Shenandoah Summer

by John Muncie

  “Something’s not right.”

  She started out of her trance to discover that Tug had stepped from behind the easel and was examining her, hands on hips, a pencil stuck behind each ear.

  “Did I move?” she asked.

  “No, you’re fine,” he said, pausing a moment before adding, “You’re perfect.”

  He walked up to her.

  “It’s me,” he said. “I’m not getting the shadows right.” He cupped the palm of his left hand against the right side of her face. He started to adjust her pose, but stopped, holding his hand motionless.

  Alyssa put her hand on top of his and held it to her cheek. Then she looked up, knowing exactly what would happen. Instantly his lips were on hers and the pose was gone forever.

  CHAPTER 37

  When Alyssa awoke, the studio was washed in the light, milky gray of predawn. The open window above the daybed let in a cool infusion of damp air mixed with birdcalls and other early-warning sounds of approaching day.

  Soon she’d have to get back to the farm before Limespring began to stir as well. Slowly, so as not to shake the bed, she eased herself up on her elbow and looked around the room.

  The sketches on the walls were beginning to materialize out of the shadows. In one of them, she could see a horse rearing up like a circus animal; in another, she recognized the swirls of round hay bales. She knew he wouldn’t be able to resist them.

  Alyssa wondered what time it was. Maybe five. She didn’t feel tired at all, though they’d fallen asleep only a couple hours before. She looked at the man sleeping next to her, Tug Palifax, the second man to share a bed with her in twenty years. He was on his back; one arm rested above his head, the other lay atop the sheet that was their only cover. He’d pulled it over them just before spooning up behind her and collapsing into exhausted sleep.

  She thought of faces as parts of the country. Her daughter, Roz, with her fine bones and intricate lines, was the Northeast. Looking at Tug, she saw the West, with its wide expanses and geologic landmarks. He had strong brows, prominent cheeks, and a small bump just below the bridge of his nose. A slight fuzz of beard was beginning to stubble his jaw, and a tiny crescent scar, nearly invisible from a distance, bracketed one corner of his mouth. During the night she’d kissed his cheeks and eyebrows and traced his moon-scar with her fingertips and tongue.

  She remembered how it felt when they first kissed, the molten glitter rushing down inside her. She remembered making so much noise through the night that afterward, slumped over on his chest, she’d asked, “Do you think anybody heard me?” “Only people in the surrounding counties,” he’d replied. She remembered laughing, their chests vibrating together.

  So many things to remember. Things she’d forgotten for years. Like the delicious slipperiness of sweaty lovers; the exploration of fingers; the taste of skin; the sweet achy feeling of a new mouth on her; how lovers talked to each other in voices deepened by tenderness; how they wrapped their legs around each other to hold on through the night.

  The light coming in through the windows was turning from gray to gold. Alyssa slid out of bed, careful to keep Tug covered with the sheet, and walked to the pile of clothes in the middle of the floor. She stepped into the sundress, slipping it up past her hips and chest, but didn’t put on the underwear. Something else she wanted to remember: what it felt like to walk around naked under her dress just because of the possibilities.

  She stepped over to the easel. Another unfinished portrait of Alyssa Brown was taped there to the drawing board, but this one didn’t look at her with recriminating eyes or make her feel incomplete. For the first time in years, she felt whole, as whole as she ever could.

  “What are you doing over there?” Tug was sitting up on the daybed. “Come back. I need you. I need you right now.”

  “Last night you said your batteries had all run down.”

  “I’ve recharged. Come back, please.” He held out his arms to her.

  “I can’t,” she said. “If I come over there, I’ll never leave, and I’ve got to get going before anybody sees me.”

  “No one will be up for hours,” Tug said. “We’ve got plenty of time to make our escape.”

  “Our escape?”

  “You didn’t think I’d let you get away that easily, did you? But first, come here. We have time. I promise.”

  Alyssa walked over, the panties still in her hand. Tug grabbed them, and Alyssa, refusing to let go, toppled onto him.

