The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  In her time, Pick too had been a good student—or what passed for a good student if you were a girl when she was a girl—but she accepted with no resentment at all the smallness of her place in the world. She did not fault Heather for coming home; on the contrary, she had endured the ten or so days of her granddaughter’s college career in a general anticipation of Heather’s return, and she marked the happy occasion by killing and roasting one of her portlier hens (as if Heather’s modest sexual foray—which she kept to herself—had somehow marked her as a prodigal). Heather unpacked her bag, and returned her clothes and books and sewing to their places with a sense of intense satisfaction, since she was back in the one place where no one questioned her oddnesses—to her face, at any rate. And she was content. At least until she saw Ashley.

  Later, she would date the change in her circumstances from this moment, like some temporal guillotine crashing her asunder, splitting her from the life she had led and reeling her, at first, into a shrill unutterable joy. At first.

  He was on a ladder in the women’s locker room, his upper half swallowed by the ceiling, his trousers poignantly slack to reveal—nothing so crude as his backside, but the place where his back narrowed, the sweet hairs in that most vulnerable curve. She saw, later, that her first impulse had been to touch those hairs from sheer curiosity, to see—in other words—if they could possibly be as wrenchingly soft, as beautifully smooth, as they appeared in that miraculous and paralyzing instant. She saw the ghost of her own hand reach up to them as she herself stood, paralyzed in her corporal bulk, watching, and the shiver came down through her fingertips into her arm, and chest, and out again, shooting to every point on the surface of her skin. There was a kind of crush in her lungs, as if each had been taken in a broad hand and squeezed like a sponge. And there were deep stigmata piercings in the palms of her hands. She was suddenly hot, and very upset.

  Ashley, oblivious, groped at the back loop of his pants, for a pair of pliers. He found them, his fingers—hard-skinned but unaccountably elegant in their length, in their lines—gripping the instrument, already wielding it as he brought it up to his shoulders and past sight into the hidden gap of the ceiling. Heather had a brief, crushing vision of those fingers inside her, the wrist supple between her thighs. She had not known she was capable of such wantonness. Nor had she known she could covet so fiercely—she had seen the clear glint of gold, a thick band, on that finger as it flashed overhead.

  She looked down at her own finger, baffled; then, abruptly, enraged —that he had married someone else in the first place. That he hadn’t waited for her.

  “Aw, fuck.”

  The legs shifted. One foot searched backward for a lower rung. Another four inches of chest was revealed, smooth-skinned in a ragged, open collar. The other foot came down: a ponytail of russet hair, unruly but clean and wrapped in a coil of red bandanna, a winsomely shaped ear. His chin was smooth, like his chest, with a faint point—elfin, almost. She wanted to look more closely, to stare at it, in fact, but with one more descent of the ladder, Ashley was suddenly there, in front of her, near enough for her to touch and looking at her as if he absolutely expected her to do just that. Involuntarily, Heather stepped back, and to her intense relief, that compulsion abated, at least for the moment.

  “Excuse my language.” Ashley shrugged. She wondered if he mistook her expression for disapproval. “I didn’t know anybody was here.”

  “I was just …” Heather heard her own voice, but she didn’t know what it wanted to say. She was glad it still worked, though.

  “You work here, right?” he prompted. “I’ve seen you.”

  Her throat went dry. He had seen her, she thought. She had been seen, without her knowledge. By him.

  “At the front desk.”

  “Right.” Heather nodded. He was telling her all the important stuff.

  “What, two, three months?”

  “About that. I mean, yes.”

  He took hold of his ladder to rattle it down, dislodging a puff of dust, an irresistible shimmer in the wake of some bleak fairy’s wand. Heather looked up.

  The tear came first, then the pain. She bent over, heat searing her eye, as if some thorn had lodged there, taken root and grown: a twig, a branch, a tree sprouting agony from the optic nerve. She had never imagined anything could be so sharp. She pressed against it, uselessly, with her hands. She was weeping freely, if lopsidedly: a one-eyed geyser. Her own voice moaned. Through the blur, she saw him step close.

  “Let me,” Ashley said.

  His hand took away her hand. He watched for a moment, his face so close. The needle in her eye jabbed with pain. Then, with two careful fingers, he spread her lids apart, splaying her open. Heather stopped cold, her tears arrested. It occurred to her that she had wet her pants. They were wet, anyway. She knew what he was going to do. She could not believe what he was going to do.

  “Don’t move,” he said, as if she could.

  Ashley opened his mouth. He breathed over the surface of her eye, then licked his own breath away. His tongue was inexpressibly soft. The thorn evaporated. He licked again, this time out of love. His tongue traced a line down her center, dividing and conquering as it went—eye from eye, breast from breast, lip from lip—splitting her open, then patching her together again with some sweet cement. She did not want the light back, or the air. She did not want him to see her face like this. Her avid eye searched the dark inside of his throat, but there was nothing visible to the eye, even the naked eye.

  Then he stepped back. The light blurred in. His abundant smile focused in her line of sight.

  “All right?” Ashley said. “Is it gone?”

