While she was off at aerobics, I went out into our woods to visit the boys from Lynn. Behind the barn I startled a deer; with a thrash that set my heart to thrashing he or she- a glimpse of russet flank, a flare of white tail swallowed by the foliage-bounded into the impenetrable area, thick with thorny greenbrier, this side of the Dunhams’ paddock. As I proceeded a bit farther, along a faint path my steps are wearing down the hill, I felt the heat of the creature’s great pelted body lingering in the air. Pieces of bright gray sky clambered overhead between the treetops.
Only Doreen was in the hut, reading a textbook edition, shortened and simplified for junior high students, of that twentieth-century master, John Grisham. She was a brainy girl, it occurred to me, who had put herself only for the time being on a low road. She was sizing life up, ready to experiment with it. Her stockinged feet were up on one wire chair while she sat in another, its metal grid softened by a dirty blanket folded into a pad. In the close heat of the cabin she had taken off her T-shirt and was bare-armed and bare-bellied in a white bra. My shadow, as I entered, dimmed the glimmer of the startling undergarment; her face lifted and also looked shady, smudged, a defensive sneer beclouding her lips. With an intentional gruffhess I asked her, “Where are your buddies?”
“Out, doing deals. José and Ray got themselves suits like you said to.”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Seems to. They say the people treat them more like they treated Spin and Phil. They cough up.”
“Good. Didn’t I say?”
“They look pretty silly.”
“To you.”
Our silence was not as uncomfortable as I would have predicted. With a sigh I sat on a third chair and looked out the square window, to take my eyes from the freckled breadth of her bony upper chest, the glossy rounds of her shoulders like inverted china cups, the single navel-dented crease across her lean belly. The square held an abstraction, a silent still gnashing of sharp-edged leaves and broken rock-faces and stabbing branches and scrabbly shapes of light-soaked sky. The boys had reinforced the stick walls with inch-thick plywood nailed to the vertical members so as to provide a crackless, relatively smooth inner surface for their shelter. This added privacy had imposed a cost: though bugs and prying eyes were better repelled, so was fresh air; when the door to the screened addition was closed, as it was now, an unstirring damp heat was sealed in. I liked it. I have always preferred the closed to the overexposed, the stuffy bed to the stinging shower.
I wondered if the boys had known I was coming. They watched me closer than I could ever watch them.
“So everything,” I said, “is working out. I keep looking out my window to see if Mrs. Lubbetts’ architecturally inappropriate beach house is burnt down yet.”
She took a breath, momentarily erasing the crease on her belly. “They said,” she said, “you could touch me wherever you wanted, but no penetration.”
I cleared my throat in the sticky air, anxious to avoid a misstep. “That’s very generous of them,” I allowed. “Is this instead of giving me my cut of the take? And what do you want, Doreen? Not to be touched at all, I imagine.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t mind too much,” she said, removing her feet from the wire chair and setting the Grisham in their place, marking her place by resting the bigger, unread half on the seat with the rest hanging down. “This book is awful macho and preachy.” She stood up, taller and more womanly already, her blue jeans insolently tilted on her jutting hip bones and so low-slung they bared the hem of powder-blue underpants.
I was frightened, and set my fingers on the white skin of her long waist as if testing a stovetop or iron for heat. She was cool to the touch, surprisingly, and clean-smelling. As my warming hands timidly investigated the ins and outs, the givingness of her waist, the immature firmness of her buttocks, I had no intention of removing any of her clothes; but the skimpy elastic bra slipped off by itself with a shrug that was her idea. She helped it up over her neck and wiry ginger-colored hair mass. The shadows between her ribs flickered when she did this. Her breasts smelled powdery like a baby’s skull, and her nipples were spherical, like paler smokier versions of honeysuckle berries. In whispers we de bated if my tongue and mouth were included in the permission to touch. We decided they were. Her fingertips toyes with the whorls of my ears as she gazed down upon my poo old scalp, naked as a baby’s beneath my transparently thinning white hair. It moved me, how much, in even so relatively undeveloped and flat-chested a sallow-skinned gir her breasts were there, jutting, reaching, even; her sharp-chinned face loomed above mine like a mothering spaceship as I slurped and nuzzled and groaned. She graciously offered to touch me, where I jutted, to relieve my groans, but I said no, the boys had made a bargain with me, and I had preached trust to them.
“A hand-job wouldn’t be penetration,” Doreen said.
“It would penetrate my soul,” I said. “I would become a love-crazed pest.” As a reward to myself for this renunciation I slid down her jeans along with her underpants, cupped her taut, porcelain-smooth buttocks in my horny old thick-fingered hands, and planted a tongue-kiss in her shallow navel. How white her belly was! Her pubic hair was just a ginger fuzz, thickest in the center, but even so she had shaved the sides in conformity with bathing-suit fashions. I stroked the pimples where whiskers would grow back. What is this human need to mutilate the most precious and tender parts of ourselves? Nostrils, earlobes, nipples. Circumcision. Art, I suppose. Taking the knife of criticism to God’s carefully considered work.
Abandoning Doreen with her jeans not yet tugged up, I hurriedly climbed the slippery hill, away from this low part of the woods. I was panting and tumescent. I had become anxious to reinsert myself back into the slowly turning works of my orderly world. The patch of heat where the invisible deer had stood and started was still there, on its spot in the path, inflaming my face. Gloria must be home by now. She mustn’t see me like this, hot and bothered. One icy-eyed question would lead to another, and there was no re-sealing the pit of truth once it was open. The curve of her car, her teal-blue Infiniti, gleamed in the driveway. The island of repetitive safety I had carved from the world seemed abruptly precious. I spit the acid taste of honeysuckle from my tongue, and emerged from beside the barn with my husbandly smile already prepared.
Over at the club, I had come in to change back into street shoes after an irritating round in which Red and I were beaten by Ken and a new sidekick of his, a younger man named Glenn, Glenn Caniff, an airline freight supervisor. There was no comparison between the way Glenn hit the ball and we did-his best drives were sixty yards beyond ours and took off on a different trajectory, low to the ground and then rising along a parabolic curve induced by backspin. His shoulder turn was exaggerated and his knee action too loose, but when he brought the club flush into the ball there was no stopping it. His chipping and putting weren’t bad either. Usually with my intermittently picture-book swing and Red’s ham-handed forearm-power we don’t lack for distance, but Glenn made us feel old and poky, and when we tried for that little extra the wheels began to come off, into the weeds. I topped two drives just up to the ladies’ tee and Red couldn’t stop his right hand from wrapping the ball around the left-field foul pole. The more frustrated we got the more smooth and affable Glenn loathsomely became and the more slowly and deliberately Ken played, giving u that sleepy silver-haired boyish pilot’s grin. Still, I sank: long putt on the last hole, for a sandy and an extra welde on our final press, so my concluding mood was not alto gether disgruntled.