  He rolled her onto her back and straddled her. She started to speak, but Tug put a finger on her lips. “You can’t know how many times I’ve pictured you here, in this light,” he said. “It’s the truest light there is. There are no—”

  He stopped in midsentence. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “I’ve been practicing for weeks what I’d say if this ever happened. And that’s the best I could come up with. It’s completely lame.”

  He looked at her for a moment, then said, “How about this: You’re beautiful.”

  Alyssa leaned up, brushed her lips against his, and said, “Better.”

  He pressed her back on the pillow with his lips hard on hers. She felt him push the sundress up past her waist and wriggle one of his knees between her thighs, separating her legs. Then he brought his other knee there, separating them even more. She expected to feel his body sliding down on hers, feel him blanketing her with his weight, but instead he sat back up on his knees.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said. Then he bent over, skimming his lips up her belly to her breasts.

  It made her shiver. She closed her eyes. “That’s much better.”

  Later they lay on their sides facing each other just a breath apart. By then rays of sunlight were making bright shapes on the floor, as if someone had peeled bits of gloom from the concrete.

  “I’ve been daydreaming about doing that, doing everything we did last night, for weeks,” said Tug. “Ever since I first saw you. And the funny thing is, my daydreams don’t even come close. What happened last night was astronomically better.”

  Alyssa gently stroked his face with her fingers. “You know, now that we’re making confessions, I have one to make, too.” She pushed Tug over on his back, and this time she straddled him. She leaned over, looking into his eyes with an expression of soulful melancholy, and said, “Last night wasn’t nearly as good as I had hoped.”

  Before Tug’s shock could register, Alyssa covered his face and neck with kisses.

  “So it’s going to be like that, is it?” he said.

  “You bet,” she said and hopped off the bed. She found his running shorts and tossed them to him. “Time to go.”

  She started for the door, but turned abruptly. Then she said, “I’m glad you’re coming with me. I’m not ready for this night to end.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Soon the brand-new lovers were walking hand in hand through the July morning. The leftover clouds of evening, trapped in the scoop of Limespring Hollow, still clung to the road and stubbly grass.

  As the mist began to brighten from dusky plum to light periwinkle, it looked to Alyssa like a crazy dream sequence from a musical. Gene Kelly in Paris; Jud Fry dancing with a frontier vixen in Oklahoma! She half expected to see smoke machines lining the road.

  “Poor Jud is dead, poor Jud Fry is dead,” she sang with outstretched hands, trying and failing to reach a deep baritone.

  “Who’s Jud?”

  Alyssa launched into a detailed explanation of dream sequences, smoke machines, and Poor Jud until Tug stopped her with a kiss. “I love your voice. Keep talking. I could listen to you forever.”

  Alyssa took him at his word and talked all the way back to the farm about musicals and dancing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and staging Stephen Sondheim. When they turned onto the drive to the farm and found Roy and Theo hanging their heads over the fences, nickering for attention, she changed course from theater to horses. “See these two swirls of hair in the middle of Roy’s forehead?” she said, rubbing the red
horse’s white blaze. “That supposedly means he’s a rogue. One swirl is good, two are bad. So much for old wives’ tales. They don’t come more even-keeled than this one.” She kissed the soft part of Roy’s nose and turned to the subjects of “wolves’ teeth” and “chestnuts” and “coronary bands” and “ringbone”—a whole glossary of equine terms that Tug gave up trying to keep straight.

  In the middle of an exposition on the fragility of a horse’s stomach, Alyssa stopped. “Oh God! You got me started, now I can’t shut up.” Then she started laughing. “I can’t even shut up about shutting up.”

  That made Tug laugh, which in turn escalated Alyssa’s laughter, a laughter fed as much by relief as by the comedy of the moment. She only stopped when Tug kissed her laughing mouth and they found themselves in a frantic embrace by the side of the road with the two horses watching.

