Yearn (26 page)

 • • • 

Knowing Alan wouldn't be home until seven-thirty, Phoebe raced back to the house. She got in at five minutes to six. Without even bothering to take her coat off she ran to the kitchen and switched on the television. This time she listed all the weatherman's physical gestures as he made them, in the order in which she found them the most erotic: rain, sleet, and threatening clouds all constituted a dramatic flourish of the hand followed by a curious flutter of the fingers that reminded Phoebe of the way she touched herself, a particular technique she had despaired of Alan ever intuiting. After listing the eighteenth movement—a shrug of the shoulders made with both palms held upward, prompted by “a gentle break in the cloud front”—Phoebe realized that the weatherman was far more animated by reports of severe or violent weather, as if he relished the drama. This was indicative of a mentality she could relate to: she too loathed monotone, monotony, the sameness of poverty, suburbia; she too craved drama. Now determined to somehow find a way of feeding this unconscious hunger she sensed in the weatherman, she moved closer to the TV screen.

Predictions like “a storm front sweeping in from the north-west will gradually clear” involved the weatherman's whole body and a wry smile, body language that Phoebe fantasized into a postcoital embrace that finished with a touch of disbelief or cynicism—the wry smile was particularly sexy. It suggested intelligence and some self-parody, again a wonderful contrast to the deathly seriousness of her husband.

“Fog” was interesting—a short push with both hands, the word itself sounding a little like a grunt, suggesting to Phoebe that despite the weatherman's perfectly rounded private school vowels, he might be capable of a little rough play, maybe even some light S&M. “A little break of sunshine” came with a hip thrust, while “hail” dipped down into a baritone and made Phoebe think of penetration and how the full weight of the tall weatherman would feel on top of her own body. That alone was almost enough to make her come.

By the time the weather report was over and she had the table laid, Phoebe had a list of twenty-five weather conditions linked to Rupert's particular illustrative body movements. She sat back in her chair, the list in hand—it was like code, erotic code, and her pants were wringing wet. Needless to say it was at that moment that Alan came home and Phoebe found that she had burnt the lamb chops.

That night Phoebe dreamt of a vast empty sky that seemed depressingly hollow. Then just at the point where she thought she might have to wake herself up to escape the despairing sensation that nothing would ever change—not the weather, not her marriage, not her job—a faint gray cloud appeared, swiftly followed by several others galloping behind like eager greyhounds. To her utter joy the sky was soon a dark gray with a crack of blue, and the phrase “a bank of nimbostratus coming in from the southeast” shuddered through her sleeping consciousness like an orgasm. Phoebe woke and realized it was an actual orgasm.

This time staring across at her snoring husband in the blue morning light, Phoebe found herself feeling, well, just a little less desperate.

The rest of the day was depressingly sunny. At work all Phoebe's colleagues appeared to be imbued with that particular banal cheerfulness that sunshine induces in the English. The nineteen-year-old intern sharing her office even attempted a clumsy flirtation and complimented her on a skirt she'd actually been wearing all week. But Phoebe remained indifferent. She retreated to the small courtyard at the back of the building and, with cigarette in hand, stared mournfully up at the blue sky, praying for a thundercloud, or at least a sudden shower.

Again, the same emotion she'd felt in her dream, the crushing sense that nothing was ever going to change in either her life or her marriage, swept across her. She looked over at the window of Alan's office. She knew he was halfway across the country doing a site assessment just outside Newcastle—the roof of a betting shop had been struck by lightning during the Grand Prix and Alan had warned her he'd be home late.

She glanced back up at the sky—one faint white cloud drifted lazily across it, but it looked uneventful and static. If only something would happen that would contort the weatherman's body into another of his delicious little dances. Her longing was palpable, a dull sexual ache. What could Rupert offer her tonight with such boringly perfect weather?

