Keeping Secrets

by Sarah Shankman

  But she really had no idea. Her imagination ran ahead, skipping right over the renovation to the finished product. She had moved right into Jesse’s fantasy, merging it with her own most recent dream of opening a restaurant. She saw herself in a white apron, stirring huge stock pots, cooking astonishing meals, just one menu each night, what she had was what you ate, like a favorite place in Provence. Wouldn’t it be the most fun in the world, to own a place like this where you could feed people, tuck them in at night, see them like family in the morning? A place where they’d feel at home?

  “I didn’t think I had the eyes right till now.”

  Emma started at the sound of Jesse’s voice. In her mind she’d been out gathering lettuce from the kitchen garden she’d planted outside the door.

  “What?”

  “The eyes. I didn’t think I had them right till now.”

  Emma followed his gaze back to the portrait. She found herself staring straight into lake-blue eyes. It was like looking into a mirror.

  Jesse switched off the flash. In the moonlight the painting shimmered.

  He moved one step closer and placed his hands on her shoulders.

  Then the fantasy in which she’d been playacting dropped away. This was the here and now. She reached up and with one forefinger touched his bottom lip.

  “You have the most beautiful mouth.” She’d been wanting to say that for hours. They both leaned just a fraction closer and their mouths joined in a kiss.

  His arms held her closer and tighter until she felt that she had stepped through the wall of his chest and was now inside.

  “Jewish eyes,” he murmured. “That’s what I was thinking about when I was doing the painting.”

  “Southern Baptist-Jewish eyes.”

  “You’ll have to tell me about that.” And then he ran the edge of his tongue down the side of her neck. Her flesh tingled as if his tongue were electric.

  “Another time,” she said.

  “Sure. We’ve got plenty.”

  But not right then they didn’t, for their mouths had so much to do without talking.

  From behind the remnants of a sofa Jesse produced a drop cloth and laid it on the floor. He lit a kerosene lantern, turning that corner of the room sepia.

  He stared straight into her eyes as his fingers unfastened the buttons of her blouse. She didn’t look away this time, but held his gaze fast.

  Later, she didn’t remember what he did with her lace-trimmed camisole and panties, but they disappeared as if he had sucked them off and chewed them up before he began to nibble on her flesh.

  “Ears,” he whispered. “You have the most wonderful ears. You saved them for me under all that golden hair.”

  He explored every crevice with his tongue, his teeth, his lips, until she moaned with the thrust of his tongue as if he had penetrated her and pinned her to the floor. Her ear was burning, hot, open, and she heard herself screaming into the big reverberating room, “Jesse, fuck me, fuck me,” when he wasn’t even close.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered. “My dear, we’ve only begun.”

  For Jesse was good, very good. He flipped her over on her stomach, one hand pinned beneath her. The other he bent against her back.

  He held her in poses. In her mind, which always saw pictures when the sex was good, they were still lifes, spare in composition, illustrated haiku.

  The swan tucked her long

  neck into the dark water

  Pierced by his gilt stake.

  But he didn’t enter her. He took her with his mouth again, his tongue tracing the curves of her behind.

  His control was complete. She couldn’t move a hand. She couldn’t caress him in return but could only receive what he chose to give.

  Her whole body was alive, hungry, parched for his lips as he concentrated on only one place at a time, giving it his total attention while the rest of her quivered, waiting in line.

  “I want you everywhere,” she moaned. “Touch me all over.”

  Jesse stopped for a moment, lifted his head from her as if he were a drinking animal who had heard a rustle in the forest.

  And in that moment he loosened his hold and Emma turned beneath him. She was desperate for his touch, his weight, everywhere upon her.

  He withheld himself for just an eternity more, lingering above her, only an inch of air separating them as he leaned upon his elbows staring down into her face.

  “Please,” she pushed the word between clenched teeth.

  “Please what?”

  You could butter your bread with his words, she thought, and eat it for your lunch.

