That made her pause, but then she considered. The pond had filled. Asa’s plan had already worked, and if he discovered the dam closed, he would think the water people had found and closed it. No real harm done.
She inspected her palms. “Look!” They were smeared with blood. She turned to show him and nearly stumbled backward into the gap.
“Careful.” Jacob grabbed hold of her. “We’d better put that in place.” He gestured to a wooden safety cover that rested against the embankment, pinning flat a dozen yellow dandelions, and reached into his back pocket for a handkerchief. “But first let me tend to your wounds, madame,” he said, blotting at the spots of blood.
She savored the moment. The press of the clean cotton against her skin. The sound of crickets or cicadas or whatever it was that filled summer afternoons. The smell of grass and river water.
When he finished with her, she pushed open his right hand, then pursed her lips and blew the rope fibers away, pressing the handkerchief against his own scraped palms. All she could think was that she wanted physical contact one more time. If she could have that, she thought, she would be content for the rest of her life.
“Dez.” He spoke firmly, but not quite firmly enough. She searched his eyes and they flickered, became less resolved even as he said, “I’m leaving. You’re married. We need to help each other stay resolved.”
She did not tell him to be resolved. Instead, she kept her eyes fixed on his and touched the inside of his wrist, knowing that when she did he would be weak. Her fingers traveled up the inside of his arm to the roll of his sleeve, her touch feathery so that his skin would quiver and jump. She thought, Maybe this is the only time in my life I will get to do this, feel this, and when I’m an old lady with dry bones I’ll be happy I didn’t deny myself the moment. She placed both hands flat against his chest and unfastened his shirt, fingers nimble with the buttons. He gave in then, with a barely audible sigh, and she swayed into him, knowing he would kiss her and snap open her dress and lead her, rather clumsily, because he was not big enough to carry her like a movie’s hero, down the embankment to the soft grass.
As the back of her head pressed against the ground, she partitioned her mind away from her body and let the body take over, reveling in the feel of his skin, slippery with sweat from the effort of closing the dam, his bones pressing into her, the smell of his hair, everything that was new and different. They whispered to each other. I love your hair. I love the way your skin feels. I love everything about you. Everything that is wonderful about me, you see, and everything that is wonderful about you, I see. It was bliss, a blur of feeling, a kaleidoscope of dizzy joy, and they kissed in a languid, all-the-time-in-the-world way, rolling around the grass for so long that by the time he looked at her questioningly, asking for permission to go further, she was beyond stopping and dismissed the fleeting thought—what if a baby came of it? She was on her seventh day, teetering on the line between safe and fertile, but she gave in to recklessness, to the gamble. She wanted him. She told him that she wanted him, that she had wanted him forever, and he murmured that he, too, had dreamed of this, his lips sticking to her hair, his words muffled, his hand fumbling at his waist. When she felt him inside her she thought all the things that people stupid with love think—this is meant to be, we are truly connected now—stunned by the solid fact of him, and by the pleasure his body knew how to give her, the building of it, incredible and fleeting, and then that moment, very fierce and satisfying, a moment that seemed to hang on to itself as if it could never end.
It ended, that moment did. It passed. They gazed up at the branches, the birds, the patches of blue sky, becoming acutely aware of themselves, their two separate bodies, the air between them moist and hot and smelling faintly metallic.
Where a few minutes earlier, all external objects outside the boundaries of themselves had seemed blurred, now Dez saw the beginnings and ends of things: the nubby weave of Jacob’s trousers, collapsed in an undignified heap by his ankles, the freckles on her forearm, the bones of his pelvis digging into her side. A dandelion, dark yellow and fragrant, tickled her cheek.
Jacob shot up to a sitting position, the intimacy of just minutes before becoming, dismayingly, a thing of the past as panic quickened on his face. He reached down for his pants. “Anyone could have seen us.”
