Subtle Bodies (10 page)

“I know. And I’m so sorry the way I left. My heart is shaking.”

He was squeezing her. He was full of joy. They had to get down from there. She was pressing his crotch with the back of her hand. She did anything she wanted to. He wasn’t hard. Afloat, he felt
afloat
.

“Hm,” she said.

“Don’t worry, my dear.”

He pulled her hand up and against his chest. He said, “Feel my heart.”

“Feel mine,” she said, and pressed his hand against the front of her bright yellow linen shirt, his favorite.

They had to stop this.

He renewed his embrace in order to keep his balance.

“Unhand my behind,” she said.

17
They had decided to proceed by stages up to the property, pulling her luggage and stopping to rest as much as they needed to, taking their time and talking, catching up. She’d said she loved all the trees, but described them as excessive, to make him laugh. She wasn’t above using a witticism twice if she thought he’d missed it the first time or had insufficiently appreciated it. She had no shame about it, in fact she thought doing that was funny.

They were at the bridge. She said, “I want to tell you something so I can forget it. You can help me. I had to squeeze past a woman in the aisle on the plane and I thought she was making a face at me so I made a face back at her, just before I realized she was exophthalmic. I feel
awful. I want you to make it fade from my mind. I want it to fade so completely there’s not a trace. So make it fade.”

“I’m doing it.”

Nina said, “Tell me when it’s completely gone.”

They laughed.

They were kissing again. “It’s good you didn’t wear lipstick,” he said.

“Thinking ahead,” she said. She was neatening him up. She’d once said that makeup was advertising for your vagina and hers was taken. He’d liked that remark even if it wasn’t serious, because she was his.

One thing he’d learned from her, that she’d learned from the burgomaster, was that there was another road, a much longer back way up the hill that avoided the torrents and was used by trucks and emergency service vehicles. And she had brought him up to date on the Convergence. There was a solid consensus that the talking points would use Invasion but not Anglo-Saxon Invasion. He’d taken the position that that was what it was going to be, literally, even if the Spaniards were brought in to put a mustache on it. It was going to be Americans, Brits, and a few Australians but no French.

They crossed the bridge. Nina wanted to know what Douglas had meant when he said he lived in a dying forest.

Ned said, “He was being melodramatic. There was an ash blight. The other trees were fine. And maples were the successor species, so it ended up greener than before.”

Ned moved his attention to the urgent question of accommodations, meaning a decent bed, not a cot, and privacy. It had to be solved.

18
It had taken only a second’s observation to dismiss the tower accommodations as impossible. She was a pest when it came to beds. She knew it. She was a mattress hog and was used to articulating her body for sleep employing an army of pillows which was why their mattress at home took up three-quarters of the bedroom. If she had to, she would lie down on an ironing board to conceive, but she strongly preferred not to.

Ned was a genius at logistics when he wanted to be. She needed him to be a genius now. He needed to start machinating immediately. She looked at his crotch. She had gone overboard with the teasing, obviously, given that he now had to go forth and interact.

“Recede,” she said, addressing his lower self.

19
He was a genius and this was a coup.

He was slightly hyperventilating as he locked the cabin door behind them, triumphant. He had proved his ingenuity his desire his what-have-you, in spades … and his, well, erectitude because here he was, getting hard again. Nina wanted more kissing. It had taken a certain power, what he had done.

What he had done was, he had executed a continuous single flourish ending where they were, safe and private together. He had gotten Nina up the hill, had her wait out of sight in the tower, sought out the head housekeeper, a new persona, Mrs. Murphy, and laid out to her that his wife
was here and that they urgently needed their own place, and getting a key from her for the unused pristine cabin expressly built for the boy, Hume. He had been delicate but frank with Mrs. Murphy, a thin, older, darker, sighing woman he guessed to be a Filipina. Elliot had approved the arrangement, frantic as he had been with phones ringing in the hive of industry that was the cockpit of everything going on. Since anything that might delay conjugation felt unbearable, he’d avoided Joris and Gruen.

