Thirst (14 page)

Fragments of nervous jokes flashed through Tom’s mind, none good enough to laugh this off. He was aware of his own near-nakedness: not only that he was wearing shorts, but that he had irrevocably exposed himself. Lucy’s eyes were open wide now, taking everything in; their wideness revealed a voluptuous beauty that he had never before noticed. He was also aware of the detritus of sleep encrusted around their rims, making her appear nearly as exposed as himself.

He kissed her again, for want of anything else, and again Lucy’s lips held out. The third time he kissed them, they opened just a little. He tasted cranapple. With the cup still in his hand, he put his arms around her and felt her lift up toward him.
Live free or die.

Neither dared break the embrace until they were in the door of the bedroom. He shut it. He put his arms around her again, and her nightgown collapsed into a pile around her ankles. Still standing, he pulled off his shorts. For a moment both were too shy to look at anything but each other’s faces. Lucy’s still showed fright, and more than a little wonder at what she was getting into. What
was
she getting into? What did this mean? Tom himself didn’t know. Making love to a woman who was not his wife—this was a gerund phrase from another language. He ran his eyes over her body, vowing to remember this forever: the pale luminescence of her skin, the curve at her hips, the buoyancy of her breasts. The hair around her vagina was indeed dark, but how dark was impossible to tell in this light.

As he tasted Lucy’s skin—salty and a little sourish—she shuddered. She didn’t speak. Sprawled back on her bed, she bit down on the edge of a pillow, grinning tightly and without humor. Her hips rose to meet him with a predatory urgency he found shocking. So: every gesture, every glare, every comment that he had thought part of a casual and ambiguous flirtation had, in fact, been a demand. Their lovemaking (Tom feared) disturbed the house’s quiet like a skater on a lake of thinning ice, every shifting of their weight breaking distant microscopic crystals. There was a loose screw in the bed-frame that rattled twice in every stroke, one rattle at a slightly shallower resonance than the other. The bed-springs, too, had a small, irregular noise, as did the friction of their bodies against each other and against the sheets. Tom even thought he heard the joints between their bones cracking. Lucy moved under him hard, needing him much more than he could ever have been prepared for. Her extravagant moistness, the strength with which her muscles pulled at him—it was as if he had caught himself in some dangerous mechanical device. So
this
is what she meant by
fucking.

“Dad? Dad?” Then more insistently:
“Dad!”

It was Adam, right outside the door. Tom pulled out of Lucy so quickly she gasped. She grabbed his hips, trying to draw him back in. He tore from her hands and found his shorts.

Tom opened the door just a crack. Adam was standing there, his cape twisted around to the front of his shirt. His eyes were unfocused, like a sleepwalker’s.

“Dad,” he said.

“Shhh. What?” Tom stepped from the room, shutting the door behind him.

“If there was a war between the Star Trek Federation and the Star Wars Empire, who do you think would win?”

The boy didn’t wait for a reply, but stumbled away down the hall, past the studio.

“Whoa,” Tom whispered, catching up and turning him around. “Your mother’s sleeping.”

“So who do you think would win?”

“The Empire,” Tom said. “They have the Death Star technology. Not to mention the Dark Side of the Force.”

They had gone over this ground just a few days earlier; Adam had come up with the answer himself. His hand pressed against the boy’s back, Tom now led him to the studio. As if in a trance, Adam climbed into the cot, wrapped himself in his blanket, and closed his eyes. Tom stood by the bed and watched him for several minutes. Adam didn’t move at all in this time; he hardly breathed. Tom waited for his own breathing to slow, and for his pulse to cease thumping in his ears. He returned to his bedroom, where his wife lay in the same position in which he had left her.

 

Tom’s spinal column grew several inches in the next few hours. In the morning it was ramming against the top of his head, squeezing the contents of his brain against his eyeballs and eardrums. Brilliant sunlight savagely broke into the bedroom. Birds outside the window screamed and wailed, tearing the air like rusty razor blades. When
he and Claire arrived in the kitchen, there was a glass of cranapple juice at every place setting around the table.

