Natural, and incredibly arousing. Every vein in Submit’s body seemed to dilate. Flushes of warmth ran through her, waves of it, from the ends of her toes and fingers to the backs of her eyes to the tips of her puckering breasts. She felt Graham loosening the tie at her waist, undoing her a step further from security. She let him, lifting her head back. He kissed his way up her throat.
Her dressing gown opened completely—he pushed it open with the backs of his hands, its trapped warmth emptying into his arms. Submit shivered, making a muffled sound, as the coolness of the night invaded her clothes. Then his fingers were riding her shift up, inches at a time, until he slid his hands under it to press his palms onto her bare thighs. Her nightgown gathered on the tops of his forearms as he slid his hands up the curve of her hips to
her waist all the way up her ribs to the outside curve of breasts to her armpits. Naked. She heard Graham let out a sound, a noise or word, but she couldn’t decipher it for the rasp and pace of her own breathing. He bent, opened his mouth over the tip of her breast, tasting, suckling a moment. Then he drew her fully against him into the crook of his legs.
He was caressing her, handling her with his hands, mouth, tongue, body, kissing her deeply while rubbing the wool of his trousers against the rise of her pubis—she could feel a hard erection, a solid reality that flooded images, sensations. Lakes…flowing in to dark, warm inlets…into caverns filled with shadows, slippery places…gliding in on bubbles of pleasure…huge, leaning, sleek Doric columns…
She felt his fingers brushing against her abdomen, undoing the buttons of his trousers.
The weight of his penis dropped onto her belly, firm, shocking. Against her cool skin, he felt heavy and hot. What remained of Submit’s composure yielded, explicit, definite, in that moment. She pulled in her breath. She wanted this man so fiercely, it made her legs weak. Graham’s arm constricted about her waist. His palm lifted her by the buttocks. It wasn’t a gentle caress, but a strong, possessive throe of longing—and the necessity of support. Submit was going to fold, she wanted to lie down with him so badly.
He freed his pants from his hips with the pitch of a fever, reaching over her buttocks, sliding his hands down the backs of her thighs. Opening. Parting. Lifting. And with a sureness that stunned, he was suddenly, swiftly, deeply inside.
“God my God in Heaven.”
There were other invocations, vague magnificats. He braced her against the banister, groped once for balance,
but his legs were buckling. With an awkward fall for the last inches, they were somehow on the ridges of stairs.
They managed to get sideways, perpendicular on the staircase so she was flat, but they lost entry. He backed off enough to gain position. Dim light, dawn, was coming from below now, reflecting the balusters across her like a cage. One of her hands opened then contracted on the ledge above her. Submit wet her lips, closed her eyes. She was lying on one stair, spread across three. As compliant as a concubine. The delicate shift lay rumpled above her flat belly, her buttocks resting on polished wood, her knees dropped—with Graham over her ragged, panting, backed off enough to cover her with his eyes, those dark, hot, piercingly beautiful eyes.
He stared at her. He had wanted exactly this, Graham realized: Submit’s modesty and dignity annihilated. As if he could now reassemble her in some pattern that would be more intelligible to him. He looked at her slender, bare body, her raised shift, glowing white in the dark, her legs, open and inviting. It all seemed so incredibly, wickedly inapposite after the tightly buttoned black dresses. He wanted to hold this image, hold all of it—keep forever the sight, smell, sound, the taste, the feel of the moment—to him. But as he penetrated again, she arched suddenly, severely into him. And there was no holding anything. He aspirated a cry. Anguish. Pleasure. The small extortion of too much too soon. The spasms endured, repeated. Then it was just their echo in throbs.
Submit lay, unable to catch her breath, beyond speech, movement, thought.
Graham lay on top of her, one foot caught between the posts of the railing. By a wrist below and an elbow above, he was holding some of his weight off her. Just barely. It was a perfectly constrained—and tortured—position, but he
couldn’t immediately move. They were both in the limbo of exhausted breathing, the inanition of expended effort. He found himself looking down the stairs, edge coming on edge in rapid descent. They were steep, minatory from the angle of lying on them. Though dawn had begun to make them familiar, it was perhaps this familiarity that made him feel so strangely frightened, so inept: like a waking drunk who had just taken the length of them at a stumble and roll.