  “Please touch me, please fuck me, please be with me.”

  “Where?” he whispered.

  She pushed her breast up into him.

  “There,” she answered.

  “Where?”

  Her pelvis grazed his.

  “Where?”

  Her mouth sucked his into hers, her teeth devouring his lips.

  “I want you,” she said.

  “Swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “Swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “There now, then,” he cried, and he pushed himself into her with no further preamble, but then none was needed, as she had never been more ready in her life. He lifted her knees upon his shoulders, and her screams bounced off the walls where just minutes, or was that hours ago now, they had talked about pictures being hung. They rode together for what seemed like days, but then Emma would never know, for she was completely adrift in time and space. They rode through foreign landscapes, along paths, beside silver streams, and then finally Emma could see a clearing at the top. Together they were approaching a high mountain plain.

  Beneath him Emma hummed. Butterflies swarmed around her breast, around her knees, and then they dove right through her center and fluttered, fluttered now in waves, fluttered out her mouth, her ears, her nose, her eyes, out the top of her head, and on, free now, out the windows.

  * * *

  Some time later as they lay stretched out upon the blanket with the lamplight shining on their damp bodies, Emma murmured, “I have to go and buy a wheel of Brie.”

  Jesse’s laugh rumbled up to the high ceiling, where Emma, with her eyes closed, could still see one butterfly stuck. “I don’t think so. Not tonight.”

  “Jesus. I’ve really screwed up. What am I going to do?”

  And then Jesse opened his mouth and out flew the words before he had time to think.

  “You’re going to come and live with me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what am I going to do about the cheese? What am I going to do about that wedding party night after tomorrow?”

  “What the hell do you mean, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’?” Jesse was leaning now on one elbow, staring down into her face.

  “I mean, yes, I accept, and thank you very much. But that still doesn’t get me a wheel of Brie.”

  “‘Thank me very much.’ Fuck me very much.”

  “Oh, Jesse, don’t be so melodramatic. Didn’t you know this was going to happen from the moment you hit me in the head with that door?”

  He paused. Well, yes. He’d hoped so.

  “So? So what’s the big deal? Why the big surprise if you could see it coming a mile off?” Then she burst into laughter and gathered him into an embrace.

  But she was bluffing, Miss Emma Fine was, trembling with terror and bluffing all the way. For she knew no more about living with love (nor did he) than she knew about renovating houses, much less an undertaking as large as Jesse and Skytop Lodge. And she didn’t know that when she held her nose, for she’d never learned to hold her breath, and jumped off the diving board into the depths of Jesse Tree, she was way, way, way over her head.

  That first year went like quicksilver. Emma didn’t have time to think.

  Jesse had bought an old Ford pickup truck. They named it Elvira.

  “You choose,” Jesse said, standing before her with a fan of color samples.

&
nbsp; She didn’t hesitate a moment. They painted Elvira the rosy pink that had become Emma’s trademark. Then they loaded her up with Emma’s things. It took two trips just for her kitchen stuff.

  “We should have used movers.”

  “Yeah. But they wouldn’t let us sing.”

  They sang up and down the mountain. He took the low parts, she the high, and then they reversed. Jesse’s falsetto was something to behold.

  Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

  And it was. Emma couldn’t believe her good fortune, when she had moments to catch her breath. What had she been so afraid of all these years? She had never been so happy or so busy in her life.

  There was much to do. For starters, though Jesse had had a world-class woodworking studio built in the side yard, his decorating efforts on the house hadn’t gone beyond knocking out most of the interior walls and painting it all white.

  “It looks like a hospital in here.”

  He held out the color samples again.

  The stairs to the two little rooms above shone with a lacquered blue. The front door was bright yellow.

  “Friendly, don’t you think?” Emma stood back and inspected their handiwork.

  “Yes. But who are we being friendly with?”

  For no one ever came up the winding little road looking for them—their rare invitation was to Maria and Clifton. The truth be known, they didn’t need anybody else. They were a world within themselves, round, fat as a tick, complete.

