Late in the Season

by Felice Picano

  The sky over the harbor was strikingly blue, shaded darker toward the horizon, softer and brighter in the middle as though it were an enormous pale taffeta ribbon. A row of little streaks of strato-cumulus clouds in one spot looked like the runs in a nylon stocking. It would get chillier tonight, she supposed. Last night had been cooler than the night before; it was September.

  Her foot still hummed with pain, and a bit of an itch. Barbara had wound the bandages so tightly. Still, it was better than having it bleeding and perhaps getting tetanus. What a stupid thing to have happened, especially now that she wanted to prove how independent she was.

  “Face facts,” she said, repeating Jonathan’s words, “you’re an instant invalid.”

  How chivalrous Jonathan was. How sensible too. Why did she have to be in love with him, of all people? Why now, out here, with so much in her life pending? And why did it have to be so physical? She’d had lovely relationships with boys before, without that ever coming into it; Michael in high school, Marty Strauss, several years ago.

  Yet it was physical and to deny that was absurd. After she had left the two boys coloring in the living room, Stevie had gone home to her parents’ house and had tried to read the books she’d borrowed. Of course she’d failed. All she could think of was Jonathan, in the hot tub, his eyes dark and secretive, the cigarette dangling off his lower lip. She hadn’t really known what she was doing when she asked to wash him; all she knew was he was there, naked, and she had to touch him. Afterward, the Balzac thrown down on the floor of her bedroom, she’d pictured the scene differently from the way it had happened.

  All was the same until he moved to take her hands, to move them away from him. At that point in her thoughts, he didn’t move away at all but leaned back against the edge of the hot tub as she leaned forward and softly began to scrub his back with the sponge she’d seen him use on the children. She moved up his shoulder, over his chest, in soft, deft swirling motions, finally down to his legs. His cigarette smoke curled up into her face, sweet and pungent. She inhaled it too, felt slightly light-headed from the tobacco and nicotine. When she looked at his face, Jonathan’s eyes were closed, his head thrown back. She stroked along the skin of his stretched out legs, up each one. Through the soapy water she felt his tension falling away.

  “Feels good,” he murmured.

  Her arms were around him; she dropped the sponge in the water and was using her hands to soap and lather his chest.

  “Stop,” he said, moaning, “it feels too good.”

  She wouldn’t stop, though. And when her hands moved down, they met his erection, not half-hard like before, but hard, straining through the sheath of skin. She begun to stroke it and he began to sit up.

  “Look, honey,” he protested.

  “Sit back, relax,” she said.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, his voice thick as though his mouth were cloyed with honey.

  “Yes I do,” she said, and went on stroking him.

  He tried to stop her once more, but she was relentless. Having him this near, this much within her grasp, she wasn’t about to let go of him.

  The cigarette went out then, or dropped in the water. He lay back, all resistance gone, his head rubbing from side to side softly against her breasts, as she leaned forward and worked at arousing him, using both hands now, one to stroke and one to cup and fondle his scrotum. The tip of his penis alone peeked pinkly out of the soapy water, as she lathered it.

  He began to gasp, and she bent down to watch his face more closely. His mouth opened slightly, his head moved from side to side more frequently, he moaned, and finally a hoarse, half-stifled cry emerged from him, as his entire body arched up out of the water, toward her, his penis entirely out of the water, full and hard in her grip. Then he spurted, three times, her hand stroking it out of him again and again, the pale fluid splashing on his chest and stomach, before he relaxed totally and sank back into the water, sitting down again, quiet, exhausted. Then she let go of him, and he raised his face up to her and kissed her.

  Thinking of that, Stevie had masturbated twice yesterday afternoon, and again today. Even remembering it, knowing it was a fantasy, made her restless. She knew it hadn’t happened, probably wouldn’t happen. Or if it did, had, their relationship—for what it was—would be over. Or would it? If only she could be more patient; if only she didn’t force herself on him, but allowed him to come to her. But would he?

