’t brought coins or a wallet. Who takes money for a short hike? I remember suddenly that the cabin keys still sit on the kitchen table where we dropped them last night. I stare at Belinda, who’s also patting the pockets on her jeans with equally feeble demonstration. We look stupidly at each other, because this isn’t something we’ve expected. The girl backs away, sensing the typical human response to her plight.
“What are you doing here?” Belinda asks, in a voice that sounds notes of the person who doesn’t imagine an encounter like this can happen to her. At least she has acted, though, because I can’t find my voice. I’m staring at this girl, a child, a waif bearing “the runaway” look about her like a yoke. Abused or fed up, it doesn’t much matter. We can’t change her story for tomorrow. We could only give her money, which we don’t have with us. The girl shifts her stance, but she has stopped backing away from us. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” the girl says in a hard-edged voice. It’s a question with a sharp edge, but inflected downward, and the voice is softer. “I’m sorry but we have no money with us,” Belinda says. The girl smirks. Belinda tries to explain. “We’re staying in a cabin and we were just out walking.” Belinda looks at me, asking a question in mime that I don’t get. She raises her eyebrows, but still I don’t understand. She turns to the girl, “Can we help you some other way? We have food back at the house. We can feed you. You could take –” She’s cut off by the girl’s violent shake of her head. Her arms come up, hands in the air now, checking her hair, looking at her soiled hands. She’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans, stained and torn, and gym shoes without laces, everything grimy as though she’s lived in this old rail tunnel her whole life. There’s little evidence to suggest she hasn’t.
She turns around and fades into the tunnel gloom, gone before new words can leave our mouths.
We hang our feet over the embankment and stare out, across the lake. Nothing is near, no one around us. The boats float in the harsh sunlight. I don’t think they’ve moved since we first saw them. We might be lost ourselves, I wonder aloud. “Castaways, beachcombers.” Next, I wonder (silently) if the thoughts come from the artist’s sense of exile while working, a hermitage, sometimes desolation. My hand smoothes out a patch of sandy ground next to me. I start to doodle. Belinda holds my left hand, so I work solo and use my forefinger to design a groove relief in the dirt. I add stray leaves for trees, cut the earth with my nails for rippling water, press pebbles into the “sky” for storm clouds, and fashion a broken Popsicle stick as a boat. Belinda asks, for the second time in five minutes, if we should go back into the tunnel and find the girl. She knows the right answer but can’t say it yet. Our feet swing out and back like the hammers of a player piano. In a while we push past the girl, leaving her at the back of our minds. We muse on the possibilities of a nap in the afternoon. There’s talk about the rack of family movies next to the cabin VCR, and wonder where the good stuff might be hidden. We laugh at our silly fears that had lurked inside the tunnel. We play “scissors, paper, rock” and I lose in a best-of-five. Our heels kick together and we’re kids again. But being a kid is tiring, and we drift back to the things we love about each other.
Awhile later, Belinda says, “Back in the cave, I said there was something there for you. That creepiness, the tunnel darkness and all that old brick, nasty and crumbling. In the way we felt trapped, too. At first I felt like an angel, and suddenly that sound shriveled my wings … you know?” I nudge her with my shoulder, but she isn’t finished. “I had to run away like a silly damsel in distress. My hero, the Mighty Minus. You were so chivalrous, taking flight to protecting me from the evil cave ogre who eats virgin maidens.”
“If that’s the ogre’s goal,” I joke, “then you’re safe. She takes my hand and we chivvy closer on the edge. “I was thinking in there, standing in all that gloom, how it was a cave. You just used that word yourself. It felt enormous, a demon’s lair, where all kinds of danger and triumph were possible. I thought we had disturbed bats in that deep darkness, not spooked a runaway.”
