The day after the fund-raiser she had called him to ask if he would like to go out with her and the dean to the Thatch River. Her voice was even, almost businesslike, yet it was hiding something. “Sure,” he said. And then, “What is this, Elizabeth?” But she had already hung up on him. It was done. No turning back now.
They had taken out the old man’s cruiser yacht, named The Dante, which he kept in a slip at the Rowe County Marina. Because townies would often break into the marina and damage the boats, Dean Orman had been forced to hire his own man, a retired cop called Pig who circled the parking lot and beamed a spotlight down on the slips every couple of hours or so.
It was one of the last hot-weather weekends, and the lake had been crowded with kids on speedboats. The giant wake of pontoons jarred the old man as he fought with the wheel. They had sailed out toward Little Fork, where you could see Winchester University high up in the trees. “This is where we go,” Dean Orman explained. “It’s quiet here.” They took the yacht back in a cove and anchored it there in the shade.
Orman took the Times up front, where there was some sun cutting a jagged line across the bow. Dennis and Elizabeth went swimming together. They both knew what was going to happen, had been communicating it silently all morning. When the old man’s mouth gaped open, his head tilted back at a strange angle and the Times slack on his chest, they climbed back onto the yacht and crept below deck. There was a little room down there. A bed. Satin sheets that were stiff from weeks of disuse. A musty, stained pillow without a pillowcase. Dennis could barely fit on the bed-he lay on his back with his feet flat on the cold plastic of the boat wall. He was naked and soft. He waited. He told himself that he was doing this for a reason, to finish things with her. It was going to be hard and driving and severe. The boat rocked in the current, and with each rock Dennis’s heart nearly cracked. The old man must surely be waking, coming downstairs to find them.
She stripped off the wet bathing suit and left it in a heap at her jeweled feet. Suddenly, she was transformed. She had shaved her pussy into a little fine arrow of fuzz. Dennis saw in her nakedness a sort of youth, a kind of playfulness he had never seen in their library meetings. How old was Elizabeth? Thirty-five? Forty? He still didn’t know, but she now looked ten years younger than that. She was suddenly achingly beautiful to him, and without really registering what he was doing he was reaching out toward her, touching her, and pulling her down onto him.
But that was the extent of Dennis’s power over Elizabeth Orman. His plan, as Jeremy Price had suggested, had been to pin her down, thrust into her a few times, make it as awful as anything she could imagine so that anything between them after today would be moot. But she would have none of that. She straddled him. And then she began to ride him, her hips matching the sliding, glassy rhythm of the Thatch below them. Dennis wondered: What kind of a woman shaves her pussy? Before he knew it he was coming, losing himself in the frenzied wake, the sloshing sound of the cove now a roar, Elizabeth with her head thrown back on top of him and her tits cupped in her own hands.
Afterward she lay on top of him, both of them bundled together like piles of rope, and listened to the lick of the river. “What about…?” he asked. She put one finger over his lips to hush him. “Don’t worry,” she breathed, and for some reason he didn’t.
Sometime much later Dennis was awakened by the old man yelling his wife’s name. Dennis tried to leap up and grab his clothes, but Elizabeth held him to the bed. She mouthed, “Shhh,” and slid back into her bathing suit. She paused a moment before she opened the door, gathering herself. And then she went up to her husband, saying-too cheerfully for Dennis’s taste-“Yes, darling.” Dennis heard him say, “Where’s Dennis?” and Elizabeth replied, “Taking a nap.” Dennis had his shoulder against the door at that point, fearing that the old man was going to rush below deck in a rage and beat him senseless.
Instead, Dennis heard a splash-someone diving in. And then a second. He put on his trunks and returned to the world. The sun had moved while he slept, and now the cove was almost completely in shadow. When the old man saw him he playfully called, “Jump in!” So Dennis did, and the three of them swam together into the evening, as if nothing had happened.
Now Dennis could not get her off his mind. Her body, her name, her-rhythm. She was so different from the unlearned, clumsy Savannah Kleppers. Savannah wanted the lights off and the stereo on, so that others in the house wouldn’t hear them. She wanted Dennis on top or else it burned. She cried after sex, whether it was good or bad, and her tears would run in streams down his shoulders and chest and he was always afraid to ask her what was wrong, why was she crying, because he was afraid that her answer would somehow have to do with him.
With Elizabeth Orman, though, there was nothing of the sort. Nothing private, nothing emotional, nothing of substance except the raw thrust of pleasure. And so here he was, looking up at his ceiling in the Tau house, thinking of nothing else.
When he couldn’t take it anymore, he called her at home, on her private line that she had slipped him on their way back to campus Sunday. At the sound of her voice Dennis almost sank to the floor, his knees weak and his gut hollowed.
“I have to come over,” he sighed.
Then he was out on campus, late on a Monday night, walking Montgomery Street. He knew he should have been studying for an economics quiz, but what was done was done. He could no more dam this feeling than he could stop time.
After a weekend with temperatures that topped eighty degrees, the first hint of fall was now descending on Winchester. The wind was sharp, autumn cool, and the autumnalis trees were turning a fierce pink. The first leaves were falling, drifting down in front of the statue, The Scientist, which had been dedicated in honor of Dean Orman’s lifelong friendship with Stanley Milgram. Dennis walked by the fountain outside Carnegie, which was choked with fallen leaves. A few students were around, their words blasted away by the harsh wind, but none of it registered with Dennis. Not a thing. He could see the lights of the Ormans’ from here, their cottage-style home on Grace Hill. Normally he would have driven, but she had told him to come in the side door and cut his headlights in the drive. Screw it, he’d thought, I’ll walk. He didn’t trust himself to make it up their steep drive with no light. He imagined himself losing control of the wheel, veering onto the grass, crashing through the old man’s front window. What a scandal! It sort of intrigued him, the danger of it all. Dennis the Menace was finally living up to his name.
She let him in the side door. The house was dark; Dennis assumed that the old man had an early bedtime. They tiptoed through the kitchen and stood for a moment kissing in the living room. She was wearing a robe, and she smelled like bathwater and fingernail polish. He felt under the robe, groped her feverishly as if he were in junior high, but she turned away and led him up the stairs. They made their way through a hall, and halfway down she jabbed her red fingernail at a closed door. The old man.