“Water a little cold?” he asked.
“Think so?” she said, and dropped the towel as she pulled the white quilt off the bed, threw it over her shoulders, and lay down on the rugs in front of T by the fire. She pulled the quilt tightly around her, tucking the edges under her thighs and legs, and pushed her body back into T. “Put your arms around me,” she said, turning to look into his face, “before I freeze to death.” She kissed him on the cheek.
T put his arms around her. Her head rested on his bicep as he held her tight.
“Ummm,” she purred. “This is delicious.” She snuggled into him, molding her body to the contours of his and closing her eyes drowsily.
T touched her bare shoulder with his cheek, and she turned in his arms onto her back and kissed him on the lips, her hand under the quilt pushing up under his T shirt and along his ribs to his chest.
T knew what was supposed to happen next. This was the moment when he kissed her in return and then fumbled out of his clothes as he raised himself up over her and onto her and then pushed himself into her for the familiar warm rocking and thrust and moan of sex, but instead of the rising and filling and swell the moment required, he felt come over him a sense of deflation, as if his body from head to toe were going so soft it might liquefy. What he felt was sadness flowing through him, deep sadness. He leaned away from her under the quilt, making enough distance to look her in the eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he said.
Jenny seemed puzzled. She leaned back on her elbow and propped her head up on her hand. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What do you mean, you don’t know what you’re doing?”
“I don’t,” T said.
“I just— Why? Why would you—”
“Why’s a dumb question.” She touched his lips with her finger. “I want you to make love to me. I just want you to.”
T watched her watching him, her eyes on his eyes, and knew she was expecting him to start again, to lean into her with the kiss that would put the act in motion. He didn’t. He waited.
“You picked us up,” she said. She sounded bewildered. “You brought us here. You cleaned up the cabin while I made the beds. You built a fire while I took a shower. Plus, I see the way you look at me. What did you think we were doing? What did you think was happening?”
T watched the fire, where the flames were shooting up from the kindling through charred gaps in the big logs. Already a bed of red embers pulsed beneath the andirons. “Jenny,” he said, and heard his voice as a dramatic harsh whisper. He coughed and tried again. “Apparently I’m not—” he said. He kissed her shoulder through the quilt. “This is sweet, though, holding you like this.”
“Oh my God,” she said, and she touched the back of his neck. “You’re so— You don’t want to make love to me?” She stroked the back of his head. “Is there something— Are you afraid I might have AIDS, or—”
“No,” T said. “That’s not—”
“Because I have condoms.”
“Jenny,” T said. “It’s not about—”
“I don’t have any diseases, Aloysius. Mr. Walker. I’m not a whore.”
“I don’t think you’re a whore.”
“Oh, please. Why wouldn’t—” She stopped and rubbed
his back gently. “Listen,” she said, “don’t lie to me. You must think I’m a whore. Why wouldn’t you think that?”
“I don’t think like that,” he said finally. “I just, don’t—”
“Well, I do,” she said. “And now— You turn out— Oh, Jesus Christ.”
T looked up from the fire and saw that her face was wet. “Jenny,” he said, and wiped a tear away from her eye with a corner of the quilt.
“I feel humiliated.”
“Because I didn’t—”
“Because I’ve been acting like a whore,” she said, articulating each word, insisting on it. “Let’s not bullshit, please. And then you turn out to actually be decent.”
“I’m not decent,” T said quickly. “I swear. No one thinks I’m decent.”
“Well, you are,” she said. “And how could you not think of me as anything but some pathetic little tramp?”
“Jenny—”
“At least let me explain.” She sat up, wrapped herself tightly in the quilt, and slid away from T, toward the fire. She crossed her legs under her.
Out from under the quilt, T felt as though he were the one who was naked. He experienced the loss of her warmth like a shock and actually shivered as he looked around for something with which to cover himself. He found his jacket near the foot of the bed.
“I’ve been acting like a little slut from the moment we
met,” she said. She spoke with the quilt wrapped around her. “For God’s sake, I just came in here naked and threw myself on you.”
“You didn’t throw yourself—”
“Yes, I did. It’s humiliating. But, please— You have to understand what Lester’s done. It’s just— It’s unbelievable, T.”
“All right,” he said. “But I swear I’m not thinking of you as a whore or a slut or any such thing.”
“Of course you are!” she said, and a little bubble of mucus blew up and popped under her nose. “Oh, Christ—” She pointed with her chin to where her drawstring purse lay near the bed. “Could you get me a tissue?”
