Fall Love

by Anne Whitehouse

  When we made love this morning, I believed it meant as much to him as it did to me, she thought. But now it seems he's already forgotten it. Althea saw in her mind that patch of blue sky she had watched over his shoulder. Now that blue sky has disappeared, she thought. It seemed to hold so much substance, but in reality it was pure emptiness.

  She glanced at Jeanne. Under her brown bangs, her friend's dark eyes were wide, her face almost expressionless. She wondered what Jeanne was thinking. She still wished that Jeanne hadn't come, but she was almost resigned to it.

  "Do you believe in coincidence?" Paul asked, glancing at them both.

  "Do you mean that things happen for a reason?" asked Jeanne.

  "No, that they happen at random," said Paul. The melancholy bellow of a foghorn trailed his words. A towhee repeated its three shrill notes again and again, like a theme. Althea paced the porch restlessly. The fog was still blowing, white and ephemeral.

  "What time is it? Three o'clock? Let's have something to eat and then go for a walk," Althea proposed. "It might rain a bit, but neither of you mind too much, do you?"

  They did not, for they agreed to her suggestion.

  * * *

  "Evening primrose, butter-and-eggs, celandine, and cinquefoil"—naming the yellow flowers that bloomed in the late summer grass, Althea made them real in Jeanne's city eyes. Jeanne found herself looking up at Althea, a familiar sensation. Though she had refrained from adding to Paul's description of their meeting, she in turn marvelled that Althea's Paul had turned out to be the stranger whom, of all her recent chance encounters, she remembered most vividly. She was attracted to Paul—she had to admit it. Once more, Althea seemed powerful to her, with a power that was unconscious and significant. It came to what she had surmised on that long-ago autumn afternoon when they had stared side by side from her father's lofty office into the terrible miniature traffic: Althea was imperial. It was as if the taller woman held sway over a domain she was always discovering.

  They were on a muddy dirt road—two ruts separated by a rise—with narrower trails off of it that led to private houses. Paul was quick and light on his feet, his sneakers still white after mud had spattered the two women's. Jeanne didn't want to struggle to keep up with him.

  "Let him go ahead if he wants to," she panted. She linked her arm in Althea's; they drew close. "We're in no hurry."

  "You're right."

  Jeanne's attention flattered Althea. She felt indulgent towards her friend, even tender. Together they watched Paul flitting ahead like a human dragonfly, a slender, dark shape enveloped in the mist. Althea didn't mind his disappearing. Soon, she knew, he'd reach the shore and have to stop.

  Althea preferred loop trails and planned to take her guests back another way, after they lingered for awhile on the narrow, rocky coast. Under the fog came a rain so fine it was a cobweb on their faces. Where the waves broke, the water was a whitened aqua; farther out it was slate green, and then the fog was too thick to see through. Paul was skipping stones when Althea and Jeanne arrived, or trying to, for they flip-flopped on the crests and fell into the surf. It was too choppy for a swim; they sat on some rocks.

  While playing with a shell, Paul was watching Jeanne. Althea he perceived whole, like a shaft of water, but Jeanne to him was in the scattered pieces of snatched looks. The wisps of hair around her forehead were clotted with mist. She was pulling apart a reed in thread-fine ringlets. Her back turned to them, Althea looked out to sea. Paul slipped over next to Jeanne.

  "Let me see," he said, placing her half-skinned reed between his angular thumbs. He blew at it, the threads frayed. He sucked in his cheeks for another effort, his lips pursed to a pinhole, and an eerie, high-pitched tone burst between them till the thread broke.

  As if in return, a foghorn sounded somberly. Suddenly Jeanne felt afraid. The blankness of Althea's back to her and Paul's instant approach conspired to make her feel she was being given away without having been asked.

  She assumed that Paul thought she was willing if he thought at all. Was he right? Jeanne admitted to herself that, depending on the occasion, she might accept his advances, but now, next to Althea? She'd seen the house; she knew the sleeping arrangements; she'd glimpsed their clothing thrown carelessly together on the spread in the only bedroom. While Paul sat next to her, Jeanne pictured him prone beside a willing Althea; when he pulled back the sweatshirt hood from her head, smoothing her tousled, moisture-plumped hair, she was motionless. She felt afraid she was being played with, that Paul was attempting to control her against her will. She felt the tips of his fingers following the whorl of her ear. Althea had walked away, and was hidden behind a jutting cliff. That was the crux: greater than Jeanne's other qualms was the salient question of Althea. She was like a serene statue surrounded by a sacred taboo.