“It’s Secret Pond, remember,” she said, sounding more certain than she felt. But she sat up, too, and glanced around. The clearing was peaceful, undisturbed, but his unease infected her. She smoothed out her dress and tucked her hair behind her ears, feeling suddenly exposed and shy. She needed a towel. Jacob’s hands moved to button his fly and she averted her eyes, again, dismayed. They had been so close and already they were apart.
“Do you feel strange?” he asked.
She wanted reassurance, talk of fatedness, not him shaking his head as if he had irreparably harmed them both. Wasn’t it the woman who was supposed to be full of remorse?
She felt uncertain and apprehensive. “No,” she said, false bravado that she hoped would be transmitted to him, thinking, Let’s be happy, our time is so short. Life is so short.
“I do,” he said. “I feel strange.”
She wanted to take back what she said and give the honest response, which was like his own. Yes, she should have said. I feel strange but there’s no need for us to feel strange if only we are connected, if we are together in this.
It wasn’t like he wasn’t a gentleman. He did the right things. He took her hand to help her as they picked their way back around the pond and into the woods. At one point along the path, he stopped and sighed and she followed his gaze. Another pink lady slipper, enfolded in its green hood.
“Whenever I see something beautiful, I think of you.” But he looked so troubled, saying that, so bemused.
They really weren’t so beautiful at all, Dez thought. Didn’t they, really, look a bit repulsive, like miniature pink-veined lungs? Part of nature’s repetition of patterns.
A few minutes later, he said, “If only things had been different.”
“What things?”
“I was thinking of that painting I gave you. I suppose I wanted you to have a little part of my life. I suppose I wish our lives hadn’t been so different.”
“They’re not all that different.” Was he talking about his culture? His family? His mother with her two cupboards?
“I like to think I’m different from my family, more bohemian.” He made a self-deprecatory gesture. “That first day I saw you, and talked to you, and you looked like that painting of Beatrice I loved, I thought, My God, here’s the woman who will be my muse. I’ve found her.”
He had?
“But you were married. And now, I suppose when I think about settling down, having children, I’m more traditional than I think.”
The acknowledged remorse coupled with his lack of clarity was terrible, made her feel all churned up. Was he saying a life with Jewish Ruth was not undesired after all? What was he saying? That an artist’s life in Greenwich Village didn’t have to mean giving up traditional aspects of his culture? Why was it so hard to ask? She thought of the pregnancy she had possibly risked with a quick, sharp prick of fright. It was impossible to think of what to say and have it be the right thing.
“I don’t want to be sorry,” she said. She wanted to hear him say that, too. But he gave her a long, sympathetic look that she recognized as regret and which irritated her. And it irritated her that she couldn’t admit her irritation, because she didn’t want him to misunderstand, she didn’t want to drive him away. But why couldn’t he just be lighthearted, at least for now, and live in the moment? In a hundred years they would both be dead, and wasn’t it good they’d had this hour together?
They walked, the sound of the river flowing over rocks and up over roots, their feet moving, time advancing, River Road becoming visible through the foliage. They emerged through the trees into the bright daylight of the street, squinting at the brightness, too quickly reach
ing his truck.
He didn’t jump right in but she sensed he wanted to.
If only he would say something, reveal what he is really thinking.
“So you said you have to make a few trips back and forth,” she said tentatively.
“I do have to come back in the morning. With more stuff for Al. Probably Saturday, too.”
“Asa goes to Hartford on Saturday. It’s his monthly trip. He gets supplies and visits his brother and never gets back till late—”
He cut her off—gently, but still. She tried to hide how stung she felt. “Maybe we shouldn’t prolong the agony,” he said. “Maybe we should just say good-bye now.”
Why, she wanted to ask. Why couldn’t they establish where each of them stood? Why was it so hard to speak?
At home in the kitchen, she sat with her head in her hands until she couldn’t stand the silence. Then she roused herself to begin wringing out the second load of laundry. Asa’s white broadcloth shirt, her nightgown, flattening between the rollers as she pushed each item through the wringer. She dumped the wet pile into the wicker basket and carried it outside, where an east wind whipped up from the river, making her eyes water as she wrestled to pin the clothes to the line, bending and pinning, bending and pinning shirts and socks and trousers to the clothesline like some numb automaton.