This Wendy house was one of the many custom living setups Douglas had tried to sell to his impossible son over the years. There had been boarding schools of various kinds including a brief spell in something in Saugerties called a Hof, which had been a facility run for the youth wing of an Odinist pagan organization. Then there was the boy’s yurt. And a room somewhere in the manse, too. So they had created this House of His Own, and he’d rejected it.

“That’s right, manhandle me,” Ned said as Nina clung to him while he edged them into the bedroom. There were two rooms, a small main room and a bedroom, and what would have to be called a kitchenette, and a bathroom. The smell of fresh paint hung in the air. Some of the window panes still bore manufacturers’ stickers. The walls were pale gray, window frames white, the floors gleaming amber pine. The main room housed an old steel desk, a chair, and a bookcase with one paperback in it,
Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth
, by H. P. Lovecraft. The kitchen had seemed to be equipped with the basics, although there was no food in the countertop refrigerator. There was a stack of new window screens awaiting installation. In the bathroom it had
been similar: towels, facecloths, soap still in its wrapper, an electric fan and an electric heater, both still boxed. The windows were uncurtained. The ceiling lights functioned and there was a gooseneck lamp on a stool near the head of the bed. So they could read when their revels were over that night. Good. The bed linen was fresh. In fact, it was new.

You could begin a new life in a place like this, which had probably been the idea, Ned thought. He imagined himself arriving with a toothbrush and a pad and pencil and sitting down to stare out at the verdure, nothing on his agenda, which reminded him that he had to find a way to cover the bedroom windows with towels, somehow. Nina was continuing with undressing him. To put up the towels he needed pushpins or a hammer and nails, and right away. Nina was being herself. She ceased long enough for him to collect a few towels and she joined him in clamping the top edge of the towels between the sashes and the casing on each of the windows looking into their bedroom. It wasn’t a neat job, but it would do.

Nina resumed her attentions, undressing him without his assistance, slowly, like the devil incarnate she was.

Nina wanted him naked but she liked herself to be half-dressed for the proceedings. She dropped her buckskin jacket to the floor. She liked to be taken in dishevelment, with her underwear askew or undone, outer garments barely obscuring her naughty bits.

She finished undressing him, kissing his genitals when she felt like it.

20
When had
buck
naked turned into
butt
naked? Nina wondered. And when had it become common for women to refer to their own breasts as
boobs
, and as casually as they might refer to their elbows or ears?

She had resisted sleep. It was midafternoon. Ned was dozing. Their limbs were still entangled. Something she liked was waking up with Ned and finding that they were in new combinations and alignments, compositions devised by their unconscious minds while they slept. Once she’d awakened to find that the soles of her feet were pressed firmly against his. She wanted everything to go on forever if possible.

Meticulously and with strategic halts she disengaged from Ned. He could sleep some more. She was feeling almost perfect. Ned had come twice. She had a good feeling about the first shot especially. She was using the word
womb
a lot in her ruminations lately. Ned had been all heat and conviction. And she should be doing one of her dumb visualizations, shouldn’t she, à la her womb becoming a flowerpot suddenly exploding with geraniums? She didn’t feel like it. As a young girl she’d visualized her heart as a dark red artichoke and the leaves as things her future boyfriends would strip away and it would be dramatic.

She was supposed to have her legs above her head by this time. Okay she was pinching her introitus shut. Now to get on with it.

She studied her sleeping man. There was something she understood, which was why Ned had felt so urgently
the need to fly east. It had to do with power. It had to do with the old days, with the dismal Roman Catholic miasma of his household, the Catholic spell over his mother and his brother, the deathly house he was raised in, the early death of his father, his escape to NYU and meeting Douglas and being included in the power group of friends. That had been his great escape, as he saw it. Right now it was like a fable where some grail or amulet has been mislaid and needed to be gotten back by a hero going into a labyrinth or dark gorge the hero had already passed through once. Oops he forgot his amulet in the gorge and has to go back. She had a better idea of what he was doing than he did. He wasn’t depressed but he wasn’t happy enough. The fucking truth was that Ned was in
fact
an instrument for good, both in Fair Trade and before, in the co-operative movement … what was left of it. But he could be more of a force! He was a skeptic on the subject of himself. It held him back. It was painful to her. She shook the thought away.