Then, like an unexpected spurt of summer rain, the experience is in me. I want to play with the fantasy that is its images tied to my irrational fears, and dance through the memory of its air, smell its age, and float on its energy to tantalize and frighten. Belinda’s hand becomes the hand of fate, and leads me to the lake shore. We step onto the water. I look down and around my feet, where, below, the fish swim in schools across our path. The fishing boats move closer, but I realize it is us that are drawing towards them. The wooden boats have long, flat oars, pulled from the water while at rest and hooked onto the stern quarters. Men sit across the beam, below square sails hanging slack in the still air. Each watches us approach with a lazy eye while repairing torn nets using fat wooden needles and coarse twine sealed in beeswax. Belinda holds me close beside her, I feel her arm’s wiry muscles brush across the hair on my arm. Her skin is cool, almost cold. When I look, her hair has changed, streaked gray, long and knotted in a witch’s necklace. Her skin is nearly white, with an eggshell grain and velvet sheen. She tightens her grip as she guides me to a spot at the center of the boats. Here we stop. She lets my hand free and, our water levitation released, we drop like arrows below the water’s surface without time to take a breath. Bubbles obscure our sinking bodies. My hands cannot reach through the water easily, and, deep down, holding the depth, we float apart. Her hair fans around her head like an explosion has happened in her mind. My fingers grasp the end of her arm, at the wrist, that same smooth-stone skin now a blue-dappled complexion in this strange light. What beauty death is, I think. So simple, how it can be. The stories our Greeks wove of their heroes, villains, and gods & goddesses, were complicated and extravagant, all the more extraordinary for me when Greek immortals interacted with Greek humans, produced children with them, influenced daily life but also the rites and rituals fundamental to life.
How wonderful and profane.
“I love you, Belinda.”
The light changes on the bank when a cloud drifts over the sun. Colors wash away in the flash shade, and our eyes blink to adjust. I feel dizzy from the transition, and must reach a hand down, press it against the ground, and steady myself from falling forward, off the lip of the embankment. Belinda’s arm slips around my back.
“Thank you, Minus.” We stare into the short distance, at the watery shoreline, both a bit stupefied by light’s change. She says, “I think about that all the time, you know. You have to believe me. I’d never have proposed to you if I’d thought there was a time limit for us to get married, or for you to answer. I already feel married to you.” She lets my hand go. I look at its empty palm. I’m not to get a responsive I love you, too. This is okay, this is better than okay. Returns on endearments are overrated anyway. Once more I try to convince myself this is true.
A child’s laughter strikes in the distance. We look along the shoreline. A family has wandered to this Poconos definition of a lake beach, wearing shorts and carrying inflatable water floaties. A little girl holds a pink flamingo around her waist and wades into the water, a single short step at a time, careful to keep in sight her father walking beside her. The mother has a handhold of a toddler boy dressed in blue shorts and shirt and a blue cap. She has fitte
d him with wrap-around sunglasses, which he claws at desperately to get them off his face.
Belinda bumps hips with me. “We should think about lunch.” Her hand twitches in my clasp. “Say — what time is Peter coming out?”
The thought jolts me. “Shit! I forgot all about him. Do you know the time?”
We slide down the bank and make for the shadow of the trees overhanging the stream. I’ve forgotten something, though, and tell her to hold on. I scramble back up the embankment, find the landscape I’d made in the soil with my fingers, and wipe the bottom of my show across it to clean the spot. I catch up to Belinda where the stream begins its delta. She takes hold of my hand and we walk up the narrow side path. When we duck beneath low branches into the half shade, we’re surprised by a figure in the emerald light. The runaway stands in the middle of the stream, waiting for us like a hitchhiker on a roadway.
“You think I can still get that meal?” she says.
I get back up the hill and find Peter sitting at the picnic table on the deck. The sun has found a space between the treetops and drenches the gray planks with white light and heat. Peter has hidden a Styrofoam cooler under the table’s shadow, and nurses a bottle of beer while shooing flies. When I ask how he’s made it to the cabin so easily, he pulls at his beer and answers, “A map, Mickey Minus Mouse.” I pull a double take at his theft of Belinda’s nickname repertoire. He shows me big white teeth. Before I can explain the cuts on my forearms and dirty legs and shoes, he lists my disheveled, post bicycle-crash appearance.
“I never liked Dickey’s anyway, so you can leave the shirt on, if it’s all the same to you,” he chides. “So where is Belinda hiding?”
“They’re coming.”
“They?”
I put a finger to my lips as I hear Belinda and Anna’s footsteps creaking the stair boards behind us. “We’ve brought a guest from the beach,” I announce.
Belinda rounds the corner railing, says hi to smiling Peter, and looks back down the stairs. “Come on up, Anna. You’re with friends here.” Footsteps on the stairs stop, start, stop again. “Don’t be afraid,” says Belinda, and encourages her with a nod. To the side, Peter smiles, but when Anna appears his face crinkles in the way a flashlight makes you cringe when its light strikes you in the dark. Before Anna takes the turn on the landing to face us, Peter has composed himself.
