by Amy Lapwing
She found the warm opening and inched her finger in as he waited. He rolled his eyes closed and thrusted. She pushed against the inside of his anus until she found the good place, a deep “Ah!” rattling out of his throat. She pushed with her finger in rhythm with his thrusts.
“Look at me,” she commanded.
His determination was gone, he wanted mercy, now. “I’m fucking you,” she said, “like she did. I’m fucking you!” The offensive word exploded on his ears.
He groaned, trying to hold back his climax.
“Say what you’re thinking!” she said.
His brows pinched his eyes shut.
“Say it!”
“Ah!” he cried.
“Say-it!” she yelled.
He thrusted faster, to obliterate the sickening feeling. “¡Chingame! ¡Chingame! ¡Puta!”
“You fuck!” she said and she clamped her teeth upon her lip, he was hammering himself so hard against her.
He closed his eyes and held his breath, little packets of air pulsing through his glottis, then he sunk his face into her shoulder and came. The shudderings of his hair tickled her nose.
He slipped swiftly out of her and laid on his stomach huddled against her shoulder.
Justina went into the bathroom and washed her hands, took her nightgown from the hook on the inside of the door and put it on. It smelled of bed, the cotton was old. She covered it with her bathrobe and went back into the bedroom.
He was putting his silk shorts back on. “I didn’t like it. It was mean. I didn't like it."
She picked up his clothes from the floor. “You came, it gave you pleasure.”
“I came because you wanted me to.”
“You came for her.”
“She was my puta.”
“I can be your puta too.”
“I don’t want you that way.”
“How do you want me then?” She wadded up his clothes and threw them on the bed.
“I didn’t want her, at all,” he said quietly as he put on his shirt.
“But you did!”
“All right,” he said. He stood to put on his pants. “I did.”
“It’s no better,” she said and she went out of the room.
He followed her down to the kitchen. She was peering into the refrigerator. “I wanted her and I didn’t love you, for that week. Then the boy was not mine and everything changed.”
She closed the refrigerator door and got down a mug and filled it with water.
“That’s what happened,” he said, “that’s the truth. I hate it, but I can’t take it back.”
She put the mug in the microwave and pressed the buttons. The machine whirred, slowly spinning the water, forcing it to send up escaping bubbles.
“I want you because I love you, I have loved you since I first saw you and constantly I have loved you for six years and two months minus one week. I love you even when you are completely in yourself and you do not pay attention to me. I love you when you are overbearing and arrogant and treat me like a pet monkey. I love you even though you make little of my passion, which it is what I love to do, which it is not a dream, I know it, it’s what I do everyday because it has my imagination. Just as you have my heart. I love you because when you love me we are opened up to something, that it’s inside us all the time, but we can only see it with each other. I don’t know how it happens, I don’t know how you do it, you don’t know either, but it’s real and it’s what I’ve waited for all my life, and—”
The microwave beeped. Justina took out her mug and put a teabag in it.
“I’ll be damned, Justina,” he said, walking around her to look in her face, “if I’m going to let you walk away from me, no matter how much I hurt you. It’s not right. It feels wrong.”
She bobbed the bag a few times and laid it in the sink.
“I demand another chance,” he said.
“Fuck you,” she said and she went into the family room. She sat on the couch and turned on the T.V. It was after one, there were only sitcom re-runs and middles of movies. She settled on Bewitched.
He sat on the couch with her; she shifted away from him.
“I want to stay here,” he said. “I’m going to stay tonight.”
She watched the silly story as though it were a news report of another wife-beating or a rape, so regrettable. “No,” she said.
“I want to stay in my house, with my wife.”
“You got to go. You got to leave me alone.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I don’t want you here. You give me the creeps.”
“I will stay in the guest room.”
“You’re not my guest.”
He persisted in looking at her as she watched the T.V. screen. He clenched and opened his fists. “God! You make me want to force you!”
“I don’t care.” She looked at him, to prove it to him. “I don’t care.”
The stairs creaked as he went back upstairs in his socks. He tip-tapped down in his shoes and reappeared in the doorway wearing his tux suit coat and overcoat. “I can’t find my other glove,” he said.
“Did you have them on when you came in?” she said, eyes on the set.
“I don’t remember.”
“Maybe it’s in the car.”
He kept looking at her, she was annoyed.
“Buenas noches,” she said.
“Buenas noches,” he responded automatically. He left her alone with her show.
