Fall Love

by Anne Whitehouse

  Jeanne left for the inn ahead of Paul but before she reached the portico, she turned to watch him, a figure in a landscape, shying stones. They were still just rendezvousing strangers. She didn't want him to find out all about her. No, she wouldn't perish for Paul. It wasn't a dying love she'd driven up here for; the dancer had a tempting touch for pastoral interludes and urban intrigues. Inspired by his plan of private conspiracy, she had let him spirit her away to this arcadian realm.

  Over a dinner of lamb with mint sauce and buttered peas, they barely spoke. Later, in their room, Jeanne kept her eyes on Paul as he piled a private pyre on the grate so deliberately it seemed he meant to provoke her. He lit the match first to a wad of paper stacked round by shavings. Tinder, kindling, fuel: by the set progression, the licking tongues of the fire gained ascendancy. One end of a sapling log caught before the other. Flames arrowed noiselessly from it.

  "It'll go soon," said Paul, standing back.

  She was curled on the bench, with a shawl over her shoulders. Her fingers were looped around her bent knee. Belatedly, she acknowledged an ache in her side from her fall, and Paul touched those fingertips a shade less hesitantly than he had in the empty row of the theater.

  Her hand was in his, and then he stroked her whole arm, but Paul's ardor wasn't over-avid. He tested the tensenesses in Jeanne, and the influences of a tender trust on the surface of her tautness foretold more immense yieldings. They made love on the floor with the fire's flicker in their faces. The firelight had a rosier hue than the early morning sunlight that had lain over their first union without Althea. But Jeanne's skin, while never too tan, was whiter in October and nearly translucent where the bluish ropes of her veins shone through. She had the knack of looking fragile. Was this what Paul, whose slenderness was all strength, finally found himself feeling for—to make that pulse beat wild until it broke?

  The wedding ring quilt over the rug on the floor hardly diminished its hardness. Fire snapped in the knots in the wood. All along their lengths the logs were alight. In the brilliance between herself and the man, Jeanne felt a shiver that centered its shaking inside her. Wider and wider it went, but it still wouldn't show its shining edge to the surface. She held Paul so hard it hurt, but what had seemed about to emerge now retreated and they both had to burrow deep to try and find it, yet she couldn't get the edge again, not that one. She was wholly conscious of what she hadn't had when she grasped his collapsing gasp to her, and yet she was elusive, even to herself.

  She clutched him until he gently disengaged her—"There, there," his hand loosely on her hip, his lips brushing the crest of her ear. The paradox was that here where it should have been easy and obvious, it was most arduous, although still ardent. Irreducible factors had intervened: the absence of a mattress, Paul's considerably heavier weight, a pain already knitting her side. Now another distance had developed, an internal one, and it was in her, for she'd had the desire but she hadn't been able to deliver herself of the energy.

  The fire was down to embers, and they half-closed the damper. They lay down in the soft bed together, and Jeanne thought she drifted off first. When she awoke later in the night, the fire was dead and the man was stirring. With his side he nudged her, but she was on her back and scarcely budged. He flung his arm across her. His hand cupped her farther breast, caressed her up to her collarbone, came back to close over her tightening nipple. Almost roughly, a warm, heavy leg introduced itself between hers, the knee pushed up as if to part her.

  But she slid up first until she was half-sitting to see him, as he tried to move more of himself onto her. She whispered his name. She wasn't mistaken; "He's asleep," she said, and it was like one of his own breaths.

  When she called his name next, it was to wake him. As he came to, he seemed shocked to be half-sprawled across her. "You were dreaming," she said, and it was partly a question. He raised himself up. Their heads were as close as two angels in a painting. Then he smiled enigmatically and, leaning on one elbow, fluttered the fingers of his free hand down her front to her navel and in semi-circular motions flattened her stomach under his palm. She hadn't guided him from the beginning, and she didn't now, but she had already quickened and sleep didn't slough it away. It was as if she'd lain in a dark tunnel all the while, waiting for him. He took her towards him. He opened other outlets for her energy, and this time she willfully held it back until it had concentrated so that she could take it wherever she wanted it to go. It was a sense of self so strong it was like another woman flowing into her.

