“Are you positively deranged?”
He gestured toward her face. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.
“About the hot water?”
“About your eye.”
She sized him up for a moment. “No, not really. Also, and I don’t mean to be insensitive or in any way appear less than grateful for your hospitality, but could I trouble you to put on some trousers?”
Oh hell.
He was wearing only a pair of boxers and black dress socks with gold toes. Cold pinpricks dotted his arms and legs. At least he wasn’t completely naked this time.
Ray went upstairs to put on some clean-ish jeans and a black “Oil Hogg” T-shirt. Living with a female again would take some getting used to. Wearing pants. No more pissing out back in the garden. No more drying his naked body by the fire.
Molly had breakfast ready by the time he got downstairs again: full Scottish, minus the haggis. The blazing sunlight illuminated the kitchen but also exposed a layer of grime on the counters and in the sink. He made the decision to ignore it. They sat and without delay Molly tore in to her food. Bacon, eggs, toast, tomatoes. Real coffee. She shoveled it all in with two hands. She slurped at her tea and belched into the crook of her elbow. “Have some tomato,” she said, sending bits of egg hurtling onto his shirt. Ray could’ve gone on eating for days, except that she sucked up everything in sight before he could get his fill. He would need to be quicker. Crumbs stuck to her cheek and wouldn’t budge even when she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, the fingers of which still grasped a triangle of toasted and buttered and jellied bread. She looked like a half-domesticated animal set loose on a feeding trough. Her gluttony was mesmerizing, yet also endearing. It was sweet in a strange and disgusting way. He envied her. She appeared so … healthy.
After she finished every morsel on her plate and then on his, she leaned back in her chair. “Okay, then,” she said. “A few ground rules. In exchange for the use of the room upstairs, I will do the cooking.”
She had clearly been rehearsing this conversation. “Terrific,” Ray said.
“Second, I will stay out of your way. I don’t want to interfere with your work and I don’t want you interfering with mine.”
“Fair enough,” he told her. Everything was happening so fast: in the span of twenty minutes he had gone from hermit to chaperone for an abused teenager. Also, what work could a seventeen-year-old girl have at a place like Barnhill?
“Most importantly, and I wouldn’t be here if I thought this would be an issue, but I want to make it clear that nothing is going to happen between us. Our relationship will be purely, strictly, and chastely platonic. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“You promise?”
“You have my solemn oath. Nothing will happen. No thing.”
She shook his hand with much ado, leaving a globule of jelly on it. “Now, while you do the washing up, I’m going to unpack my things. We’ll reconvene for lunch. Until then, I will appreciate very much having some privacy. Also, you stink — take a bath. Mind you, I do like your beard.”
The possibility of a physical relationship with Molly hadn’t even occurred to him. It wasn’t even within the realm of possibility. “Sure,” he said. “You’ll have all the privacy your heart desires. Can I help with your bags?”
“No, but you could get rid of the dead fox at the front door. You need to bury it or it will attract carrion and they attack the lambs.”
Indeed, another animal sat prostrate and disemboweled at the doorstep, surrounded by a miniature Stonehenge of gooey fur. The stench was unbearable. He squinted at it in the sun. A pair of crows was enjoying a feast and they dared him to chase them away. “Yah!” he said and stomped a foot in their general direction. They looked at him with disdain then continued to peck and pull at their brunch. He went to the garage to fetch the shovel. The generator now powering the house purred almost inaudibly, much unlike the petroleum-spewing models he would see on the neighbors’ farms as a kid or powering gigantic TVs and PA systems at Saturday tailgate parties.
Shovel in hand, he scraped the mess into a burlap sack and carried it to the garden, where he chose a dead tree as a grave marker. The blade of the shovel carved cleanly through the layer of heather and into the soft, peaty soil, but the job would still take half an hour. He got to digging. Molly’s uninvited presence got him thinking about Flora and the way his time in Chicago had ended. Flora had asked him once what he feared most and since then he had given the question a great deal of thought. Not rats. Not bad gin. He feared that he would never regain the certainty he had possessed when first reading Orwell.
He brushed the sweat from his forehead and surveyed the new grave. It was a beautiful thing to be in Scotland and to dig a hole on a sunny day. He kicked the sack into the hole and leaned on the handle of the shovel to catch his breath. His fingers grew calloused, but it was strange how easily he could slip off his wedding ring. Without giving it much further thought, he dropped it on top of the burlap sack and threw a pile of black dirt on top until the island itself swallowed the band of gold. That was when he caught Molly watching him from an upstairs window. He smiled at her, but the curtain flittered closed. Ray got down on the ground and reached for the ring. The putrid odor rose to greet him. The burlap squished beneath his fingers. He thought about putting it back on, but allowed the fox to carry it with him into the next world.
He ruled out searching for the other dead animals he had tossed into the bushes and refilled the hole and stowed the shovel back in the garage. The muscles in his shoulders ached and he wanted nothing more than to take a hot bath, but Molly had beaten him to it. She was in the bathroom singing something like a lullaby or children’s rhyme, albeit a profane one. He took the opportunity to poke his head into what had become her bedroom. The door creaked open.
Three folding easels stood sentry in a semicircle facing the northern window. A wooden bucket from the garage held a bouquet of paintbrushes and palette knives. White sheets covered the three paintings in progress. The bath was still running, so he tiptoed in and lifted the corner of one.
The painting was a self-portrait, but her hands and feet had yet to be painted. She was completely nude, her belly and big boobs protruding, and looking at the viewer as if to say, This is who I am. Take it or leave it. She had laid herself bare and in vivid detail. It was beautiful — she was an amazing painter. He couldn’t stop staring. Something operating inside his respiratory system came to a halt. His heart was no longer beating. Then the bath water stopped.
Ray covered the painting again and crept back into the hallway. The floorboards whined beneath his feet. Molly surely knew what he was up to. She would be livid. Before she could emerge, he fled to his room and closed the door. The image of Molly had imprinted itself onto his imagination. Her gaze challenged him to look away, but he didn’t want to.
In the painting, she had given herself a black eye.
During the days that followed they settled into a pleasant enough routine. Each morning after breakfast they retired to their respective rooms so that Molly could paint and he could read. She asked him a few times about his obsession with Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he was unable to come up with a sensible explanation. It had something to do with the fact that Winston Smith had suffered every manner of torture before he surrendered to the system. Big Brother threatened him with starving rats in a cage they placed over his head. The fear got to be too much and by the end he stopped rebelling. Winston came to love his oppressor and in doing so found some semblance of contentment.