When had buck naked turned into butt naked? Nina wondered. And when had it become common for women to refer to their own breasts as boobs, and as casually as they might refer to their elbows or ears?
She had resisted sleep. It was midafternoon. Ned was dozing. Their limbs were still entangled. Something she liked was waking up with Ned and finding that they were in new combinations and alignments, compositions devised by their unconscious minds while they slept. Once she’d awakened to find that the soles of her feet were pressed firmly against his. She wanted everything to go on forever if possible.
Meticulously and with strategic halts she disengaged from Ned. He could sleep some more. She was feeling almost perfect. Ned had come twice. She had a good feeling about the first shot especially. She was using the word womb a lot in her ruminations lately. Ned had been all heat and conviction. And she should be doing one of her dumb visualizations, shouldn’t she, à la her womb becoming a flowerpot suddenly exploding with geraniums? She didn’t feel like it. As a young girl she’d visualized her heart as a dark red artichoke and the leaves as things her future boyfriends would strip away and it would be dramatic.
She was supposed to have her legs above her head by this time. Okay she was pinching her introitus shut. Now to get on with it.
She studied her sleeping man. There was something she understood, which was why Ned had felt so urgently the need to fly east. It had to do with power. It had to do with the old days, with the dismal Roman Catholic miasma of his household, the Catholic spell over his mother and his brother, the deathly house he was raised in, the early death of his father, his escape to NYU and meeting Douglas and being included in the power group of friends. That had been his great escape, as he saw it. Right now it was like a fable where some grail or amulet has been mislaid and needed to be gotten back by a hero going into a labyrinth or dark gorge the hero had already passed through once. Oops he forgot his amulet in the gorge and has to go back. She had a better idea of what he was doing than he did. He wasn’t depressed but he wasn’t happy enough. The fucking truth was that Ned was in fact an instrument for good, both in Fair Trade and before, in the co-operative movement … what was left of it. But he could be more of a force! He was a skeptic on the subject of himself. It held him back. It was painful to her. She shook the thought away.
She had inched herself to a sitting position on her edge of the bed. Her next feat was going to be achieving a three-quarter shoulder stand without waking her husband up. She swiveled around and raising her pelvis she levered her feet up the wall at the head of the bed. When she felt the angle was steep enough she let go of her vulva. She held the position. She was dogged. Should she throw in some visualization? It was too boring. She would distract herself otherwise. “You guys are adorable,” she murmured to her breasts. Ned was a fiend for her breasts. It was almost a dream state he went into. She was reminded that there was an amount of hair on Ned’s back she might suggest doing something about, if he were somebody else.
Getting fucked was so interesting, seen from the peculiar detached mental moment that could descend on her during the act. She felt a flash of fellowship with all women getting fucked, the ones getting fucked carelessly or badly or cruelly, the ones fucked decently or brilliantly. She thought of the shadow of night sliding around the globe endlessly, and with the fall of night the clashing of a million cymbals sounding and representing the coming together of males and females in the Continue Humanity project, this colossal enterprise. But that was enough. There was too much blood in her head.
She let herself relax off the wall. She lay with her knees up for a while, and then turned on her side, sensing suddenly that something was wrong. One of the towels was moving. Where it had been clenched between the sash and casing, something was dragging it minutely to one side leaving naked glass along the edge of the window and then there was an eye and part of a face in that space and then that was gone. It was gone before she could gasp. She was freezing. Violently she caught the sheets up against her and in the process woke Ned.
21
He hadn’t run this fast since his last field day at Frick Junior High. He was running in an attempt to lay hands on the only child of an old friend who was dead. Life was unusual.
Peeping at naked people without their permission was a crime. He could understand an adolescent doing it, but still. When he’d realized what it was Nina was trying to tell him he’d jammed himself into his clothes. His loafers were meant to be worn with socks, not bare feet.
He stopped to finish buttoning his shirt and to get his breath. He could see Hume. This was a lower part of the hill where the lawn had given way to brush, down past the place Douglas’s life on earth had ended. His quarry, which is what Hume was, appeared intermittently. He was on the opposite side of the stream that was roaring its way toward the flatlands. Hume was scrambling nimbly up and away through the vegetation. Douglas would have been proud.
He was tired. He’d scared Hume, which was all he could do for now. He didn’t know if there was something generically wrong with the next generation or not. You can’t lift a cheesecake with an iron hook, somebody had said. Hume was tearing his way out of sight. He was gone. Ned turned back. Nina was coming to join him.
Sex with Nina was so … great. And there was no work to it. Claire had thought of her own body as a votive object.
“I wish you wouldn’t run,” she said when she reached him.
“Why not?”
“You could fall. People fall and die around here.” She swept her hand in the direction of the raging brook. There were slick boulders spaced across the brook that only an idiot would use to cross over. She pointed at them. “Look, you might have tried to jump on those youyouyou, my man of action, my man of action guy. Good thing I came … What’s wrong with that boy?” She was wearing a man’s engulfing white terrycloth robe and flip-flops.
“I don’t know. What Joris said is that they were going to try homeschooling again. Hume told his mother he’s a follower of Odin. They’re a pagan group and their religion is based on Norse mythology. The whole deal is right wing.”
Nina was a proud person. He had to remember about not over-explaining things to her. She was self-conscious about her two-year community college education but she knew more than anybody, really, and certainly more than Claire, and Claire had a PhD. It would be good not to spend too much time thinking about fucked-up children. Only children, like Hume, seemed to be the biggest risk and their child was likely to be a one and only.
She said, “You must be cold.”
Here it came. She had a fixation about being dressed warmly at all times, not only herself but the world. There was nothing annoying about it, or there shouldn’t be, because it came from nothing worse than out-of-control empathy. It was part of her character. She was also crazed about bedclothes, blankets. She tended to want more coverage than he did and she would frequently insist or at least imply that she knew better how comfortable he was going to be with his choice of blanket layers than he did. She laughed when he accused her of making too many blanket statements.
They came to a decision. They would go back to the cabin, where he would scotch-tape paper towels onto the windowpanes, two layers if he went outside and could see anything. They would make tea.
She led the way back. She was doing something. She was torquing around in the cavernous robe she had on. She was making good time.
Her underpants dropped to the ground and she kicked them to the side, striding straight ahead. He picked them up, noted the teardrop-shaped wetness in the crotchpiece, balled them up, and put them in a pocket.