  They didn’t own a television.

  They lay in bed propped on a sea of pillows and stared at each other’s toes.

  “Yours are beautiful. Just like your hands. Mine are weird.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Mine are weird.”

  Then he took a footful of her toes in his mouth.

  “If I suck on this little middle one, do you think it will grow?”

  “Nope, my father’s never did. It’s part of my inheritance.”

  “Do all Jews have a short middle toe?”

  “Do all blacks have little bitty dicks?”

  “Yep. All of us. Now why don’t you suck on this one and see if it’ll grow bigger than your toe?”

  “Lawdy, Mistah Jesse, leave me be, I don’t know nothing ’bout sucking dicks.”

  * * *

  Emma asked, “What do you think about puce for the bathroom?”

  “I think your cousin Wanda June’s tastes has rubbed off on you.”

  Wanda June Cooter was one of Jesse’s favorites. She was Emma’s step-aunt Janey’s only girl.

  “Tell me another Cooter bedtime story,” Jesse begged of Emma sitting beside him in one of his old T-shirts.

  “I don’t think it’s nice you making fun of my relatives, Jesse.”

  “They’re no more your kin than I am, honey bun.”

  So once again Emma would tell about how when they were children Wanda June got to pick all the colors of the Cooter house. The living room was bright orange. The dining room chocolate brown.

  “You’d drop something in there off the table, you might as well have thrown it down the outhouse for all you could see. Smelled like that, too, sort of. Their house was way out in the country, out past Bernie’s, and always smelled like cold dishwater, sorghum syrup and beans.”

  Wanda June’s room was deepest orchid. The boys’ rooms were red, navy and snow-pea green.

  Jesse picked it up. “And in her purse, just in case, she carried…you tell it.”

  “Why, you know it all by heart.”

  “Nope.” They were sitting out in the carport they’d screened in and planted like a florist’s shop with begonias, fuchsias and ferns.

  “She carried a bottle of Mercurochrome and the number of the FBI.”

  Jesse slapped his leg. “Now do Lollie, do Lollie,” he begged.

  So once again she told him about Wanda June’s brother Lollie Cooter who invented his own religion which had all the trappings of Christianity except Jesus. “I told him he didn’t know it but he’d become a Jew.” He quit his job as a washing-machine repairman and devoted full time to proselytizing. He built a billboard in front of the house he and his mother, Janey, lived in when they moved to town. “Look Here, Sinners,” it began.

  * * *

  “Do you think I’m getting fat?” Emma asked.

  “Well, you might be. If you’re leading up to being pregnant, go pin it on one of the dudes you screw when I’m up in the studio.” It was one of their running jokes. For Jesse had had himself fixed after the woman named Patience whom he married for three months had tricked him with her false pregnancy. And Emma wouldn’t have looked at another man if she’d had the energy. Which she didn’t. Jesse used it all up.

  “Is there a square inch of this house on which we haven’t banged yet?” she asked.

  Jesse pulled on his mustache. “How about the doormat?”

  “Pull the sucker in here. Can’t hurt its feelings, leaving it out.”

  “Is it May yet?”

  Emma checked her watch. Actually, she’d completely lost track of the seasons. Sometimes she was so consumed with Jesse, his taste, his smell, his voice, his touch that she didn’t even know what day it was. Her students at the junior college thought she was on drugs.

  “I think it’s May fifteenth,” she said.

  “By God, we’ve missed the beginning of outdoor fucking season by over two weeks. I want your sweet ass on this doormat at good dark.”

  * * *

  To answer Emma’s question, they should have been getting fat, for her genius in the kitchen had gone berserk. She cooked in at least eight languages now. Her catering was getting to be a problem. She had to expand or quit.

  “Why don’t we just move down into Los Gatos to the Safeway?” Jesse asked. “It’ll save us carting all those groceries up the hill.”

