I stepped close to Marla and held her. For a moment she didn’t respond, then she lifted her head and looked at me sadly and whispered, “This shouldn’t have been our first time.”
I kissed her. And with that kiss I tried to pull us into a dark cocoon that would hide us from the man who sat watching. For a moment it worked, for a moment we were lost in each other. But then his voice came again.
“Take her clothes off.”
I knew, even as I began undoing her bikini top, that I should stop this, that she was uncomfortable, unhappy, that the honorable thing to do would be to just give Bill his money back and tell him we’d changed our minds. But I didn’t. I couldn’t let go of this opportunity. I wanted sex, there was no doubt about that, but what drove me more to peel away Marla’s swimsuit was a raging emotional greed, the need to be close enough to her again to begin fixing the piece of my past that belonged to her.
We got down to it, there in that warm hollow that like a lens seemed to capture the heat and concentrate it about us. When I entered her, despite being watched, despite the tawdry circumstances of the act, I felt an immediate and overpowering sense of relief. She had let me close to her. And if she could do that then surely there could be no further barrier to becoming a couple again. In Marla, too, I sensed a relaxation of spirit, as though she had wanted to clear this hurdle every bit as much as I.
This letting-go of hers, though, didn’t last long. At some point she shifted under me and I saw that she was looking over my shoulder at Bill. I turned my head. He was standing, pants around his ankles, masturbating as he watched us. It didn’t surprise me. In fact I had assumed he’d do exactly that, but it seemed to disgust Marla and she went stiff and kept her eyes closed until we were finished.
Bill left as soon as it was over, just buttoned his pants and walked quickly away. I thought about yelling after him to look out for bears, but I didn’t. Marla and I sat there silent and naked and watched him go. When he was out of sight I turned to her and forced a laugh.
“Well…”
I wanted her to laugh too, but she did not.
We got dressed and made our way back through the forest holding hands and not saying anything.
In the parking lot Bill Prentice was waiting beside his SUV. He waved for me to come over. Marla let go of my hand and went to wait by the pickup. Bill had the lease papers for the warehouse ready for me to sign-one year with the option to renew for two more, a reasonable yearly fee, three months up front, the rest in monthly installments. I signed them against the metal of the car’s hood and prayed that this venture with Stan would not turn out to be too disastrous.
CHAPTER 9
I stayed the rest of the weekend at Marla’s place and by the end of it she had agreed to a permanent relationship again. Even though our exhibition in the forest had played a role in this reconnection Marla seemed haunted by the episode.
“Sometimes, I can’t believe what we’re capable of. The things we do… it seems like we’re programmed to destroy ourselves.”
“Forget about it. It was a crazy afternoon, that’s all. We’ve got to leave the past behind us.”
Marla looked at me skeptically. “I really don’t think you’re made that way, Johnny. But what choice do we have? You want to be with me and I can’t live without you. We’ll have to go through it until it all falls apart again.”
“It’s not going to fall apart. There’s nothing to say we can’t have a great life together.”
She smiled sadly. “We’ll see.”
About eleven o’clock on Monday morning I got home to find Stan in the kitchen sitting at the table eating a large bowl of cereal and reading a comic book.
“How come you’re not at work?”
“’Cause Dad wants to take us somewhere. He said it was a big surprise. I called Bill, it’s okay.”
“What sort of surprise?”
“I don’t know, Johnny, that’s why it’s a surprise.” Stan pushed the cereal box toward me. “Have some breakfast. Nutrition’s important. And guess what? Bill’s leaving the key to the warehouse with the girls at the counter. Can we go check it out after?”
“Sure, you bet.”
“Awesome!”
Stan got up and stared shunting around the room like a train, chanting, “Business-man, business-man, businessman…”
Half an hour later my father came home. He was carrying a flat package wrapped in brown paper. We followed him into the living room and watched as he tore open the wrapping and lifted out a framed black-and-white photograph about two feet long. He set it on the back of the couch so that it leaned against the wall.
Stan bent forward and examined it. “Is it around here?”
“Yes, not far.”
It was an aerial photo of forested land. The dark line of a river curved in from the right of the frame and made a pronounced bulge around what looked to be some sort of rock spur. Trees lined both sides of it. In the upper half of the photo they were unbroken, but below the river there was a patch of cleared land. On the bottom right-hand corner of the picture a serial number was imprinted and the image itself looked slightly grainy, as though it had been blown up from a smaller print.
“Did you go up in a plane and take it, Dad?”
My father laughed. “Not me, Stan.”
“Are you going to put it on the wall?” Stan sounded dubious.
“I was planning to.”
“You should have gotten something with colors.”
“This is a special picture. What do you notice about it?”
Stan squinted hard at it, then stepped back and blinked his eyes rapidly. “Whew, that made me dizzy. It’s just a river, Dad. Is it the Swallow River?”
“Well done. See anything else?”
“Yikes, you’re going to make my head spin round. I can’t see anything. Ask Johnny.”
“It’s just trees and a river to me too.”
My father smiled and looked at the photo and shook his head as though he couldn’t believe his luck.
“Come on. We’re going for a drive.”
We left the house and got into my father’s car. As we rolled out of the driveway Stan put on a pair of mirrored aviator shades and tied a patterned silk handkerchief around his neck.
The place my father took us to was called Empty Mile. Once we were out of Oakridge it was about a twenty-minute drive, the last few miles of it along a single winding lane of blacktop known only as Rural Route 12. Along the sides of this road dusty wooden poles supported an old electricity feed that served isolated dwellings erected over the years by a handful of families who preferred a more reclusive lifestyle. Neither tourists nor townsfolk had any reason to come out this way-there was nothing to see here that couldn’t be seen closer to town or in more scenic surroundings. The only sign that the area was inhabited came from occasional boards, hand-painted with family names, that marked the entrances to unpaved trails.
At one of these my father turned off the road and onto a track that was just two tire furrows worn in the earth. We drove along this through sparse forest until we emerged at the top of a wide meadow of deep grass that sloped downhill for several hundred yards. My father stopped the car and we got out.
The trees we’d passed through were behind us and to the left and ahead of us also the meadow was bordered by forest. On our right the land rose in a steep rock wall about seventy feet high.
In the top left corner of the meadow there was an old wooden house that needed paint. It was set off the ground and had a short flight of steps leading up to a roofed veranda. A beaten-up orange Datsun was parked beside it and in an unfenced garden washing hung on a line.
On the opposite side of the meadow from this house, about halfway down the slope, there was a much newer log cabin. This too had a stoop along its front and there was a large rainwater tank and a small shed out back.