They strove upward in silence. A couple of moments later, it was her bra. It was black, a new one. He retrieved it.
“I’m smiling,” he said.
• • •
She was in the bathroom.
After a moment, she said, “Shit.”
“What is it?”
“I’m marveling at the feebleness of this shower and how much I don’t care anyway.”
He went to see. The water spraying out of the showerheads smelled old or stale. It wasn’t foul. Later he could unscrew the fixture and make the flow normal. He assumed the odor would go away, with use.
He considered her there, in the shower stall.
“My breasts are looking at you,” she said.
She was trying to keep him cheered up. After a baby the areolas of her perfect small breasts would take up more of the divine surface. At least that was what he expected to happen. Because she would nurse. That was already decided on. She’d once asked why men thought undressed women were not considered really naked if their nipples were obscured. He didn’t know.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Well. Quoting somebody, A pleasant despair in the region of the loins.”
“Why despair?”
“It’s just a quote. Post coitum triste, maybe, but I don’t really feel that. In fact I think maybe we struck pay dirt.” He thought, You’ve struck gold … fool’s gold: that’s from something. He said, “But it’s the female who gets the intuition, isn’t it?”
“I’m not telling,” she said.
She positioned herself so that the spray was playing directly on her face. Her hair was so long that he could grab it tight at the nape of her neck, twist up the fall, and mock-lash her with it, now and then.
“Look how much I’m not complaining,” she said.
“Look how much you’re repeating yourself. And get the fuck dressed. You have to meet people.”
“I’ll look nice. I’m putting on makeup.”
“You don’t have to.”
“No I mean the right amount, about as much as for work.”
“That much?” He said it gently.
He was sorry for women. Nina had a rather gnarled little toe she didn’t like him to look at and she was standing awkwardly with her good foot on top of the toes of what she called her awful foot.
She pointed at his crotch. “Do you think you’ll have time to give me my just deserts again, one more time?”
“That remains to be seen,” he said, leaving the bathroom.
“Wait, my breasts are still filthy,” she called. But he ignored her.
Nina was malingering. Some day someone would explain to her why everything had to be so difficult. She was supposed to be actively calm. And what if he returned with that juvenile delinquent to deal with.
Ned was competent. The windows were satisfactorily covered. And he was interesting. He’d asked her if she thought it meant anything that his favorite toy as a child had been a little tin periscope. She’d said she didn’t think so. And then he’d gone on about how long he’d been willing to secrete himself behind a sofa and wait for something to happen in the living room. And she’d said Well it shows once again your long attention span, but frankly, re a child, it was about as interesting as saying he was fascinated by secret passages and buried treasure. He wanted to tell her things. And then there was this: there had been a girl in the third grade named Lynn who wore a locket he was curious about. She was flirtatious, as in making an undue number of references to her behind, but with everybody. And she flaunted, if that’s the word, her locket, during these suggestive behaviors. And nobody knew what was in the locket. And then this and that had happened and he had gotten closer to her than the other boys had, and she’d said she was going to show him something secret — the contents of her locket. And what had been in the locket was, she’d explained, a collection of her desiccated scabs, from wounds that had healed, and he’d said that there had been something intimate about it and that in fact he’d felt like running around the play yard in some kind of triumph. Ned was increasingly into telling her the truth about everything. It was no wonder, because he’d been living for years with a piece of statuary. His mind was jammed with unshared reflections, memories …
The cabin was weird but maybe it was just right. He’d done a neat job with the paper towels and typing paper, on the windows. When she looked around she thought of shoji screens and kabuki.
22
She was always doing something, Nina. Somewhere in the cabin she had found a tiny rabbit-eared black-and-white TV set. Earlier, she had tried to get a news program on it, without success. Now she was sitting naked, crosslegged, on the bed, holding the thing out at arm’s length, squinting at it.
She said, “It only works on this one channel and only in certain places in here, certain elevations, so to speak.”
The reception was on the dappled side, but he was able to make out that she was watching an ice skating exhibition. A girl was doing a prolonged spin, head flung back.
Nina said, “I can do that for twenty minutes.”
“You don’t do it that often, I notice.”
“Do you want to know why I don’t?”
“Naturally.”
“Because it makes me dizzy.”
“Right.”
He reminded her that she needed to get ready. He went outside again.
Hume was somewhere. So be it, Ned thought.
A little way down from the cottage a mossy granite hump about the size of a compact car stuck up out of the lawn. Ned was leaning against it. He had completed the last of the top nine calls required by Convergence business. The marches were going to be immense.
Moss had a distinct odor. I did not know that, he thought. The odor was like the smell of urine. He pushed himself away from the rock and bent to examine the lower surfaces of the monolith more closely. Someone may have peed on it, he thought, or an animal like a stag marking its territory.
He was keeping an eye on the cottage. Nina must be almost dressed. She knew where he was waiting and that the paper-covered windows would let her put on a shadow play for him. She was doing it. They could doubtless get some actual curtains from the manse, if it mattered.
He stretched. It was still misty. He wanted Joris to sign the petition, and the others, too, but especially Joris. He shouldn’t be assuming he knew where his friends stood politically, based on the past. If only his personal dark sense of what it was going to be like this time could be instilled in other minds by some kind of contagion, that would help. But he didn’t have that gift. Douglas had once had it. He himself could help once the ball got rolling. He could help with the arrangements and he was always willing to be on the cleanup committee. He felt his pilot light was back on. The standard munitions the U.S. Army used were made from recycled radioactive metal. He hadn’t mentioned that to Joris, the new the hideous permanent consequences of just blowing things up. The only bad news he’d gotten during his calls was that some absolute idiot had approached ISKCON about joining the East Bay march and ISKCON had seemed interested. He was not going to have the Hare Krishnas involved if he could help it.
He walked up to the bedroom window, tapped on it, and then stepped back. Nina posed, making a cruciform shadow, which meant, he guessed, that she was ready for her debut.
He wanted to delay everything. He wanted to get up on a big rock and hold his arms out like Nina, like the Gandhi of the Catskills or the Jesus overlooking Rio de Janeiro.