Chapter Twenty-two
Keep Cold
The cold room was atmosphere-controlled for optimum apple keeping, a kind of sleeping chamber for the just-picked apples, slowing their breathing, keeping them young. On the rows of shelves apples sat in bins, marked by variety, waiting to be nestled into small bags week by week, and sold in the Abbey Orchard store by the peck, half-bushel, or bushel. They would last until May when the last ones would be sold and the store would close until late August, except for the ice cream stand where the cider slush was the only item on the menu that told the people of the Abbey family’s centuries-old love of the apple.
Grace came in and found an empty cart and pushed it up to the shelves. Paul sat in the forklift, maneuvering a great wooden bin from the middle shelf down onto the floor. He parked the forklift and went to Grace.
“Hi,” he said.
His cheeks were red from the chill, or the work of fork lifting. He was smiling, but his eyes were not part of it, they gave all their attention to the work of looking at Grace.
“Hi,” she said back. She flipped open an empty peck bag and began filling it from the bin. Mutsus. They were ‘perfect now.’
“I loved,” said Paul, “your performance. Gosh!” He began filling a bushel bag.
“Thank you, Paul.”
“How long did it take you to learn it?”
“He gave it to me about a week and half before.”
“But you didn’t learn to sing like that in a week and a half.”
“I guess not.” She put her full bag on the cart. They worked side by side, he filling the heavier bags, she busying herself with the smaller ones.
“How do you do that stone-skipping thing?” he asked.
“What?”
“You know, where your voice goes, like, skipping across these real high notes.”
“Oh. I don’t know. I guess you imagine yourself doing it first, to get the idea in your head. Then you just try it. You try to get it to sound like it does in your head.”
Paul put another bag on the cart. He whipped open a new one. “I don’t think I hear it right in my head.”
Grace rearranged the full bags on the cart and found room for another one. “What do you hear in your head?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Words, mostly. Phrases. Things people say.” He heaved a bag to the cart. The bottom fell through and the apples rolled all over the floor, bruised for the first time in their lives.
“Got to be careful not to overfill them,” said Grace, and she squ
atted down to help him pick up the apples.
“Actually, I usually don’t hear anything. Nothing coherent. Nothing memorable,” he admitted. “Except once in a while.”
“Quiet is nice,” she said.
He snuck a look at her; he was right, she did mean him, she was smiling at him. Now I have to prove to her I am not just a quiet guy.
“Grace,” he said, “I thought of a place.”
“A place?” The top of the cart was full, she put her full bag on the lower shelf.
“A place no one’s ever taken you. Well, I’m sure you’ve been there, but not, you know, with someone.”
“Okay,” said Grace, “I’ll bite. Where?”
“Let me just take you there,” he said. He paused in his work to look at her, no masking smile, trying to send with his eyes the message, “I am not an asshole.”
“I got to help my mother with dinner.”
“Just an hour. Look! See how fast we’re filling this cart?”
She smiled at him. “Okay,” she said.
Oh! That sunlight look, it’s flitting across her face, her lips, her eyes, her brow.
“Mr. Blank Sheet,” she completed.
It’s still there, oh, God, it’s so wonderful. Grace!
“B.S.,” he muttered. “Bad choice of words.”
She laughed at him and his heart pooled into his shoes.
An hour later Paul parked his little Ford on a street in downtown Dunster. He got out and zipped around to Grace’s door. She had already opened it and gotten out. Looking up at the grand old building, she said, “The public library?”
“All right, so it is a quiet guy kind of place. But it’s really hopping, you’ll see.”
They walked into the atrium. Grace tilted her head back and looked up at the domed ceiling.
“This way.” Paul led her into periodicals. They sat at a table between the tall racks of magazines and journals. “Most of the people here are regulars,” he said.
She looked around at the people. Everyone was alone, it seemed, their minds alive in some article or short story or poem. No, there were two teenaged girls looking for some magazine. It didn’t seem to be on the shelf. A woman noticed their confusion and lifted the rack and revealed the stack of back copies. They looked at her with amazed gratitude, and flipped eagerly through the stack. Here it is, the one we were looking for. What tinkerbells we are!
“Uh-oh,” said Paul. He was looking at a gnome-like man who stood by their table, red chick fuzz hair, round, heavy-lidded eyes, his mouth twisted like a wrung rag. He clutched a notebook to his chest and glared at them. They got up and stepped back from the table. He put his notebook down and took off his parka and put it on the back of one of the chairs and sat down, staring straight ahead. He cast them a peevish glance over his shoulder.
“Come on!” smiled Paul to Grace. “They can get kind of territorial.” He showed her the iron spiral staircase and they went up into the stacks.
“Where’s your usual place?” she asked.
“I’ll show you,” he said, and he led her to the fiction section. They went down one of the aisles. “Right here,” he said, separating two of the books. “Right here between Forster and—” He tilted his head to read the spine. “Gardner. Make way for Fortinbras, you guys.”