Graham’s first coherent words to her, “Are you all right?” acknowledged an ordeal, a survival. Though Submit felt less the victim of a flight of stairs than some larger disaster. A shipwreck, perhaps. A woman coming alive on some unknown shore. Her hair clung in damp wisps to her face. He pulled a piece from her mouth. She lay on her back, eyes closed, unable to move except to throw one listless arm over her face.
By the faint light and a draft on his backside, Graham began to know how compromised they were. He took in her plundered nightclothes, his own flapped shirt, bare flanks. He could feel the restriction of trousers not properly up or down. This sight, he realized, lay across a utilitarian passage, a stairway that would carry firewood, breakfast, and laundry in something less than half an hour.
Graham began to move awkwardly to his knees. He felt the first plummet of despair, irremedy, as if they had committed an error of unmendable consequence. But after a cursory look around, it occurred to him that there was not a reason—a witness—in the world that they should not get away with this; that, in fact, it was simply a matter of straightening clothes and resuming.
He tried to rouse Submit, but she was slow to recover herself. She slid up enough to sit against the wall, letting one arm go limp along the edge of an upper step. Slowly, she raised her other arm to put it behind her head. She leaned back into the crook of her own elbow. For a moment, they were face to face, calf to thigh, then Submit closed her eyes.
She tried not to see the fact before her. But she could feel
him: Graham moving, brushing up against her calf as he pulled his trousers up over his bare backside. She could still feel the wet pulse, the welcoming, elated throes of her own body, wanting only that whatever he’d just done, he should please do it again. Having him there, adjusting himself into the front of his pants, brushing her belly lightly as he lowered her nightgown over her own supreme immodesty, made her want to cry. Her hands were warm. Every muscle in her body was relaxed. She uttered a deep sigh. She should have known better. The smell of burnt sulfur and niters clung to his skin, his hair. No moonlight swim could water it down. She opened her eyes to slits. And, God bless, she wished she hadn’t. In the semidark, the angles and planes of his face were cast sharply. Graham was painfully handsome to her eyes. Her hands could still feel the fluid strength of his shoulders. His abdomen, her fingers remembered, moved by segments, individual tendinous divisions so distinct he could have served as an anatomy lesson;
linea transversae, linea semilunaris, linea alba
…. Graham was beautiful, as physically perfect as a statue, a god, though he was not Neptune tonight. More like Orcus, having taken Persephone and dragged her into the Underworld. For surely, Submit thought as she revived, she lay on the shore of Hades.
She had just made passionate love on a staircase with a man she had been horribly, sanctimoniously rebuking in print for just this sort of act. Submit groaned—no, she thought, this was no godly act. Just two messy, stupid human beings. She turned away from the actuality, bending her face into her own raised arm.
He murmured soft encouragements. “Someone will find us.” “The girl will be up for the laundry.” Submit responded with a hushed economy of syllables, none of them words.
He stood up, tucking in his shirt. She stirred, and he of
fered a hand. She pretended not to see it, moving on her own with the careful independence of someone deprived of a sense, as if she were blind or deaf or both. She put her hand flat, with slow precision, on the stair at her elbow, then raised herself up. Her clothing fell over her bare legs. She took one, two, three premeditated steps back to lean on the wall, then closed her eyes. She turned her cheek to press it against her shoulder. It seemed a milestone that she had made it to her feet.
Graham saw her remote, slightly wounded self-sufficiency and didn’t know how to take it. He finished with the buttons of his trousers and stepped close again. When he took her waist, her palms came up instantly, firmly against his chest.
He studied the locked resistance, the averted face, her slow recovery.
“Has there been a rape?” he asked.
Her eyes flew up, surprised, preoccupied, then she looked away again. “No.”
She eased herself from him. She wanted distance. She straightened herself, brushing down the length of her nightgown. Each movement was a jerk and tremble.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She paused. “Everything.”
“Look at me.”
