The insertion of the needle was quick and easy. Melinda's small, intake of breath as the needle entered was lost in the sound of the rain. He put the strips of adhesive, crisscrossed, holding the needle to her skin with one hand, and in the other he held the bottle above her. When the strips were secure, he reached
up to the bottle and adjusted the drip, his two hands, with the bottle in them, elevated. He was sitting on the bed at her hips, and before he could lower the hand he had raised to the bottle, she lifted her left arm and put her hand under the fold of his bathrobe at his chest and put the tip of her index finger into his hair and moved it until she touched his nipple. She then rotated her finger in small circles, outlining the hardening flesh. He looked down at her face; she was smiling. Lying on her back like this, gravity pulled at the skin on her cheeks, deepening the hollows in which the shadows in her pale skin rested. Her fingers moved in a twisted line through the hair on his chest, heading for the other nipple. He anticipated, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
“Snake trail,” she murmured, an edge of her smile twisting.
She reached the other nipple and circled it, then brought her thumb up and squeezed it. Her right hand moved to the bathrobe, along his leg. The needle was in at the front of her elbow, and she had little play, had to keep the arm from bending, but her hand could move from the wrist. She got it under the robe, flipping the fold off his leg, and ran her fingers inside his knee and just above it. He lowered his right arm slowly, leaving the bottle in the air, elevated, held in his left hand and dripping, and put his hand on the knot of her robe and disengaged it. His hand went under her robe; he lay it flat, his fingers spread on her lower belly in the deep hollow, the heel just touching the hair at the rise of her pubis. He gathered his fingers a little, holding and squeezing a span of her loose flesh. She shuddered fully, but with a shallowness that was indicative of her profound weakness, and he was at the dull edge of despair for a moment, but as she shuddered her fingers hit spasmodically at the tip of his nipple, and he was aroused away from it.
“Snake bite,” she whispered, and pushed her hips up into the heel of his hand. He moved the whole hand down, and she parted her legs a little, and he pushed up into the hair. She took the flesh on the inside of his thigh for support, keeping herself
where she was. Her left hand slid from his chest to his crotch; she traced another snake line in the soft flesh above his penis.
She brought her hand out from under his robe, crossing her own body, allowing her left shoulder to settle into the bed, and arranged her arm in an L, her hand open and palm up on the pillow beside her head.
“Do it,” she said, and he looked up at his left hand in the air, holding the bottle, and checked the drip; it was regular and steady. And the rain outside was regular and steady, and the steady drops bit against the glass doors. He had not pulled the heavy curtains across them, and some of the drops sat there, and others made abbreviated snake trails in the glass. The sky was dark and cloud covered, and he could see the suggested outline of the car beyond the glass doors, but he could see nothing else.
He put two of his fingers into her and moved them from side to side; she was wet and healthy there, and he pushed deeply into her, and she opened her legs wider and tucked her chin down to see his hand on and in her, but the effort was too much for her, and she let her head fall back on the pillow and pushed into his hand, her eyes closing, then opening, and looking into his eyes. He smiled and took a third finger and touched her clitoris and brought his thumb to it and squeezed and rolled it. “Snake bite,” he said, and she growled, and ground a little against him.
And then she was rising. She squeezed harder into his right thigh, keeping her arm with the needle in it as straight as she could. She moved in a small space, did not flail or kick out; she shuddered and rose and shuddered. The back of her left hand moved back and forth beside her head on the pillow. Once she moved the hand to her mouth and sucked at her fingers and bit them. When she came, she came long and delicately, and before she could reach the peak of it, she was tired from it, but she was able to begin to relax near it, and her sighs were strange and ethereal. They were a mixture of passion and giving in to the failed effort of passion at the same time. They hurt her, and
they hurt him. His hurt was the hurt of loss impending made into an emblem from the future as he felt and heard her coming. Hers was the hurt of fulfillment coming from the diminished quota of fulfillments. She felt another one going as it went. She wanted to rise up to it completely, to say good-by to it, but she could not make it. It went above and beyond her, and when it was almost gone she slipped back from it into the tiredness that had, almost insidiously, its own reward. For a while she would not have to struggle against the cancer, to win the small holding-action battles that gave her the little moments that were left to her, if she wanted to fight for them. And she did fight for them, always; they were living, and she felt very alive. But they were hard won, and she was tired, and the guilt-free and long resting after such times with him had their own value; they renewed her a little.
