by Tina Welling
He finally disentangles himself and steps down off the ledge to walk toward me. I am fighting hysterical laughter and losing the battle. I get control of myself. Then the picture of him dangling helplessly from the cable above and heading for the ignominy of the net wipes out my resolve.
Bo takes one look at me collapsed on the ground in a heap of hilarity and says, “Shit.” He starts for the slope, hollering over his shoulder that he’ll meet me down below. I know he just wants to get away from everyone’s staring. The chair still hasn’t begun moving.
The lift operator calls, “Hey, you. You hurt or what?” I realize he has been waiting for me to show I can get myself off the ground. Great. I’ve been laughing so hard, projecting embarrassment onto Bo, I didn’t catch on that I, too, was creating a problem. I get upright on my skis and yell back that I’m fine, check my bindings, and push off.
By the time I meet up with Bo at the bottom of Apres Vous, I am finished laughing and Bo is ready to start. He pulls my glove liner and glove out of his inside pocket. “Better keep these beauties covered whenever I’m near heavy machinery,” he says, as he puts the liner back on my chilled red hand. “Sexy fingers make me stupid.”
By the time Bo pulls into the drive next to my cabin, I am limp from the fullness of our day. Still, I want more. Skiing saps my physical energy while it invigorates the rest of me.
“What do you say we shower and meet here again in a little while?” Bo says.
I feel playful. “Meet here in the driveway?”
“Had another spot in mind.” Bo reaches his arms across to me, forgetting his seat belt, and for a moment his wrestling with it recalls to my mind the net fiasco, but I keep myself in line. Once unhooked he looks up and catches a lingering glint of humor in my eyes.
Bo turns off the ignition and opens his car door.
“What?” I ask.
“Showers can wait. You’ll just stand under the hot water replaying the image of me entangled in that blue net like a tuna.”
“No, I won’t,” I lie. “Really.”
I’m ready for what I think is coming next, but we are building up to something important, Bo and I; I feel its hot breath fogging my heart. Sometimes it feels so big, I am frightened. Making love with Bo will add up to more than a night’s exchange of pleasure; the commitment of my body to him represents a vast promise of my spirit. I swear I could share a bed with a stranger more easily just now.
Bo gets out of the Suburban and comes around to my door, where I sit like a zombie thinking, Now? Right now? I try to remember which pair of underpants I put on this morning so I won’t become shocked at the sudden sight of them. At the same time I feel inclined to whip them off so eagerly they will be nothing but a blur to either of us. Oh, God, I need to focus.
Bo sets his foot in my opened car door. “Suzannah, here’s how I see it.” He leans in closer, crosses his forearms on his knee. “We got everything going for us but the physical thing. We’re like a table with one leg short, you know? We’re wobbling, Zann.”
“You think?”
“I think we had a bad start, and we’re bound to be a little leery of starting off wrong again, but…I say let’s not wait any longer.” He holds out his hand.
I start to shake it, but that’s not what he intended.
He turns his palm upward and pulls me gently out of the car.
In the mudroom, Bo takes off his Sorel Pacs and his ski pants. He is wearing jeans beneath them, whereas I have on only insulated ski bibs and beneath those the mysterious panties. Black silk? Could I have had such foresight? Oh, please, oh, please, not the stretchy cotton things, not the faded, threadbare ones that feel so good when I am skiing. Or not the joke panties Tam gave me. I love to ski in those, too, but they’re orange and have SPERM WARFARE printed across them. I turn and raise my arms to hang my down jacket on the hook, and Bo comes from behind me, hooks my coat for me, slips his hands beneath my bib straps, and kisses the back of my neck.
He says, “Your hair smells like snow and pine trees.” He moves his face around to the other side of my neck. “Like watermelon and Christmas.”
