“How sorry are you?”
“So sorry, but we’re forgiving each other, right?”
“Not yet. I’m not going to kill you, I’m going to fuck you.”
“Absolutely.”
“That is your punishment.”
“I know. And I’m so sorry the way I left. My heart is shaking.”
He was squeezing her. He was full of joy. They had to get down from there. She was pressing his crotch with the back of her hand. She did anything she wanted to. He wasn’t hard. Afloat, he felt afloat.
“Hm,” she said.
“Don’t worry, my dear.”
He pulled her hand up and against his chest. He said, “Feel my heart.”
“Feel mine,” she said, and pressed his hand against the front of her bright yellow linen shirt, his favorite.
They had to stop this.
He renewed his embrace in order to keep his balance.
“Unhand my behind,” she said.
17
They had decided to proceed by stages up to the property, pulling her luggage and stopping to rest as much as they needed to, taking their time and talking, catching up. She’d said she loved all the trees, but described them as excessive, to make him laugh. She wasn’t above using a witticism twice if she thought he’d missed it the first time or had insufficiently appreciated it. She had no shame about it, in fact she thought doing that was funny.
They were at the bridge. She said, “I want to tell you something so I can forget it. You can help me. I had to squeeze past a woman in the aisle on the plane and I thought she was making a face at me so I made a face back at her, just before I realized she was exophthalmic. I feel awful. I want you to make it fade from my mind. I want it to fade so completely there’s not a trace. So make it fade.”
“I’m doing it.”
Nina said, “Tell me when it’s completely gone.”
They laughed.
They were kissing again. “It’s good you didn’t wear lipstick,” he said.
“Thinking ahead,” she said. She was neatening him up. She’d once said that makeup was advertising for your vagina and hers was taken. He’d liked that remark even if it wasn’t serious, because she was his.
One thing he’d learned from her, that she’d learned from the burgomaster, was that there was another road, a much longer back way up the hill that avoided the torrents and was used by trucks and emergency service vehicles. And she had brought him up to date on the Convergence. There was a solid consensus that the talking points would use Invasion but not Anglo-Saxon Invasion. He’d taken the position that that was what it was going to be, literally, even if the Spaniards were brought in to put a mustache on it. It was going to be Americans, Brits, and a few Australians but no French.
They crossed the bridge. Nina wanted to know what Douglas had meant when he said he lived in a dying forest.
Ned said, “He was being melodramatic. There was an ash blight. The other trees were fine. And maples were the successor species, so it ended up greener than before.”
Ned moved his attention to the urgent question of accommodations, meaning a decent bed, not a cot, and privacy. It had to be solved.
18
It had taken only a second’s observation to dismiss the tower accommodations as impossible. She was a pest when it came to beds. She knew it. She was a mattress hog and was used to articulating her body for sleep employing an army of pillows which was why their mattress at home took up three-quarters of the bedroom. If she had to, she would lie down on an ironing board to conceive, but she strongly preferred not to.
Ned was a genius at logistics when he wanted to be. She needed him to be a genius now. He needed to start machinating immediately. She looked at his crotch. She had gone overboard with the teasing, obviously, given that he now had to go forth and interact.
“Recede,” she said, addressing his lower self.
19
He was a genius and this was a coup.
He was slightly hyperventilating as he locked the cabin door behind them, triumphant. He had proved his ingenuity his desire his what-have-you, in spades … and his, well, erectitude because here he was, getting hard again. Nina wanted more kissing. It had taken a certain power, what he had done.
What he had done was, he had executed a continuous single flourish ending where they were, safe and private together. He had gotten Nina up the hill, had her wait out of sight in the tower, sought out the head housekeeper, a new persona, Mrs. Murphy, and laid out to her that his wife was here and that they urgently needed their own place, and getting a key from her for the unused pristine cabin expressly built for the boy, Hume. He had been delicate but frank with Mrs. Murphy, a thin, older, darker, sighing woman he guessed to be a Filipina. Elliot had approved the arrangement, frantic as he had been with phones ringing in the hive of industry that was the cockpit of everything going on. Since anything that might delay conjugation felt unbearable, he’d avoided Joris and Gruen.
This Wendy house was one of the many custom living setups Douglas had tried to sell to his impossible son over the years. There had been boarding schools of various kinds including a brief spell in something in Saugerties called a Hof, which had been a facility run for the youth wing of an Odinist pagan organization. Then there was the boy’s yurt. And a room somewhere in the manse, too. So they had created this House of His Own, and he’d rejected it.
“That’s right, manhandle me,” Ned said as Nina clung to him while he edged them into the bedroom. There were two rooms, a small main room and a bedroom, and what would have to be called a kitchenette, and a bathroom. The smell of fresh paint hung in the air. Some of the window panes still bore manufacturers’ stickers. The walls were pale gray, window frames white, the floors gleaming amber pine. The main room housed an old steel desk, a chair, and a bookcase with one paperback in it, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, by H. P. Lovecraft. The kitchen had seemed to be equipped with the basics, although there was no food in the countertop refrigerator. There was a stack of new window screens awaiting installation. In the bathroom it had been similar: towels, facecloths, soap still in its wrapper, an electric fan and an electric heater, both still boxed. The windows were uncurtained. The ceiling lights functioned and there was a gooseneck lamp on a stool near the head of the bed. So they could read when their revels were over that night. Good. The bed linen was fresh. In fact, it was new.
You could begin a new life in a place like this, which had probably been the idea, Ned thought. He imagined himself arriving with a toothbrush and a pad and pencil and sitting down to stare out at the verdure, nothing on his agenda, which reminded him that he had to find a way to cover the bedroom windows with towels, somehow. Nina was continuing with undressing him. To put up the towels he needed pushpins or a hammer and nails, and right away. Nina was being herself. She ceased long enough for him to collect a few towels and she joined him in clamping the top edge of the towels between the sashes and the casing on each of the windows looking into their bedroom. It wasn’t a neat job, but it would do.
Nina resumed her attentions, undressing him without his assistance, slowly, like the devil incarnate she was.
Nina wanted him naked but she liked herself to be half-dressed for the proceedings. She dropped her buckskin jacket to the floor. She liked to be taken in dishevelment, with her underwear askew or undone, outer garments barely obscuring her naughty bits.
She finished undressing him, kissing his genitals when she felt like it.
20