The pure masculine beauty of it.
The forbidden beauty of it.
I was a married woman sleeping on a weeknight with a man many years younger than I was. We had fucked on the floor of the apartment, and then again on the futon, and then taken a shower together that had ended with me on my knees, the hot water shattering across my back, his erection sliding in and out of my mouth until he came in warm and salty pulsing intervals in my throat.
In the dark, his shadow over me and the sight of him in the moonlight, the thrilling terror of it, made me catch my breath, and then he looked down, and saw that I was awake. I thought I saw a flash of sympathy cross his face. He was sorry. He hadn't wanted to scare me. He said, "It's just me, gorgeous."
"You're not leaving, are you?" I asked. I couldn't help the note of longing in my voice.
He said, "I was thinking I should go. So I can change clothes in the morning. At home. Not go into work smelling like pussy."
The crudeness of it made me catch my breath again. It had been high school since I'd heard someone use that word, or any word like it, meaning me. I said, "Oh."
"But now I'm not so sure," he said. He was smiling, the flash of it reflected in the light from the window. "It looks awfully inviting to just get back in that nest and cuddle up with you."
I reached up, and he knelt down into my arms and crawled back under the sheets with me. We woke again together in the morning to the sound of a garbage truck—beep, beep, beep— backing up beneath the window.
***
DRIVING home that night, between thoughts of Bram, I thought guiltily of my father, picturing him in his chair, in his room—that enormous rose in the Styrofoam cup on his windowsill, and the way it had sunk low over the ledge until it had fallen onto the floor.
In my imagination, this time, there was no one there to pick it up, just a puddle of water and shredded petals on the linoleum at my father's feet, the cold and damp of it soaking into his slippers. Who knew how long it would lie there on the floor before a nurse's aide found it and cleaned up the mess?
I'd go to see him as soon as I could arrange it, I thought.
Maybe, I thought, the Zoloft would help.
I liked the name of it, anyway. Zoloft. As if joy could be made into some kind of airship, a ship my father could board, and be lifted, lofted, from the despair of age and physical decay into—what?
He'd been a good man, but he'd always been morose, I thought. My friends had always said, "Your father's so easygoing," but they only knew him from a brief and occasional conversation in the driveway, a moment or two passing in the kitchen on a weekend. My father had been anything but easygoing. I could still picture him at the kitchen table on a morning he didn't need to go to work—cigarette dangling at the edge of an ashtray, his fingers drumming dully on the surface of the table, staring at some point ahead of him, on the beige wallpaper. If I didn't clear my throat before walking into the room, he would start, and gasp, and swear.
"Shit, Sherry. Why are you sneaking up behind me?"
I was thinking of this when I saw her. If I'd been looking for her, I didn't register it consciously—but then she was everything out the windshield, in the median, that dead doe, looking as if she had fallen from the sky, had landed softly, but that the fall had killed her nonetheless.
The grass around her had begun to grow. Not yet emerald, but a color of green that held the promise of more greenness in it. Her fur had begun to bleach out. Now, she looked a little like a pure, white deer—the kind that might wander out of the forest, in a fairy tale, nuzzling the hand of a virgin.
But, other than that, she was unchanged. She hadn't moved an inch.
Wasn't there supposed to be, I thought, some county service that came out and hauled the roadkill away? And, if not, what other changes would I see in her over the spring as I passed her on the freeway? Coming. Going. How long, I thought, until she'd melt completely back into the earth? Would her shadow last all summer there? The impression of her lingering in the grass? Or would the grass finally grow up around her, fertilized by her, and cover the whole bad memory over?
"YOU LOOK worn out," Jon said from the love seat when I walked in. "Rough night?"
The front and back doors were open. The kitchen window was open, too. From the Henslins' farm, the smell of manure wafted in. But it wasn't a bad smell. It was sweet, and only if someone told you what it was would you have known that the smell was waste, was shit, spread all over their fields.
"I'm tired," I said.