Grace sat down on the floor. “And when’s that going to happen?”
He sat down with her. “Any day now.” They smiled at each other until Paul looked away. “What about you, Grace? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Promise you won’t laugh?” she said.
Paul traced a cross on his chest with his finger.
“I don’t know. Just, passionate, I think.”
The word rang in his mind. The truth of it shattered the quiet guy facade. “Oh!” he cried. “That’s the only thing you could be!”
“How do you know that? You think you know me?”
“Word of the day,” he said, “is ‘temerity.’”
She bit the inside of her cheek, and appeared to be looking for the definition up on the ‘E’ row.
“As in,” he continued, “will he have the temerity to say, you’re never far from my thoughts.” He kept his eyes on her slowly smiling face as long as he could, but she had a bit more temerity than this sweet boy.
When he looked away, she said, “So, tell me about your novel.”
“No point in talking about it till you’ve read it.”
“Can I read it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, drawing his shoulders up as though he were chilled. “Then you’ll know more about me than I do about you.”
She leaned back on her hands.
“You willing to even up the score?” he said.
She stood up and walked toward the railing at the end of the aisle. “Might take a while,” she said.
“I’m in no hurry,” he said, following her. They stood at the railing and talked, spinning their own gentle cocoon above the swarming crowd below.
Pascale called on Saturday morning and left a message. Justina knew she was dying to know why Jacques had called their house late the night before to ask James to come get him. She did not return her call. She put on her sweats and her hat and mittens and popped a cassette into her Walkman and went running.
A deep, deep cold had blown in overnight and the bitter wind was still whipping. She could barely trot into it, it pushed against her like a great stretched sheet. She pulled her hat down over her ears and dropped to a walk. The branches in the orchard creaked with the wind’s force. The young shoots of new growth from the summer stuck up from the tops of the trees and slammed into each other, unaware of their danger. So changed are they from their fruit-bearing days a few months ago, when each tree was so precious and exalted, the apples guarded by additional employees hired to keep thieving at a minimum. Now the trees sit ignored in their white fields, tempting no one. Left alone and looking wise in their scaly old bark, they seem happy. It is not a bitter old age, they know they will be reborn and doted upon like a fiancée when the green springs again from their fingertips.
Every moment spent in bitterness is a moment not spent in tenderness. ‘A leopard does not change his spots.’ His tender spots. He is older than I, like those trees. He is handsome, like them. But he is not happy to be left alone, he will not be reborn. His life may change, if he is with people. With me. Bitterness is a thief who lies and tells you he gives you something as he takes. Self-pride. I am proud of myself, I refuse to love my husband.
Justina turned around at Grace’s house, she was tired of fighting the wind. The wind made her run back home, and she warmed herself on the couch under the black and red afghan. It was tattered, the squares were coming apart. She usually used the gold one she had made for Michael. A fire would be nice, but she had never learned how to make one, that was his department. She picked up the phone and put it back down when she heard a key turn in the front door lock.
She met him as he came in. His shoulders were hunched up trying to shield his bare head from the wind.
She closed the door quickly behind him. “You should’ve worn a hat.”
“I didn’t have one with me.”
She muttered, “Nimrod,” but he didn’t hear and she went into the living room. “Why don’t you make a fire?”
He got a hat from the closet and went back out. She waited at the door, ready to open it when he came back. He stacked kindling and small logs in the grate and crumpled newspaper beneath. She brought him the matches and he lit it. The paper burned with a high blaze. He hung his coat in the closet and took off his boots and sat beside her on the sofa. They looked into the fire and felt better.
Afterword
The lyrics to selections of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana are found in the album notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording of that work by the Chor und Orchester de Deutschen Oper Berlin under the direction of Eugen Jochum. The English translation of "In trutina" from that work is mine; all other English translations o
f Carmina selections are taken from the album notes.
French poetry excerpts are from Charles Baudelaire's "L'Invitation au voyage," a sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, and "L'Amoureuse" by Paul Eluard. The English translations are mine.
I used lyrics from the traditional American folk song "The Water is Wide." For the English translation of the aria "Libiamo ne' lieti calici" from Verdi's La Traviata, I used the album notes of the "Three Tenors" 1994 concert recording. I translated into English the lyrics from Jacques Brel's "Prochain amour" found on the album cover of the 1978 reprinting of his recording "Ne me quitte pas." And the English translation of Portillo de la Luz’s “Delirio" is likewise mine.
A Note About the Author
Amy Lapwing is the recipient of a 2006 Polly Bond Award for Episcopal communications. She has published poetry in Chester College's Compass Rose. This is her first novel. She works as a software engineer and lives with her children in New Hampshire.
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