It’s been so long for me. I haven’t shared my body with a man for almost a year…. Well, since Bo and I…Oh, never mind. I tip my head down so Bo has access to the best parts of my neck. It’s all coming back to me, the way it works if you just let it. I turn in Bo’s arms and face him. We rub noses, then lightly brush our lips together side to side. Bo kisses the corners of my mouth. He drops small kisses along my bottom lip until I relax my mouth. Then he opens his and we come together. We kiss deep, briny kisses, oceanic kisses, treasure-chest kisses, lost-at-sea kisses, woman-overboard kisses. Bo’s chest thuds against my chest, he feels damp beneath his collar where my hands hold him, and I am grateful he is so moved by me.
Once we pull apart I hear his rough-edged breath, as if it’s been cut with pinking shears, in my ear. Then he takes my hand and leads me to my bedroom. I start on the panties again, then switch to the sheets. When did I last change them? If my pillowcases smell like dirty hair, I’ll die. Shut up, shut up.
Bo pulls me into the room, closes the door behind me and he turns the big old skeleton key, which has been stuck in the keyhole since I bought the place. Teasing me for my earlier reluctance, he holds the key up, smiles, and tucks it into his back Levi’s pocket, before swooping down into another kiss with me.
As in a slow-motion waltz, we inch toward my bed. I hear the swish of my ski bibs against his Levi’s. I hear us breathing. I hear my heart, his heart. Thoughts have thankfully stopped and I give in to the petals of desire opening within me as Bo lays me down on the bed, slips down the straps of my bibs, eases my turtleneck off, and stretches out beside me.
Bo’s kisses begin below my ear, ripple across my shoulder, and move down my arm, down the inside of my elbow, on down to my wrist. He kisses the heel of my palm and uncurls my fingers to kiss me all the way to the tips.
Lying in the center of my palm is the door key.
I lifted it from his back pocket. I don’t know why.
Bo sees the key, an inch from his nose, and freezes.
“Zann…” He gives up and drops his face down onto the sheet. He rolls his forehead side to side.
I keep meaning to say, Never mind the key. Kiss me more. But the words don’t quite make it out. I am almost as surprised as he is to see the key lying in my palm. My instincts are still a puzzle to me; I don’t understand their code; I don’t have a reason to trust them. As if I’m reaching for a faceted garnet instead of the silver-wrapped onyx I meant to use, my actions sprout from some hidden, silent place that doesn’t explain itself till later. An alarm just hums inside me now, as if its battery is not fully charged for a decisive alert.
“Zann,” Bo muffles into the bed again. Finally, he raises his face and looks at me. “I suppose we have to talk now.” He shakes his head again. “I got to tell you, Zann, I’m not much for talking right now. We’ve been talking since you moved here.”
Before I can respond, the telephone rings. Bo irritably picks up the receiver and hands it to me. I would have let it ring; I don’t want to talk to anybody.
“Hello,” I say into the phone.
“Let me talk to him,” she says back.
Caro has uncanny timing. And nerve.
I hand the phone to Bo, refusing to meet his questioning look. Now I know why I have the key in my hand—I can easily let myself out the bedroom door while Bo talks with his girlfriend.
I wrestle my turtleneck back over my head as I walk into the kitchen. He is not finished with her and I am not finished with myself. And we better Mother, may I three steps back to handholding until we are. I wait on the bench for Bo, sitting with my back against the wall, my hands folded on top of the table. I stare at the geranium on the windowsill and its reflection in the dark glass behind.
She’s still here; I feel her. Still a part of my relationship with Bo; still the third side of the triangle. I was wrong to believe she
left without trace.
I hear the bedroom door open. Bo leans against the kitchen doorway, slightly behind me, so that I have to crane my neck if I want to look at him. But I don’t want to look at him.
“Sorry, Zann. That shouldn’t have happened.”
“Which part?” I ask, feeling sarcastic as well as foolish. I’ve got a cartoon drawing in my head of me tousle headed in bed beside Bo with my shirt off, bare breasts throbbing, while sketched in the next panel he talks on the phone to Caro. She is drawn with towering hair and haughty nostrils, one hand spinning her diamond ear stud.