Jon was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt I'd bought for him during a trip we'd taken with Chad to Mackinac Island. The long expanse of that suspension bridge was stenciled onto the T-shirt, each end of the bridge aborted, as if it connected nothing to nothing.
The summer we'd gone there, Chad was four years old and didn't want to drive across the bridge—the longest of its kind in the world—but we'd taken him anyway, although we had nothing to do on the other side of it but turn around and drive back. We just wanted him to be able to say he'd been across it, and to show him that there was nothing to fear.
It was August, a windy day, and fall seemed to be blustering down from the Upper Peninsula already—a dark purple sky over the bridge, portending rain—and each time a gust of it rocked Jon's sedan, Chad whimpered.
I kept saying, "It's fine, Chad. It's fine"—turning around to smile at him in the backseat. "It's fine. Mommy and Daddy wouldn't take you across a bridge if it wasn't safe."
This seemed to comfort him. He progressed from covering his eyes with his hands to looking fearfully out the window. At one point he was distracted enough from his fear to notice a boat in the water below. "Look," he said—but then the wind blew the car again, and it rocked hard to the left, and Jon said, "Whoa," and Chad began to cry. My hands were wet with sweat. I'd read newspaper stories, plenty of them, about cars being blown off the Mackinac Bridge in high winds. It wasn't safe.
I knew that, but Chad didn't.
Maybe, by now, he did.
And, if he's learned that by now—that cars do blow off that bridge—and he remembers what I said (Mommy and Daddy wouldn't take you across a bridge if it wasn't safe...) would he think it was amusing, that false comfort, or that his mother had simply been ignorant, deluded, or a liar?
When Jon stepped toward me with his arms open, wearing that T-shirt, I started to cry. Chad. Bram. The dead doe. My father. Jon. All the losses and betrayals, and even the love, the dreams, the fantasies—burdens made of memory, burdens made of air, so easily blown off a bridge.
No. I was, I thought, just tired.
"Oh," Jon said, kissing the top of my head. "Sherry, what's wrong?"
I looked up at him.
Jon. Jon, just as he'd always been Jon, looking down at me. He took a step backward. He brushed a tear off my eyelashes. He said, "Tell me what's wrong," and the expression on his face was so kind, wise, so bright with love that, I knew, if I told him the truth, he would say, Of course. I know. Didn't you know? I always knew.
And, if he didn't already know—fully, really—when I told him, he would understand. We were adults. He would take the responsibility on himself. He would say that his fantasy had been a kind of permission. That he'd participated, of course, in his way.
"Tell me," he said.
There was a bright and watery sheen in his eyes which turned them entirely into my own reflection, fed me back to me—myself, miniaturized, drowning. Outside, the sun was setting, and the frogs that had thawed in the ponds near our house had begun to chirr—rhythmically, like some kind of engine, like the generator at the center of all of it: the world, sex, spring, a gentle machine made of amphibious flesh, but the source of everything, nonetheless. Unending. Freezing, thawing, chirring, vibrating, damp and green out there. There were pink and red streaks of light coming in through the windows, pouring baptismally over his forehead.
"What have you been up to, Sherry?" he asked.
I backed away from him and sat d
own at the edge of the love seat.
He knelt down beside me.
He said, "Were you up all night fucking your boyfriend, Sherry?"
I inhaled. I could feel my lips quiver. I said, "Yes."
Jon inhaled, too, then. He said, "Tell me all about it."
I said, "What do you want to know?" I could see that his hands, folded in front of him as if he were praying, were trembling.
He said, "How many times did you do it?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Come on, Sherry. You know. Tell me. I'm not mad." There were a few brilliant beads of sweat on his forehead. Where had they come from? How had they sprung to the surface so quickly?
I shrugged. I said, in a voice that sounded to me as if it were rising out of a deep, empty well, "Twice, I think, on the floor, and once on the futon."
Jon pushed the skirt up over my knees, and then he looked up at me. One of those beads of sweat was traveling, swiftly, toward the bridge of his nose. "Are you sure it wasn't four times?" he asked. "It couldn't have been four?"