He checked the bottle. It was half empty, his arm was tired, but he could hold it there. She was relaxing now; her breath was returning. The last thing she released was the flesh inside his thigh. When her hand went loose the drip quickened a little, the pressure she had given her veins, their blood pushing against the Laetrile, diminished, allowing the fluid in. He was still hard above her hand, but he began to fall, and when the head of his penis hit the tips of her fingers, he lurched up and became hard again. She looked up at him out of her half-closed eyes. They both knew that there was not much left that she could manage, maybe nothing. He needed more, but he knew the trip and the time at the pool, the snake dinner, and now the rain had taken a lot out of her. She looked wasted and on the edge of a kind of sleep.
“It's okay,” he said. “You go to sleep; I'll unhook you when the bottle's empty.”
She sighed and settled deeper. Her left arm moved from the L down to her body, her hand coining slowly to rest on her stomach. Her legs came together, and he reached to her and adjusted her robe, covering her breasts and legs. When he tucked the collar of her robe at her throat, she said “No,” and she reached her hand up and pulled her robe back from her breasts, tucking it
around them, so that they stood free and accentuated, very white and brown tipped against the green of the robe's fabric. She reached up a little and took him in her right hand and ran her fingers over his penis; she shifted slowly, and her breasts moved a little, swaying. She smiled faintly below her lids, looking at his face he thought, but he could not see her eyes. “Let me see it,” she said, and that aroused him further, and he moved closer to her and half stood, one knee on the bed. As he moved, the clamp on the tubing hit with a light click against the bottle as he lowered it to get to her, and he glanced up and elevated it again.
When he looked back he found he cast a shadow cutting into the light and that her right breast was now darkened, the left the more prominent in contrast. He caught his breath to hide his response from her, though she was occupied and would not have noticed. The fear of mastectomy, and the odd wish for it, hit into his stomach briefly. There had been a biopsy and some time of dazed fear in waiting before the call came. And he remembered it and how they had looked not quite at each other, neither able to incorporate the idea of it. And now he saw that negative image on the right. It was like a boy's chest. There was a place below her breast, just under it, where he liked to put his hand flat against her ribs while she was on her back, with arms on the pillow above her head, her breasts pulled up. To move his hand down the ribs to her waist and back up again, to the edge of her breast on that side. And in this light, he could imagine the breast gone, could almost see it that way, but without the scar tissue, and could think of the way her boy's chest would feel on that side, his hand moving to touch ribs all the way up, stopping and changing the fingering of bone only when it reached her clavicle and the cup's indentation above it before it reached her chin and cheek. He would take her head then, his palm holding her lower mandible, and would be rising up himself, beginning to lift and turn her face toward him. He would want her eyes in his eyes before he kissed her, and he would be looking at her face up until the final moment before his lips touched her lips. Their
flat, bare chests would touch against each other as they embraced; there would be no protuberance to keep them apart.
Then his hand moved, in the imagining, up cheek to ear, and the hard, gold bullet in the post driven through her lobe scraped against the pad at his hand's edge, and she came back to him as who she was. He backed up slightly, lifting his eyes up from her shadowed chest. She shifted as he moved, and their linked actions brought her right breast into the light. And she was symmetrical and ordered again and conventionally lovely.
