He thought, Is there trouble in this? Do I want to be responsible for a break between Louise Germane and her lover? Do I know what public stance to take?
Louise Germane came into his house in the middle of the night. He turned on the lights. She looked around happily. “I’ve always wanted to come here. Even before your wife died.”
She stood in the middle of Laura’s living room, looking at Laura’s paintings, the piano, the bookcases, sofa, chair, coffee table. Violating Laura by not being her. She was not his wife, nor his daughter, he hardly knew her, yet he wanted to take hold of her like an intimate, a member of his family. The paradox made him dizzy.
She said, “I want you to show me everything.”
“Now?”
She laughed, stepped up to him full front to front, and said, “Tomorrow will do.” Then the kiss itself, the first one, already probing, this young person whom he once considered timid, but who knew all about this kind of kissing, better than he, probably. She pressed her middle and lower parts against him and leaned back to look at him, and said, “Where do we go for the festivities?”
“Upstairs?”
“Master bedroom? Great, let’s go.”
He felt a certain irritation. They went upstairs. At the door he turned on the light and stopped. Laura’s ghost. Tony was surprised, for he thought she had lifted the ban, but here she was, still not ready to leave the room. He looked into Helen’s room, also barred, and then the cool neutral guest room.
“Let’s go here.”
The festivities. She crossed her arms and pulled off her T-shirt, then they undressed, looking at each other all the while, her triumphant smile no longer secret. She was thin, her hips cast a shadow over the hollow of her thighs. She touched his cock, this girl who had been his student.
Muffled laughs, murmurs, nuzzles, tickles. Her body was as familiar as if he had known her forever. Go there, it’s okay, I wish you would. I never dreamed I’d be doing this with you. Not to rush things, but the time began to swell, it filled and could not be delayed, and he leaned over Louise Germane, maneuvering to find her, and then he was there. He thought how good to be back.
In his own guest room, under the hairy bone while she clutched, he became aware of someone watching in the doorway. Jack Billings, ousted. The ceremony was moving into its wild stage, the gauge rising. It wasn’t Jack Billings, it was someone in the other bed, while the color changed, sunset blazed on the snow, the solitary skier released to fall raced downhill on the fiery snow and dropped below into the late gray shadow. In the other bed someone was being raped by a man with his back turned, whom Bobby Andes was hitting over the back with a stick. Then Tony Hastings, even as he drew the last rich gold from Louise Germane, felt himself dividing, rising like a spirit from his twitching body to tug at the raping man in the other bed but being a spirit unable to touch him.
It was as quiet in the room as the funeral had been. She was stroking the back of his head. The people were quiet, perhaps they were gone. He looked at the other bed and discovered there was no other bed. There was Louise Germane, sweet and vulnerable, smiling vaguely like a child just waked up, and he relieved she was still alive felt tender toward her. He was confused by the violence they had just been through and the shock of seeing there was no other bed. It seemed to mean that the two beds were the same, in which case the man raping the woman was himself, which they were trying to stop, and the spirit of himself trying to intervene was only a spirit.
He was disappointed, for though he knew the time with Louise Germane had been good in itself, it was not a time in itself, for the case was not closed. He asked, “Will you spend the night?”
“I thought that was already settled.”
In the middle of the night he wanted to wake her up and tell her, hey, remember when she seduced him in the blueberry field behind the house in Maine? When Helen was bike riding with her friend, he and Laura went out with a couple of blueberry baskets. She in shorts and a flimsy shirt, a warm sunny day, absolutely still, he heard her laugh behind him, turned around, saw her with her blouse open and her hands hooked in the waist of her shorts, pushing them down. “Hey man,” she said, “what say?” and afterward a buzzing in the silence on the prickly ground. “Relax,” she said in his ear, “no one ever comes here.” Then the water, chasing her running down to the rocks where she dove in naked and he behind, the bitter cold, quick in and quick out, and, “Jesus, we forgot our towels,” running up to the house with wild stinging skin. Laura the athlete, her arm-swinging walk. Skating in winter, he went with her sometimes to the rink to watch her pirouettes and figures, where she would teach him though his ankles were weak and he had no aptitude. Once she went on a skating trip with her friend Mira to the northern part of the state and was late coming back. He lay awake until five in the morning and she still hadn’t come, and he thought the car had smashed on the highway ice. Not her fault, she had a good reason for not calling, now forgotten. Nights in the dark to tell Louise Germane about. Usually the worry was Helen, while Laura and Tony pretended to be asleep though each knew the other was awake, before Laura would sit up in bed and say, “Isn’t that child back yet?” Marriage and worry, Louise. When the doctor discovered the abnormal tissue in a routine test, they had to wait through the step by step of elimination before they could celebrate with a Chinese dinner, their future free and clear at last again.
Thinking for Louise, if you marry, you will worry. But when she died, the worries ceased, which you might consider a relief. He looked at Louise Germane, a big lump in the bedclothes, and thought: let’s marry you when we get straightened out.
THREE
The next page marks the beginning of PART FOUR. Since there’s no room for a fifth part, it’s four movements, a symphony, and we’re three quarters done. The shape of the book should be clear, but Susan still can’t predict what’s in it.
There was a blueberry field behind the house in Maine, where Susan and Edward went picking with their baskets. No sex, though. It was not she who opened her blouse or pulled down her shorts or said, “Hey man.” Does Edward writing wish she had? She’s uneasy about the sexuality in his novel. The notion that slugging Ray unfurled Tony’s cock. The vision of rape and struggle while making love to Louise. Is Tony’s sex full of rape and death because he was traumatized by Ray, or is that what Edward now believes sex is? If she could talk to Stephanie and ask.
She would tell Edward that Arnold denies violence in his cock. He never wanted to rape anyone, can’t conceive of sex against a woman’s will. Susan Morrow believes him. She wonders, do men really differ, like tribes, the gentles and the roughs? What’s violent in Arnold is meted out in a different arena: in ritual steps, washed hands in rubber gloves, tray and scalpel, measured pressure and delicate cut, concentration and control.
In their version of sex, she comes in after her shower, door shut, bedlamp on, Arnold reading in bed. Undisciplined children loose in the house, television downstairs, Nilsson immolating Brünnhilde through a closed door upstairs. Her short nightie, perfume sweetening her neck and ears. She stands near where he reads. He looks gravely at her knees, puts his book down. His hand, sensitive, moves up the back of her leg, the undercurve of her buttocks before going around to the front. She likes to see her husband the great surgeon’s distended cock, his eyes boylike before the ballgame, and she loves his stubbly head against her cheek, his projection inside her.