by Jane Smiley
I was in the office the next day when Felicity showed up with a bag of hamburgers and fries. It was the first really hot day of the year, and she was wearing linen shorts and espadrilles. Her hair was pinned up casually and fell in sweaty tendrils over her collar. It was almost too hot to eat, but the hamburgers smelled good. She set them out on paper towels on Bobby’s desk. She lifted the top of the bun off mine and showed me the underside. She said, “Look at that. See that crispy rim there? This is a great bun. Aren’t you hungry? I almost got another one to eat in the car on the way over. And these seasoned fries. I told the waitress to be sure they came out of the fryer and into the bag so they would be perfect by the time I got here. Oh, God!” She put two fries into her mouth.
“How’s Bobby?”
“Safely ensconced on his sofa with a cooler of Cokes next to his right hand and the TV remote in his left. My father brought him some take-out veal piccata for dinner last night and some take-out bacon and eggs for breakfast this morning. God forbid he should miss a meal.”
“Is he on crutches?”
“He would be, but the last time he was on crutches—remember? when he fractured his heel going down into the basement to turn out the light—anyway, that time he went to the movies at the Odeon Plaza in Portsmouth with Fernie, and when they came out the whole floor of the lobby had just been mopped, and the crutches went right out from under him and he hit his head against the refreshment stand and Fernie had to call an ambulance so they could monitor him at the hospital all night. Remember that?” She took a bite of her burger. “Crutches are just too dangerous for him. We’re catering to his every need on a round-robin basis, all except for Fernie, because my mother thinks—”
“Your mother is afraid that if Fern really comes to understand what married life is going to be like—”
“She wouldn’t marry him in a million years! Exactly. Eat! Eat! I brought you iced tea with mint and lemon to cool you off.”
We ate. As always, a meal with Felicity was savory, delicious, and almost silent. I noticed the crunchy onion and smooth tomato and juicy meat, as well as the crisp edge of the bun and the lightness of the fries. If I’d been alone, I would have eaten and been satisfied—I was a hungry sort of guy from a family of big eaters—but I would have been reading something, or talking on the phone, or getting ready to go out. Felicity did only one thing at a time.
While she was balling up the papers and stuffing them into the bag, I put my arm around her waist. She put her hands on my shoulders and smiled and said, “Do you have appointments this afternoon, then?”
“There’s a house the Sloans want to see. I’m going to meet them in Nut Valley.”
“What time?”
“Not till three.”
She threw the remains of the meal into the wastebasket and then let down the blinds and closed them. The room had seven more windows and a door, and she went around to each one and did the same, until we were in semidarkness. She locked the door and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED. Then she went into the back closet and rummaged around. She came out with a parka, two raincoats, and an exercise mat, and laid them out in the middle of the floor, between Bobby’s desk and mine. Then she sat down on the arrangement she made and began to untie the ribbons of her espadrilles. This took maybe two or three minutes, but I watched it like a kind of performance: her pale shirt and shorts and long legs, made longer by the wedge sole of the espadrilles. She had Gordon’s grace of movement, long arms, long fingers, such dramatic hair. I pushed back my desk chair and went over to her.
She looked up at me, smiling. She said, “I was going to go have my hair cut, you know—my hairdresser is right in this mall—but then I got into your aura or something; maybe it’s your bodily fragrance, but it has this effect on me. I start looking at your face, and the way your eyes are so bright and your eyelids are kind of droopy, and then your eyebrows have this wing sort of shape, and then I start looking at your nose, which is very smoothly big and beaky, and pretty soon your hand is there too, and I love your hands, you have these long knuckly fingers.”
By now she had pulled me down onto the clothes and was stroking my face with her own two hands, touching each feature as she named it. She lowered her voice, not so that others wouldn’t hear, but so that I would hear more clearly, and went on.
“And then there’s the bonus of your personal apparatus. Well. I can’t say I knew what I would find there, but I am very appreciative of—what shall I call it?—its objective aesthetic charms: you know, size and shape and texture.” She inhaled slowly. “There. Now feel that.” I did. She was running her thumb and forefinger very lightly up either side of the shaft of my cock. “That is just not like anything else on earth, so silky and delicate.” She licked her lips. “Mmm. Just so nice.”