In truth, I wasn't sure. I said, "It might have been four times."
Jon smiled again. He licked his lips. "Did you like it?" he asked.
"I liked it," I said.
Jon's eyes were wide, expectant, and he was breathing heavily.
"Did he like it?"—and, again, for just an instant, that same flash of anger passed through me: market testing.
"He loved it," I said, and looked as deeply, as openly, into his eyes as I could as I said it.
Jon put his fingers on my knee then, and for a few more seconds he just stared at it, as if it were the first knee, the only knee, he'd ever seen, and then he was between my knees, parting them, pushing the dress all the way up, over my thighs, and his face was pressed into the crotch of my panties, and he was biting me there, pushing the panties aside with his fingers, clawing and biting, and moving around with his tongue, with his teeth, a finger inside me, and then two fingers, and then he was unbuckling his pants—breathing raggedly, pushing into me, looking down at himself inside me as he did it, and then back up into my face from the great distance of his sexual pleasure before he came.
I WOKE up with the alarm. Jon was already awake, propped up on an elbow, smiling (impishly?) down into my face. I had told him the truth, I remembered, and it was all still fine. I had told him the truth about what I was doing, and he hadn't asked me to stop. He kissed my eyes. He kissed my neck. He said, "I liked that a lot."
I said, "I did, too," but I didn't look at him. I looked at a tiny black spot just over his shoulder.
It was an ant.
It was crawling so slowly across the ceiling that I had to squint to see that it was moving at all.
To that ant, I thought, our ceiling must have been like the arctic, like the Sahara, but also like death, being, as it was, without weather.
Jon said, "And it's all true—about your lover? Four times, Sherry? On the floor, on the futon, on—"
I put a finger to his lips. I said, "Shhh."
The sound of his voice—too eager, too loud—would ruin everything, I realized, if he kept talking. The morning, the moment, the last twenty years. I would move, I feared, from a vague dissatisfaction to something else entirely. I would shift from disliking the sound of his voice so close to my face in the morning to hating it. The ant, lost in its ant dream above us, would hear him, too, if ants could hear. It would realize suddenly where it was, and also where it wasn't.
THE DRIVE into work seemed strangely brief. I never even had a chance to glance in the direction of that dead deer. For the first time I noticed that the trees had leaves, and seeing that sudden, new green, I thought that whatever had been done to them, whatever life had been stirred in the dirt around those trees and had made its way into their sap, into their veins, and resulted in this furious blooming, I could feel it in my veins, too.
Something erotic. Something warm, stirring. Something that had been there for a long time, waiting to be summoned up by warmth, and to spill over into this upheaval of green.
But, even thinking it, on the freeway, passing a truck of cows (one of which had its nose and mouth pressed out of the slats of the trailer, smelling the wind, or was it trying to cry for help?) I felt ashamed for thinking it:
I was nothing like those trees.
I was a middle-aged English teacher carrying on with a younger man—an auto mechanic—making love on the floor of a student efficiency, spending a fortune on new dresses and shoes, planning my day around a cup of coffee with a stranger in the cafeteria, a rendezvous with him again at night.
Still, the shame of it didn't lessen the excitement of it. I put in a CD. The Well-Tempered Clavier, but then, at the first brilliant notes, I thought no, and fished around under the seat for something of Chad's, something he'd left behind, and came up with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and put it in.
I turned it up, the bass rattling the windows of my car, and the voice of the singer (Nick Cave?) low and melodic, reminding me hopelessly of Bram—and, although I was behind the wheel of my car, driving eighty miles an hour down the interstate, inwardly, I swooned.
That swooning, I realized—these years of being a mother and a wife, that girlish swooning was what I'd missed.
The sensation of dangerous longing for something just beyond my reach.
The terrible implosion of desire. The warm flood of it. The rushing blood of it. It was what the trees (I thought of them again) must have felt just before that final push toward leafing.
