He dragged her bed to the end of the room. “I’ll show you.”
He positioned her easel in the corner. Then he lay on the bed, his head closest to her, his feet farthest away.
She stood at her easel and looked at him lying there. It was a strange angle. She would have to paint his shoulder and his head very big and his feet very small. His shoulder was like giant Greenland in one of those projected world maps, and his feet were way down there, little, like the Cape of Good Hope. But then again, his private areas would be somewhat less apparent in this pose. Like maybe Ecuador.
This was about as good as could be hoped for.
“I think this will work,” she said.
“Okay. Good.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, so I’ll just…”
“Okay.” She looked down at her paints, her cheeks flaming. She was such a baby. What would Bee say?
He sat up and pulled his T-shirt over his head. She kept her head down. “I’ve never done this before. It’s kind of strange.”
She couldn’t even make a noise come out.
“It seems so ordinary for the models in the studio, you know?”
She nodded, still staring at her cadmium red.
“I mean, it’s just a pose. It’s for a painting.” He talked himself through the unbuttoning and removal of his jeans.
“Yeah,” she attempted to say, but it came up more phlegm than word.
Was he really going to take off his underwear? Arg. She was such a baby.
“Hey. It’s not like there’s something else going on here….” His voice faded uncertainly. He tripped out of his underwear and was lying on the bed in under one second.
How could she look? How could she concentrate on painting?
He didn’t think there was anything going on here? She thought there was something going on here!
Her face was sweating. Her hands were sweating and also shaking. She tried to hold the brush. If she lifted the brush, he would see how badly her hand was shaking.
He said there wasn’t anything else going on here. Hey. What was that supposed to mean?
“All set,” he said. “Can you time the pose?”
No. She couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t even make her eyeballs move in their sockets.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She registered that his voice was actually quite sweet.
She tried to shift her weight. “I’m Greek,” she said finally. Her catchall. For garlic, for shame.
“Oh.” There was some understanding in the way he said it. “Can you try to think of me as a regular model in class?”
She made her eyes shift upward slowly. His shoulder, his face. His face was flushed, like hers, though not sweating as profusely. Their eyes met for a moment, which was not what she intended.
He didn’t think there was anything else going on here?
This was not how she felt when Nora posed. This was not how she felt when Marvin posed. Not even a twenty-millionth of this.
Her indignation kept her eyes up, though her pupils did not focus. She clamped her fingers around her brush and aimed it at the canvas. It was not a good technique. She made some clumsy strokes.
Too flustered to look at her canvas, she looked at him. Frying pan to fire. She looked down his body, down all the golden skin. Oh, my. She saw what was there. How could she not? It wasn’t Ecuador. It was more Brazil.
She looked away quickly. There was too something else going on here.
She let her brush rest on the palette.
“Let’s take a break,” he said.
“You’d be so lean, that blasts of January
Would blow you through and through.—Now, my fair’st friend,
I would I had some flowers o’ the spring, that might
Become your time of day—”
Carmen looked up, caught her breath.
In spite of the fact that Polixenes was played by an actor Carmen had seen in at least four movies, he bore an almost uncanny resemblance to her uncle Hal. As she stood across from him, she tried to pretend he was Uncle Hal, because otherwise she felt too nervous. He nodded at her to keep going.
“That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing:—O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett’st fall
From Dis’s waggon!”
She was addressing herself now to Florizel, her supposed love interest. He was at least ten years older than she, wore cakey makeup, and seemed frankly more interested in Polixenes.
She was relieved when they finally got to take a break. They were now in rehearsals almost ten hours a day and costume fittings at other times.
She saw Leontes where he’d been watching from the side of the stage and nervously attempted to swing wide around him. He was so magnificent that she had not yet drawn up the courage to say a word to him that wasn’t one of Perdita’s.
The swing did not work. He was looking directly at her.
“Carmen, that was absolutely lovely,” he said to her as she scuttled along like a baby turtle racing for the sea.
“Thank you,” she squeaked in response, perspiring from every one of her pores.
But outside, she couldn’t keep down her joy. “Lovely,” he had said. “Absolutely lovely.”
“Absolutely lovely.” That was what he said. She laughed to nobody. The armpits of her T-shirt were soaked through in a way that was not absolutely lovely.
It was astounding to her. It really was. She had never in her life felt like she was naturally gifted at anything. In the past she had felt like she’d worked, willed, begged, bossed, or stolen everything she’d ever gotten.
She was good at math because she spent twice as many hours on it as the people who weren’t. She scored well on her SATs because she studied vocabulary lists and took practice tests every week for two years. She got an A in physics because she sat to the right of Brian Jervis, an overachieving lefty who never covered his test paper.
And now here she was, managing with little discernable effort to be absolutely lovely.
The joy of it. The loveliness.