T handed her the purse.
She blew her nose and threw the tissue into the fire, where it was eaten up immediately in a bright yellow flame. “I’ve been behaving like a tramp,” she said, composed. “At least let me have the dignity of admitting it. I have been, but you have to understand, I’m terrified. I’m frightened for my life.” With those words, the tears came again. She seemed to give up on wiping them away. “I’ve been behaving badly, but my life is threatened. Lester stole money from a guy who everybody knows is a sick, murdering, torturing perv. We spent the last two nights hiding in my wine cellar, terrified, while this guy and the sick biker assholes who work for him totally destroyed my house.”
“What? Like the Wild Bunch?”
“The what?”
“Never mind,” T said, realizing she probably wouldn’t even know Marlon Brando let alone the Wild Bunch. “I’m having a hard time visualizing this,” he said. “Where was your house? What do you mean bikers destroyed it?”
“It was my mother’s house first,” she said, and pulled the quilt tighter around her. “I had just bought it in September; I had just finally gotten the money together…” She stopped a moment and shook her head, as if to compose herself and keep from crying yet again. “It’s outside of Chattanooga. It’s a small house, but it’s on five acres, which is why it was so hard to raise the money. It used to be a plantation a gazillion years ago. This is going back to the Civil War.”
“You own a house on five acres of land?”
“Wrecked house,” she said. “They tore it apart so bad it’ll have to be rebuilt.”
“Because of Lester?”
“They couldn’t figure out where the hell we were.” She paused and took a breath, as if gathering her thoughts, then gave him a look that announced she was about to tell the story, and he should just relax and listen. “Lester,” she said, starting off slowly. “Lester, who’s never had an entrepreneurial notion in his life, hatches this plan to steal money from these monsters and then he’s going to buy coke and resell it and replace the money, and nobody’s ever going to know about it. Of course he gets ripped off, and when it dawns on him that he’s now a dead man, he comes to my house looking to borrow money so he can run to Canada.”
“This is a few days ago,” T said.
“Three days ago now,” she answered. “He’s not there two minutes, at my house— I mean, he just came in the door, a half-dozen bikes and cars come screaming down the drive. I have no idea what’s going on yet, but Lester’s panicked, so I hide him, us, in the wine cellar, which goes back to Prohibition. It’s hidden under a trapdoor under a fake boiler. They never found it, but they tore the house down looking for us. They’re like,
We know they’re in here. We saw them go in; we didn’t see them go out
. We can hear it all from the wine cellar, where we’re curled up like a couple of rats, scared to death. Eventually they decided we slipped out somehow. After they left, we gathered a few things and ran. We hitched a ride with a trucker into Virginia, and then a perv insurance salesman who couldn’t keep his hands off me took us to Tully, where we spent the last of the money we had between us on breakfast. Then we stood there by the side of the road all day until you picked us up.”
When she finished her story, T looked away from her, into the fire, at the growing bed of embers, its pulsing red surface crisscrossed with crackling white rivers of heat. He wondered if she would ask him for the money they needed to get straight with the bad guys outright at this point, or if she’d wait for him to offer it. And if he offered right now, he wondered if she’d decline and wait for him to offer again in the morning, to offer perhaps several times, until he was practically begging her to let him help, and then, only then, finally, taking the money reluctantly. He looked into the embers and considered
how much he could give her. He knew he’d give her something. He just didn’t know how much yet.
“Oh my God,” she said, and she touched her mouth with two fingers, as if she might blow him a kiss. “Oh my God,” she repeated. “You don’t believe me. You don’t believe any of it.”
T was surprised and embarrassed. He lied immediately. “No. Of course I believe you,” he said.
Her face seemed to collapse, as if a huge tiredness had overcome her. She lay down in front of the fire and curled up inside the quilt. “All right,” she said. “I need to get some sleep.”
T watched her as she closed her eyes and laid her cheek on the balled-up fabric of the quilt. Above her head, one of the bear’s dog-like ears stood up as if listening for what would happen next. The fire crackled and filled the room with the smell of wood smoke. He touched her shoulder and she opened her eyes to look up at him. He had the urge to tell her how beautiful she was. “Jenny,” he said. “I believe you.”