GARRETT was waiting for me outside my office when I got there in the morning. He was reading a poem I kept tacked to my door—a poem about a dead lamb, by Richard Eberhart:
I saw on the slant hill a putrid lamb,/Propped with daisies.
I'd tacked it there so many years ago I'd forgotten why except that it had made me cry when I first read it in an anthology. Robert Z had professed it to be doggerel. ("Sherry, sweetheart, what the hell is this, Hallmark Training Camp? Good god. 'Putrid' is right.") But now I couldn't bear to take it down. It had been with me through years of teaching, greeted me every morning outside my office. Ferris, before he'd moved away with his family, used to stop outside my door to read it, or pretend to read it, every day between his classes, coming to and from his own office a few doors down from mine. I would find him there, touch his shoulder, and he would turn and look at me, meaningfully, painfully.
It was yellowed now, but still stuck there with a bright silver tack. The last lines were, Say he's in the wind somewhere,/Say, there's a lamb in the daisies.
It never failed to make my eyes sting, that sentiment—the idea that the dead lamb was not dead, but had, in dying, become a part of everything.
Garrett was startled when I came up behind him and touched him on the shoulder.
"Mrs. Seymour!" he said, turning around. "I just wanted to come by and tell you about something. Do you have a minute?"
I did. I was early. I had a half hour to kill before I was to meet Bram in the cafeteria, and then Amanda Stefanski, back at my office. "Come on in," I said, opening the door to my office with a key.
Garrett followed. I motioned for him to move a book off the chair and sit down, and he did. He put a foot up on his knee and then, maybe thinking it was too casual, or somehow disrespectful, he took it off and placed both feet on the floor in front of him, straightened up, looking uncomfortable in the vinyl chair.
I sat down at my desk across from him and smiled.
Garrett was wearing a blue T-shirt under his white dress shirt, and I imagined he would take off that white dress shirt when he went to Auto II, that they would all be there in their T-shirts, bent over their machines, shouting to one another over the gunning of engines, the steady roar of that big garage where I'd first seen Bram—or seen him for what felt like the first time.
I could tell that Garrett was too hot in my office. His cheeks were flushed, and his neck. They never got the temperature right in the buildings when the weather c
hanged, and the institutional windows, of course, wouldn't open. I said, "Garrett. Are you okay?"
"I'm great, Mrs. Seymour," he said. "I just wanted to come down here and tell you the news."
"What is it, Garrett? I'm all ears."
"I joined the Marines, Mrs. Seymour," he said. "The Delayed Entry Program. I leave for boot camp in August."
I looked at him.
The sunlight through the window had made a halo on the wall behind him, where, tacked to the wall, I had a print of Dall's The Rose—a spectacular surreal red blossom floating in a blue sky over a vast desert. I'd bought it and put it there years ago, while I was still trying to grow roses in the garden, before small black worms ate them all one summer, destroying hundreds of dollars' worth of bushes and turning the gorgeous blossoms into velvet rags.
When it first started happening, that destruction, I'd gone to the library, but found nothing about small black worms and roses, so I called Mrs. Henslin, who had a rose garden of her own that seemed to thrive wildly every summer without my ever seeing her, even once, tending to it.
She came down one morning in an apron and thick hose and stood over my roses, then bent to look at the leaves, those worms. She said, "You need poison if you're going to grow roses."
She shook her head, as if my ignorance were astonishing. She said she'd have one of her grandsons come down with a hose and spray them.
"Oh," I told her. "I'm not sure. I'm afraid, really, of those kinds of poisons."
Mrs. Henslin laughed. In the bright summer sunlight I could see that her cheeks were shot through with little blue lines, that they looked like streams, thin estuaries, on a map, or seen from the sky. She was wearing pink lipstick, but I could see there was a brown spot on her lower lip. An age spot, or a scar, or a malignancy.
"Well," she said, shaking her head, "you can't grow anything without poisons."
I wondered, then, what they were using down there, on their farm—on the soybeans, on the corn—and was that what I sometimes smelled, chemically sweet, on the breeze through the bedroom windows when the wind was blowing out of the east?