Submit did. And knew what he saw: guilt. She could feel it behind her eyes, hot and threatening to be wet. She looked down at the front of her dressing gown, hunting for the hooks. They seemed like little puzzles, foreign objects. Her fingers had no idea how they worked.
“No one is the wiser,” he told her. He reached and did several of the hooks himself. “It is only what you and I make of it now. And I would like to make something more of it than a debacle on the stairs. I want to hold you, make love to you in bed properly—”
She pushed him away as she vehemently shook her head. “That’s not possible.” She wanted to break the mood. It felt so dishonest. “I must talk to you. In the light. I must talk to your face.”
“As possible as the other. Let’s talk upstairs.” He laughed faintly. “If we can make it up the twenty steps and fifty feet to your room. God—” He let out a deep breath. “All I want to do is make love to you—”
She stopped him with a small, emphatic intake of breath. “No.”
He waited for a space of silence, then asked, “You’re not serious?”
She didn’t answer.
It occurred to Graham that she might be earnestly contemplating this as a single episode. He tried to take her into his arms again, but her limber body found innumerable ways to shift from him. He expelled his frustration, a guttural confoundment. Empty hands. Then he touched her once more, taking the underside of her arm as he stabilized her on the stairs—she was not solidly on her feet—and even this was resented.
“Let me be.”
“This is absurd.”
“Please. I know how awful—”
“One doesn’t take half-satisfaction on the spur of the moment, then toy with the idea of depriving oneself”—he dropped the impersonal pronoun—“of depriving you and me of more leisurely, more natural affection.”
She fixed a watery look on him. “I’m not toying.” She hung her head. “There are worse things I could do.”
“The only thing worse than never would be once—and once poorly.”
Her head moved back and forth in repeated denial he had any claim. “You think nothing could make you hate me more—”
“I don’t hate you.”
She looked up again, tears balanced, unblinking. “Listen to me—”
“As long as you don’t talk nonsense.”
She glared for an instant, then blinked, and a tear slid down her cheek. Her distress was unfathomable. She bowed her head into her hand, her fingers coming up over her mouth and nose and cheeks. Her shoulders shuddered.
“You have ruined me,” she said. “You have put me where I can’t win.” Then she more or less leaned and slid down the wall, coming to rest in a pile on the steps.
Graham was silent. Her reaction, her every movement since reviving on the staircase, had been so much more extreme than his. It hinted at the edges of melodrama, of something somewhere of which he wanted no part. He didn’t understand her difficulties; he couldn’t seem to skirt them.
“If it is having been the faithful wife to one man for—what? Twelve years? If I have rushed you—” But what was rushing in on him was that he was somehow worse off than when he’d started—still longing for her, with her hinting at some hidden, insurmountable barrier he would never be able to scale.
She didn’t answer. Graham was left standing above her, not knowing what to do with himself. He felt the predawn chill inordinately well. The draft coming up the stairs made him wish they both had on more clothes. He tucked his hands into opposite armpits, huddling in on himself, wondering where all this left him.
Below, in the entrance hall, a dim light was infiltrating the windows and draperies. A bird had set up an unpoetic repetition, a crisp
rirkk
coming from the woods across the orchard. Graham began to feel the disorientation of standing on a staircase. He knew he must move, only he hated to go without knowing Submit’s direction.
“Will you pack your bags? The wounded heroine?”
She laughed, a sound as natural and disheartening as the bird outside.
“Submit—” The name again. He wished he could stop using it, or that she would start using his. “There is something desperately wrong here.” When she said nothing, he continued. “When dark, quiet conversations lead to a consummation, be it ever so lacking in judgment…. And now, the two of us, to go our separate ways…” Which didn’t adequately express it. “If I were the romantic I am supposed to be, I would know the right words. Or be less afraid of the wrong ones.” He paused, for courage. “I would tell you that I can’t bear to be without you, that I want to talk to you endlessly into every night. And that I
can’t
keep from touching you, and you mustn’t stop me; nothing else makes any sense.”
Then he knew why he had used all the idiotic ifs and disclaimers, why he was trying to disown the statement before it was even out: It demonstrated their dichotomy. There were things each of them did not want to hear from the other. He did not want teary, apologetic explanations of why she was ruined for having lain with him. And she did not want to hear that he was in love with her.