  When they were girls, Jeanne and Althea had often undressed together. They had shared showers, slept in the same room. Jeanne could still picture Althea at thirteen in a flannel nightgown smelling of soap, her head bent forward under her hairbrush, as she asked Jeanne to unclasp her necklace. Jeanne could recall the feel of her finger working the catch above the downy hair at the nape of Althea's neck.

  The adult gave less to friendship than the child. Other commitments and attractions were supposed to subsume that one, yet Jeanne secretly grieved for this early and equal intimacy, this sharing she had lost.

  She bent her head; and Paul, thinking she meant to instruct him, began massaging her neck, her shoulders, the nodes of her spine. She relaxed and then, abruptly, stiffened.

  "Wait!" Stricken, she twisted around to face him. Paul dropped his hands. Again, he was faster than she. Looking past Jeanne, he called out, "Althea, have you had enough?"

  Althea didn't answer at once. She had deliberately walked away from them. She was concentrating her attention on the kelp strewn, stony beach, noticing how, in the white overcast light, certain colors were intensified—the fuchsias, the greens, the beige, the blacks—she named them to herself.

  One part of Althea was always in solitude. Her vacation had been a lesson in being alone as well as a romantic interlude, and perhaps one more than the other. She had four paintings in progress that no one else had seen. She had a separate life that only they would reveal. She tried to keep her eyes open for possible influences, but that didn't mean that she didn't blink sometimes, as now, against the salt spray.

  Althea, who, watching the waves breaking, could feel at her back Paul stroking Jeanne, had a tendency to overestimate her own strength, which was her greatest danger. Miscalculation might devastate her, no less in love than in a worked-over painting. She felt bruised by Paul's attentions to Jeanne in her presence. While, behind her, Paul's hand moved from Jeanne's hair to her white neck, Althea considered a worse dread: Paul would permanently let her drop when back with Bryce. She concluded that Paul on a part-time basis might be better than nothing at all. She had more to lose if she cast Jeanne in the role of rival.

  There were other elements as well. A lonely woman haunted even on vacation by subway dreams, an eager eavesdropper—for yes, she admitted that she often listened to strangers on New York streets—wanted company to banish the cobwebs that seemed to grow naturally from her application to art. It was solitude or intimacy for Althea. She dared herself to take a chance.

  She came back to them holding a green ribbon of dripping kelp, a moon snail, a crab claw colored white, pink, and magenta. "Look what you've brought!" Paul's tone was soothing and light. He put his arms around them both before he backed off in exaggerated disgust at the offensive odor of Althea's seaweed, but Althea didn't seem to mind his holding Jeanne. "What a wonderful color," she sighed, flinging the kelp on the sand and wiping her slimy fingers on her shirt. "Well, are you ready to go?"

  She told them she thought they could cut through an abandoned field and link up with another path. What she hadn't predicted was the poison ivy, shiny leaves drooping, already tinged with scarlet blotches. Jeanne hung back; she alone was
in shorts, but she didn't expect Paul to scoop her up in his arms as he did.

  "I'm used to lifting women, and you're not large. We wouldn't want that skin to get all red and itchy," he murmured like a solicitous mother, stroking her shin.

  Jeanne laughed and relaxed. Though pinned in his arms, she felt herself mentally step back, as if she were watching herself in a dream.

  Althea plunged ahead to find a way through overgrown fields bounded by tumbling stone walls. Over the next rise, three deer emerged in single file from a stand of sweet pepperbush so fragrant Althea could smell it from yards away. With a finger over her lips, she warned Paul as he stalked behind her, holding Jeanne like a bridegroom. First came a stag with young antlers, then a doe and fawn. In spite of her efforts, the deer shied at their presence. Nose in the air, the stag sniffed and, revolving his head, bounded off from her, the doe and fawn following. After the deer disappeared, they could still hear the swish of limbs through the underbrush.

