Thirst (12 page)

At that same moment Lucy stepped from her odd clapboard house, as radiant and lush as the day. Whole wheat bread and granola, Tom guessed. Waving her arms, she did a little dance of excitement as he parked behind her rust-eaten Nova. The clothes hanger he had twisted around its muffler the previous summer, the day she had joined them on Cape Cod, was still there.

“Welcome to New Hampshire.”

Claire said, “Is that where we are?”

“Hey, live free or die. It’s on my plates.”

The two friends hugged. Tom stepped around the car for the four-hour drive’s payoff: a gently applied, moist kiss on his lips, Lucy’s slightly parted to suggest the tongue fluttering behind them.

Meanwhile, Adam, who didn’t like to be kissed by anyone, not even his grandparents, much less a thirty-two-year-old blonde wearing lipstick, hurried from the car. Leaving the door swung open, he jogged to the edge
of the hill. The land fell away at his feet to reveal waves of lesser, tree-covered hills that broke against the horizon, an expanse untouched by human effort. The shadows of a few puffed clouds rode the landscape like aircraft carriers. Adam swallowed a bucket’s worth of air and announced, “This is paradise!”

Lucy gave them a tour of the house, whose rooms were stretched along a single axis, making them difficult, she had been warned, to heat in the winter. It was about twenty years old. “The landlord told me the people who built it were from Arizona, and this model had been the home of their dreams. They lasted exactly two weeks after the first frost.” She showed them the guest room, the living room, a small den she had outfitted as a studio, and her bedroom. A slight yet evocative depression shaded the center of her bedspread. Tom recognized Lucy’s books and things from her apartment in Boston, shuffled and redealt into these strange rooms. A Chinese character print on the wall above her bed, shelves of densely printed college paperbacks, a tiny, unplugged black-and-white television whose face had been scratched during an earlier move—these were clearly the possessions of a single woman, Tom thought. Lucy had broken up nearly a year earlier with a guy she had lived with for five; an easy-going, bantering academic, he had called Tom “Pedro” for no reason at all, but which pleased Tom anyway. Tom wondered what he was doing now.

“Look, this is terrible. You’ve driven all morning, but now I’ve got to get to the grocer before he closes. I’m sorry. It’s been a gruesome week. I haven’t done any
shopping. If you like, you can stay here and relax. Or we can all go down and have lunch.”

“Sure,” Claire said. “I’d like to see the village.”

“Are we going to have pizza?” Adam said. “I think I want pizza.”

“Pizza?” Tom replied. “What, are you crazy? You can’t get pizza in New Hampshire. This is the great outdoors: mountains, woods, streams. They don’t eat pizza here.”

“What do they eat then?”

“Moose.”

“You’re lying.”

“They do eat moose,” Lucy said. “But the restaurant in the village has spaghetti. With regular meat meatballs. You’ll like it, I think.”

Adam insisted on sitting in the front seat with his father. Tom drove, watching Lucy in his rearview mirror as the two women caught up with each other. The summer had speckled her smooth, frail skin. She looked especially vulnerable, with those pale lips, that round, open face. A vein throbbed across her temple. She saw him looking at her and smiled, holding his stare. Her eyes were not delicate at all.

“What color’s the hair around her pussy?” Tom had once asked his wife, before this current infatuation, back when it was just a matter of curiosity. “Is it blonde?”

Claire had laughed.

“Actually, it’s pretty dark, reddish. Not as dark as mine, though.”

“You mind me asking?”

“I’d rather have you ask me than her.”

“Why is it dark?”

“That’s how it is. You rarely ever see a truly blonde pussy.”

“I never slept with a blonde,” Tom murmured, mostly to himself. Claire already knew this; the list of women he had slept with before they were married was a brief one.

“Men usually have darker pubic hair, too,” she said.

Tom had nodded, absorbed by a picture of Lucy naked, her vagina covered by dark, reddish hair. He had found it surprisingly easy to imagine.

 

The restaurant was a bean-sprouts-and-carrot-bread kind of place. They filed into the restaurant, Tom, Lucy, Claire, and Adam. As they were about to take their seats, Adam pushed up ahead past the women and declared, “I’m sitting next to Dad.”

