Amateurs (22 page)

They were getting closer to their destination. The first ocean sounds made Sara think of the surf scene in
From Here to Eternity.
She was about to ask if Archer had seen the movie—she hadn't, only that clip—but stopped herself. She let out a light laugh at the thought.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.”

Grumblingly: “I hate that.”

“I know, I know. Isn't there an old Ukrainian proverb: ‘She who leaves her chuckles unexplained finds her tears unconsoled'?” They walked on in happy silence. Her arrangement with Archer had its drawbacks—the anonymity, the secrecy, the jealousy—but for now it suited her, and in certain frames of mind, such as the one she was in on this walk, the advantages overwhelmed the drawbacks. She was doing the best work of her life. The conservative mutual fund Archer had led her to would be a benison during the water wars of her senior citizenship. Having finally found the right allergy medication, she was putting her mouth-breathing days behind her. (That was
only coincidental to her work with Archer, but it felt causal.) She was going out: to readings, restaurants, yoga classes, nightclubs. She was having sex, good sex, mostly with an IT guy whose lazy eye and atavistically leading-edge mustache made him look like a recently punched Orville Wright. He was boyfriend material in few respects, the sort of jagged playboy who couldn't be trusted to remember a birthday but would inevitably come through with the gift of chlamydia. His strong-and-silent posturings—an encyclopedia of nods and monosyllables—were at once seductive and risible. But mostly seductive; she let her birthday pass unannounced and hoped for the best, enjoying his skinny intensity, his eyebrow scar, his slight scent of having spent many hours untangling cables under dusty cubicles. Though she knew his desire was dispersed across several subsets of womanly Buffalo, she didn't doubt that it was strong for her, and while she hadn't in the past been a great fan of bedroom talk, she loved how he got talkier during sex, full of blandishments, compliments, and instructions. His name was TJ, which she found funny and unspeakable. She hadn't mentioned him to Archer. They didn't talk much about her personal life, but she preferred for Archer to think of her as chastely single, or patiently steadfast. Mentioning TJ to Archer would have felt like confessing to an affair.

They came out of the forest to a more exposed part of the trail not far from the shore. Now the ground was sandy, the plant life desertic. The flat red tops of the Turk's head cacti indeed looked like fezzes. Some needles from a different species penetrated the sole of Archer's running shoe, and when he decided he couldn't wait till they got to the beach to pluck them out, he sat—it was slapstick—on more cactus needles. Sara stood in the sun trying to offer moral support, the small of her back pooling with sweat. “Just leave me here for the goats,” he said, but he recovered. After passing quickly through another more forested area that was in one spot slimy and putrid with pelican guano, they were on the beach.

The sun made TV static on the water. “Swim first, eat first?” she said, pantomiming a fluctuating two-pan balance. He said he was hungry. They leaned on a rock, eating their sandwiches, apples, and witch-finger carrots, sipping water and lemonade from complicatedly sealed bottles.

“Oh, did you catch my line this morning, ‘gather my thought'? Singular. Self-mocking, right? Try and work that into
EC
during edits. Or you could say 'collect my thought.'”

“Where were you thinking I'd work it in?”

“Not sure.”

“I wonder if it's funny enough to insert, you know, this late in the game.”

“It's definitely funny. And it's the kind of thing—people will say, ‘That's
so
Archer.' Even if they don't remember me saying it, it'll trigger something.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and took off his
HIGHER IN CANADA
T-shirt.

“Might look like a typo,” she said.

“You'll know how to set it up.”

“Yeah, okay.”

They were both wearing their suits underneath their clothes. His patchwork-patterned trunks were short, loose, and boyish, the boyishness echoed by his inability to thoroughly apply suntan lotion. “You have blotches of lotion on your nose and cheek,” she said.

He put a few more seconds into the job. “Better?”

She made a shrugging sound.

“Do you need me to get your back?” he asked, and she turned around.

