Vida (14 page)

“You don’t feel connected to them?”

“That glue came unstuck years ago. Glue? Sure. Airplane glue is thicker than blood, and a lot more fun to sniff in the ninth grade, no lie” He flung himself down in the sand moodily. They were on a shelf hollowed from the dune face. The cliffs dropped off so abruptly the beach below was invisible under the shadow of the dune.

Stretching out on the hot sand beside him, she sighed with pleasure. Her head filled with sky. The moment shimmered like a glass of full-bodied wine. Red. A Rhone. Purple Hermitage.

“It’s real clever how you didn’t answer me about Kevin” he said, rising on an elbow. “How instead you flattered me to change the subject”

“I wasn’t flattering you … I suppose I don’t want to think about Kevin because that makes me worry about heat and trouble, precautions. I want to escape from that a little.”

“I’m not some aspirin you can take to get rid of a headache. This is real too.”

“Is it?” She opened her eyes to smile at him. “Are you sure?”

“Kevin counts because he’s a heavy. He was cadre. I’m just a little shit draft dodger”

“Oooooh. Come, Joel. None of us are leading armies. You and I are in the same boat, as Laura put it.”

“So why aren’t I real too?”

“You are! But you’re ten years younger than me and hung up on Kiley. This is a vacation for both of us”

“I’m no fucking vacation. I don’t want to sleep with you anymore if you feel like that.”

“I assumed you felt like that too.” She sat up. “I do want to sleep with you.”

“Just for the sex.” Head bowed, he was sulking. He sulked beautifully, but she felt a premonition of trouble.

“What are you sleeping with me for? The exercise? I like you.”

“Do you really?” He looked at her. His eyes were green again from the lenses. His own dark brown hid behind.

“Was your hair really that color?” He had his cheek against her mons. “All of it”

”Too gaudy” he said. “You’d clash with everything” He ran his hands over her belly. “You compare things too much. What would it matter if we were both bald? We could still do this.”

He lay half over her, kissing her and kissing her until she melted and put her hand on his cock to guide him in. But he refused to enter her yet. He teased her until she moaned and reached for him again, and then finally he entered. “I like it when you make noises like that,” he said.

“Do noises bother you?”

“No. I used to make more noises. I got in the habit of keeping quiet when a lot of us were living in a big house in Vermont—Hardscrabble” she said realizing he knew already.

“I like seeing you. It’s scary making love in the dark with someone you don’t know yet.”

“What would you be scared of, Joel?”

“Does that feel good?”

“Everything feels good.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I could lie to you. But I’d rather lie with you. Oh, that does feel good, that does” A twisting motion he had, as if he were actually screwing her. At a confluence of energies, a gathering of tensions and pulses, she knew she would come from that certain swollen urgency in the muscles around her vagina. After that gathering, unless the ceiling fell, the police burst in or he lost his erection, her orgasm was inevitable. Cautiously she brought her hand under him and cupped his balls, exploratorily, gently. “I’m going to come very soon. Very soon.”

“Is like this good?”

She only moaned, letting herself go in sound. If he liked noises, noises he would get. All that was incidental. If a partner wanted moaning, whistling, singing opera, so long as the act itself went along nicely, what did she care? The waves of orgasm radiated up to her breasts, more intense, more long-lasting than before, good, unendurably good. Then slowly dwindling, a sunset of the vagina. “Come now” she said. “Come”

“Inside you?”

“That’s what the diaphragm’s for.” Gently she began to squeeze his balls again. Please, let’s bring it off this time, right.

He began driving harder, pushing high into her, and on impulse she raised her legs to let him enter more deeply. She could not climax with her legs up—her clitoris did not get enough impact—but after she had come she would just as soon endure less direct stimulation that became almost painful. She took her hand off his balls and wriggled it around to his ass. With a loud screaming moan, a sound such as an animal, charging, might make in pain or rut, he came. She could feel the contractions and the rush of the warm semen. With a great sigh she relaxed. He was truly functional. That was better. There.

The night was clear and vibrant up to the Milky Way arched over the pond. They huddled on a small dock. Minute ripples tickled the sand, but the air was still, stiff as a cardboard. The lights in the far house twinkled yellow. “About the only thing I ever read for kicks was science fiction” Joel was saying. With his arm around her and the same coat over their backs, she could feel his deep voice in her ribs. “I wanted to go to some other world. Any other world.”

“I never could get into it. Fancy gadgets, and all they could imagine were kings and queens and empires. Forward into the feudal past.”

“I love gadgets … Imagine you’re a two-bit Jewish businessman trying to claw up a ways and what do you get? A son with reading problems who wants to work on cars. Bad karma.”

“You’re not like anyone I was ever with” she mused. “Most of my lovers were intellectuals.” She felt his body tighten. “I don’t mean that in a positive way. Intellectuals are people to whom ideas are more real than people.”

“Intellectuals read a lot, right? And there’s nothing to read at Laura’s except antinuke pamphlets and some
Times
from August … I see you pick up the pamphlets and toss them down again like you couldn’t care less.”

“Well, I’m not awfully interested … “

“Before you came I had nothing else to do, so I read some of them … and if it’s all for real, how can you not be interested?”

“Nuclear power is basically a bourgeois issue,” she said, squinting up at the stars.

“Oh.” He was silent awhile. “ ‘Cause that’s who cares?”

“Right. Quality of life”

“Oh … Who got upset about the Vietnam War first?”

“Touche.” She turned to look at him. She was a bit surprised, a bit startled. “Do you want me to read the pamphlets?”

“Yeah … It bothers me. I never thought about it before, but it gets to me … Like if there’s no future, what’s the point of what we did? You see? We might as well have got off on drugs and stayed high. I’d like to talk about that stuff, if you’ll read it. If you don’t mind talking about politics with me”

“I’ll read it” she said more humbly. What he had said still stuck like a dart in her brain. She had to think about that, off in secret.

