The gorget rose and fell as she breathed through her nose; the long muscles in her bare shoulders slid over each other as she reached for her beer.
“God, I hate this, too. Bartender, bring me a glass of chardonnay.”
She was fierce and wild as a hawk. I could imagine her wheeling between cliffs, sun glinting from her talons, harsh skree echoing down the canyon.
“So. You’re very quiet.”
She would lift those wings, thrust herself from the ledge to beat the hot air, rise and rise, and when her marigold eyes caught tiny movement down below she would stoop: crack of wind under the pinions, tiny rodent squeak of terror, snap of vertebrae, then the beat-beat-beat upward, hare hanging warm and limp from her talons. And suddenly I understood all those I don’t knows. Understood why I had come with her to Norway and taken her to visit Tante Hjørdis; why I had stood in that shop and bought the gorget; why I had shown her the Munch Room. I knew how the hawk’s mate felt when she returned with the hare and they ripped its flesh from its bones and swallowed the raw muscle and skin and stared into each other’s eyes. I understood why when she had asked Am I safe? I had said I’ll protect you, because I would protect her, from anyone, anything. The realization was shocking, like the taste of a copper penny in my mouth, like the taste of blood.
She laughed. “You have the oddest look on your face! Forget my pissing and moaning, ignore it. We’re here now. Drink some of your beer!”
The music was sinuous, insistent. She was moving with it again, swaying silver like a sleeping fish in its current.
“Dance with me,” I said, and held out my hand, and when she took it, it was not like before, not like the Munch Room; it was like closing a circuit and the current ran straight through my bones and began to heat my belly.
“Ah,” she said, and a flush bloomed under her cheekbones.
The floor was small and crowded with dancers, each their own private country as they moved belly to back, or wildly, like dervishes. Julia danced more with her body than her arms, more with her hips than breasts, and I could almost see the heat gathering below her navel, heat to match mine, like the molten core of a planet. This time we moved around a common centre of gravity that was suspended between us. It pulled us in, closer and closer, until the swell of her silver dress moved nine inches from mine, eight, seven.
“Aud,” she whispered, “Aud…”
I put my arm around her waist and swept her through the crowd. She stumbled once, legs uncoordinated and uncaring, all attention fixed on the heat gathering between my arm and her back, between the flats of my fingers where they curled over her hipbone and brushed her belly. I thrust two hundred kroner at the man at the door. “Taxi,” I said.
It appeared between one moment and the next and though the cab drove fast on empty roads, inside everything was still. We hardly breathed. My arm was still about her waist but neither of us moved as the heat built.
I must have paid him, must have ridden up in the elevator because suddenly we were in the familiar corridor and she was reaching for her doorknob and I was saying, “No, my room, it has to be my room,” and we were inside and I was locking the door.
She stood in the middle of the room and waited. I stopped two inches in front of her and reached out with my fingertips, fluttered them across her lips, down her throat where a great pulse beat, across the bare skin above her dress, and she began to moan, a deep rhythmic moan with a huff, until I stepped closer and my thigh pushed against her belly and she spread her feet wider and groaned into my mouth. Holding her to me with one hand behind her head, I used the other to slide down her zipper. When I stepped away an inch, the dress began to slip and she started to writhe. With the same hand, I unbuttoned my shirt and unzipped my trousers and now it was like trying to hold down a hurricane, and then she was straining against me and we were on the bed.
She was strong, lithe and fit and wild past civility. I stripped her naked and she literally tore the shirt from my back, and when I pushed her down and straddled her she had my pants yanked down to midthigh and her arms around my neck, and we were breast to breast and I could feel the muscles in her stomach flexing under mine. Her eyes were black as basalt. I ran my hands down her flank, bumping over ribs, curving over her hipbone, and then she was pushing herself up against me and the cords in her arms and shoulders stood out as she pulled me down against her, and we were moving over each other, sliding skin to skin, spinning a cocoon of wet trails, breathing each other’s breath, gazes locked, and the heat between us built, and she was muttering, “In me. In me.” And we moved harder and faster, and the heat built and built and now she was shouting and her arms were knotted behind my back and the heat was a blast furnace, red yellow white hot, and then it came roaring out over us, filling the world with hot air, hot metal, and flesh and bone dissolved to nothing in its path.
Julia lay on her back, smiling. I stroked her head, still tasting the shock of realization. It was just like that time when I was nine years old, and I had been playing in the autumn-wild gardens of Horley House, running and jumping for the sheer joy of being alive, and my mother had leaned from one of the big sash windows and called for me and I had run and run, full of joy and energy and vigour, leaping over rocks, over low gorse bushes, over the pile of deadwood and brambles that the gardeners had pulled together for a fire. I remember the smoky Yorkshire air, the heat of my cheeks in the rushing cool twilight, the way they burned as I finally skidded to a halt in the hall, eyes bright, and my mother looked at me, went white, and said, “What have you done to your leg?”
And I looked down and thought: Oh. My left leg was sheathed in red from the knee down, as though I were wearing a bright red sock. Then I could smell it: sharp and coppery. Blood. I twisted and peered at the back of my leg. One inch below the fold of my knee was a gaping cut.
“Lucky you didn’t hamstring yourself,” said the young, acne-riddled doctor at the hospital as he put in the final stitches.
I still have that four-inch scar today. I still wonder how it was that I got a wound like that—from the brambles, perhaps, or the nail in some old fencing—and not feel it, not feel the skin part, then the fat beneath it, and the plump, pink muscle beneath that.
Julia sighed and smiled some more. How had she managed to get inside me, slip between my ribs and rest against my heart, without me feeling it?
I stroked her up and down; so long and slim and fine. My stiletto. This is where the fear had come from, the unconscious knowledge that I was vulnerable. “I love you,” I said. Her smile broadened: she had known all along. I laughed, and it was my laugh, not one designed to cover anything. I laughed again at the sound. She laughed at my pleasure. The world is a strange and splendid place.
ten
We were packed and eating our second breakfast, this time in the hotel dining room, when the hire company delivered the car and phone. I had the driver bring the papers and phone to our table. I finished the smoked salmon while Julia called Edvard Borlaug to give him the number and tell him where we’d be, “Just in case.” When she was done, I talked to Tante Hjørdis, who said she would be delighted to see us on our way out of the city.