The silence lay tightly between them, as solid and wedged as a lump in the throat.
Poorly, without conviction, he tried to break in on it from another approach. “It is not,” he said, “as if taking a lover were such an enormous or terrible thing.”
Then it was she who truly broke the silence, exposing his bald-faced lie: “I have a lover,” she whispered.
He couldn’t have heard right. And yet he knew instantly—
Everything stopped in him, as if his system had suddenly decided to pump his blood in the opposite direction. His stomach rolled over. He bent his head into his folded arms.
Tate, he thought. “Who?” he asked.
“Not who; what. Yves DuJauc. I
am
Yves DuJauc. I have slept with Ronmoor, day and night, for it seems like ages now. Henry, Graham. It is what Henry left me, without really meaning to. He wrote the early ones. I wrote the latter. He left me a box full of notes.” There were five seconds where she wanted him to say something, a guidepost, an indication. When he gave none, she said, “Honestly, Graham, it was not until my first visit to Netham that I was sure the parody was intentional. But by then…well, it was what they were buying.”
“They?”
“Audience. Pease. The people who honor the draft at the bank.”
It hit him so suddenly, so sharply, that he said something equally sharp. “What a shame Henry left me the pornography. It’s a small market, but so lucrative.”
“That is an obnoxious and unfair—”
“Don’t speak to me of fairness—”
“If you will only think for a moment—”
“Or of thinking, goddamn it—”
She tried to defend herself. “If it were simply venality—” She paused. “Have you no understanding?”
He knew she was waiting for a more definite reaction than sarcasm. Fury. Anguish. Forgiveness. Something. But he had nothing to offer. This information—that she and Henry were in collusion, had been betraying him in unison—seemed impossible to absorb.
“I wish I could explain,” she continued, “the part I have loved about it. To have something of Henry’s that William couldn’t touch, a true legacy. It is mine. And it has been a practical necessity. I have supported myself by it.” Her voice broke. She looked down. “God, what you have done to me,” she said. “By your gentleness. By taking such genuinely in
nocent pleasure in my company. And then by making those other moments, those less-than-innocent moments also true. By being both: a cad and a gentleman.”
“What you have done to yourself,” he corrected.
She sounded weary. “Yes. Yes, of course you are right. But part of you is very much Ronmoor—a remarkably handsome man who relies flatly on that, almost as if he were afraid that nothing else about himself would ever measure up to the superlatives of his good looks.”
Having summed him up neatly with that, she rose to her feet again.
“So,” she said. She left a businesslike pause. He could imagine her differing over figures with Pease. “If I continue, I am a hypocrite. And if I stop, I am destitute. Or—I take it you would offer me an alternative—obliged.” She lent the word an extra meaning.
The funny thing was, he would have taken that implied arrangement. Put her in his flat and fucked her silly. With or without the serial’s stopping, there would have been satisfaction in that. He looked over his shoulder, at this dickering, word-struck female. “And would”—he looked for a better word, then chose irony instead—“obligation—is that what you’d call it?—be so terrible?”
“Yes. When I have just tasted, for the first time in my life, not being obligated to anyone. I want to be selfish. I
have
to be selfish right now.” There was a frustrated pause. “Can’t you see? I can’t describe to you the sense of power—pure, halfpenny, economic power—I have over myself. The sense of freedom.”
“Autonomy is more expensive than you think. And more lonely: I know.”
She waited before she gave her pat, sophomoric answer. He hated her for what he saw as willful stupidity: “Well, I don’t know,” she said.
He didn’t dare speak. He didn’t dare move for fear he’d shove her down the stairs.
Seconds elapsed before he was finally able to say, “Then you must continue to sell me. To make commerce of my faults.”
“You trade on them.”
“They’re mine.”
She was not completely confident. “Perhaps I will find a way—a compromise.”
He made a dry laugh. “Already compromise.”
“You know what I mean. Temper it.”
“No one will like that. Not what they’re buying, as I recall.”
She took a rebellious breath. “You are so sure I can’t shift the attention, that I haven’t the skill to create a fiction larger than yours?”