She nodded, acknowledging his effort at kindness and at the same time signaling it had no effect. “You know what I’d like?” she whispered, her voice so drained even the volume was gone. “It was nice when you were holding me. Could you just do that for me, please? Could you just hold me till I fall asleep?”
T gathered the pillows from the bed and crawled under the quilt with her, holding her as he had before, his arms around her, her head on his bicep, but with a pillow now between her head and his skin. She closed her eyes and then opened them
again to watch the fire a while in silence, then closed them again. Tears seeped out from under her eyelashes, not drops, just a flow, a thick wetness seeping out, spreading to her cheek, pooling between her eye and the bridge of her nose. With a corner of his pillowcase he wiped the tears away, but said nothing and she said nothing.
He supposed her story could be true, the whole implausible thing. He doubted it, but, really, he didn’t care. He looked down at the young woman wrapped up with him in a quilt and watched her a while with the palpable sense of holding a mystery in his arms. She twisted around, making herself comfortable, snuggling against his chest, and he saw that she was close to sleep, and then he put his own head down on a pillow on the bear’s head, and closed his eyes, and drifted toward darkness thinking of her as a foreign creature in bed with him, her breath against his chest, amazed—though it was a lesson he had already learned well—amazed still at how rapidly at least the outward circumstances of a life could change.
He woke to Jenny nuzzling blindly into him for warmth, throwing a leg over his thigh and seemingly attempting to glue the front of her body to the front of his. It took him a second to remember where he was. He had no idea of the time, only that the temperature had dropped significantly and the wind had picked up outside. He could hear a loud soughing in the trees. It felt late. It felt like the deepest hours of the night. In the moonlight through the window on the other side of the
room, smoke drifted near the ceiling and moved from side to side with each loud gust of wind. The fire had burned down to quiet embers, and the fiercest gusts of wind were pushing smoke down the flue and into the bedroom. He seemed to remember from fireplaces in the past that this was not a big problem. Still, he thought he should probably open a window an inch or so, and he lifted himself up on one elbow, peeling away from Jenny, who then folded up her body like a child, pulling her knees toward her chest, clamping her legs around her clasped hands, and burrowing down into the layers of rugs.
In the process of extricating himself from the tangled quilt, he caught a glimpse of Jenny’s body, her breasts framed between her arms, the tight flesh of her stomach, the triangle of her sex where her hands were pushed between her legs. She had shaved herself there in a narrow strip, which he had noticed before, when she had first come into the bedroom from the shower. He had wondered then, as he did again at this moment, why she would shave like that, given it wasn’t the time of year for bikinis. While contemplating her body, he was immensely pleased to feel his own body responding. He unbuttoned his jeans and looked down at a hard and arching erection with a feeling not unlike the pleasure of running unexpectedly into an old friend. It had been a very long time since he had experienced this degree of youthful readiness for sex, and for a moment he seriously considered initiating the act while she was still sleeping, remembering how Brooke had once told him there was nothing she loved better than waking up being fucked. He touched Jenny’s thigh lightly, but as soon as the
thought of sex moved out of the realm of the hypothetical and toward the realm of the actual, a voice in the back of his head laughed at him and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. This girl was twenty-three, younger than his own daughter. Considerably younger. Did he believe for one second that she could be genuinely attracted to him? No, he didn’t. With that acknowledgment, his old friend waved good-bye and disappeared. T buttoned up, tucked the quilt around Jenny, and got up to open a window.
Outside, the trees were trembling in a steady wind, and the river seethed under lines of white foam. He opened the window an inch and then stood a long time with his arms crossed on the windowsill looking out at the night. He tried hard to concentrate on the physical world, the world of trees and rocks, of wind and water. He tried to feel himself as a creature alive in the physical world, an animate being in the phenomenal world, someone to whom anything might happen and capable of setting into effect an infinite sequence of actions. Tom Walker, a human being alive for a stunningly brief span of years on a small planet circling a medium-sized star in an unimaginably massive universe. He tried hard to feel the gift of being alive right then at that moment—and he did. He felt it and was grateful, and was able to hold on to the feeling for a second or two before his thoughts shifted to Alicia, his most recent ex, whom he had met some twenty-four years ago when she was almost exactly the same age as the young woman currently sleeping in front of the fire across the room from him. Moving from one mode of perception to the other, from the
metaphysical to the personal, was like walking out of a beautiful countryside and into a prison, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He stared out a cabin window at the Saint Lawrence River on a windy and extraordinary night and thought his pedestrian thoughts about his own life.