“Anna, this is our good friend, Peter,” I say. “Pete, this is Anna. She’s going to have lunch with us.”
Peter stands and holds out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Anna.”
We watch her stand on a spot of porch board, thinking what to do. She looks down the stairs. This time, running isn’t her answer. She tries a smile and nearly makes it work, the corners of her mouth spread back but only nudge upward as a test. Not having been raised by wolves as we may think from her appearance, she reaches to shake Peter’s hand.
Belinda says, “We girls are going to get cleaned up before lunch. Okay?” Anna looks around again, bringing her neck down between her shoulder blades. “Follow me, Anna. It’s alright. I’ll show you the cabin.”
Belinda doesn’t touch the girl, but leads her with a nod and a profoundly benevolent look past the picnic bench to open the screen door. When they’ve disappeared into the far room, Peter N waits on my explanation. I give him the short version while hunched over the cooler, fishing for a beer and hiding my voice in the noise of rattling ice.
Then I realize that I need to clean myself up, too. After a few sips from my beer and an apology for our tardiness, I head for the cabin door.
Inside, I hear Belinda and Anna talking in the second bedroom. Water is running. Belinda comes out and closes the door. She tells me Anna is going to shower. She’s lent the girl jeans and a shirt while she runs a load of wash to try and work out the weeks of grime (I’m guessing months) pressed into her clothes. I go into our bedroom, turn on the Chevrolet radio and turn up the volume. Jazz again, the only decent station to come in with any clarity, here in the woods.
In the bathroom I pick the last bits of Poconos nature from my arms and apply antiseptic spray over everything, and then mercurochrome to the rawest of the scrapes. When I return to the porch, Anna hasn’t reappeared, but Belinda is talking with Peter. They’ve moved to a shady corner of the broad deck, and have carried the table with them. Peter hands me my beer and I slide into an Adirondack, feeling my back and neck muscles ease with a notion of finality of their use for the day.
“Can we make our grilling a group effort?” I ask.
Fast music is playing from the radio, discordant notes that somehow make sense. Pete puts the cold beer bottle against his forehead and rolls it across, leaving water beads in its path. We make a few sallies about lunch, the cabin, the Poconos, and getting back to The City. When I drain my beer on what I think is my fourth swallow, I know I’m on a vacation of a different sort. Belinda opens the cooler and fishes out three fresh bottles. Pete says he’ll be ready to grill the prawns and strip steaks we bought at a state-line grocers. We finish planning the menu — salad, chips, melon for dessert — and Belinda tells us to occupy ourselves while she showers. After a few minutes we hear new water sounds from the window of the master bath. It seems we’re in a rainstorm under blue skies, or behind a waterfall.
Peter opens his arms and says, “It’s a nice place to find yourself, Minus.”
I look at the house, its screened windows, the shake roof and cedar clapboards. “We rented it through an internet site. They had pictures of the place and everything. You know, I think that web net thing — er, inter-web? — is going to be big some day. Can you imagine trying to sell art canvases on that?” He shakes his head. “All we had to do for the keys was drop by the owner’s place over on the west-side with the rent and deposit.”
“Hmmm,” Peter utters. “Yeah, the cabin is nice. Just the same, I was talking about you and Belinda, bro’. The two of you are in a nice place with each other.”
Pete’s giving me this look that wants to say, or must communicate, Do you know what you’re doing? I interpret this question as a warning. There’s an ending that he’s left off, and I’m to determine what it is: “…what you’re doing with Belinda?” My long, evasive (or just plain stupid) stare has left him bored and he’s looked away, into the trees, awaiting my eventual answer or total evasion by out-waiting his resolve to learn something through his trickery. Oh, yes, Peter can be tricky, apart from his bonhomie confederation. It’s his honesty about life that scares me. Is this what success allows, a carefree life that appears nauseatingly simple?
“Jesus, Minus, say something,” Peter demands. “At least move your face so I know you haven’t had a fucking stroke. Otherwise we’ll miss lunch to take you to the hospital.”
As I thought: tricky.
Pete’s relationship with his girl, Wendy, is replete with idiosyncratic notions of what a couple does for each other, even by modern standards. Idle talk at his studio, and my witness to their lives over the months I’ve been in NYC, have given me insight. In a word: conservative.