  Sighting the path ahead of her, Althea breathed a sigh of relief that she hadn't gotten lost. The rain ended, though fog was still suspended over the wind-waved grasses. Past the poison ivy, Paul let go of Jeanne. Her legs accepted her weight joyfully as she slid to the ground. Suddenly energetic, she broke into a full-tilt run to the road. Passing Paul and Althea, she sprinted uphill, spattering mud, the scarlet hood of her sweatshirt bouncing. Holding hands, fingers laced together, Althea and Paul followed.

  Jeanne reached the road well ahead of them, and walked back down to meet them, panting, her face flushed. She'd raised a sweat; now the air cooled it. She felt loose-limbed, like a jerking puppet maneuvered downhill. She hadn't run away; she hadn't even waited. She'd gone back and they forward, and it mattered less where they met than that they met at all.

  The fog was too full around them for even a glimpse of the sunset. Warm from exercise, Jeanne took off her sweatshirt, and Paul found himself watching her breasts through her thin tee shirt while his arm was in Althea's. Jeanne could feel him watching her, and she didn't put her sweatshirt back on.

  They returned to a darkened house. Althea hadn't locked the door when they left, and, as she went inside ahead of them, she wondered if an intruder had disturbed their absence. She sensed a change in the house, as if it harbored an alien presence. The curtains blew back in the open windows, rounded and fluttering, and she realized that the animation she sensed might be nothing but the wind.

  Outside, in the gathering gloom, Jeanne shivered with a sudden chill. From the shadows of the porch, she felt Paul approaching her. He gathered her in his arms, folding her against him. He breathed into her ears, stroking her throat until she gasped.

  Inside the house, Althea switched on a lamp. "Turn it off," she heard Paul saying behind her. "It's nicer without it." Without a word she obeyed him. In the silence she couldn't say how she knew that Paul was kissing Jeanne.

  She wasn't surprised, but she was still hurt. Her step quickened through the living room, leaving them alone. She heard Paul say, "Come, come, Althea, don't stalk off like that. Don't be left out."

  Paul startled Jeanne when he spoke to Althea. Jeanne hid her face in his chest. He held her close, molded against him. She felt exposed, ashamed, and yet thrilled. She dreaded to face her friend, not wanting her to see how weak she was. She was afraid that Althea would despise her.

  "Come, don't be afraid," Paul coaxed again. Althea felt herself being drawn to the open doorway and back outside. In the dim light she made out their linked shapes. Then she saw him release Jeanne and turn to face her.

  "Althea."

  He waited, hardly breathing. Wordlessly she approached. He felt desire rising in his body, opening him, making him vivid. It was not a hunger, but an intoxication—a thrill, and a dreaminess in which the body absorbed the mind. He wondered, If the mind is caught by the body, can the body then release it?

  It was as if he were entirely within a spell, as if a drug worked on him through the air. He felt his nerves quickening. He saw both women looking at him, Althea calm like the smooth face of a stone, Jeanne slightly trembling.

  To each he gave a hand as he led them inside the house, leaving the door open. Silently they all watched their hands' caresses. Gently withdrawing his palm from Jeanne's, Paul smoothed back Althea's heavy, honey-light-dark hair with both his hands and kissed her face, first her forehead and then her mouth. Then he turned back to Jeanne, kissing her again. He was quivering, charged, flowing between a febrile surface and a still depth, his embraces returned, encircling him.

  The fog had settled in fine threads of moisture in the women's hair that, taken in his hands, wet them. "You seem so alike. You both smell like the sea. Oh yes," he said, his voice rising from a whisper, rich and smooth. "I want you both."

  Lightning flared outside in the gloomy sky, shuddering through the fog, above the darkening bushes and low trees. A gust of wind rang the chimes hanging from the porch rafters and blew the smell of rain through the house.

  Althea felt her heart pounding as Paul caressed her, opening her shirt of oxford cloth, slipping it off so that she felt the ends of her hair brush her bare shoulders. Jeanne had never thought she would see Althea, so private and so proud, share a lover's kisses with her. This shock was followed by the greater one of witnessing Paul deliberately unclothing Althea, and Althea letting him.