And then the wind ceased blowing, so abruptly that Asa’s trousers did a final little dance before they slumped and hung limp.
She’d made a cuckold out of her husband. Cuckold—that Middle English–sounding word, more suited to the stage of the Cascade Theater than a modern house on River Road. It is a heartbreaking thing to see a handsome man loose-wiv’d—that line from somewhere. Antony and Cleopatra? Loose-wiv’d.
How could so much have happened so quickly? She looked down at the damp shorts in her hand. She had committed adultery. Adultery. The four syllables reverberating in her head. Seen objectively, what she’d done was unforgivable, so why was it that a deep and central part of her was glad she had done it? At the same time she felt hurt, because how could Jacob have been content to say good-bye like that? When he would come back to Cascade tomorrow and Saturday? She couldn’t stand the thought of him coming here without seeing her again, so how could he stand it? And how could she go back to the business of living when all the hours left to her seemed to hang, suspended in limbo?
She pinned the last shirt to the line and headed into her studio, where she came face-to-face with his painting.
She wished the subject were anyone or anything but his mother with her penetrating eyes. No one is good enough for my son, those eyes said. Especially you.
She turned away from it and sat down. She had to work. The edge of the table pushed against her ribs; it felt real and hard and cold. There was a new set of postcards to conceive and complete.
She had been considering a two-card, duel-type comparison of Cascade and Whistling Falls, but had she interfered in that decision? She’d closed Asa’s dam. The knowledge dropped through her the way the word adultery had. She’d closed Asa’s dam, with none of the nervousness that billowed through her now like those clothes drying in the wind.
But the pond was already filled. Asa’s plan had already worked. She told herself there was no need to worry, to concentrate instead on her work.
Which will it be? Cascade or Whistling Falls? She pressed pencil to paper. She had to start somewhere, with some line, some form, had to concentrate on the task at hand, draw one line and then another until a pleasing concordance of shapes assembled under her hand.
And that was the saving grace of art. As soon as you started to immerse yourself, even slightly, you could be swept up, absorbed. The banjo clock struck three thirty, four. At four thirty she got to her feet. She’d managed to complete the first card: a firmly honest representation of Whistling Falls’s rolling farmland and fertile valley.
In the kitchen, she rooted through the cutlery drawer to find Rose’s old meat hammer. Using it to pound chicken breasts flat between wax paper, she suddenly missed Rose so much she had to pause a moment, had to pinch between her eyes. She rolled the breasts in bread crumbs and fried them in lard. She mashed three potatoes. Then she rolled and dragged the washing machine back to its corner, scraping her ankle on the rusty wheel as she did so, a quick stab of pain that brought tears to her eyes and triggered a flow of them.
When Asa came home, he took in her swollen eyes and asked what was wrong. She pretended she had cramps and then felt worse, seeing the disappointment in his eyes.
It was easy to hate herself that evening. On his way back to the drugstore for the evening shift, Asa asked did she want him to bring her home some ice cream? Something to soothe her stomach? He noticed her scraped-up palms. “What happened here?”
“Brambles,” she said. “From the raspberry canes.”
He rooted in the medicine cabinet and found a tube of salve. “Here,” he said, “keep that on there.” Then he headed back to town. When the door shut behind him, Dez sank against the door frame. He deserved better, she told herself. She even said it aloud: “He deserves a wife who appreciates salve on her hands, who wants three or four babies, who isn’t consumed with another man.”
But she was not that kind of wife. She was the type who brewed a cup of tea and gave in to replaying the afternoon’s moments over and over in her mind. Jacob had said, “I didn’t even know if you would want to see me again. I was so relieved when I got your telegram.” He had said, “Maybe we shouldn’t prolong the agony. Maybe we should just say good-bye now.” Perhaps she had been too sensitive, too negative. She couldn’t be sure he wasn’t in the same miserable limbo she felt herself to be in. She could at least inform him about the job in New York, see if he responded positively to the news.