Franklin Beach, she discovered, was less gradual than the resort's main beach, the water colder and rougher, which made sense since it was the Atlantic not the Caribbean. She shrieked when the first splashes reached her thighs. “Do you hate it when people say that cold water is ‘nice once you get used to it'?”

“Would you like it if I shared your irrational hatred for this innocent expression?”

“Yes, it would mean a great—”

While she was talking he dived in with a yawning bellow that seemed to emanate from the Ghost of Christmas Future. She followed, and they trod water not far from each other. “It's nice once you get used to it,” he said.

“It really is.”

She tried to slacken her features into their most invitational positions.

The beach wasn't as remote as promised, in that once in a while boats sped or sailed by in the middle distance, and sometimes small planes flew overhead. She got out of the water first, without saying anything or looking back at Archer. He followed her. She set her sights on a spot behind a huge rock, craggy and brown. Her swimsuit rode up her ass as she walked to the rock, but she kept herself from pulling the suit down, not sure if that was the right move. TJ was forever extolling her ass, urging her to present it in specific ways (“Oh God, baby, arch your back, arch your back!”). She sat on a smaller rock in the shade of the big one. Archer was walking slowly and uneasily, his trunks failing to screen his erection. When he caught up to her, she pulled the straps of her one-piece suit off her shoulders and looked up at him.

All the guys now—TJ and one of the others, at least—seemed to want dramatically salivary blowjobs sometimes performed in odd positions, so she concentrated as best as she could under the circumstances on that, taking Archer deep in her mouth and at one point crouching in a crablike position, letting a strand of drool drip off her chin onto her breasts. His penis was somewhat hook-shaped and sprang back toward his navel whenever he pulled out of her mouth; she almost expected to hear a
boing.
For a while they were situated so that much of his weight was on his left leg, with only the ball of his
right foot touching the sand, and because of that, or because of his excitement and the slight chance of exposure, or because he was cold (though that didn't seem likely), his right leg started shaking like a washing machine in its final spin. She tried to hold his tense thigh to still him, but she didn't really want it to stop, and she liked what the tenseness did to the muscle around his femur. She loosened her grip on his leg, lightly tracing the seam of his testicles with her fingernails.

“I'm shaking,” he said shakily.

“Mmm.”

“I wish we had a condom.”

“I know,” she said. As it happened, she did have a condom in her backpack. She had brought two of them on the trip, just in case, though she usually let the guy deal with that. When she learned that Archer and she would be hiking alone, she had returned to her cabin to discreetly tuck one in the pack. She hadn't really considered, though, how she would explain, even silently, the condom's presence, and she perceived now that retrieving it could be destructive.

She stood up and they kissed, at first with enough force for her to feel it in her teeth and jaw. He pushed her hair aside to kiss her neck, instinctively choosing the more sensitive side, and before long she found herself lying in the shade on the gritty sand while he licked, rubbed, and fingered her. He had a good sense for delay, knew for the most part when to concentrate directly on her clit, when to increase pressure, when to add another finger. They were very long, his fingers. She vised his head with her thighs when she came and trusted that the speedboat passing by was too far away to see them, much less to record them and post the results on the internet. It all felt more urgent than rushed, though as they sat looking out at the ocean again, close enough to touch each other but not touching, she knew that the urgency, or any other part of the experience, wouldn't be
repeated, wouldn't even be spoken of, and she started to regret that their probable one time hadn't been a more extended once. A night, a weekend, a long weekend.

Real sadness and guilt might have set in over a long weekend, though, and she was visited by little of that now. A trace of melancholy, yes, but mostly pleasure and some relief. And it was perhaps better—considering Gemma, considering everything—that in the Clintonian sense they hadn't even had sex.

“I sorta don't want to go back,” he said.

She was slow to respond.

“But we should,” he said. Partly to wash away the evidence, they took another swim, and in the cool water she felt deliciously slippery.