  It was gone, that grain, though a boulder had taken its place. It seemed to her now that the amorphous, irreducible thing that had always been wedged between herself and her peers, between herself and the town in which she had spent her life, had suddenly crystallized into stunning certainty. Finally, beautifully, the world had a point around which it revolved. The world had a winsome symmetry, and the music of its turning spheres was transformative. Through primitive instinct, she understood the mesh their lives would make. Her tongue knew the taste of his skin. Her skin knew the sweetness of his hands.

  Ask me something else, she thought, but Ashley already knew everything.

  “Your name’s Heather. Steve Trask said.” His voice seemed to resonate in her own throat, as if she were ventriloquizing him without conscious intention.

  “Yes.”

  Ashley bent down to his toolbox. His ponytail fell forward, over a shoulder. A blue vein rose from the back of his fine hand.

  “I think I’ve figured out why the air conditioning isn’t working, anyway. I need to order a part, though.” He looked up at her. His confidence in her was electric between them. It made her strangely proud, as if she had indeed accomplished something rare and utterly admirable. “Have to come back, I guess.”

  Heather felt her own head nod, encased in heat. “I guess so.” He straightened then and looked at her. He was waiting.

  “When?” she said. “When will you come back?”

  Ashley smiled, his lips together, the tip of one white tooth revealing itself nonetheless. He told her his name.

  “I don’t have a car,” said Heather Pratt.

  Chapter 11

  The Logging Road

  ASHLEY HAD A CAR. A BATTERED VOLVO, RUSTED and unlovely, the cracked plastic of its gearshift covered with a leather cap worn to the shape of his palm. When she first sat down beside him on the frayed plastic of the front passenger seat, the body of the car seemed to close around them, defining the specific world that was to be theirs alone. It did not occur to her to begrudge the smallness of this world, its arguable tawdriness and lack of comfort. Already it was clear to Heather that whatever destinations she might reach in this car would be the most meaningful she could possibly aspire to.

  That first day he drove her through Goddard and into the forest along the Sabbathday, past the plac
e called Nate’s Landing, where, already, it was too chilly for children to play in the sandbox or near the water, and then past the Drumlins, past any place she knew the name of. A logging road set off into the forest then, into the unmarked expanse, its spiky pines blazed in occasional orange or ornamented in strips of yellow plastic, like—she thought, she couldn’t help thinking—the tree in that song about the prisoner coming home.

  Because she was about to come home, Heather knew, the Volvo rocking heavily along its rutted path. Ashley would stop when they got there, and she would look around herself and recognize the contours of her intended place on this earth. Already that place was dear to her. Already she could anticipate nostalgia for it, intense like the nostalgia of exiles amputated from their homelands. She leaned forward in her seat, perched for a first glimpse.

  The path opened near a stand of birches, then dissipated in gravel and grass. There simply was no way forward and no farther place to get to. She had never, it seemed to her, felt so thoroughly the sensation of being in exactly the right place. The forest seemed close, not claustrophobic, the air full of sap and pine. Heather felt, rather than saw, his eyes on her. She felt held, as if he were indeed carrying her over some invisible threshold. It was pleasant. It was shattering, but also pleasant. Even in the fraternity room in Hanover she had had no notion of this, of being longed for with such fond violence. Her body wasn’t listening to her, if it ever had before. Glancing down at herself, she saw her own limbs move confidently in their new command. It stunned her, watching one wrist tense in the rope of Ashley’s hair, the other reach with perfect aim for the narrow sway of his back, its skin electrically hot. The chill air hit her like a smack as he took away her clothing. Somewhere a zipper tore with an understated purr, and then her hips were free. Tights tangled her ankles, hobbling her like a dumb animal: she nearly howled in frustration. Ashley’s shirt was gone; somebody’s hand had reached back and torn it away over his head, shaking loose the ponytail. His hair was longer than hers, even. Its thick beauty shamed her. She wiped a handful of it across her face and, to her amazement and dismay, it came away slick with tears. She could not imagine a more terrible demonstration of weakness. He would hate her now, Heather thought, but she saw in his face that he did not hate her. Even she could recognize what passion looked like, Heather thought. Even she must recognize love when she saw it. “You’re so beautiful,” he said then, as if it had to be confirmed.

  Her eyes, without warning, blurred again. She shut them. “I don’t see it,” her own voice said, sounding unaccountably weary.

  Ashley was over her, his mouth at the lobe of her ear. “But you’ve never seen yourself like this,” he said, and it was so sensible that she knew he was right. Heather was beautiful, so. She had wanted to be, and now she was, for him. She understood then that she would never be able to love him enough to show her gratitude.

  His miraculous hand untangled her tights and they came away. She did not know where they went. All she wanted on earth was to be bare next to his bareness, and it felt to her that she was twisting wildly, as if she might rid herself of what remained in this way. A bra had never seemed such a ridiculous thing before, so utterly useless but, at the same time, so unnecessarily complicated. She scratched herself, clawing it from her skin. Ashley touched the place to his tongue, a rising welt by the nipple. He kissed the nipple with an open mouth, then he closed his mouth. Breath rushed from her. He took away her underpants and she was glad, because they were wet and they embarrassed her. She was better off without them, Heather thought, reaching for his hand, but his hand was already there.