  When they reached the house, Alyssa led Tug to the upstairs bathroom. The floor was laid in worn red linoleum tiles. Wrapped around the aquamarine walls was a giant purple dragon, painted by a Limespring muralist for Alyssa’s fortieth birthday. The dragon’s scaly tail circled the mirror over the sink; her voluptuous body (the artist painted her with breasts and called her “Marilyn”) curved around the walls; her arched neck ended at the shower fixture, which sprouted a ceramic dragon’s head whose mouth was the spout.

  “I’m ready for a shower, how about you?” Alyssa asked. Tug answered by kicking off his sandals. As he started to pull up his T-shirt, she stopped him. “No,” she said. “I want to.”

  She slid the shirt over his head, then moved her hands down his torso, descending the ladder of his ribs one rung at time. Tug watched her fingers reach his running shorts and slip under the elastic of his waistband.

  He closed his eyes and felt his shorts pulled over his hips and down to the floor. He felt her lips press against the skin just below his belly button. When he opened his eyes again she was leaning into the shower, her dress a little heap of dusty sunlight on the red linoleum.

  She turned on the faucets, felt the water for a few seconds, testing the heat, then stepped into the tub. Facing the rear wall, she leaned back into the spray. The water raced down her shoulders, around her breasts, and past her belly to darken the blond triangle between her legs.

  “Come in,” she said. Tug stepped into the stream of water and immersed his hands in the warm rivulets that braided Alyssa’s thighs. She wrapped her arms around his neck, kissed him hard, and whispered into his watery ear, “You wash me first, then I’ll wash you.”

  Tug took a pink bar of soap from the tile holder and rubbed until his hands were covered with a thick pink lather. He made small soapy circles down her back. He washed each leg, starting at the swell of her inner thigh. Then he reached around to her front, his soapy hands sliding up and down her curves like a car on a country road.

  Alyssa cupped her hands over his and rode them to her breasts. She stopped him there. Then she pushed back into him. Soon they began to move together, slowly at first, as the water showered over them, spattering the tile and filling the bathroom with steam.

  CHAPTER 39

  They got out of bed that day for the last time at 5 P.M. Tug hadn’t wanted to leave and Alyssa hadn’t wanted him to leave. Still, she took his hand and led him to the front door.

  “Go,” she said, as he dragged along behind her like a reluctant child. “If you don’t show up for dinner at Limespring, the gossip will start flying.”

  “Who cares?” he said, kissing her hand and starting to work up her arm.

  “You can come back later,” she said as he reached her neck. “Now, shoo.” She pushed him out the door and lightly kicked him on his rear end.

  “Expect a night visitor,” Tug said.

  She leaned against the front door and watched him walk down the road until he became a dot at the end of the drive. A vanishing point, where all lines converge.

  She made a pot of coffee, the third that day, and sat on the sofa, sipping from a heavy green mug. One by one, as if taking cookies from a plate, she began to savor the images of the day. Their morning shower, their breakfast in bed, their sleepless nap in the soft heat of the afternoon.

  She was wearing only a T-shirt, and the nubby red fabric of the sofa pressed against her bare skin like the tips of a thousand tiny fingers. Without thinking, she began to move her legs back and forth across the cushions, slowly and methodically like a swimmer treading water. She closed her eyes and let the sensation mix with a vision of Tug’s body arched above hers.

  Over the past few weeks, she’d sidetracked her brain from these kinds of thoughts by making mental lists. Things Roz would need in her dorm room, props for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, veterinary products for the farm, seeds she wanted to order for next year’s garden. It hadn’t worked. The moment she wasn’t vigilant, the moment she hesitated between basil and cantaloupe, her mind bolted free and raced back to Tug. She’d force her attention to another list, only to repeat the futile process time and again.

  She didn’t bother fighting it now. With the warm mug pressed against her chest, she leaned back, rubbed her legs against the fabric, and let her mind wander to where it wanted to be.

  Who knows how long she might have sat there, luxuriating in the freedom of delicious thoughts, if the phone hadn’t rung. She wanted to ignore it, but it could have been Darryl or Roz.

  “Liss, you’re not going to believe what she’s done now.”