She had inched herself to a sitting position on her edge of the bed. Her next feat was going to be achieving a three-quarter shoulder stand without waking her husband up. She swiveled around and raising her pelvis she levered her feet up the wall at the head of the bed. When she felt the angle was steep enough she let go of her vulva. She held the position. She was dogged. Should she throw in some visualization? It was too boring. She would distract herself otherwise. “You guys are adorable,” she murmured to her breasts. Ned was a fiend for her breasts. It was almost a dream state he went into. She was reminded that there was an amount of hair on Ned’s back she might suggest doing something about, if he were somebody else.

Getting fucked was so interesting, seen from the peculiar
detached mental moment that could descend on her during the act. She felt a flash of fellowship with all women getting fucked, the ones getting fucked carelessly or badly or cruelly, the ones fucked decently or brilliantly. She thought of the shadow of night sliding around the globe endlessly, and with the fall of night the clashing of a million cymbals sounding and representing the coming together of males and females in the Continue Humanity project, this colossal enterprise. But that was enough. There was too much blood in her head.

She let herself relax off the wall. She lay with her knees up for a while, and then turned on her side, sensing suddenly that something was wrong. One of the towels was moving. Where it had been clenched between the sash and casing, something was dragging it minutely to one side leaving naked glass along the edge of the window and then there was an eye and part of a face in that space and then that was gone. It was gone before she could gasp. She was freezing. Violently she caught the sheets up against her and in the process woke Ned.

21
He hadn’t run this fast since his last field day at Frick Junior High. He was running in an attempt to lay hands on the only child of an old friend who was dead. Life was unusual.

Peeping at naked people without their permission was a crime. He could understand an adolescent doing it, but still. When he’d realized what it was Nina was trying to tell him he’d jammed himself into his clothes. His loafers were meant to be worn with socks, not bare feet.

He stopped to finish buttoning his shirt and to get his breath. He could see Hume. This was a lower part of the hill where the lawn had given way to brush, down past the place Douglas’s life on earth had ended. His quarry, which is what Hume was, appeared intermittently. He was on the opposite side of the stream that was roaring its way toward the flatlands. Hume was scrambling nimbly up and away through the vegetation. Douglas would have been proud.

He was tired. He’d scared Hume, which was all he could do for now. He didn’t know if there was something generically wrong with the next generation or not. You can’t lift a cheesecake with an iron hook, somebody had said. Hume was tearing his way out of sight. He was gone. Ned turned back. Nina was coming to join him.

Sex with Nina was so … great. And there was no work to it. Claire had thought of her own body as a votive object.

“I wish you wouldn’t run,” she said when she reached him.

“Why not?”

“You could fall. People fall and die around here.” She swept her hand in the direction of the raging brook. There were slick boulders spaced across the brook that only an idiot would use to cross over. She pointed at them. “Look, you might have tried to jump on those youyouyou, my man of action, my man of action guy. Good thing I came … What’s
wrong
with that boy?” She was wearing a man’s engulfing white terrycloth robe and flip-flops.

“I don’t know. What Joris said is that they were going to try homeschooling again. Hume told his mother he’s a follower of Odin. They’re a pagan group and their religion is based on Norse mythology. The whole deal is right wing.”

Nina was a proud person. He had to remember about
not over-explaining things to her. She was self-conscious about her two-year community college education but she knew more than anybody, really, and certainly more than Claire, and Claire had a PhD. It would be good not to spend too much time thinking about fucked-up children. Only children, like Hume, seemed to be the biggest risk and their child was likely to be a one and only.