When they woke, the windows were covered with frost tracery.

“I can’t believe that just happens by itself. No wonder people believed in fairies,” he said.

“Marvelous flowers. Aubrey Beardsley arabesques. Like Art Nouveau designs.”

“What’s all that shit?”

“Oh.” She could be startled yet, not just by him. The political children, how little they knew. They arrived at college knowing nothing but television. They never finished school. While in college they seemed to be taught none of the grounding in culture she had received almost automatically. “The pattern on the glass made me think of a style of decorating where everything curved and the ornaments were built on natural forms—like flowers, leaves. I’ll show you sometime and then you’ll know what I mean”

The marigolds outside were brown. “Oh, of course,” she said. “It really was a frost.” She made their bed, tidied, both housewife and soldier’s neatness.

“Is everything dead in the garden?”

“Only the tender stuff. After breakfast, we better pick what we can save. The lettuce, the kale will grow all right for a while.”

“How come? How come the flowers die and the lettuce goes on?”

He always asked questions. He wanted to please, he asked questions, he needed approval in enormous heaping spoonfuls all day. She thought of him as innocent, but his eye was exacting.

After a breakfast of the last of their eggs, he was shaving, with her perched on the toilet seat watching him, when they heard a car. Quickly he snapped off the light, wiped the lather from his face. She edged past him into the hall. The car had stopped outside. “It’s not Laura,” she hissed.

“Let’s get out of here!” He thrust into his shirt.

“Too late. They’d see us” Two people were getting out of the car, a man and a woman, while a child stayed in the back seat. They were walking down the steps toward the house, both carrying baskets.

“We’ll have to hide,” he barked. “Come on.”

They crammed into the closet of the bedroom where they had been sleeping. She was glad she had compulsively made the bed, that she tended to make beds as soon as she got up. Darting out of the closet, she grabbed her pack and his, dragged them in, shut the door but for a crack for her ear.

“Laura! Laura! It’s Mike and Wendy,” a woman was calling. “Laura, are you home?”

“She’s got to be here. We saw the lights. There’s dishes in the sink.”

”Her car isn’t here,” the woman said. “Maybe she went into town.”

“We left the fucking door unlocked,” Joel whispered at her ear. She shook her head fiercely at him to shut up.

“She wouldn’t go back to Boston and leave her door open,” the man said.

“What should we do, honey?” the woman asked. Her footsteps came nearer. “Laura? Are you asleep?” She sounded in the room. Vida eased the door shut. “Nobody’s here either. She must have gone shopping”

“Let’s just leave the stuff for her” the man said. “Come on, I got to get back to the job.”

Vida took Joel’s hand. In the dark of the closet she scarcely breathed, standing pressed among Laura’s musty sundresses, beach wraps, the webs of spiders whose present whereabouts she preferred not to consider. Her hand was cold and Joel’s hot. His hand inched up to close on her breast. Standing crushed together, she felt his erection. Unbelievable. How could he get excited under these conditions? With Kevin in tight situations she had always had to pay as much attention to him as to the outside danger, because he might suddenly go berserk and decide to fight. With Eva she could draw comfort and worry about the real dangers. But Joel seemed to take danger too lightly. She realized he had never lived as a normal adult. Would the woman ever leave? Vida could have sworn she was poking around Laura’s dresser, handling things. Would she decide to go through the closet too?

“Come on, Wendy. Don’t be so nosy. Suppose she walks in?”

The steps pittered away. For an interminable period the couple muddled around in the kitchen. Once again, Vida made a crack for her ear. Wendy said, “She’s not here by herself, Mike. Look. Two of everything for breakfast.”

“She got herself a boyfriend, finally. Remember that guy we saw paddling her canoe on Labor Day?”

“I’d love to meet him. I wonder who he is.”

“What do you care. Some doctor. Let’s get out of here”

“Wait. I’m writing a note. Mike, should I ask them over?”

“Forget it. I want to watch the World Series. Who wants to spend the evening with some doctor? Her going on about radiation and nukes.”

Finally the door shut. After a while they heard the car start up and drive off. Joel pushed the closet door open and drew deep breaths. “Thought I was going to suffocate”

“We had plenty of air, dear one,” Vida said. “This closet is roughly slapped together.”

“I get claustrophobia. You don’t, huh?”

”If I did, I guess I’d be dead. Once I had to spend fourteen hours locked in the trunk of a car”

“What did you do about going to the bathroom?”

She laughed. “That would be the first thing you’d think of. I pissed in a jar”

“Who the hell were those people?” Cautiously he moved out of the bedroom, walking on the balls of his feet. “I thought she was going to start searching the bedroom.”

The kitchen counter was covered with green tomatoes, undersized bell peppers, eggplants the size of a thumb, fingerling zucchini. “The frost last night. They had to harvest everything. They had so much they decided to give some to their neighbors—I bet they’re the lights we see at the end of the pond.”

“They could make themselves a nuisance.” Joel glared at the produce.

“Which reminds me, we better go out and salvage what we can. Then we have to think how to shut off their curiosity”“ Walking, Vida felt weak through the legs. She picked up the note.

Dear Laura, Here are some extra vegetables from our garden. Hope you enjoy them. Let’s get together if you’re going to be around. Your neighbors, the Kensingtons.

“Green-tomato soup” she explained, chopping. “I remember it from my childhood. Ruby always had a garden. She doesn’t cook a lot of different things, but what she does she cooks well. Sort of Cleveland Jewish peasant plus what you learn to please a goyishe husband who was a meat-and-potatoes man.”

“Who’s Ruby?”