“Belinda wants to get married,” I begin. His eyes flutter in mock amusement — or maybe he is amused. “She sprung that on me a few months ago. It’s how I got the ‘throw method’ I told you about. Actually, my first try was accidental. I spewed Cap’n Crunch onto our kitchen window. Okay, I can live with her as my muse. We love each other; we have fun and our life is comfortable. It’s the lifestyle and the goal of artists, right? Maybe that’s men in general, but I don’t think so. But a guiding fairy-of-my-mind she’s not. It doesn’t work like that. Not that she isn’t doing great as my manager. That’s her Siren side, that other thing I mean — and it scares me. I know, I know … but you and I have to forget the contradictions. So this marriage question comes up, not as a question because she demanded a proposal from me. Maybe demanded is too strong a word. The old ‘fish or cut bait’ argument, right? Then this other thing with the bag lady –” I stop, backtrack on my thoughts, an
d change tack “– the Mythos project came up. I asked her to give me time. Anyhow, she’s pulled back from the ultimatum and we’re … we’re, yeah, in a good place.”
Peter says, “Minus, what the fuck are you babbling about?”
There’s only one way out: tell him all about Karen K. See what he says. He’s my friend; I can’t believe I haven’t already told him everything. It’s been months! But I catch myself. What’s there to tell? Any admission remains unclear to me as for its significance. How would Peter see it? The idea, or process of confession to a mere thought, is all too parochial, I think. I try an argument out for example: I refused Karen K’s fuck proposal — so my conscience is clear. In fact Belinda would be proud of me, I could say; I think she’d say this to me. Only, then she’d insist I stay away from Karen, which is why I’ve vowed not to tell her about her, Karen K, any more. If she asks, of course I won’t lie, but otherwise…. Peter, though, he’ll understand. He’s urbane.
I open my mouth again, but instead of confessing to the sin of fanaticism, this is what I say: “What do you think about older women, Pete?”
He hitches up onto his elbows and leans forward; we’re almost nose to nose. Suspicion pleats his brow, and I think I’m in for an interrogation, which is hardly what I’m prepared for or expected, but after what I’ve just heard myself ask, I couldn’t blame him. Now I think a confession would have been easier, but he interrupts any attempt with a question.
“How do you mean?” His voice is low, gruff. I cock my head toward the screen door. Both showers still run. The noise has hidden the music’s rhythm, leaving only the bass and tinny horns. I can’t think (although I try for a second) what Anna has been doing in her shower for the last twenty minutes.
“You know how I mean,” I tell him.
He takes a terrified expression and makes that scarier. “That’s not for my imagination,” he says. “Ick! Some sixty-year-old broad, gray roots hidden by monthly Clairol washes, but then she forgets to dye the chatte, right? Ugh-yuuuk! Think of this woman, Minus, all the loose skin, her tits misshapen. You know that Playboy comic-strip grandma with the torpedo breasts pointing at her toes? Yo! And you haf’ta remember, old people don’t shower often. Like they get lazy and forgetful. Or maybe it’s that entitlement syndrome old people get like kids get the measles. Smell me ‘cuz I’ve smelled you my whole life! So there’s the smell, the gray hair, the sag, the wrinkles, false teeth –”
“Pete, Pete!” I stop his obnoxiousness. “We began with an older woman who takes care of herself, and you’ve erroneously aged her to sixty, then juggernaut across all reason straight to the octogenarian day-care wing at some moldy retirement home.”
Peter waves his hands. “Takes care of herself? Did you use ‘an older woman’ and ‘takes care of herself’ in the same sentence? Your dick ought to be fined just for thinking of that archeology pussy, my friend.”
“Fifty isn’t old, you asshole! Sixty isn’t even old, not if she –”
“Don’t say ‘Takes care of herself’ again. Please.” Pete stabs the words at me. “You’ve laid out that plan already.”
“Hey, put this in perspective. We’re both going to get old, and our women are going to get old alongside us. Are you suggesting that, when they lose their youthful beauty, we should go trolling college campuses for the Pussy of Youth to keep us strong, maintain our manhood vanity? Older women have their own beauty, my friend, and maybe it just takes an older man to appreciate that.”