 • • • 

That evening at the magical hour of twenty-five past six the weatherman stood for a moment as if waiting for the camera to focus on him. In that split second Phoebe wondered what Rupert was thinking. Could it, through some weird osmosis, be about her? Could he feel the heat of her gaze tunneling down the tube, down into his eyes, into his consciousness? Could he distinguish her gaze from the millions of other viewers? The erotic tension she now felt, poised on the edge of the kitchen chair, staring intently at the screen, was surely mutual. How could such intense longing not be? Then, as if both her prayers and her question had been answered, Phoebe suddenly noticed the tie Rupert was wearing: a new tie, a tie she hadn't seen in any of his previous appearances. She gasped, her hand instinctively reaching down toward her skirt—the tie and the skirt were made from exactly the same fabric. Thinking she must be imagining it, Phoebe moved nearer to the television screen, now kneeling on the floor beside it. She held the edge of her skirt up against the screen.

No, she wasn't imagining it; the tie and the skirt were the same pattern (a distinctive tartan) and the same color. A thrill ran through her body. It was a message; it had to be—they were linked, destined for each other. The weatherman was sending her a signal, a signal that he knew about her, he had felt her watching, empathizing. They were soul mates in a wind tunnel, two lost people reaching out for each other across a huge savannah of rain, hail, tornadoes, and generally foul weather—but love would prevail.

“Hello, folks. Well, what a day, eh? What a glorious English summer's day, one to cherish, for there are some changes on the way. Let's turn to the northern part of the country, to the very top of Scotland. . . .”

Rupert's baritone voice resonated right down to the tip of Phoebe's clitoris, and the way he swung around to the weather map was positively muscular. She pressed her breasts against the chilly glass of the television screen, imagining Rupert's chiseled profile buried between them. Just then he repeated “glorious English summer's day,” illustrating the phrase with a new gesture Phoebe hadn't seen before—a gentle bending of the knees followed by a sweep of the arms with upturned palms. She was enthralled. Instantly she envisioned her naked body wound around his, legs wrapped over both his hips, his cock buried deep within her, thrusting simultaneously as he articulated the word glorious. With her skirt pushed over her hips and her breasts hanging out of their bra, she reached for her notebook and wrote in her own lexicon of Rupert Thornton's weather phrases: “Gesture number thirty-seven: the knee bend summer's day.”

Oblivious to her intense scrutiny, Rupert continued: “We start the day with a stunning empty clear blue sky but as you can see from the map there is a small amount of cloud building up in Scotland, which will be followed later in the day by a bank of nimbostratus coming in from the southeast. . . .”

A bank of nimbostratus coming in from the southeast! It was the very same phrase that had resonated in her dream the night before. Could she really have dreamt the weather before Rupert predicted it? But what was even more thrilling was that the actual order of the words had triggered a gesture from the weatherman that had Phoebe, within seconds, in a sexual frenzy. As she reached down into her panties a glorious sense of omnipotence flooded her. She spent the rest of the weather report pleasuring herself, timing her orgasm so that she came just as the sentence “And that's all from me, folks, until tomorrow,” fell from Rupert Thornton's lips.

Afterward, lying there in a fetal position on the kitchen floor, her hand still buried between her legs, the cat wanting to be fed and purring and butting itself against her back, Phoebe thought about the way they had both chosen the same material, him for his tie, her for her skirt, the manner in which they appeared to be psychically linked, the coincidence of the way he seemed to like the same weather as she, and she came to the overwhelming conclusion that she was morally obliged to take their relationship to the next level.

 • • • 

Alan didn't come home that night until late and when he crept into bed at about one a.m., Phoebe, who'd been woken by the click of the bedroom door, pretended to be asleep. But to her surprise, he reached for her, his long arms encircling her waist. Pulling her toward him, he made love to her. It was their usual routine: first he played with her breasts in a slightly distracted manner that, unfortunately for Alan, had always reminded Phoebe of the way her gynecologist handled them. Then he gave her a little manual stimulation, enough so that he knew she was ready for him. Finally, after a little pant of exertion, he mounted her. As he puffed in her ear, nearing his climax, Phoebe realized she would have to resort to fantasy if she was to come at all. Her imagination conjured up the weatherman. Magically, Alan's panting breath became a howling wind sweeping across the weather map of her own body as his body lengthened, his face narrowed, his hair turned blond and thick, and she imagined that it was the weatherman's penis thickening within her. And then, to complete the fantasy, she imagined Rupert's voice whispering “torrential rain” over and over. This was the final trigger, and Phoebe reached her second orgasm of the day. It was shaping up to be a better summer than she had thought.

