Chapter 6 #3
“Is that so?” she said.
She made a pile out of the squashed rinds and gradually filled the pitcher with juice.
In two squat glasses, she mixed it with the simple syrup and the tequila and added a handful of ice, the tiny air bubbles releasing fizzy snaps and pops.
Then we went to their library, the book-lined, plant-filled antechamber off the dining room.
I’d seen the room in the dark, but in the daylight it was even more inviting.
The room was designed for comfortable contemplation.
Two armchairs faced a sofa running under the bay windows overlooking the side yard.
Outside were two plum trees, bleary in the marbled panes.
A hanging glass prism splashed the room with rainbow fragments.
We took seats well apart from each other, her on the sofa, me in an armchair, and continued our play.
“So what else is happening?” she said, pulling her legs under herself, smoothing her dress. “How’s the book coming?”
We never talked about the book on our island. She knew I found it hard to talk about a book in progress, the action was so mental and slow-moving. There were never any good anecdotes to recount. But this play we were acting in was forcing us into new, more generic territory.
“I’m getting my daily word count,” I said.
“How many words do you go for in a day?” she said.
“A few hundred,” I said. “If I can. Five hundred is a good day. A thousand is great. That almost never happens.”
“What’s the title?”
“Right now it’s just called The Tree Book. ”
“That’s kind of a dull title.”
“I have some other ideas. We’ll see.”
“Do you have a lot of files?” she said. “Or one big file?”
“A lot of files,” I said. “But they’ll all join together pretty soon.”
“Interesting.”
It wasn’t that interesting. We talked about formatting for a while, and fonts.
We kept it very superficial. Phil was our true audience, even though he couldn’t hear a thing we said, and the words were only a shell game, anyway, a thin veil covering up the pulse of sex that had started beating between us.
As we talked, Sarah was shifting her weight on the couch and stretching her arms so the straps of her sundress sometimes fell.
She was taking satisfying sips of her drink that showed off the elegant curve of her neck.
I leaned back in the chair, slouching, allowing my lap to spread.
The signals passing between us were silent but constant.
We hadn’t been in a room without disrobing in weeks.
“Do you ever write longhand?” she said.
“I take notes longhand,” I said. “And sometimes I’ll write a whole first draft longhand. I print out a lot no matter what, and make a lot of notes with a pen.”
“How often do you print out?” she said.
“Every couple weeks, I’d say,” I said. “Inputting the written notes is a real pain. But I once made the mistake of not printing out often enough. It really hurt the book. I got lost. I need to see it on paper.”
“Writing is such a graphic thing, isn’t it?”
“The shape of a paragraph is a kind of sculpture.”
We talked about handwriting for a while, and how illegible people’s handwriting had become.
Kids never learned how to write with a pen anymore.
My own handwriting hadn’t ever been any good.
I had trouble reading it myself sometimes.
Maybe I needed glasses, she said. I’d look good in glasses.
And then she told me about where to find the best glasses.
It was sometime during that lecture that she got up and went to the doorway between the library and the dining room and quietly edged the sliding door partly closed, though not all the way.
To close the door all the way would have been suspicious, but to close the door partly seemed within reason, a courtesy.
On the way back to the couch she paused and crouched and kissed me on the mouth. The kiss was long, flavored with tequila. Her hand wandered to my lap. My groin rose to meet her.
Our kissing was only a dumb joke at first, a dare. We were both terrified of Phil only a matter of feet away, hidden behind a couple of thin walls. But when no one stirred, no sounds drifted down, she kissed me again.
“This is a very bad idea,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
But I guided her closer. She pivoted and lowered herself onto my lap and we kissed more deeply.
The betrayal was building to a new magnitude.
This was a true sin we were committing. To sneak off in the night, away from anyone’s eyes, that was one thing.
To do this here was a form of sadism. The cruelty of the act was unforgivable. But we kept going.
The next moments went by fast and hot. My hands slipped under her dress, running up her spine, cupping her naked breasts. Our breathing became ragged, our eyes blank. I stood up from the armchair and went down onto my knees, lifting her dress and going at her from the angle I knew she liked.
Sarah shuddered, her hands caught in my hair.
I held her thighs as I licked her and kept going until she moaned quietly and pulled away.
We weren’t done yet. She grabbed a pillow from the couch and threw it onto the floor and lay down and pulled me along with her.
A moment later, our hot breath was in each other’s ears.
She was fumbling with my belt and then my pants were at my knees.
She opened her legs and I slid inside her.
She whimpered. I groaned. Within a few strokes it was over, as quickly as it started, appalling but ecstatic.
Immediately, I peeled off my sock and swabbed our stomachs, looking at her with a mixture of gratitude and remorse.