“Different topic,” Pete says. “In that story, we’re getting old together, as a couple. That’s what you said. Taking the same path that Time has given us. Here, though, you’re talking about going gray when you’re a ripe specimen of manhood at thirty-one. Young with old? Now that’s mean soup.”
I’m off track and feel defeated. A song from the radio is fast and dissonant, and bugs me enough to make me look around, as if I can stop it or change the station with a look, but that’s not going to happen, so I try once more to convince Peter of something he’s not seeing. “Listen, I’ve only been talking hypothetically, but there’s a point you’re not getting. Women can keep themselves in good shape. Look at Jane Fonda with her exercise tapes. She’s gotten a whole army of America’s fifty-plus crowd …” Pete’s horrified look grows back. I’m not sure I believe myself anymore! “My point is, I think younger men have all kinds of potential with older women. Think of the pickings a guy can get from reading the classifieds in New York Review and Atlantic Monthly. There are plenty of classy broads out there looking for younger, youthful men that have their shit together.”
“Okay, yeah,” Peter says. “I see your point. Just not us, you know? We’ve got what we want, right? Is that at least what I hear you saying? Or are you telling me something’s changed? Gimme a nod now, Minus! Okay, right. That’s good. Okay. Pheww! You had me worried, buddy. I mean, this isn’t a ‘once black you won’t go back’ thing. That’s a good sex rep. But, you know, once you go gray, no one’s taking you back, dude. Shit like that gets around. Word.”
We settle back against our chairs, the battle left in truce, and keep the silence of our troubled thoughts just there. Peter’s holding a grin that’s brutally wretched with thought and imagery as all get out, and I suddenly can’t help laughing. The absurdity of his joke, the discordant subject with Belinda in the other room, my twenty-nine-year-old woman in the shower, naked, water running down that smooth, unblemished skin, no sunspots, no liver spots, no scales or rosacea blotches; meanwhile Karen K roams NYC in bum’s clothing, hiding the fit body of middle age. I’m not attracted to her, not as she is now, nor as she could be. Can my future with Belinda, twenty-five-plus years ahead, be something like I see with Karen today? If so, I’ll at least be there without a beer gut — and dressed like a gent, thank you.
I say, “We’re doing great, Peter,” circling back to the subject he’d begun. “Belinda and I are fantastic. Seeing too little of each other because of the work, maybe. That’s why this weekend in this tick-infested wood is important touch-time for us. I should be at the studio, but –”
“I remember that throwing act you got going, though you didn’t tell me about the Cap’n Crunch episode,” Peter says. “That’s the first thing I can think of that I’d take offense to missing: you owe me a good laugh, Minus. You know I’m joking, so be easy. Listen. Take it light, buddy. Give your mind a rest. We all get that ‘work hard’ attitude and then find ourselves overloaded with ideas. What that gives us is unfocused art. It’s a waste of time. And sloppy. Makes no sense to work like that. Neither does the art make sense, in the end. I went through that phase when I was traveling through the states, doing those shows on the fly and organizing the workshops. All that great stuff that wasn’t shit, or hadn’t turned into shit, but the ideas sat too heavily on my mind to concentrate. Each piece wants its own time. Now, if this marriage question weighs on you….”
“Not so much,” I admit. “She’s let me off the hook. No — that’s not fair of me. It’s not a game, not a pressure tactic. In fact, I want to marry her. The timing is … somehow off. I don’t want to feel like I’m struggling in life and work.”
“That’s a tough attitude to take,” Pete says. “First off, you aren’t struggling at your art. What did I say about your Myths project? You don’t think I was throwing sand in your eyes, do you? Man, the success thing just doesn’t happen like we want it to happen. Usually we’re not ready for it when it comes. Whatever your vision of that is, take a chisel and chop it down to cubes. That’s where you’ll start to find the reality. You see, dude, the time comes when you forget that you’re working toward anything but yourself.”
I lift my hands from the armchair in a sign of helplessness. “Pete, I’m fucking broke, man. Dog walking and short sales are killing us. Yeah, ‘arting’ – that’s what I’m doing. I’m arting hard and staying true to it and fair to myself. There is nothing else for me to do in this life. This ‘happening’ thing has to happen sooner than later, thou
gh. No, no, the Grandma Moses story doesn’t impress me, and Modigliani was doomed from birth. I’m not one of those people with the luck of the Irish or what- what-ever.”