  He did seem to like her and to want her company. At least he didn’t avoid her. That must mean something, no? Take today for example. She’d been coming down the ramp from the deck of her family’s house, on her way to the village to do grocery shopping. When she reached the boardwalk, she saw Jonathan putting out large, shiny, plastic garbage bags, explaining to her that it was refuse collection day. He’d been wearing a different pair of shorts, pale blue ones with deep slashed pockets on their sides that hugged his hips, this time topped by a dark blue Lacoste shirt. His hair seemed more curly, more unkempt than usual, his eyes slightly puffy and veiled, as though he hadn’t slept enough last night. But he’d smiled at her and been friendly, and asked where she was going. When she told him, he said he had errands to do too: could he accompany her? Stevie had waited on his front deck, looking at the wonderful view of the ocean as he went inside to make a fast grocery list and get his wallet. She looked down at his lined music paper, filled with illegible scrawls and notations that seemed almost like cuneiform. She’d wondered what to say about the evening before; but as she had already turned it into a fairly satisfying fantasy, she couldn’t bring herself to spoil it by saying anything about it to him. If he brought it up, of course… He came out, fingers or a brush run through his hair, his beard slicked down, slightly damp so that tiny droplets of water gathered between curls like dew on a lawn. And they had walked and talked, chatting, friendly, Jonathan telling her how the boys had eaten him out of house and home but what a good distraction they had been from the grind of his work. Then she had felt the snag to her toe and looked down.

  “Cab, ma’am,” Jonathan said.

  She realized she’d been daydreaming. She looked up to see Jonathan pulling a little red Radio Flyer wagon with two bags of groceries standing in it.

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “I’ll break it.”

  “Step in,” he said, and came to help lift her into it.

  “I’m too heavy.”

  “We moved the stereo equipment in this,” he said. “Come on—that weighed more than you do.”

  When she was settled in the wagon, he placed the two bags of groceries in front of her. Her bandaged foot stuck out over the railing. She didn’t feel like a child. She felt like an oversize adult playing a child’s game.

  “Present,” he said, and handed her a long, green tissue paper cone.

  “What is it?”

  “Open it.”

  She tore the top of the paper and exposed a brilliant coral- and wine-colored orchid, with dewlaps of speckled red on white; it was as soft as satin. It smelled luscious and vaguely familiar.

  “That’s for being a patient invalid,” he said.

  He went in front and lifted up the handle.

  “Hold on,” he said, and began to pull.

  When they arrived at the place on their boardwalk where her ramp began, she started to get out of the wagon.

  “Stay put,” he said. “You’re my guest for dinner tonight. Remember what Barbara said about you having to stay off your foot for a while. Looks like you’re going to be pampered a little bit. So you might as well get used to it.”

  She began to argue, but he didn’t listen. He pulled the wagon up to his house and onto the back deck, helped her out, set her into a chaise longue, then unpacked the groceries.

  It was only several hours later, still in his house, when she was gingerly stepping into the shower before dinner, that she knew what the fragrance was she had smelled so strongly in the orchid: it was herself.

  Chapter Thirteen
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  It was odd the way she slept, her body half on its side, curled against his, or against the barrier of sheets and light blankets he’d thrown off in his sleep. The same kind of sleeping that Artie and Ken did, as though even in her sleep she had to be sure he was there. She didn’t snore either, although once in a while he would hear a slight gasp, half a sigh, as though she’d remembered something sad in a dream. She did move around while sleeping, unlike Jonathan, who went to sleep flat on his back, his hands at his sides, or folded in front, and woke up exactly in that position, hours later. Daniel used to say he would be an easy job for the mortician if he died in his sleep. Not Stevie. Jonathan would half awaken to find her head on his chest, her legs entwined in his, the fingers of one of his hands threaded through hers. She dreamed too. Jonathan almost never dreamed, or if he did, seldom remembered doing so later. Daniel dreamed too, on occasion. He would waken Jonathan sometimes with his somnambulistic battles. “Hey!” Jonathan would have to shout and Daniel would awaken embarrassed, or surprised. One time, Daniel had begun to strike out in his sleep, and Jonathan had to protect himself, which was difficult since Daniel was so much larger, and finally he’d struck back. Daniel had come to then, and they’d both stayed awake until dawn, trying to explain to each other what had happened, what flaw had occurred in their communication.