“Zann,” he says, “give me a chance here. It’s not like I’m sleeping with Caro. She just keeps calling me with new jobs.” I glance at him. He runs his fingers through his hair, then says, “Want to ski up to watch the moon? We do better outside. We can talk when we get there.”
I agree. I long for darkness to hide me while I hear what else Bo has to say. His words about Caro have taken me by surprise; my feelings toward them confuse me. We layer gear back on in the mudroom. Bo keeps his cross-country skis in his truck; mine are stuck in the snow beside my back door. Once we are outside, I close the door and reach for my skis. Bo comes up behind me and slips his hands inside the deep pockets on each side of my hip-length Windbreaker. I feel the pressure and warmth of his bare fingers low on my pelvis. I lean my back against him.
He holds me for a while, his cheek beside my ear. “Zann, let’s fix this.”
I believe that Bo knows me and cares for me enough to do what is necessary to fix this. I turn my face so we can kiss. Then move away and pull my skis out of the snow, because I also believe that Bo keeps approaching me from behind for some reason I haven’t figured out yet; perhaps neither has he.
The Suburban’s interior light casts squares of yellow on the snow when Bo opens the rear door and reaches for his skis. Like his downhill skis, his cross-country skis have straw and alfalfa stuck in their bindings from the floor of the truck. He intended all winter to install his ski rack, but never got around to it. There are so many things he hasn’t gotten around to in the time I’ve known him. There’s no new sculpture or progress on his artists’ retreat. These intentions he allows to slide past him as unheeding as he did the ski ramp this afternoon. Is it really like the aunts said? Does he have to make a big mess first in order to get motivated into action?
I watch him shake his cross-country boots upside down.
“The last straw,” I say, plucking a piece from his shoe string.
It occurs to me that if I am the one physically holding off, it is in response to my sense of Bo’s own reluctance. He is not any more ready than I was a few months back. Why would he accept jobs from Caro unless it was to give himself time? Leaning on my poles as I insert my boot tip into the binding on my ski, I stop and look at Bo.
“What are you scared of?”
He answers without hesitation. “You’re going to change my life.”
“We’ll change each other. Is that so bad?”
“Let’s ski.”
The snowy hills gleam against the dark sky. The crescent moon is a mere thread. Or a wick, perhaps, drawing today’s sunlight from within the crystal points of the snowflakes. Earlier, just past sunset as Bo and I were driving back from the village, the Sleeping Indian glowed with a reflected light that seemed to come from deep within itself rather than the setting sun. It kindled the eastern horizon, a benign illumination guarding the valley, like a nightlight in a child’s room.
Now warm winds blow from the southwest, pushing up the temperature, and I think of the last chinook in the spring when Bo and I first made love. I stop and yank off the fleece pullover from beneath my Windbreaker, tie it around my waist, and put my jacket back on. Once at our lookout point, we sit on Bo’s down vest, with skis and poles stuck upright in the snow beside us. I lean against Bo’s chest with a leg of his on each side of me. We are close and alone above the world, accompanied only by the crescent moon and Venus, the planet Native Americans call White Star Woman. Maybe Bo and I will make love after all tonight, in the snow, the chinook winds wrapping our bare limbs, White Star Woman guiding our coming together.
Bo is right. We can work this out better in the outdoors. But he must understand that he has to be clear with me. I can’t be manipulated into demonstrating his own emotions. I’m still porous enough from living like that with Erik and my mother that I pick up signals directed my way without my own awareness. I picture the key laying in my palm like a message to me.
“Talk to me, Bo.”
“Caro refuses to be dumped—she said so.”
“You’ve been seeing her and talking to her all this time?”
“I’ve been trying not to all this time. It’s eerie. She acts as if that conversation in your kitchen didn’t take place. She phones constantly.”
“You’re still scouting livestock for her?”
“I keep telling her to find somebody else.”
I am silent. Is this Fatal Attraction without the knife, as Bo once called it? Or is this Bo failing to act on his intentions again?