I put my hand in her hair and began kissing her while she arranged herself, pressing her stomach against me, then unbuttoning my shirt and hers, pressing her breasts against my chest. Soon enough we were naked; the room was cool from the air-conditioning, but Felicity was warm. When she kissed me, when she put her arms around my shoulders and her legs around my hips, I was contained in a delicious embracing glow. I went deep inside her and she squeezed me, decidedly and rhythmically, all up and down the shaft. Then she angled her hips slightly to the left, then to the right, all the time murmuring, “Ahhh, ahhh.” I opened my eyes. The room was brighter. Her eyes were closed. She spread her hands over the cheeks of my ass and pressed. I closed my eyes. We kissed and made love in this way for a long time, but the only way that I knew time was passing was that I began to feel my heart pumping faster. Her fingers slipped up and down my back, to either side of my spine. Suddenly she started trembling violently, gripping me hard into her and pressing her mouth into mine. When her trembling stopped, I felt myself swept into coming—not a buildup like I was accustomed to, something aimed for and cultivated, but a much more sudden and overwhelming sensation that seemed to empty me out. She pressed her head against mine.
A moment later, she said, “Oh, honey, you were screaming.”
“I was?”
“What will they say next door?”
“I don’t know. Were you screaming?”
“I was calling you God.”
“I suppose they’ll say Joe’s been saved at last, then.”
We caught our breath. I handed her my shirt to wipe off the sweat we had made. I laughed again when she sat up and started with her toes. Everything about her delighted me.
After a moment, we lay back on the clothes. She rolled into the crook of my arm and I pushed her hair out of her face. I yawned, but I wasn’t tired, only relaxed. She said, “I’m going to meet that woman for a drink today.”
“What woman?”
“Linda Burns.”
“Who’s that?” It had been several weeks by that time since I had looked over Marcus Burns’s tax returns.
“The wife of Bobby’s friend Marcus. They went out with us—Thursday night, I guess it was. We went to Mercados.”
Mercados was one of Gordon’s favorite restaurants, truly out of another era. They served large plates of pretty good old-fashioned Sicilian food, but the menus had no prices. If they knew you, they gave you one price; if they didn’t, they gave you another price, much higher. Strangers were not encouraged to return, but friends ate practically for free. I yawned again. I was still a little disoriented from the direction my afternoon’s activities had taken. The Sloans and the ranch-style three-bedroom with three-car garage on a corner lot that we were seeing seemed very very far away. I realized Felicity was still talking about the Burns woman. I said, “Do you have your own friends, Felicity?”
“Of course I do. I have lots of girlfriends.”
“What do you do together? I mean, Sherry didn’t have many girlfriends. She thought women were irritating.”
“She thought everyone was irritating, honey. She was so jealous, I didn’t know how you could stand it. She was always herding you and guarding you and telling you
what to do.”
“Maybe she was.”
“Daddy always used to say after you left, ‘Isn’t that one a full agenda?’ and Betty would say, ‘He would have been perfect for Sally.’ And then everyone would sigh.” She looked at me mischievously. “I would say to myself, ‘More perfect for me.’ Wasn’t that utterly wicked?”
“Have you been planning this for a long time, Felicity?”
“Well, not planning. Just being open to opportunity.”
I gazed at her. She looked friendly and receptive.
She went on. “You know, a couple of years ago, I was going in the door of my house with a bag of groceries, and I just happened to look down at the basket we keep by the door for shoes and sneakers. We started doing that when the boys were little, so I wouldn’t have to be looking for their shoes all over the house whenever we had to go somewhere. Anyway, this time I looked down, and all their shoes were so big! Then, a couple of days later, I had this vase Mom gave me, and I’d put some star lilies in it that I had bought. So I set it on the mantel and stepped back, and I was looking at it, thinking how pretty it was, and a football came over my shoulder and smashed right into it and all the pieces and the flowers fell to the floor.”
I said, “Oh, Felicity!”
She said, “Oh, it wasn’t a tragedy or anything. I was shocked in that moment, but then it was a revelation! I thought, I live in a frat house and it’s okay with me. My boys are very independent, and so is Hank, and I thought, What am I doing, holding some kind of candle up here for traditional family life when my family doesn’t even see it? So I started living like they do—getting up every morning and saying to myself, What would be fun today? and then going out and doing it. I’m telling you, the house doesn’t look great, but everyone is a lot happier. I don’t think any of them even realized the degree to which I was nudging them to conform to an ideal I didn’t even know I had. So that’s what I mean by being open to opportunity. Many desires have gone through my mind over the years about lots of things. I’m almost thirty-nine. And while I haven’t planned to pursue any of those desires, I remember them perfectly well when the opportunity presents itself.” She looked at me for a moment. “So there you are.”
“And here you are.”
“Not for long, I suppose, if you have to go show a house. Linda Burns loves that place. When are they moving in?”
“Closing is in a couple of weeks, I think. I’m hoping Bobby is up and about by that time.”
“Oh, who cares! He’s safer in his house.”