  Emma just smiled and kept on cooking, twirling her wooden spoons and her French knives as if she were a magician dressed in kitchen whites.

  Besides, she liked taking Jesse to the grocery store with her. She liked handing him a list and his own cart and then trailing behind as if she were a stranger, watching the looks women gave him. Some of them crashed their buggies into his on purpose, some because they had seen him only at the last minute and had been stunned like a deer in the light. They winked. They dimpled. They twitched their behinds. Driving back up the mountain, Emma could hardly keep her hands off him. Sometimes she didn’t.

  “Emma, Emma, stop,” he said to the top of her head buried in his lap. “Stop. I can’t drive while you do that.”

  “Then pull over.”

  * * *

  Skytop was the only blemish on the peach of their contentment. It just wasn’t going as planned.

  “How long’s the new subflooring on the porch going to take if I come help you pound nails?”

  “A weekend.”

  Three weekends later Emma was still pulling splinters from her ruined manicure, and it wasn’t finished yet.

  “Do you think this is going to take longer than you planned?”

  Jesse frowned and grew silent and Emma bit her tongue.

  When they met, Jesse was a scotch drinker, but after two or three she didn’t like him much.

  “You ought not to do this to yourself—and to us.”

  “You got a better suggestion?”

  “I’d rather dance.”

  “Apples and oranges,” he said.

  Emma did some research.

  “You want the Giggles, the Zombie, the I Need a Cookie, or the Motha, Just Let Me Lie Down?” Emma had the marijuana separated, nicknamed and labeled in cannisters on a kitchen shelf. She bought it from their next-door neighbor, an entrepreneur of wholesale smoke.

  “Just roll one of each and we’ll decide when we get to the Catalyst.”

  On the way to Santa Cruz, they never smoked until they were over the mountains with the o
cean in sight. Otherwise, like so many others, they’d have been roadkill, victims of the unforgiving Highway 17.

  The Catalyst met all of Emma’s requirements: it was old and funky, a bar, a dance hall, a good café, a coffeehouse, all in one.

  Somewhere between the car door and the Catalyst’s palm trees, Emma lit up.

  “I can hear the colors of the music,” she said as they passed through the swinging doors. She took Jesse’s hand.

  “Let’s dance to the purple, Jess.”

  “Just a minute, hon.”

  Jesse didn’t really like to dance, but she was twirling already, out on the floor with the couples, the trios, the children, the dogs. It was that kind of place. One old man swayed every night before a speaker that was twice as tall as he.

  “Never,” said Emma, looking a gigantic whole-grain tostada in the face while a Stones tune shook the table, “never eat anything bigger than your head.”

  “If one could find your head.” Jesse smiled, for he knew it could be anywhere. He loved to watch Emma when she was stoned. God, how the woman flew. Loosey-goosey. She giggled. She shook her booty to the music. And more than once she’d taken his hand and led him out to the street, where she’d pulled him into the nearest darkened doorway and lifted her skirt above her hips.

  “Do me, Jess,” she whispered. “I can’t wait till we get home.”

  Oh, yes, Jesse loved Emma and the naughty woman she became when she was stoned.

  * * *

  Now, if things would only go right with Skytop. He couldn’t get a handle on it. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He couldn’t get the flow going. He kept bumping into corners, running into blind alleys. He’d start in one room, and then another would seem to be calling to him.

  Emma stood with a hand on one hip, the tip of her tongue poised to point to the heart of the matter.

  “You’re all over the lot here, Jess. Why don’t you just pick a room and finish it, as if it were a piece of furniture, then move on to the next?”

  “Why don’t you just shut up? Go home and tend to your cooking, woman.”

  He was sorry afterward when he saw her tears. But he couldn’t help himself. Skytop, which was supposed to have been such fun, his retreat from hard-driving obsession, was driving him nuts. And he didn’t know why. Sometimes he wondered whether the place was haunted, but if so, with whose demons?