  Now the telephone was going to ring. He’d asked Daniel to call later. Stevie liked to sleep late. But so far Dan hadn’t gone along with this. Slave to habit as he was. Or to having his own way. Jonathan was never certain which. At least Jonathan had turned off the phone in the bedrooms, so it only rang distantly, in the kitchen, too far away for it to bother her. There it went!

  He pulled himself out of bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, walked sleepily out, closing the bedroom door, going out into the light of another splendidly sunny day, opening two glass doors to catch the fresh ocean morning, then opening the back deck glass doors, for the odor of hot-leaved Swedish ivy.

  “Hello,” he said into the receiver. Then, without even listening to what the overseas operator was saying, “Yes. I’ll accept the call.”

  “You sound sleepy.”

  “I told you I was sleeping later,” Jonathan said. “It has something to do with the change of seasons. Hold on, will you. I want to heat up some coffee.”

  Daniel began talking, as he usually did, this time about the scriptwriters, who wouldn’t accept the least bit of criticism. “They all think they’re fucking George Bernard Shaw or something,” Daniel insisted. “And he could have used a good editor, too, if you ask me.” Then about the actors in the first two films, some of whom were terrific in their parts, and others awful. “Sods. Bleedings sods,” Daniel called them—he’d already assimilated all the argot on the set.

  “That’s probably what they call you, when you aren’t there to hear,” Jonathan said. “With better cause.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, don’t you know what a sod is? It’s a sodomite.”

  “Oh?” Daniel said in that small, tight voice, by which he expressed correction or knowledge imparted, as though he were doing a favor by listening, by learning. Then he sailed on about the producers.

  Jonathan listened for a long time without further interruption or comment. He sipped his coffee; he pulled the phone outside onto the deck, where the sun had burned off a light mist, and where he could see the water on both sides of the island sparkling with the fractured intensity of a Monet seascape.

  “So, when he gave me that line,” Daniel said, “I told him…” Jonathan uh-hmmed and uh-huhed a bit to show he was still on the line. But he wasn’t. He was thinking about act two of Lady and the Falcon, where only last night, in a burst of surprising creativity, he had added an entirely new number for Fiammetta’s father, a complaint of great complexity and humor: the old man’s list of how his daughter was driving him to distraction. He’d called up his collaborator, Barry, and first outlined it very carefully, explaining how, without this break, the show would run from one relatively quiet number to another rather somber one—the chiding chorus of the women against Fiammetta’s whimsicality. Surprisingly, Barry was amenable. Even more astonishing, after having Jonathan’s ad-libbed lyrics read to him only three times, he made a half dozen changes, and agreed to the inclusion of the new song.

  Finally Daniel stopped, interrupting himself to say, “Aren’t you awake yet?”

  “Uh-huh,” Jonathan answered.

  “You don’t sound it. Are you sick or something?”

  “I’m fine. I’m just waking up. I was up very late working last night, Dan.”

  The other end of the line was silent, then, “Is anything wrong there? Barry or Saul or anyone giving you a hard time?”

  “On the contrary. They’re being perfect angels.”

  “The composing going all right?”

  “Terrific. That’s why I was up late last night. That’s why I’m still sleepy. What is this, anyway? A cross-examination?”

  “You don’t sound right,” Daniel said firmly.

  “How in the hell can you tell? You’re the one doing all the talking!”

  “Something is wrong,” said Daniel; and his conviction irritated Jonathan even more than his refusal to listen.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Jonathan said calmly.

  “I know you, Jonathan Lash. And I say something’s wrong. You’re sick, or angry with me, or something is off with your score, or someone is giving you trouble. It’s not the kids, is it?”