In spite of the darkness and the CLOSED sign, I heard a knock on the door, then another sharper knock. I looked at my watch. It was not beyond the Sloans to come and find me if I was late, but I wasn’t late; I still had over an hour before I had to meet them. Felicity and I looked at each other and hunkered down, but there was still another knock, this one very insistent. I pulled on my jeans and shirt and went to the door. Through the blinds I could see two men standing on the porch. They looked like brothers, one slightly taller and heavier than the other. The shorter one was bending down and peering at one of the for-sale photos I had in the window, and the other, I saw, was looking at me.
I opened the door and said, “Yes?”
“Oh, I knew you were in there.”
The other one stood up. He said, “We’re going to buy this house.” He put his finger on the window glass over the photo. I went out on the porch and looked. The house in question was a beat-up Colonial on Main Street in Deacon. It was big, but two hundred years of remodeling had not done it any favors. About ten years before, for example, the current owners had covered the old clapboards with aluminum siding and boxed in the decorated soffits. “A lot of work” didn’t begin to cover what it would take to get that place together. And the price was high.
The taller one said, “We’ve already been over there and looked in the windows. I mean, the ones we could get to. The shrubs were monstrous. It was right out of the Addams family over there.”
I said, “Central location.”
“May we come in? It doesn’t matter what you were doing in there. Believe me, we’ve seen it all.”
I looked in the door. Felicity was dressed and sitting at Bobby’s desk. She had kicked the clothes we’d been lying on back into a corner and turned on a light. When the two men followed me in, the shorter one said, “Oh, hi! What a surprise! I’m David and this is David. You must be Joe’s wife, right? Nice to meet you.” But it seemed by our glances and our smiles that we all knew Felicity was not my wife.
I cleared my throat and attempted to become more businesslike. The shorter man said, “Your belt is unbuckled.”
I buckled it.
“All better now,” said the taller man.
They were David John and David Pollock. Felicity introduced herself, and they drew up chairs near hers. David Pollock was the taller one. He said, “Well, Felicity, have you seen this house in Deacon?”
“Not really. I can’t remember it.”
“Want to go over there? I’m sure Joe would be happy to show it to the three of us, especially since we’ve practically bought it already.”
I recollected that I was legally the seller’s agent and said nothing. David John looked at me. “I’m sure the place is sordidly run-down.”
The other David: “Abominations to be uncovered on every floor. That’s why Joe is keeping mum, right, Joe?”
“I can show you several promising properties.”
“Joe, we always buy on impulse. We drive down a road or a street and we say, ‘Time to buy and that’s the one.’ Then we snoop around; then we call the Realtor. Five years ago, we bought a house in a town we had never been to before and moved there three weeks later, all the dogs, all the objets d’art, all the canned tomatoes and pickled peaches.”
“We made forty percent in sixteen months on that one. Of course, that was California, but still.”
“Our instincts are famous,” said David Pollock.
I reached into a drawer and pulled out purchase offer forms.
“But let’s say we see it anyway,” said David John.
“Felicity,” said David Pollock, “you have great hair. Let’s go in our car.”
The two men drove an Oldsmobile Toronado, from the sixties but perfectly maintained, upholstered in the brown leather of library sofas. Most of the roomy backseat was taken up by two dogs. “Marlin Perkins, here, is a rat terrier,” said David Pollock, “and Doris Day is a simple but elegant bichon frise. Scrunch together, girls.” He got in beside the dogs, who moved together for a moment until the spotted one arranged herself in his lap. He stroked her ears. “Marlin is a female too, but she just looked so much like him that we couldn’t resist.”
David John slipped into the driver’s seat and we swooped away, down Highway 12 at eighty miles an hour and around the curve into Hardy Well Road. Felicity had her hand on the dash, but she looked cheerful and sassy in her shorts and shirt. It was eight miles to Deacon. Riding with these guys was like taking a spaceship.
The listing—103 Main Street, Deacon—looked even gloomier than I had remembered. Knowing the owners wouldn’t do it, I had set up a yard maintenance schedule, but they were only cutting the grass every two weeks and recently there had been a lot of rain. The few flowers in the beds were awash in weeds. Dandelions bloomed all over the front yard. But John and Pollock were undaunted. “Yards are the easiest thing!” John exclaimed. “Oh, my God! We’ll have that yard tricked out in a week or two.”
“Of course, the best thing is that we aren’t selling our place in the city. This is our first second home! Can you believe it? The start of a lifetime of weekending, two venues, Friday drives from the city, talking about the weather all the time, breakfast Saturday morning! My God, we’ll be right out of The New York Times Magazine. The sunlight coming in here and just sort of angling across the butcher-block table.”