  Althea stood as still as a statue. She heard Jeanne sigh, felt her watching, Jeanne, who had watched her undress so many times in the past when it was innocent, and she did not cover herself. Jeanne, meanwhile, wondered what Althea was thinking. She could see, though not clearly, a deep cleft of shadow between Althea's pale breasts. Whether it was unnatural or not, she could not say, but she realized that the love she felt at that moment for her friend was desire.

  Jeanne shocked herself, sensing what she was capable of. The pale illumination trembled again in the sky. They felt the rumble of thunder as if it came from the earth.

  "Once. What's the harm in once?" said Paul. "I promise that nothing will happen if you don't want it to."

  Althea shivered, feeling exposed. She thought, All afternoon has been leading to this moment. It is inevitable. I have been dreading it, and now it is happening. If I say no, he will stay with her.

  "We'll keep the storm out," said Paul. Jeanne watched as he shut the windows, unrolled the blinds, and drew fast the heavy front door, plunging the room into darkness. She felt a mixture of sensations—curiosity, fear, eagerness. She could hardly believe what was happening. In the darkness Paul found her. His chest was bare. He put his hands under her tee-shirt, closing his palms over her breasts. He slipped the garment over her head, discarding it on the floor. "No, not in here," he whispered.

  Althea felt his arm brush against hers, and he took her wrist, guiding them both down the short corridor into the bedroom, bending his head in the low doorway. He asked for a candle. "I want to see you together," he murmured.

  * * *

  I love you more than money, more than my past. We meet with the tips of all our fingers, our bodies open, swollen, risen, expectant, tense. Our arms and legs are quivering with hope and dread. Ease this trembling, this emptiness we call desire, or else increase it, enlarge it, augment it with the meanings of wordless sounds. Whose mouth is this, whose eyes, whose breast? Whose softness, whose wetness, whose breathing life do I feel as close as mine, and louder?

  * * *

  Althea moved to make room for Jeanne between her and Paul. In the flickering light of the candle, she smoothed back Jeanne's brown hair, following the curve of her brow and cheek, and then confided her to Paul.

  It was Paul that she watched then. He appeared unearthly to her, like someone in a dream, moving so close to her, and yet as if she were not there at all. It felt terrible to her, to be so affected and to have no effect.

  At last Paul and Jeanne separated silently and lay apart. Beyond her, he lay clothed in shadow, his features smoothed out in the gloom, as if he were submerged. They were silent except
for their breathing. Then the two women turned to each other as if blindly, with hands and lips.

  Gently, without urgency, he lay beside them. From the perimeter, he watched them swaying, rocking against each other like weeds in a sea. Tentatively, he caressed a limb, then drew back his fingers; his presence, unacknowledged, was implicit between them.

  It puzzled Althea that while she caressed Jeanne's pale skin and kissed her, she felt herself resisting the meaning that glowed in Jeanne's dark, shining eyes. It seemed to her that she was making love to Jeanne with her eyes veiled, that in a deep sense she was contriving not to see the feelings that Jeanne was baring to her. Even as they lay as if lapped by the same sea, she felt a removal in herself that at first was like passivity and then was more.

  When she sensed a hand along her thigh that she knew to be Paul's, she did not stiffen, but instead acted as if desire were indulgence. Yet her indulgence soon had its limits. Lightly she touched Jeanne's cheek and drew back. Quietly she removed Jeanne's hand from her waist. The women lay quite still; then Jeanne shifted, making room for Paul between them.

  Lying on her stomach, her face pressed into the pillow, Althea closed her eyes. Soon she was asleep. In fact, they all fell asleep easily and remained asleep effortlessly. They slumbered dreamlessly, or else forgetful of their dreams.

  * * *

  Althea waked to the bedroom's pallor before six o'clock. Beside her, they were asleep, Paul's face half-hidden in the pillow, in sideways repose, while Jeanne curled next to him, brown hair stranded across her cheek. Althea slipped out of bed and into shorts and a shirt, tiptoeing outside, sneakers in hand.

  A thin fog lay over the early morning. The grass was wet, and birds were active on the lawn and in the underbrush. Catbirds and robins and towhees were trilling and chirping, starlings were scattering in flocks. Down the hill she went, following the dirt road. A white gate swung invitingly open. She passed it, wondering what time the sun reached the western cove. She thought of how soon she wouldn't be able to take a swim from a shaded beach and come out to the sparkling sun, the water dripping down her as if it were alive.