 • • • 

Over the next few weeks Phoebe lost weight, cut and dyed her hair, and filled much of her wardrobe with sexier clothes—shorter skirts, tighter blouses, higher heels. Alan, whose sudden sexual interest had abated again, began to notice and, convinced she'd taken a lover, bribed the young intern his wife worked with to spy on her. But the nineteen-year-old hadn't noticed any specific change, except that Phoebe seemed to take an unusual interest in the weather forecast on page fifteen of
The Sun
, a fact the intern dutifully reported back to Alan, who then fatally dismissed it as an innocent hobby.

As for Phoebe, well, she thought she was in love, and thinking is the same as being for many of us—whether the love is mutual or not. Our heroine was on a mission. She was convinced she had met her psychic soul mate. Every day for the past month she had correctly dreamt what the weather would be like forty-eight hours later: she would dream it, Rupert would predict it that evening, and the next day, without fail, the weather would appear. The weatherman's faithful reproductions of her dreamt predictions thrilled his young devotee to the point of orgasm—sometimes even more than one. He was, Phoebe concluded, the most wonderful of all her lovers, even if she'd never met him. He was capable of plummeting to imaginative depths and then soaring with her to the highest peaks of her most secret and perverse desires.

But as erotically fulfilling as their “relationship” was, it did not come close to the sense of absolute power her predictive abilities gave her. It was as if Phoebe herself—a mediocre comprehensive school kid who had barely got three O levels—was now unwittingly controlling the weather for the whole of the British Isles, weather that affected transport, plane flights, race meetings, harvesting, the army, the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, and the Queen's visit to Windsor Castle. The list was dazzlingly extensive and aroused Phoebe every time she thought about it. It was, well, like she was God.

Phoebe contemplated telling someone—like her older sister—about her extraordinary newfound powers, but she couldn't think of anyone who would take her seriously or, worse, not question her sanity. Certainly her sister had voiced her unfavorable opinion about Phoebe's propensity for imaginative flights of fancy. But Phoebe had to confess her supernatural abilities to someone to validate them, so instead she took to talking to Rupert's image on television every night in between bouts of intense masturbation during the weather report.

“Didn't I tell you it was going to get windy on Thursday? There'll be hail too, along the coast of Ireland, and don't forget the patches of fog in the northeast . . . oh yes, oh yes, sweeping rain, and yes! The breaks of sunshine!” she shouted, coming with a shudder as Rupert, smiling brightly into the camera, encircled the air with both his palms as if caressing large breasts.

It was all going along nicely, Phoebe concluded: Rupert was always on time, never disappointed, never answered back, and he made her feel both beautiful and connected to important things—like choreographing the English weather in her dreams. It was the perfect affair and even her marriage was beginning to benefit. The distraction of her obsession had distanced her from Alan, and Alan, sensing this new separation, suddenly felt insecure. Still convinced she was having an affair, he'd taken to vetting the post and on more than one occasion had broken into the secret drawer she kept locked in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, convinced he would find a stash of love letters. To his great puzzlement, he'd found a pile of newspaper clippings, all of which appeared to be weather reports since mid-July, and a small plastic dome (the kind you'd give to a child) that held a miniature skyline of London that, if turned upside down and back again, got snowed upon. This disturbed Alan greatly, although he couldn't quite work out why. He started to wonder whether he shouldn't bring forward the planned date of conception he'd imposed on his young wife, thinking that perhaps having a baby might be the solution. But then, as Alan never got home before seven-thirty, he remained totally oblivious to the real cause of Phoebe's distraction. Alan's solution was to make love to her more often; a reminder note he penciled in his diary carefully noted the days he knew she was fertile.