“Why do you think she’s acting this way?” I ask.
“If she stops seeing me, Dickie will direct his suspicions toward her brother—I mean, Benj.” Bo rests his chin on top of my head. “Hell, I should have told Caro that I’m in love with you. That would have stopped her. I could have told Dickie, too.”
A cool pink rage rises from my pelvis. By the time it reaches my chin, I’m on my feet, snapped into my skis, and hissing downslope. Bo does not follow or call after me.
I cannot explain this anger. It burns through me, sizzles pathways sharp as the tracks my skis cut into the softening snow. I reach my cabin, kick out of my skis, and open the back door enough to slip my arm inside and grab my backpack off the hook. I throw myself into my car and head down the driveway.
I believed we both understood the meaning of the connection between us and that we were just biding time till everything played itself out. Till we both grew strong enough to handle what would be a demanding love affair. And then he says, “I should have told Caro I’m in love with you.” Of course, he should have told Caro—if he wanted Caro out of his life. And first he should have told me—if he wanted me in his life.
How could I have figured it so wrong?
I drive to the end of the dirt road and hit the highway. Where the hell am I going? I turn toward Dubois instead of Jackson. I drive fast and angrily, but am alone on the road, so I can get away with it.
Far into the distance I see the first lights. A bar, of course—this is Wyoming. I pull in anyway, though I’ve never been to a bar alone. But I am not alone. Beside me, like a full-blown entity, is my anger. It just balloons up around me till I feel my air nearly cut off. I wish I could chop it into small manageable pieces, to sort and label; instead, I feel like I should pull out a chair for it as I sit at a small round table one step above the dance floor and order a bottle of Moosehead and a glass.
A small group of musicians play. A few people slow dance. I create chains of wet circles with my sweaty beer glass on the varnished tabletop and try to keep my lips from moving as I scream inside my head, How could he say that to me? How could he speak of love for me with her name wrapped around it, like mud packed around fresh trout?
The waitress brings me another bottle of Moosehead. I don’t remember ordering this. When I reach for my backpack to pay her, she mumbles something I can’t hear since I am sitting close to the sound system.
I feel thick with anger at Bo and at myself. I knew somewhere inside that the mop-up with Caro was not complete, but I ignored the knowledge. Like Erik, I act one way and feel another. I passionately kiss Bo, while hiding an escape key in my curled fingers. But Bo has been hiding Caro.
I reach for the second bottle of beer and pour half of it into my glass, counseling myself not to drink more so I can drive home safely. Now that I have surfaced to my surroundings, I notice a tingling at the nape of my neck. Without lifting
my eyes, I all at once feel self-conscious, as if I am being talked about or watched. I take mental inventory. Cross-country ski boots, bibs—that’s not unusual around here. Hair wildly spread across my shoulders, uncombed since morning—that’s not unusual around here. So what’s the deal?
Finally, I look up. The entire band is swiveled my way, singing Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” I turn my head. The bar is two-thirds full, some couples, mostly men, and many are watching for my reaction with slight smiles on their faces. I have missed something big here.
I give my attention to the band. The lead singer is a gorgeous, long-haired blond. Twentysomething, I’d guess. He nods and smiles to me, then ends the song, calls for a break, and heads for my table.
“I’m Deak.” He smiles and gives me a chance to tell my name, which I let pass. “Can I sit a minute?”
I shrug. He pulls out a chair and sits. In my head I am putting together the second bottle of beer with the song and the stares.
“I’m thinking this isn’t what you had in mind, coming here tonight, but life is circular, you know?” Deak grins. “Full of curves.” He leans toward me. “I’ll back off if you want.”
“No,” I say. “It’s okay.” The distraction of him is a relief. He’s pretty, in a masculine way. Turquoise eyes, wavy hair to his shoulders. Looks strong, probably from carrying musical equipment place to place. There is something playful and nice about him. Something clean and straightforward. Young though. Is he going to take a closer look any minute and realize I’m older than he is by a decade or two?
“Can you tell me your name?”