June 2011

Karyn stood in the passageway between the kitchen and the dining room, holding out a four-dollar can of carbonated energy water. “Seems late for energy,” Lucas said. Rejecting a coquettish response (“Is it?”), she fetched him a spotty glass of tap water. He was standing at the table behind Maxwell, who for two weeks had been designing uniforms for his alternate-universe football league. “Ooh, Barracudas,” Lucas said. “That one's off the chain.”

“Thanks. It's my third favorite.”

Premature, surely, to suspect Lucas of launching a stepfather audition, but the thought occurred to Karyn. If so, he had a knack for it; his friendliness toward Maxwell, at least, didn't seem especially exhibitive.

“I was gonna do silver pants,” Maxwell said, “but then it's biting the Lions.”

“Try white with a blue stripe.”

“Color it white or just paper white?”

“I'd color it.”

His text had come through on her lunch break. Could they, he had wondered, get together, maybe tonight, to talk about her play? She considered responding with caveats: she wasn't interested in lengthy, in any, discussion of her essentially private play, nor was she up for cooking dinner. In the end that seemed overwrought. She wrote, “Sure, drop by at 8.”

Lucas gave Maxwell one last helmet suggestion, passed through the archway to the living room, and, establishing a certain familiarity, took a seat near the center of the two-cushion sofa. Karyn joined him as he pulled out the play from one of his vinyl bags, this one decorated with zebras.

“That one's off the chain,” she said.

He thanked her. For fun, she guessed, he pronounced
zebra
in the British way. He tapped the play's (un)title(d) page. “I love it,” he said.

“I'm not really—”

“I know you're not looking for praise or pointers or anything. I just want to say I love it.”

“Thank you.”

“It's funny, I started kind of mechanically writing notes, but they were, I don't know, mostly tangential.” He rested his foot on his knee. “Like the scene with Derek and the patched-up overcoat got me thinking 'bout this guy from Bright Lake, the Gum Man.” Karyn had a vague sense of Bright Lake, a Twin Cities exurb that must have been more of a farm town when Lucas was a boy. “He was this hunched old man,” he said, “not homeless, 'cause he had—it was a shack. Maybe not dictionary
shack,
though I think probably. He would shuffle down Main Street tossing sticks of gum at the towns-children's feet. We'd pick them up and eat them. Which seems so strange now—that the transaction wasn't hand to hand, that our parents looked on as we stooped for our gum like urchins.”

“They were wrapped though, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, silver foil. Wrigley's. Stale. I guess with stick gum staleness doesn't much matter after ten seconds, but you don't want it to snap or crumble when you first put it in.” He paused. “I'm still not sure if throwing the sticks on the ground was the Gum Man's way of being subservient, presenting himself as a kind of untouchable. Or if it was more the opposite, like, contemptuous.”

“
Chew up, you little fucks!
”

“Or just super low pressure:
Hey, buddy, I'm gonna toss this gum here. If you want it, great; if not, that's cool too.
”

“And he wore a patched-up overcoat?”

“Well, it seems like he would have. Later, I thought the whole thing must have been a gift-economy situation, you know, where he's tossing the gum in exchange for handouts from the parents, like stealthy”—he finished the thought with his hands. “But I asked my mom about it a few years ago, and she said no, as far as she knew that wasn't it.”

For friendship or otherwise, Karyn hadn't often been attracted to voluble people like this. On the contrary, she was often turned on by reserved, word-sparing men. Her only perfect one-night stand unfolded nearly in pantomime at the end of her twentieth summer, a summer spent in Germany drinking too much while learning too little of the language. Her host family had brought her along to a resort on Norderney, one of the East Frisian Islands, where she found herself watching the sunset near a man who had sidled closer to her over the preceding minutes. He seemed old at the time, though he was probably under thirty. Looking straight ahead, she said, “Der See ist sehr schön.” She didn't have the linguistic resources for a more inventive opener. He agreed, said something about salmon, or laughter, and asked in English about the length of her stay. Though his English seemed flawless, they said almost nothing else. His chest was shaved.