Hot Springs
Carol Queen
It was Sunday morning before I finally got out of the city, leaving the piles of books and notes that were my dissertation on my desk and closing the apartment door firmly on them. By the time I’d driven an hour north into the valley, I’d begun to relax. The leaves on the grapevines were beginning to turn, great clusters of soon-to-be-harvested fruit everywhere, but the October day was hot as summer. It was beautiful, and got more so as soon as I’d left the valley towns behind and began the drive up the old wild mountain, the road narrow, one switchback after another, and a slightly hazy vista of hill and valley and hill at every turn. Little enough traffic up there that I could take the mountain curves fast, two-handed, my car and I like one creature. I love this feeling, that I’m half man, half machine. Soon I reached the hot springs.
I was ready for a two-day soak, ready to sleep under the mountain stars, ready to be away. The springs were old sacred land, one place where the vast geothermal soup bubbling under the mountain broke through to the surface, appropriated lately as a kind of New Age resort. Still a powerful place, though, and its proprietors now tried to reinforce that sense of the sacred by dotting the place with little shrines, a Buddha here, a goddess there. Its specialness was most apparent in the demeanour of its visitors, all of whom seemed to sense and respect that it had been a healing place long before any of us were born. I lost no time in choosing a place to camp and then sliding into the warm pool, and my dissertation, already well out of mind, retreated a little further still.
I’d left the water to sun myself on the nearby deck when I saw her, unloading her car with her companion, probably her lover, by the way she spoke to and touched him familiarly, almost absently, for she seemed more absorbed in her surroundings. Perhaps a newcomer here. I caught her eye, and she let a small, wary smile slip; then they climbed the steps to the lodge. Not campers, then. I watched them leave their room to explore, strolling the grounds, locating the pools and the showers, passing me once or twice. Then they went back inside. I imagined them undressing, falling on to the bed.
But he was out before long and in the pool, and it was an hour or more before she emerged, clad in a towel. Their room key hung from one of her hoop earrings, and when she turned or shook her head, it grazed her neck, making a tiny jingle, I imagined, that only she could hear. The pool was so deep that the key’s tip touched the water, making a little wake as she glided through.
She stood alone for a while, eyes closed, feeling the warm silken water of the mineral springs on her skin. He saw her and moved to join her. Heads close together, they talked quietly for a moment, then left the pool for the sauna. I watched the door swing closed behind them.
She was probably still inside, probably lying flat on the smooth, hot wood of the benches, the heat searing into her with every breath, sweat pooling between her pretty little breasts — she had a tattoo on one, but I hadn’t been able to make it out from a distance — when he returned to the pool. He came in slowly, pearls of sweat on him, too, surveying everyone. Seeing me, he moved towards me through the water. Had he noticed me watching them?
He smiled, said hello, began to chat. He was gregarious but somehow sweet, with big blue eyes and the smile of a cherub. He asked my name, told me his, found out within a scant few minutes where I was from, where and what I studied, the topic of my dissertation, how soon I hoped to be finished, and what I wanted to do next. He and the woman were indeed first-time visitors to the springs. He talked about his work a bit — he was a nurse who cared for AIDS patients — but more about hers.
She was a sex educator, he said, who also did AIDS-related work, teaching people about safer sex. He’d been talking about her for a full five minutes when she emerged from the sauna, prompting an overly bright, “Well! There she is now!” from him.
She moved with the languor of one surrendered to relaxation. I could see the sheen of sweat on her eyes in the deepening twilight, and she carried her towel in her hand, not bothering to cover her nakedness as she approached the pool. The key swayed from her ear as she moved. Others in the pool were watching her, too.
Did I imagine the look of pleasure when she saw that he was talking with me? She slid into the water and moved towards us, laughing. “You’re such a friendly thing, honey.” When he introduced us, her attention turned to me. He told her what he’d learned about me; she asked me to tell her more about my academic work, more keenly interested than he had been.
Serious, intense green eyes. She reached to touch him but kept her eyes fixed on me. Her tattoo shimmered below the water. I thought I could make out the images of a moon and a star. Maybe I’d ask her about it later.
“I understand your area of interest is sexuality,” I said, imagining the leering way she must have heard it said before, hoping I sounded nothing like that.
“He’s been talking behind my back again, eh?” she said. She smiled at me, arched her eyebrows at him, and he laughed like a kid caught at a game and said, “Yes, I’ve been telling him all about you.”
“I used to read Kinsey out loud to my friends when I was seventeen,” she said. “The study of sex always fascinated me, but it didn’t seem a serious enough area to specialize in. . too lightweight, too dilettantish. Until recently,” she added, with a little frown.
“Until AIDS?” I asked.
She nodded. “Now it’s too real, it’s crucial. People seem to have a lot of trouble adjusting to safe sex, or else they’re in such fear that they risk losing touch with their sexuality altogether.”
What a funny pair they were. He was listening to our conversation with satisfaction, blue eyes laughing, looking first at one of us, then the other, not seeming to respond much to her great seriousness. Some sex educators manage to make the juiciest pleasures sound dry and academic. Not her: she talked about sex like it was the grail, a higher calling — passionate yet earnest, like a Marxist talking about revolution. Tempted to make a wisecrack — “Well, I bet you excelled at your labs” — I decided instead to meet her devotion to her subject with the kind of respect I’d want anyone to show about my own work.
“I have to confess I’ve had some of those problems myself,” I said. “It can be so difficult to know when to talk about safe sex, and I can’t really say I like to use condoms.” It seemed perfectly easy to talk to her about it. But he was quicker to reply than she was: “You ’re in luck — we give lessons!” he said with a big grin. Her smile flashed back but she pretended to ignore him, saying, “The real key is having a casual experimental attitude, especially at first. Take it too seriously and it’ll seem like work, not pleasure.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard him, too. I regarded them. Were they coming on to me? Her earnestness in talking, her lack of flirtatiousness threw me off, though he was certainly forward enough for the both of them. Was she a participant at all? Surely this was not just an ingenuous act. I determined to wait until she extended me an invitation to decide whether to take it.
I didn’t have to wait long. He moved behind her as she and I continued to talk, and lifted her. He held her up with one hand — easily, she was buoyed by the water — and traced her body with the other. She sighed and settled back against him. She was more near my eye level now, her breasts above water. I could see the tattoo clearly, and even in the dimming light, I could see her nipples growing hard from the touch of the cool air. It was not immediately clear whether this was a show for me; I felt a little uneasy, not knowing, nor knowing how to proceed. Was I going to be a part of this scene?