  “Nothing is wrong,” Jonathan said with Antarctic coolness, aware that Daniel would interpret this, too, as proof of what he was asserting, as he would if Jonathan were calm or angry or insanely raging. Damn Dan! “Go on,” he said, attempting to alter his tone to one of greater warmth. “You were talking about Heather and Tony.”

  There was another short silence, then Daniel did go on talking about the filming problems, but he never seemed as unself-consciously glib as before his question. Before he hung up, he wanted to leave a number where he would be in the next few hours.

  “What for?” Jonathan asked. “So you’ll fly over and pat my wrists? How inane!”

  “Well,” Daniel waffled. “Maybe it really just is a case of your getting up on the wrong side of the bed, after all.”

  “Hey, Daniel,” Jonathan said in an urgent, conspiratorial whisper.

  Daniel answered back warily, “What?”

  “Screw yourself,” Jonathan said, and hung up. “Wasn’t that mature,” he said to himself, and sighed.

  He brought the phone back into the kitchen, thought of taking it off the hook, then decided against it. If Daniel called again, he’d let it ring. He wouldn’t answer it. Then he went back out onto the deck, his coffee mug refilled, with a cigarette, and a sun visor against the glare.

  Not much birdsong this late in the month. In May and June the goldfinches and greenfiches would chirrup, cavorting through the bushes surrounding the deck, zooming in and out of the leaves. Most of the butterflies were gone too. Only a few, languid, aged ones still slowly sailed by—specimens that would never complete the migration to their spawning grounds south. Very few monarchs had passed this year compared to last September, when there had been thousands of them every day for three weeks, clouds of them for a few days: afterward lovely, rich-colored corpses everywhere—from old age, accidents, head winds, and fatigue. This year he’d seen one dead monarch on the surf, its wing caught in the grip of a sand crab; both creatures dead. Fascinated, he’d looked at them entangled in their awful dance of death and fate, and remembered Robert Frost’s poem “Design,” that haunting, morbid sonnet. Later on, he’d thought about them, thought that if he were to take a photo of them, someone would surely accuse him of being surrealist or symbolist—and whichever, take him to task for being so obvious about it. Yet it had happened naturally. Nature, life, accident, design, fate had been responsible, not he. And that could never be cheapened.

  Of course the swallows were m
ore numerous this summer, as though making up for the dearth of butterflies. Like little Phantom jets, twisting and spinning over the houses and down again, their wings turned vertically, they swerved between telephone wires only inches apart at incredible speeds, around poles, over hedges, and never seemed to have accidents. They appeared to take real pleasure in flying, unlike so many other birds, who flew unconsciously: the hummingbird on its rotaries pecking at the stamen of a flower, tiny, like a wind-up Japanese toy. He was always astonished at hummingbirds, but he loved swallows for their love of flying.

  He’d been an idiot, of course, to let Dan hear he was annoyed. He’d never hear the end of it now. It was his own fault, naturally. He’d fallen right into the trap: Daniel’s tidy little irritation trap, set especially for him, as carefully constructed as a black widow’s. The bastard! He was incorrigible. Even from across the Atlantic, fresh from some boy harlot’s bed, he’d managed to pull off this number on Jonathan with unerring aim and skill. He’d do anything to avert suspicion from himself, of course, to cover up his own tracks. God knew, even half listening to him as Jonathan had been, he’d picked up enough key words and hinting modulations to figure out what Daniel was up to over there, as clearly as though his life were a television sitcom that had been going on for years, where one has tuned in for one program midway.

  Jonathan went back into the house, opened the bedroom door, and watched Stevie sleep. She’d moved almost entirely onto the area he’d just gotten up from fifteen minutes ago. For an instant, he thought of going back to bed, of awakening on the other side of her and letting her be surprised by it as he avoided mentioning it, instead covering her with touches and kisses. Then the private world of her sleep dissuaded him. He stood sipping his coffee, watching her, noting details.

  Would she be surprised? Perhaps not. She seemed to take an awful lot of things that astounded him for granted. Such as the fact that she’d been sleeping with him, in his bed, making love with him, for four days now.