“The batter’s mixed,” Lucy said, handing him a spatula. “The rest is up to you.”

She smiled at him, but the smile was neither complicitous nor flirtatious, nor annoyed, nor wrathful, nor embarrassed, nor perplexed. Against all odds, it was just a smile. She stepped away to bring Claire a cup of coffee. Tom vaguely recalled boasting about his skills as a pancake turner. It had been in another life, in a galaxy far away and long ago. He stood for a moment at the screen door. Adam was already outside with his net, looking for butterflies at the edge of the hill.

“Dad, I almost caught one!”

Now, what did
that
mean? Tom approached the bowl and stared into it. Lucy was telling Claire an apparently amusing story about a fender bender she had suffered in Nashua; Tom listened intently to her words for some hidden message directed either to Claire or himself. He listened further for all the particular sounds of the country: the drumming of their claws on the bark as two squirrels chased each other around the trunk of a maple, his son stamping through the high grass, the whir of some fantastic insect, the tentative creaks in the structure of his life before it fell down around him. His head felt like it had not yet adjusted to the altitude.

Claire said, “So, you’ve studied the problem. Now how about greasing the skillet?”

Tom burned the butter. He ran the bottom of the pan under water to cool it, greased the pan again, and
burned it again. Sighing theatrically, his wife left the room to dry her hair.

He was alone with Lucy. She read the paper, her back to him. Was she aware they were alone, that he was watching the back of her bare neck, trembling? She turned and raised her head toward him, her face lit in the sun like a new penny. Adam burst through the door.

“I really need help,” he said. “You don’t expect me to catch butterflies by myself, do you? I’m only eight.”

“After breakfast,” Tom said.

“Are you making pancakes? Can I watch?”

He shrugged. “If you like.”

Tom poured the batter and stood by the range, Adam counting the bubbles rising through each pancake. When the boy, aware that his father was staring at him, turned up his eyes, Tom looked away. Lucy said, in a voice husky with promise, “Why don’t you have a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll get it for you, Dad.”

It was as if it had never happened, as if it were some terrific dream, a dream of her breasts and her tart tongue. Suddenly, the dream’s significance thundered at him, and in the lightning flash that preceded it he saw himself, Claire, and Adam, and Lucy too, a year hence—love sundered, friendship sundered, all of them cast into the abyss, the world’s sum of loneliness increased—a year now held off. But here it was morning, and their lives were intact. In his mind, the shadows of the
darkened house were blown into clouds of neural fog, disassembling and reassembling pieces of his memory. He couldn’t recall Lucy’s body. Here in the daylit kitchen, it was hard to believe he had ever made a pass at her. Except for one thing: this morning when he woke, his dick had been wet.

They finished breakfast late. A walk along a trail near Lucy’s house occupied the remainder of the day. Tom and Lucy were never alone. Claire was there, of course, close to Tom, a hand around his waist or in the back pocket of his jeans and, once or twice, arm in arm with Lucy. The few times she was out of sight, Adam stayed near, hectoring them about the internet, Power Rangers, and Esperanto. Whenever Tom tried to catch Lucy’s eye, she was facing away from him, or looking beyond him; when he tried to avoid her gaze—as the implications of what they had done the night before once more assailed him—he found her directly across from him, on the edge, it seemed, of saying something.

The afternoon deepened and their return home approached in a rush. They packed their bags and loaded the car, including four jam jars of “unusual specimens” that Adam had discovered on their walk. The sky blued and thickened, hushing the valley below Lucy’s house. Birds slept, or perhaps were just caught on the wing between songs. The earth had stopped for the moment Tom stood on the hill, his overnighter in his hand.

“I don’t want to go,” he blurted.

“Stay,” Lucy said lightly.