During lunch, Tom tried to catch Lucy’s eye again. Had that stare in the car meant she was available? On reflection, it may have been less of a stare than a long glance; he needed it repeated for him to be sure. And he too wanted to communicate something, though he wasn’t sure what. Meanwhile, his wife was interrogating Lucy about her job: the working conditions, her boss, her prospects for promotion. Tom enjoyed hearing Lucy talk—but not about her job. What kind of woman, Tom wondered about his wife, wasn’t interested in her ex-college roommate’s sex life? Claire didn’t ask Lucy whether she had been dating anyone, so, finally, Tom ventured:

“You don’t find it too dull up here?”

“It’s quiet,” Lucy admitted.

“Is there anything to do?”

“There’s movie theaters in Keene, and a playhouse in Peterborough. And they tell me it snows. Next winter I’m going to ski my ass off.”

Unbidden, the image of Lucy’s small, flat ass rose up in the steam off Tom’s omelet.

“Have you met anybody?”

“I knew everyone in town after three fill-ups at the Chevron.”

“I meant people our age.”

“Sure. There’s hardly anyone at the magazine over thirty-five.”

Adam asked, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

Heads of the other diners turned at the women’s raucous laughter. Adam stared into his plate, trying not to grin, enjoying the response.
This is the wrong lesson,
his father thought:
he’ll grow up to be a clown.
Tom forced a chuckle.

Meanwhile, Claire and Lucy went on to discuss Claire’s work, and then Lucy asked Tom about his. Tom kept his answers brief. Claire said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with this guy. Usually you can’t shut him up.”

She went on to describe in detail the latest progress in Tom’s career. Several projects under his control had turned out well; his responsibilities had been broadened. Tom listened to Claire talk about it as if it had happened to someone else, someone he wasn’t particularly interested in at the moment—say, Claire’s husband.

Lucy said she went to a play to celebrate her birthday.

“What’d you see?” Claire asked.

Who’d you see it with?
Tom wondered, fully aware of the absurdity of his jealousy. For that’s what it was: he slept with his wife every night but couldn’t bear the thought that Lucy, on whom he had no claims of romantic affection at all, might be touched by another man.

“It was a new play. I forget the title. It may have been the first time it was produced. Definitely a small-time, small-town production. Listen to what happened. After the play, we went to the bar next to the theater and ordered some drinks.”

“And of course we talked about the play,” Lucy continued. “Not too loud, but in normal voices. And I said it needed work. That’s all I said, I swear it. Then this guy I never saw before got up, glared at us as if he were about to rip out our lungs, and walked out of the place, slamming the door. ‘Oh, by the way,’ the bartender told us, ‘that was the playwright.’”

Claire said, “You’re lucky you didn’t say you hated it.”

If it had been any other woman—even his own widowed mother—Tom would have now bantered, sweet-heart, you still haven’t answered my boy’s question. But Tom knew that he could never ask the question in a way that would camouflage how seriously he sought the answer. Claire might not see through him, but Lucy would.

 

Tom had long believed that all they needed was a single block of time together, alone and near a bed. The courtship had already been conducted—wordlessly. All that
was left was for him to kiss her. But was there any reason for them to be alone? How often in the last ten years had they ever been alone? After all, Lucy was technically Claire’s friend. When she told Tom, in one of the many ostensibly casual phone calls he had made to her from his office, that she had finally found a house to rent near Peterborough, he had offered to help her move. “That’s sweet,” she said, “but I have to do it in the middle of the week, probably Tuesday or Wednesday.” “That’s okay, I’ll take off from work,” Tom gushed, envisioning passion among the packing cartons. It was, in fact, famously difficult for Tom to take off from work, requiring negotiated accommodations with his employer and his colleagues. “No, that won’t be necessary.” “Do you have someone helping you?” he asked. “It’s really not that much. I’ll be fine,” she insisted.

They now returned from the village with groceries. “Okay,” Lucy said. “The activity portion of the afternoon has been completed. You can take it easy now.”

“I think I’m going to change,” Claire said.