Prince Mamillius came out the side door. When he saw her he sat down next to her. She couldn’t remember his actual name. Though he was technically her brother in the play, he died before she was born, so they didn’t share the stage.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
When he was the prince, he spoke in pristine Shakespearean English, but when he wasn’t, she was amused to hear, his accent was more like central New Jersey.
“Good,” she said. He had a tattoo of a badger on his ankle. He was actually very cute.
“Nice flowers,” he said.
Carmen lifted her hand to her ear. Andrew Kerr had asked her to wear flowers in her hair during the romancing scene to prepare for her elaborate costume as Flora. “Oh.” She felt stupid, and then she decided she didn’t.
He leaned over, very close to her, and smelled them. “Yum,” he said. She could feel his breath on her hair.
“Can I get you a lemonade?” he asked, standing up again. He was a jumpy sort of person.
She thought of saying no, but then she said yes. “I’d love that,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows at her before he turned to walk away. She realized in slow motion that Prince Mamillius, her own brother, had most likely just flirted with her.
Three hours later, Lena had squished several dollars’ worth of paint around on a perfectly well-made canvas. She had wasted both, as well as Leo’s time. Her painting wasn’t even a painting. Her sister, Effie, would have made a better painting.
For the third hour, Lena’s cheeks smoldered deep purple. There was no way she could let him look at her so-called painting.
“Let’s call it quits for the day,” she said defeatedly.
“Are you sure?” He didn’t sound opposed.
“Yeah.”
He was undeniably awkward too. “Sorry I’m not a bet
ter model.”
“No. No, you’re fine. It’s just.”
She washed her brushes in the bathroom while he got dressed. When she came back they sat side by side on her bed.
“That didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped,” he said.
She breathed out in relief. That he was dressed. That she wasn’t trying to hold a paintbrush.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“No, it’s not.”
They were quiet for a while.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked.
She looked at him in surprise.
“Sorry. That’s getting kind of personal, I know. Don’t answer if you don’t want.”
She didn’t want to answer at first. But his face was nice. He looked at her intently. He wore his own version of disarray, and his was beautiful.
“That’s okay. God. Is it so obvious?”
“No. And anyway, it’s nothing to be sorry for.”
He put his hand over her hand. Not holding hers, quite, just lying there.
After he left, Lena fell into her bed in a heap of exhaustion and didn’t move for an hour. Somewhere in the back of her mind pressed the knowledge that in the pose-trading bargain, today was the easy part.
Bridget had spent all day Saturday touring Halicarnassus, now a city called Bodrum. In the van she’d nearly made herself sick to her stomach reading books that Peter had lent her, gobbling up information spanning the time from the first settlements of the Greeks in Asia Minor all the way to the Persian invasion that nearly destroyed them.
Once inside the ruins of the city, she’d darted around to every column, every path, every step of the ancient stadium. She’d loved it, but she was happy to get back to the site, where a package from Tibby that contained the Traveling Pants was waiting for her, as was her floor.
Now she was sitting on the floor in her Pants, glad to think that they would forever harbor a few particles of this old dirt. She savored her time with both of them. And with Peter, too. The fact that it was just her and Peter, and the satellite was still down, made her feel that much more insulated from the regular world.
There were only a few feet left to clear. They were both going slowly now.
“What time is it?” he asked. The sun had set hours before, and they’d spent a long, meditative stretch of quiet digging and sorting.
“I don’t know. Do you want me to find out?”
He nodded. “Would you?”
She stood up.
“Hey, I like your pants,” he said. It was like him to notice.
She went closer to him and stood in the light so he could see. “These belong to the unconventional family I mentioned.”
He nodded, studying some of the pictures and inscriptions on the front. Then he grabbed her by a belt loop and slowly rotated her to look at the rest.
You are looking at my Pants, she told him silently, but she also suspected that he was looking at the shape of her underneath.
Self-consciously she climbed out of the room by the makeshift wooden stairs and went to the embankment party, which was just winding down. “Does anybody have the time?”
Darius had a watch. “Twelve-forty,” he told her.
She went back down into the room to tell Peter.
“Guess what?” he said.
“What?”
“I’m thirty.”
“Right now?”
“Forty minutes ago.”
“No way! Happy birthday! That’s a big one.”
“Thanks.” He sat back against the wall. He dusted off his hands. Suddenly he looked suspicious. “If you tell anyone I’ll kill you.”
“That would be kind of an overreaction.”
He laughed. “You’re right. But don’t anyway, okay?”
“Okay.” It seemed perhaps too natural that he should be sharing his secrets with her. She studied his face. Thirty didn’t seem very old on him now that she knew him.
“You’ve got to have a cake or something, don’t you?”
“I think I’ll manage without it. I have a childhood fear of being sung to by strangers.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I’m happy to become thirty with just the floor.” He stopped and looked at her. “And you.”
She tried to shrug it off, but her face burned. “Thanks. I’m honored.” She felt his mood wavering between heavy and light. She wasn’t sure how to read him.