“Okay, bro’, okay. So you do the thing and keep it together and all is going to be okay. You have to believe that. It’s what we do best. So, yeah, you have your Belinda and it’s a nice nest. Take that for starters. She’s a good influence on you, Minus. There’s no denying her love for you, I see it in every glance she settles on your sorry Chicago face.” Peter stops and stares over my shoulder. “Hey, Belinda, you foxy babe!”
My head fights against my neck’s urge to whip around. The head wins. I reach my hand into the air and way backwards, palm aiming the all-seeing-eye trick at her, whom I guess has been standing behind the screen, but for how long she’s been there is impossible to tell. I’d lost track of the shower sounds. The music is clearer; she could have been listening (inadvertently). Still no sign from Anna, either, but the water sounds have ceased.
Not that Belinda cares much about any of what we’ve been saying. All hypothetical and manishly lame. Guy blather. She has her opinions, and strong judgments they are, while I have mine. We’ve never thought we needed to share one brain.
“I’m organizing drinks,” she says from behind the screen. “Tea or coffee? I’ve brought the froth maker. There’s an espresso machine in the cabinet that looks seaworthy. One of those screw-together Italian models. Any takers?”
“I need to check the time,” Peter says. Under our watch, he does so. “Okay. It’s late enough for whisky to be involved. I’m a taker. Minus, are you a taker?”
“I’m a taker,” I say. This feels like an admission and absolution. Belinda’s voice has betrayed nothing, least of all that she’d heard our conversation, of which only Peter would appear the normal man. I lift myself from the chair and turn around. I feel slim today, muscled. This must be the grueling exercise of holiday making. “Belinda,” I say, “are you a taker?”
She comes through the screen door and squats between our chairs. Peter and I pass a look, and she puts on a serious face. I’m afraid she’s about to say something about Anna, like we need to take her home, or to a shelter or, worst possible, to the police. “I’m a taker, too,” she says. “Now who’s got the sixty-year-old whisky?” She arches an eyebrow. I feel a deep blush scorch my face. Peter deflates in the chair. Belinda slaps us both on the shoulder.
My head lifts upward, eyes to the sky, and I cry out, “I call on thee, Dionysus,” in a great bellow. Birds scattering through the trees. “Bring us your liquid embodiment of life, distillates preferred. We, your minions and supplicants, await your libation and direction. I am the bull, he is the serpent, and she the fox, keepers of secrets that are good and just.”
Belinda’s countenance is blazoned with wonder. Peter coughs into his beer to catch my attention.
“Wow,” he says. “You have spent a lot of time in the studio. Those statues start to come alive.”
My own narcissism tells me this is the one day, and the place, to follow the chord sounds of treacherous youth. I throw up my arms and call out an incantation. “Son of Zeus, born of two mothers, you carry the madness of three in you. My humble theater before you now shows us in need of celebration and ecstasy. Speak to Bacchus on our behalf, if you must. A bottle of red, a flagon of white. What have you to bring these initiates to your secrets? We’ll take wine, but we prefer whisky.”
In the caesura, I look around. We can catch ourselves in reality only so much before we need a new reality to make sense of life. Peter’s face is a sack of sand; Belinda remains crouched on the porch, holding to the subdued light of my gray shadow. The silence in which we find ourselves touches me. Then her beautiful smile arches in a delectable repose.
“What’s happened to the music?” I ask. We’re with the birds and the cicadas. Somewhere below us the sound of rustling is in the bushes; squirrels playing in the underbrush, or a deer spooked by my tomfoolery. The three of us pass blank looks. Belinda stands and calls out, “Anna?” She strides into the house with a quick whiplash of the screen door. On its return it rattles the rafters. We hear Belinda in the bedroom, calling for Anna again and again. One set of footsteps thud across the floorboards. Belinda appears behind the screen door.
“She’s not here.”
“What happened to the radio?” I ask again.
Peter says, “Uh-oh.”
In that moment, I lose my trust in Anna’s innocence. I lurch toward the screen door, but Belinda is already beating her heels through the house, and makes it to the bedroom before me. We find an empty rectangle in the dust on the dresser. A drawer is open. Inside, my wallet has been rifled through, my cash gone. Belinda finds her purse upended in the corner. We stare at each other.
“That little bitch ripped us off,” Belinda says. “What are we gonna do?”