“Go ahead.” Lucy turned to Adam. “Want to see my horse?”

“You have a horse?”

“It’s my landlord’s. He keeps it corralled at the other end of the field.”

“Can you ride it?”

“No, it’s for breeding.”

Adam nodded, taking this in gravely.

In the guest room, Tom removed his shirt and watched his wife undress. Marriage and motherhood, Tom and Adam, had hardly touched her body at all.
They had married young; he had courted her with manic persistence—flowers every day for a month, poetry, candlelit dinners—pleased and astounded that he’d make himself ridiculous in the cause of love, perhaps more enamored by his passion than its object. He had finally worn her down, and her body had come to him like a revelation, an exposé of the female form, all bubbling spheres and oblique curves. But now, after the passage of years, it was more like a well-known fact, something repeated so often he could hardly believe it was true. Tom wondered, to his numbing despair, if he would ever want to—really want to—make love to his wife again. He rummaged through his overnighter for another polo shirt.

Claire said, “You know what I just remembered?”

“What?”

“The time you took me rowing on the Schuylkill. You were so romantic. You had a little table, a checkered tablecloth, wine, wine glasses, violin music on the tape deck. It was very sweet.”

“But I left the hamper on the pier. Why are you bringing this up now?”

“I don’t know. Don’t be such a sourpuss. It worked out pretty well.”

It had. The useless table kicked aft, they had made love that afternoon on the floor of the boat, the river slapping against the hull. Tom had looked up to see a sculling crew skim the water like an insect less than twenty feet away, each young man indistinguishable from the other, their bodies joined in a single movement.

How could he be so wrong about Claire’s mood? In
the car she had hardly talked to him, except to say the most necessary and practical things. How could she be so wrong about
his
mood? She had evidently taken his coldly appraising glances for affection. How could
he
be so wrong about his mood? Now he felt desire uncoiling within him, a mournful tenderness.

“Lucy looks beautiful,” Claire said as she went over her makeup. “Really gorgeous.”

“Yes,” he said noncommittally.

“The country suits her. Fresh air and water every day, a fifty-mile view from her front porch, no traffic . . .”

“It’s nice, all right.”

“But I think she’s lonely.”

“Oh, yeah? How can you tell?”

“There’s no man in her life.” They were standing by the dressing mirror, Claire behind him, Tom still holding his shirt. She kissed his shoulders.
“I’d
be lonely.”

“How do you know there’s no man?”

“I can tell,” Claire said. “Lucy has a certain look about her when she hasn’t been laid for a while.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Don’t believe me. You know everything there is to know about women, don’t you?”

Tom turned and kissed her.

“Do you get the same look?”

“It puts lines in your face,” she said. “That’s why I keep several lovers at a time.”

When Lucy returned to the house with Adam, Tom watched her closely. Perhaps Claire was right: Tom thought there was an unmistakable tightness around
her mouth, and that her motions were abrupt as she prepared drinks for them to take out onto the porch—while Claire’s were fluid and nonchalant.

“Dad, you know what I would like? More than anything? A hang glider. You could get one too. We could jump off Lucy’s hill and fly back. All we have to do is find some eagles and follow the thermals over the mountains. Mom can drive the car home.”

“No, I can’t,” Claire said. “I’m planning to water-ski back.”

Adam was like a very short man, resembling an adult-featured child in a medieval painting—a miniature of his father. He had the same bristly black hair as Tom did, and Claire insisted on the boy wearing it in the same way. “It’s cute,” she said. “My two men.” When Adam spoke, it was with a childishly pitched whine, but also with Tom’s inflections, his mannerisms, and occasionally his language. This was what fatherhood had come down to: this compact, mocking figure. There was virtually nothing of Claire in the boy, a fact that didn’t seem to disturb her at all.

“You know,” Adam said to Lucy, “most people think of the tomato as a vegetable, but it’s really a fruit. They thought it was poisonous until 1820, when some guy in New Jersey proved that it wasn’t. He showed up on the steps of the local courthouse, pulled one out of his pocket, and took a bite. This really happened. I bet you didn’t know that.”