We both knew we’d crossed a terrible line.
We’d thrown Phil into a boiling volcano, or maybe thrown ourselves in, we weren’t sure yet.
We’d definitely committed a human sacrifice, that much was clear, but of whom, and to what deity, we had no idea. In that moment, we didn’t really care.
We didn’t care, that was, until a few seconds later, when we heard sounds in the kitchen.
Sarah was in the middle of handing me back the damp sock, and we both froze in place.
We’d been so blinded by our desires we hadn’t noticed Phil’s footsteps descending the stairs.
He must have come down right in the middle of our lunacy.
What idiots! To take such a stupid risk!
We sat there on the floor for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes. We didn’t know what to do. We could hear Phil moving around, opening the cabinet doors, rattling dishware. Sarah was the first to collect herself and begin talking again.
“I bet handwriting has changed a lot in the last few years,” she said, almost normally. She stood and tiptoed back to the couch where she’d been, replacing the cushion, softly lowering herself down. “I mean, with computers and all. Do girls still do the big, bubble letters anymore, I wonder?”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” I said, sliding my pants up to my hips. “I think maybe not? I don’t have any idea.”
“That seemed like such a forever thing,” she said, locating her glass. “The big bubble letters, with the hearts and stuff. But I guess that was just a phase of history. I wonder when girls started writing that way?”
“Ballpoint pens,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
She fluffed her hair and I checked my shirttails and pants for any fluids.
Her cheeks were flushed, but the margarita could probably be blamed for that.
The whistle of a teakettle came from the kitchen.
I projected the question into her mind: “Does Phil have any idea what we just did?” “I don’t know!
” she projected back. “I don’t think so. ”
“I know an artist who works in ballpoint pens,” she said. “She’s really amazing. She can do anything with a Bic. Giant works on paper. Women and apes. And plants. Amazing stuff. Your mom’s an artist, isn’t she? What kind of art does she make? I don’t think I know.”
“She makes quilts,” I said. “But the kind you hang on a wall.”
“Do you like your mom’s quilts?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Tell me about your mom’s art.”
I didn’t have any desire to talk about my mom’s art, though there was plenty I could say.
I was possibly the world’s foremost expert.
But before I could get started, Phil’s footsteps exited the kitchen.
We heard them crossing the dining room floor, growing louder.
Would he peek in on us, we wondered, or would he go back upstairs?
We waited to find out. The footsteps continued coming closer.
We heard him shuffling to the doorjamb and pulling the door wider a few inches.
His face appeared in the crack. His friendly, innocent face, haggard with flu, eyes red and baggy.
“Oh, Arthur,” he said. “I thought I heard you.”
“I hear you’re feeling not so great,” I said, with moist concern. “I hope you’re doing okay. Are you?”
“Getting worse before I get better, I’m afraid,” he said, wiping his nose.
“Seems like a flu has to touch every part of my body before it goes away. This one started in the throat last night. Now it’s down in my chest. It’ll be up in my head tomorrow.
Sorry, I’m too sick to come inside. I don’t want to give you anything. ”
“Sounds like it’s running its course, honey,” Sarah said.
“I can hold on to a cough for months, personally,” I said. “You should take it real easy, Phil.”
“Arthur’s right,” Sarah said. “You should be back in bed.”
Phil nodded, and his eyes roamed over the room, a bit longingly.
He gazed over the books, the plants, and then my sock near the fireplace.
I thought I’d stuffed the sock into my pocket, but apparently it’d fallen out in the scramble.
Phil seemed to stare at the sock for a moment, puzzling over it.
Probably he thought it was his sock. It was gray and wadded.
My bare foot was tucked under my leg to avoid drawing any attention.
For a moment, Phil seemed to hover in the doorway, pondering whether to come in and pluck the sock from the floor, but mercifully, a coughing jag hit him.
He hacked uncontrollably for a few seconds, his face reddening, tears squeezing from his eyes.
When the spasm ended he stood there in the jamb, swaying, shaking his head.
“I’ll leave you two to it,” he said.
“I’ll bring you more tea soon,” Sarah said. “You sound awful. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll be asleep,” he said. “I just took some Theraflu. That always knocks me out. Well. Good evening. Drink another one for me.”
We bade him goodbye and listened as his feet heavily climbed the stairs.
If he’d noticed anything, he’d disguised any signs completely.
We didn’t feel the need to celebrate, though, or even acknowledge our victory.
Barring a moment of wide-eyed relief, we continued talking as we had been, about penmanship and the nature of art versus craft.
Soon, Sarah fixed us another round of margaritas.
It would’ve been suspicious to have just one.