“Tantric imagery?” I suggest.
I hear a noise and turn. Peter stands out in the middle of the living room. “Her clothes are still in the washing machine,” he says. “I looked in the fridge, and she’s grabbed some food. But your rental car is still in the driveway.”
Then I remember the sound behind the house, the animal sounds in the bushes. That had to be Anna, running away with our money, food, and the vintage radio to hock for booze, cigarettes, and drugs — the runaway’s staples, I uncharitably think — or maybe a bus ticket home (though I don’t have much hope or altruism for this thought, while I stand at the dresser looking at the scratches across the wood).
Belinda wants to call the police, but Peter thinks we’d be wasting their time as much as ours. Anna knows her terrain, Pete argues, and could be getting into a boyfriend’s car right now to speed her way to Philly or Jersey or Trenton (Belinda’s jaded guess is Trenton: “Lots of riff-raff there.”). Besides, I’ve lost only twenty dollars and Belinda twenty-five. Peter suggests this is why Anna burgled the radio — she thought we’d have more cash, and spite made her throw in the radio for the trouble we’d put her through, coming all the way up that stream and climbing the trail. Unexpectedly, we all laugh.
In the end, we wander back to the kitchen, check on what Anna has left us in the fridge, and find in the bottom drawer a wheel of Italian sausage and Vidalia onions and one fresh sweet bell pepper. When Peter tells us he has more beer in his car, we decide to party and drown our failed charity in a feast that, if the wind blows right, will send the teasing smells of our “honest” food down to wherever, Belinda sneers, “that bitch lives like a rat.”
For the next two hours we do just this, grilling over mesquite charcoal and sipping cold micro-brews. In between we tell Peter about Anna, what little we’d learned on our walk back up the brook. Peter does duty and nods in the right places, or challenges when we’ve proved easy pawns in her scheme. At the end of this short biography that includes teenage angst, parental verbal abuse, and “a little coke habit,” we realize that nothing Anna told us could be believed, in light of what she’s done.
When the food is in our bellies and a few beers remain bobbing in the cooler water, Peter slides his long legs from beneath the picnic table and says farewell. In just a few minutes, Belinda and I stand alone at the foot of the drive, listening to Peter’s truck move through its gears down the road.
After we clean the dishes, Belinda walks the house to close and lock every window, checks that the rental car’s alarm is activated, and turns on all the outdoor lights so the exterior looks either like the cops have surrounded it or it is a redoubt of unquestionable security.
In the bedroom’s semi-darkness and growing heat (a product of the windows having been closed), we undress and lie on top of the cotton sheets, the duvet pulled down to the foot of the bed. Once more we tread the waters of Anna. “It’s less than fifty bucks,” Belinda finally says. “I’d have given her that much for the asking.” In my enmity, I take a while to nod agreement, but can’t help thinking about that bitch’n radio.
We lie close toget
her, face to face, and I can’t think of a time when I’ve been happier. We begin to fool around a little, touching and caressing, not knowing where this will lead and not caring if sex happens. We’re relaxed but not so tired. We admit our non-horniness but reserve the option of becoming aroused later, sometime in the middle of the night. Belinda likes to laugh when we play around, and sigh while we have sex. I want to hear her laugh tonight. In the darkness her smile is unusual, a non-bedtime smile. I see in this face what it was like our first time; “you’re only a virgin once” is not the same as being a virgin with the man or woman you’ve not yet slept with, and then you do sleep together. I can guess she’s thinking of how hilarious we were together that night, how my hands shook while taking off her bra, vibrating in their shaking and it was this that started to really turn her on. “Touch me over here, now lower, lower – there! –” She whispered and gasped and moaned like a woman of all men’s dreams and fantasies. And when she said, “Now vibrate my button!” we began to laugh so hard my hard-on shrank and we had to start over.
So this was the sex part of the lovemaking, but the emotional part was its scenery and aura, how we looked and smelled and tasted. When we finished, had had enough, and lay side by side as we lie side by side tonight, what we felt was different than what we had an hour before. A good sort of different, an understanding different. We wanted to remember what we were before, and what we had become. I know Belinda’s thinking this now because she’s nodding in the way we’ve learned to nod when one of us has been brought back to that time and place. This isn’t meant to re-live the moment, but re-see the imagery. Sometimes it’s almost as good as the original, if we let ourselves be.