She had never telephoned him, and every muscle in her body contracted at the thought of doing so. But she made herself lift the earpiece, even though her heartbeat was so out of control that when Lil or Alma or someone picked up, she set it down again.
She couldn’t do it.
But neither could she go on like this—agitated, second-guessing everything.
She picked up the phone again. Alma came on, and though Dez knew it was best to speak cryptically, at least Alma Webster wasn’t a gossip. She gave Alma the number, then waited while the line rang through. She prayed that he would answer, or that at least his sister would, but an impatient old-lady voice came through the crackle and static of the line. “Hallo? Hallo?”
Dez plowed through the moment, explaining that she was Dez Spaulding and was looking for Jacob. She expected that Mrs. Solomon would at least know who Dez Spaulding was.
“Who? Eh? Who?” she said, her accent thick and hard to decipher. “Despoldingk, hah?”
“I’m looking for Jacob?”
She deciphered that Jacob was “out in the evening.”
“Oh,” she said, through a feeling like wind in her chest.
“With Ruth.”
Ruth. She’d assumed he was all done with Ruth. Maybe he was simply saying good-bye. Dez herself was married, for goodness sake. What kind of man would Jacob be if he had no woman in his life?
“Will he be long?” That question also misunderstood, so she shouted, enunciating each syllable: “DO-YOU-HAVE-A-PENCIL?”
The woman put down the phone with a grunt and returned a moment later. “Ah-kay, go.”
Dez didn’t quite trust that she really had a pencil, but she had no choice but to speak slowly, to deliver the message: that Jacob needed to meet Dez at the Pine Point parking area tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.
“For what you want?”
Dez was taken aback. “Because—I’m the painter he meets with? In Cascade? I’m sure he’s mentioned me.”
In reply, Mrs. Solomon said something that Dez did not understand, then hung up.
She was rattled. A mess of emotion. Mixed up. What would he think when he got that message? How was he spending his evening? Time was excruciating. It would not
pass. Every minute watched another minute make its way around the face of the kitchen clock. Too early to go to bed. Asa would not be home for hours. She still had to finish the other half of the postcard set—one depicting Cascade as a lively community in contrast to the sleepiness of Whistling Falls. She forced herself back to work, blocking out a busy scene that showed children streaming out of school, Main Street bustling with pedestrians, the milk truck, the ice truck, the police car, Jimmy delivering the post.
Later, she heated milk on the stove and sipped a full cup—anything to make herself sleepy, to end the night and bring on morning.
Asa arrived home at eleven, carrying a softening brick of vanilla ice cream. He scooped Dez a sweet bowlful that tasted of guilt. Guilt was a useless emotion, she knew, her tongue on the cold spoon. Guilt was self-indulgent penance that made you feel like you were suffering for what you didn’t want or plan to change; guilt didn’t resolve a thing.
Asa filled her in on the day’s news. Caseworkers from the county relief board had showed up at Bud’s house, he said, to see if the Fosters really qualified. “It’s terrible. I guess they inspect your icebox, your closets, your cupboards, everything. They walk around calculating just how poor you are and you’ve no choice but to accept it.”
Dez agreed, thinking it was amazing, really, how people could partition themselves, how Jacob could exist in a distinct and separate part of her that had nothing to do with anything else.
22
There had been other such days—the long-ago morning her mother took sick, the afternoon the telegram spelled out the fact of her father’s first heart attack. At the ends of those days, Dez had looked back through the blur of hours to the innocent mornings, which started so normally. An egg, a piece of buttered toast, plans for this or that. And if those days had stayed normal, if the flu had passed through her mother’s body, through her brother, Timon’s, if her father’s heart had not seized, there would be no marveling at the day’s normalcy, no reeling from being blindsided.
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