Showing off.
Anneke loves it, smiles with her cheeks shining, her eyes big like the eyes of a little girl at the circus. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer still pours from the speakers, unaccompanied now. How beautiful the fireflies are, a small galaxy of them signaling to one another as the last violet light fails above them.
“Exquisite,” he breathes, unheard under the music, then pulls his lights back on.
“More!” she shouts. “Encore!”
Instead he speeds again, and she honks the Mustang’s horn, then howls from the window like a wolf.
At the bluffs.
The whispering of the surf makes him think of the thing that came from the water at him in a dream.
Not a dream.
You were flying without your body and you almost didn’t make it back.
But he loves these bluffs and so does Anneke and he’ll be damned if he’ll let some bloated nasty in a sunken ship keep him away. The ship’s far out, and the Russian’s cabin is a good mile away.
They’re safe.
The two witches, master and apprentice, are alone.
The two recovering alcoholics, one holding on, one in full relapse, are alone.
The grieving daughter and her best friend are alone.
And kissing.
When they arrived he spread an Indian throw over the high grass and they both comically rolled on it to flatten it out; it’s still lumpy beneath them, but they want to be off the main trail in case some other celebrants arrive. The Sterling Renaissance festival is opening soon and musicians, actors, and vendors wander out here in the summer months to sing, drink, and couple. Oswegian teenagers also frequent these bluffs, breaking into parked cars, smoking pot, drinking hooch. But now nothing stirs but the lake and the breeze. Andrew and Anneke lie together, cocooned in their small, grassy cell.
Hidden.
Occult, in the original and medical meaning of the word.
And kissing.
They had barely spoken on the walk from the car, just trudged out here, hopped the rusted guardrail, hiked the rise that, by daylight, gives on the lake and the little promontory one dare not walk now. They had just gotten the blanket down when her mouth was on his, hot and boozy.
And the kissing was good.
Is good.
She fumbles for his belt, and, to his utter surprise, he stops her, playing goalie like a good Catholic girl.
She stops, squints her bleary eyes at him.
“Don’t you want this?”
He sees that she’s crying.
“I’m just afraid you don’t want this.”
“You’re wrong.”
Her strong hands on his belt again, more insistent; she unbuckles it. He scooches back away from her.
“Are you fucking serious?” she says, wristing a tear out from under her eye.
“Anneke, you’re plastered.”
“So?”
“You’ll regret this, that’s all.”
She pushes him down.
Holy shit, is she actually stronger than me?
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But regret?”
She’s too drunk to say the words she wants to say, but shakes her head. He gets it. Anneke doesn’t do regret, or at least she tells herself that enough that it has become her mantra. If she were in Game of Thrones, her household words would be, “Yes, I did do that. And fuck you.”
“I need this,” she says.
She’s straddling his hips now, towering over him, the horns of the moon behind her and an embarrassment of stars about her like a fay court, bearing witness to her need and to her primacy in this.
My father is dead and you’re going to help me fuck some of it away. Just that first little bit of it. Because when the tribe shrinks by one, the sons and daughters go into the fields and make increase.
This won’t be Papillon.
She’s not laughing with him now.
She’s fearsome.
Will this bring the raven down?
“Do you love me?”
Her silhouette nods.
“Brother. Not husband. But we’re doing this tonight.”
She bends down, a tear falling ridiculously into his nostril, but this is still not funny, and she grabs two fistfuls of his inky hair, painfully, the hair at the temples. She kisses him softly, though, wetly, until the tension leaves his body. He feels it in the crotch now, that first twitch, and she feels it, too.
Off him now, and down with his pants.
She has never put her mouth to him before, perhaps never to a man before; she doesn’t entirely know what she’s doing, hurts him a little, but it doesn’t matter.
It feels to Andrew like that warm, wet contact point between them is the geographical center of all creation.
This is so unlike Althea—he feels this; his heart is as warm as the marrow of a roast lamb’s bone, melting like that, and she could beak under his sternum and lick it right out of him.
They both know it’s going to happen.
And it does.
Urgently.
Quickly.
She barely gets her jeans off.
He spends around her navel, in it, abundantly like a twenty-year-old, and gasps as he does.
She clenches her teeth to keep from sobbing, not with pleasure, he’s sure she didn’t come, but with grief and thwarted love and mortality and gratitude for this little bit of warmth, this sliver of divinity, and she holds him, her wet belly hitching.
He knows he’ll hear the sound a second before he does, and it seems so clichéd and awful and obvious that he’s angry at whatever passes for God that he should have to hear it, that the gears should move so predictably and so intractably toward sorrow.
Always sorrow.
A raven in the trees.
Kwaaar!
He tries to tell himself it’s a crow, and maybe it is.
He only hears it once.
And he isn’t sure.
51
Noisy crows in the trees greet Jim Coyle, former professor of comparative religions at Cornell University, as he clambers out of his Toyota. He arms up his modest bag of groceries—important not to overshop when you’re about to leave a place—and heads for the cabin.
He has mostly enjoyed his half-summer on Lake Ontario. The landlady lives in Pennsylvania, does all her business by mail and over the Internet; nobody disturbs him out here, and he is halfway through with his manuscript, working title The God Mechanism: Making Friends with Death. He’s ahead of schedule and still has most of his advance in the bank.
The time away from his wife has been restorative, too. The system they’ve used since her son moved out is simple: When we need space, someone leaves. When we miss each other, we reunite. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Use Protection” rule has, at least on his end, been vestigial since he turned sixty—he just doesn’t care about all the wrestling and sweating anymore, and has no feelings approaching jealousy regarding Nancy. He half hopes someone is paying attention to her that way—she’s still aesthetically attractive enough—as long as she doesn’t give him permanent walking papers; he would really miss her, even if he doesn’t easily respond to her below the waist these days. Truth be told, he feels guilty about his apathy in that department. Hormone therapy has occurred to him, but it would undoubtedly involve testosterone, and testosterone is his prime suspect in the case of his assholish youth. Interrogating girlfriends about past lovers, obsessing over sophomores and freshmen and sometimes bedding them, getting in loud fights on pay phones, it was all a ridiculous storm of ego from which he was glad to feel himself emerging in middle age. He began balding young; he purses his lips, remembering how carefully he used to hide his patchy tonsure in the days before baseball caps were cool for adults.