Tom turned to her. A length of hair blew across her impassive face. There was no sign that she had just
spoken. Tom watched the strand dangle as if he might learn something from its motions.

“We’d love to,” Claire said, “but Tom doesn’t have any personal days left.”

“I feel that if I go, I’ll never be able to come back.”

Claire smiled. “I’m sure Lucy will invite us again.”

Lucy didn’t say anything to this.

“It won’t be this weekend,” Tom murmured. “It’ll be another weekend.”

“Uh-huh. That’s how time works,” Claire said. She was about to grin, but stopped, glimpsing something unsettling in his expression.

“Are we going or what?” Adam called from the car.

Lucy and Claire kissed, brushing each other’s cheeks, and Claire buckled herself into her seat. Lucy walked around the front to the driver’s side. Tom stood there, caught between the open door and the car, clutching his keys. He smiled tentatively. With the door between them, their heads hidden from the occupants of the car, she kissed him directly on the mouth. It was with as much affection as she had kissed him upon his arrival, but no more. Or did Tom see in her eyes something wistful, or angry, or sad? He thought he did, he was sure of it—but perhaps he was wrong. Before he could kiss her again, she had stepped back.

Claire and Adam waved good-bye as Tom pulled the car away. He looked at Lucy in the rearview mirror, standing at the edge of the clearing. She waved once and began the walk back alone to the house. Her head was bent low and her hands were in her pockets. She seemed to be studying the ground. The setting sun
flashed in the mirror, obliterating the scene, and when the image cleared, she was gone. Neither Tom, Claire, nor Adam said anything as they coasted down the hill, the car in neutral, riding the thermals back home. Tom watched his son, sitting directly behind him and Claire, his expression subdued, perhaps reflective. Or perhaps he was just a little sleepy. Tom made a mental note: he’d have to ask him what happened. Say, in about forty or fifty years.

Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Monica, an indoor shopping mall entirely occupied by the past. Crowding one boutique after another are Mickey Mouse watches and souvenir ashtrays from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, stretched Coke bottles, incense candles and Day Glo posters, smile
decals and fake gas lamps, pet rocks and electronic pet birds. Monica’s merchants have already placed orders for merchandise nearly obsolete but not yet in fashion. The mall has structural defects and a short lease on the land, but the merchants know they will stay in business forever. They envy their customers, who believe they were happy when they owned what the merchants own now.

In the shops of Alice, you can buy philosophers’ stones, golden fleeces, holy grails, concubines of absolute beauty and passion, books that answer the questions posed by wise men and children, and elixirs that deliver eternal life. Each of these items, however, is priced at slightly more than you think it’s worth, plus sales tax. After you’ve left without making a purchase, you feel the difference between what you want to pay and what the goods cost as a little hole burning into the lining of your stomach. You realize that the item is worth more than you thought. You return to the store but find the price has been raised to a new figure that is really unreasonable. Annoyed, you again leave empty-handed, reconsider and return, find the price has been raised again, leave once more, and so on, forever.

The items in Larissa’s shops relate to the many aspects of sleep. These include sheets and bedspreads, of course, and pillows as soft as clouds, comforters of perfect comfort, gossamer negligees weaved by genetically
engineered Peruvian spiders, as well as bedside tables, bedside lamps and bedside books that, in the disjointed-ness of their narratives and the vagueness of their metaphors, are written to ease the transition from wakefulness. Across the way, a small shop sells a single line of alarm clocks that are individually calibrated in order to rouse each customer with the most urgency that can be obtained with the least amount of discomfort. The other shops that line Larissa’s softly lit corridors supply the foreshortened hours between night and dawn: for example, notebooks whose pages have been chemically treated to better capture the evaporating details of your dreams. These shops also sell the committed sleeper devices to intensify the vividness of his dreams, others to minimize the same dreams, computer software that program dreams, and mass-produced dream rentals. Here are scales that measure the weight of your night-mares and calipers to measure their width.