  It took a moment for Alyssa to attach a name to the voice. It was Carol, with her weekly update on the Shrike’s latest atrocity: She’d called a student “a piece of work,” then defended it by saying, “Everyone is a piece of God’s work.” Carol slipped into an alarmingly accurate imitation of the Shrike’s Texas accent: “‘You know I studied thee-ahhhhl-ogee in graduate school . . .’”

  Alyssa held the phone to her ear, not really registering the rest of Carol’s rant. She didn’t want to talk about the Shrike. She wanted to talk about Tug; about how the yellow sundress skimmed her nipples as it fell to the floor; about how every cell in her body felt like it was shimmering.

  She couldn’t, certainly not to Carol, who had the biggest mouth at Emerson. Telling her would be like posting a notice on the school bulletin board: Mrs. Brown is in love with an artist.

  “In love with.” Alyssa weighed the words, measured them on her tongue, tried them out with her lips. “In love with.”

  “What’s that?” Carol asked. “Who’s in love with?”

  Alyssa recovered quickly: “The Shrike, she’s in love with her own voice.”

  “Boy you’re not kidding, the last meeting she . . .”

  Carol started off on another tirade. But Alyssa told her it was time to feed the horses. She made polite good-bye noises and hung up.

  She didn’t want to think about Emerson and her future. Up until the Shrike, she used to think she’d be there forever. Emerson and the farm were the two anchors in her life. Now Emerson seemed to be slipping away. That left just the farm.

  Or did it? “You go, the farm goes,” Darryl had said. She saw his face, twisted in anger; his fingers, clamped around her wrist. She stood up from the sofa and shook her arm. She refused to think about that now.

  Instead she walked outside and looked up the drive to where the vanishing point had vanished an hour before. She turned to the barn, thinking about yellow sundresses and shimmering cells.

  Part 2

  CHAPTER 40

  There was a crazy bloom of flowers at Limespring that summer. Daisies ran rampant, daylilies crowded the roadsides, black-eyed Susans sprang up by the hundreds along fencelines. The coned blossoms of the butterfly bushes, which were fuller than anyone could remember, were so heavy they could barely lift their heads to the sun. The air was practically syrupy. Its hazy confection of honeysuckle mixed with the sugared incense of summersweet drove the honeybees to a frenzied dance.

  But it was the colors that everyone talked about. The pastels of spring, a woodwind concerto
of light green baby maple leaves and creamy dogwood blossoms, had exploded into a big brass symphony of bold color, with purple playing lead horns. Its swoopy, sexy notes were everywhere—in the violet balloon flowers that had taken over Cora Beeson’s garden, in the butterfly bushes, in the phlox, the chicory, the lavender. On the edges of the fields, thistles raised their periwinkle cups to toast the sky. And the pastures were dotted by thousands of tiny amethyst flowers the farmers called knotweed and swore made the cows more fertile.

  The local newspaper even carried stories about the unusual season of flowers in Fauquier County. A hot, wet spring was considered the culprit, though a county extension agent noted a record number of bees and speculated on a connection. An astrologer in Warrenton claimed it was because Aquarius, the water bearer, was in conjunction with Taurus, a sign of the fixed Earth.

  At Limespring, it wasn’t only the flowers that blossomed wildly. The normally drowsy summer had become a season of infatuation. Flirtations sprang up like dandelions.

  Jackie Burke took Talbot Rice, a Limespring donor who’d been widowed three years before, to dinner at Four and Twenty Blackbirds in Flint Hill. She’d intended to talk to him about increasing his donation. But something happened over the appetizers, an architectural construction of scallops and red peppers. Maybe it was the heartbreak red of the peppers or the lonely look in Talbot’s eyes, but Jackie found herself taking his hand to comfort him, then saying she’d always found him to be a very attractive man. He accompanied her back to Limespring that night. The next day, Nattie saw a couple walk hand in hand toward the boxwood maze. Could the woman have been Jackie? Nattie thought so, but then it was dusk and she was in a hurry to get to Rudy’s cabin where he was freshly showered and waiting for her with a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace and a bottle of cold Pouilly-Fuissé.