“Me too,” he said. They didn’t need to pretend they hadn’t become close these weeks. That was undeniable.
She had an idea. “Okay, then. Hold on a minute.”
The kitchen area of the big tent was empty, but she found a flashlight and, with the help of that, a half tray of baklava, a votive candle, and a bottle of wine. She found matches and two plastic cups and took the stash back to Peter.
Sitting across from him on their smooth floor, she poured two cups of wine. She lit the candle and set it next to the baklava. “I don’t think you want me to sing,” she said. “But happy birthday, my friend.” She said it seriously and she meant it. It was a big deal, a big day. She glanced down at the floor as he blew out his candle and made his wish.
Because he was her friend and she felt solely responsible for bringing him into a new decade of his life, she lifted her cup to tap his and at the same time she leaned in. She wasn’t sure what she meant by it. Maybe she thought she’d hug him or kiss his cheek, the way she did with lots of people.
But he misinterpreted her closeness, or maybe she did. Her cheek pressed against his cheek and then her mouth pressed against his cheek. And then he turned, whether to get closer or farther away she couldn’t be sure. But the effect of it, accidentally or on purpose, was that her mouth touched his mouth.
The first touch was bumbling and awkward. The second touch was almost certainly on purpose. She felt herself pulled into the heat and smell of him. She touched his face, which you don’t do with lots of people. She kissed him purposefully and she felt his purposeful hand on the back of her neck.
“That was a happy birthday kiss,” she said, forcing herself to pull away. She was dizzy. She was not quite in her mind. She needed to keep alive the possibility of turning back. Did he need that too?
He stood up quickly and she followed. “Do you want to walk?” he asked her.
They both needed that. A walk, a breeze.
They walked toward the sea, up to the top of the hill and over it to a nice perch of soft brown summer grass laid out under a trillion stars.
She had the urge to run all the way down to the water and jump into it and swim for another shore. She had the urge to kiss Peter again, to throw herself against him and bury her face in his neck.
She was still wearing a filthy white tank top from the morning. She might have been cold but she couldn’t feel it.
Peter took her hand in his and put them together on his thigh. “Bee.”
“Yes.”
“I have to confess to a very monstrous addiction to you.” He said it slowly and with some deliberation. “I was hoping it wouldn’t get to this, but I’m also hoping it might help to say it out loud.”
She rested her cheek on her hand, looking across at him. “I have that kind of addiction too,” she said.
“To the floor.”
“To the floor. To you.”
“To me?”
“To you.” It did feel good to say it. But will it really help?
“I shouldn’t be happy about that,” he said, appearing to defy his words as he said them.
“No. And I shouldn’t either.”
She felt her hair fluttering in the light wind, tickling his arm, working its magic. She wasn’t sure she wanted more magic right now.
“It’s very tricky…,” he began slowly, his speech punctuated by consideration and a few uneasy breaths, “not to feel like I’m falling in love with you now. It’s such a strong feeling and a good feeling having you right here like this. Looking at you, it’s hard to keep in my mind the re
asons why I can’t.”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
He looked genuinely unhappy for a moment. “No.”
She looked at him with the hint of a challenge in her eyes. “Then what do you want?”
The reckless happiness was creeping back. He couldn’t help himself. He was like her. He couldn’t keep it down. “Do you really want to know?”
She nodded, knowing she shouldn’t. She shouldn’t have asked. She shouldn’t want to know.
“Here’s what I want to do. I want to pull you on top of me and roll you down this hill. Then I want to take off your clothes and kiss every part of you. And then I want to make passionate love to you on the grass right there.” He pointed to a place near the bottom of the hill. “And then I want to fall asleep holding you. And then I want to wake up when the sun is rising and do it all again.”
She kept her eyes closed for a minute. These were dangerous places they were passing through. How could she not picture it and feel it and want it the way he said it?
“And what will you do?” she asked, her voice hardly above a whisper.
She could practically see the opposing forces duking it out in his head. She wasn’t sure which side was winning or even which side she was rooting for.
A weariness came into his eyes, giving her a clue. “We’ll kiss, because it’s my thirtieth birthday and it’s what I’ve been wishing for. And then I’ll walk you to your cabin and say goodnight.”
“Okay,” she said, happy and sad.
He did kiss her. He rolled her over onto the grass and kissed her passionately. His hands reached under her shirt to press against her naked back. She felt the strength of his longing and it made her woozy.
She sat up before they could be sucked into the next phase of what he wanted.
They held hands on the way back to camp. He kissed her on the cheek at the entrance to her cabin.
“You better get out of here before this thing goes the other way,” he whispered in her ear. “You know, the rolling-down-the-hill way.”
She nodded against his cheek. “Happy birthday, mister,” she said out of the side of her mouth as if she were Mae West.
And so she lay on her crappy metal cot in a cloud of desire. But even in her cloud she perceived a buffeting sensation, a brooding feeling of discomfort beneath her.