She tossed a fold of his robe to the side, exposing him; she put the tips of her fingers under his scrotum and ran them out to his tip. She shook her breasts a little, and he reached down and took the whole of her right breast in his hand. He was hunched over, his left hand in the air above them holding the bottle, his right arm fully extended as he held her breast. Her head shifted a little, her lids still half closed over her eyes; her breath was very shallow. She brought her hand to her mouth and stuck out her tongue a little and wet her palm and her fingers. He watched her mouth, straining in himself in his position. She was weak and fading; she was half conscious, but the corner of her mouth was up, half twisted, leering, beautiful, and spacy. Were it not sickness it would be drug-lust, he thought. Or lust from desire he imagined; lust after desire fulfilled, lust from thankfulness, from the purest kind of relaxation. He squeezed her breast harder, ran his index finger over her nipple. She moved her wet hand and took his penis, her fingers cool and slippery. She pulled gently, watching herself do it. He watched her breast in his hand, her face, her hand moving. He looked to the glass doors and saw the rain and the shadow of the car and a new shadow the size of a man standing. The hair on the inside of his thighs raised up, though he was not sure of the shadow at all. He looked back at her breasts, her face, and her hand. His semen began to flow out, the first drops falling to her wrist, the rest running down her hand to reach them. As he came, the bottle high in his left hand was quaking; it was lighter, almost empty.
“Almost empty,” he grunted softly, and when she looked from her hand to his face, he nodded up to the bottle, directing her eyes there. She followed his look, and when she saw the bottle she got the point and shook a little in weak laughter. He laughed softly with her; he was still shaking and quivering, still coming, his penis lurching. And then the lurches had more space between them. He glanced at the glass doors. The figure was gone. They stayed as they were for what seemed to both of them a long time, his body bent over, her hand holding him, the semen slowly drying, the bottle in the air.
After a while he said, “Let me get a Kleenex, before it dries.” She had drifted off to sleep, but just to the edge of it, and she woke up without much transition. She let her hand fall from him.
“Let it stay there,” she said weakly. “I want it there.”
He got up carefully. He had some muscle pains. His left arm was stiff, and it hurt at the elbow as he lowered the bottle.
He clamped the tubing off and placed the bottle on the bed beside her. Her sweat had loosened the adhesive, and the tape came off easily. He took a piece of cotton from the alcohol container on the floor at his foot. When he withdrew the needle he pressed it against the point of exit to keep the blood in, the hematoma from forming. After he had pressed it there for a while, he used a piece of the adhesive to secure it. She was sleeping, her breath regular and shallow again. The semen had begun to dry into crystals on her hand and wrist. He closed his robe and tied it. He adjusted her pillows and her robe, put her right hand over her left on her stomach. He stood back from the bed, the bottle and the tubing with the needle in the end of it in his left hand, the metal alcohol-sponge container in his right. For no good reason he could have articulated, he smiled, and then he bowed to her, deeply and from the waist. As if she knew somewhere in her early sleep that he was doing something odd and possibly extraordinary, she shifted a little and she smiled too. He walked to the glass doors, the materials still in his hands. It was still raining, a little harder than before; the glass doors were sheeted and running with it.
He could not see the car beyond them. He put his face close to the glass, trying to see out. He could see nothing. He put his forehead against the glass. The glass was cool, and it felt good.
After he had put the Laetrile materials away, he took a shower, missing the feel of the golf balls around his feet, and dried and dressed himself. Then he got paper and pencil and wrote a note to her:
Melinda: had to go out. you know. be back by seven. Call Bob White if you need anything. I'll get dinner. I love you of course. Allen.
He put the note on the pillow beside her head, then changed his mind and propped it up with a glass on the motel room table. He got the gun from between the folds of white towel in his suitcase. He loaded a clip into it carefully. He looked at it, then took the clip out and checked the chamber; it was empty, and he pulled the trigger. It did not click. The safety was on, and he made a note of its position and snapped the clip in again.
He put the gun into the pocket of his raincoat and put his arms into the sleeves and settled the coat on his shoulders and buttoned it. It hung heavily to one side, pulling the collar against his neck. He looked around the room, checking, a thing he always did before leaving a place. He looked down at peaceful Melinda sleeping. Then he turned away, opened the door, and stepped out into the rain.