  For one crazy moment she had no thought at all, then all she could think of was that picture, the famous one where God touches Adam and brings him to life, finger to finger. Ashley’s finger was in her now. She didn’t know she went that deep, really. He seemed to be searching for something, and she wanted him to find it, whatever it was, because he should have what he wanted, anything he wanted. A drone filled the space between their two bodies, but every time he kissed her the sound stopped in her throat. That embarrassed her, too, but she couldn’t stop. She began to conjure wants—specific physical necessities. She could not have made sentences of the things she wanted him to do. Her legs went wide around him. The strength of his hand was unbearable. God gives life to Adam; it made her laugh. The world turned on Ashley’s fingertip. He took his fingertip away.

  First it pained her, a cutting pain that flashed to the terminus of each limb with a dull depression hard in its wake. For the swiftest instant Heather saw the murky face of her other lover, her drunken, genial frat boy, and it seemed to her that there must be so little to this vast mythic act, after all, and she had been wrong to come here, even with Ashley, but then Ashley moved and the mood fled. He moved not in and out of her, but around inside her, as if he were stirring her from within, mixing some potion of her innards. She didn’t know what to do, and in her frustration began pushing against him—all wrong—until Ashley, without scolding or mocking her, very calmly reached below Heather and lifted her, and showed her how she was not to trouble herself but only hang on. “Better?” He smiled. But she was already away.

  Through haze: the rasp of his pointed chin burrowing her collarbone, her burning nipple cooled by his tongue, the sawdust edge to his smell. She catalogued fiercely, hurling them in to think about later, when she could think again, when there wasn’t this swirl of distraction around her. His shining hair over her eyes. Her own name spoken in her own ear, like the highest imaginable praise. The pressure churning a spiral at the base of her spine, then shooting to the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, how loud it was, and only the unmistakable sensation from within her own throat could convince her that the voice calling so loudly was her own. He came in a shower of sparks. He loved her that much.

  It was sticky between them when he moved. Ashley laughed. Heather was mortified at the noise, which lingered still, trapped around them in the car, but he refused to acknowledge her apology. “It’s like that thing in the Bible.” He grinned. “Isn’t it?”

  “What thing?”

  “You know—about the voice crying out in the wilderness.”

  Heather smiled at him. He slipped from her, leaving her suddenly bereft. “I wish,” she said suddenly. She wiped her face. He was waiting. “I wish I was a virgin. I mean,” her voice was indistinct, “for you. I wish I was a virgin for you.”

  It was dark now, but she could see him clearly. He took a long time to respond, long enough for her to be horrified at what she had said, but he seemed to understand this also, because he shook his head and kissed her.

  He drove her home. Heather didn’t say anything. He would pick her up the next afternoon—every next afternoon, from now on—and take her to the forest. He left her at the end of the drive and turned the Volvo around. She waited till she couldn’t hear it anymore, then she turned and walked through the bald moonlight up to her house. It was a few minutes’ walk. Technically, she was pregnant by the time she reached her own front door.

  Chapter 12

  A Coincidence

  OF COURSE SHE KNEW HE WAS MARRIED. HE WORE a wedding ring, after all, and Heather wasn’t stupid. She also assumed the marriage was happy, since Ashley was too good a man to stay in a marriage that wasn’t. He never lied to Heather about these things. He respected her too much for that. He never told her he would leave Sue, or that his wife did not understand him, or even that they no longer had sex together. Sue, his life with Sue, was utterly beside the point as far as Heather was concerned; the point was that, for Heather, Ashley had saved one portion of his bliss. It was a finite portion, and yet it was abundant beyond anything she had ever imagined for herself. It felt unseemly to want more from him.

  He collected her every day after work. He waited for her in the parking lot, folding and refolding The Manchester Union Leader into wedges to read against the steering wheel, drinking from his thermos of sweet whit
e coffee, not hiding. That he was not ashamed of her filled Heather with helium joy. She reached for the passenger door of the Volvo with a proprietary pleasure she had not felt even in her own home, and took her own seat beside him. It was the lightest moment of her day, and the moment she most missed on weekends, or on the few afternoons Ashley could not come for her. Even more than the sex, Heather thought, though she craved the sex and was harmed by its lack, as if, without it, some vital substance were draining itself from her and howling for replenishment.

  It gave her grace, or seemed to. She was aware of that, swiveling over him or bending herself to his bending, as if they had trained and trained together to make this look effortless. Her naked body became a nude beneath his hands; he had, by some alchemy, charged art into her, and she moved as she imagined a woman in a painting must move, released from her canvas restraints. It gave Heather an undreamed-of power: a touch made him shudder. Her touch. She touched him again and he moaned. He showed her the strength in her own tongue. He showed her the reason her breasts were so soft. He showed her the way in which words could actually sound like themselves: moist, friction, thrust. His voice in her hair could make her cry out. The sweet coffee in his mouth shot its sweetness down between her legs.