  It was herself, after all, but a further self she wasn't always lucky enough to reach. She didn't think she could survive it every time—"A light touch," she said, and he answered, "Still waters run deep."

  "Not still," she said, and showed him.

  She thought she heard the tiny plunk of a piece of light, burnt-out wood fall from the grate; and, as if its subsidence had been inside herself, she felt, after the sound settled, a spreading growth, and she held onto all of it this time until it bloomed clear out of her.

  Elation brought them closer, and then comfort divided them. She thought of how Paul had begun to make love to her in his sleep. What had he been dreaming of, then? He hadn't answered the question at once when she'd waked him, nor did he the next morning when they walked in a woods.

  "You won't ever tell me, will you?" She said it in a girl's small voice. "So it wasn't me, then?"

  He was feigning a tightrope walk on a fallen log. His arms spread inordinately wide and careened in a crazy arc. "I'm doomed!" he called, and dipped as if he'd take a dive dozens of feet down and not just the two to the forest floor. Then he steadied himself and smoothed his jacket. "What are you laughing about?"

  He more than amused her, and maybe his dreams didn't matter if she had his body. She certainly found him a pleasure to look at now, fresh from his bath in the morning, and his hunger sated with bacon and eggs. "You want something else?" he had said at breakfast, teasing her, while under the table his toes grazed hers. With one hand wrapped around her coffee cup and her head leaning lazily on the other, she had drawled out, "I've had enough for right now, thank you." The exchange came back to her among the maples and hemlocks and paper bark birches. The last, she thought, were her favorite, slim and upright, even if they did let their yellow topknots of leaves loose at the very beginning.

  Rounded, heart-shaped leaves, drifts and piles of them slid over the pine needles that were always there, and there were other leaves, too—stars and ovals and small, tight isosceles triangles. She called to Paul so as not to lose his erect figure already ahead of her and behind the narrow, white columns of the birch trees. She liked it that the trees couldn't camouflage even so pliant a man as Paul. She'd have to see him, walking away from her, past the light, shimmering trunks. Branchless, they seemed less like trees than the spirits always present, if unacknowledged, among the living—the speechless dead, or other beings whose mortality was not like hers.

  He was bound to kiss her in the clearing. She saw he'd been waiting past the trees, standing as still as they. Before they touched, she held back a little, to look at him. It seemed that if she so much as breathed, he would take flight, so that this time, too, he approached her first.

  She felt as if she were rich enough in beauty to give some of it back to the world, as if she shed it like light. He smoothed her hair back from her forehead in a gesture that, had it been made absently, would have seemed maternal, but because of the concentration of attention and delicacy in his fingertips made her feel instead that this man noticed her in ways that no one else as yet had tried to. She believed he'd always known, even when she didn't, that she couldn't resist him.

  They resumed walking. As if sensing her thought, he asked her casually, "When are you leaving?" She guessed he had never planned to return to New York with her.

  She told herself that maybe she'd rather travel alone. Maybe she'd even drop in on her parents after she dropped off the car. "About three," she said, and then, "do you think
I can manage the driving?"

  "Mmm-hmm," he assented, and stepping back, arms folded across his chest, he made a parody of looking her up and down, as if taking stock of her. She wasn't sure she didn't detect a real appraisal in his face. He held out his arm to her: that was it, then.

  "Aren't you leaving?"

  "I thought I'd stay on. I don't have to get back tonight."

  "And relive memories?"

  Jeanne heard the caustic sound of her voice. Paul didn't answer, and this bitterness, if bitterness it was, didn't last. At the time she thought she accepted his terms if it led to nights like their last night. Paul waited with her while she packed, changing to a denim skirt. They chatted, and she found herself lingering longer than she'd said she would. The hands on the inn's china-faced clock marked the dot of four when at last Jeanne told Paul goodbye.

  Carrying her bag, he quickly descended the steps to the lobby. They didn't stop at the registration desk, but walked across the floor fashioned of former grindstones, oblongs and wheels of differing shapes and sizes set in mortar.

  Jeanne dragged her feet over the uneven pavement. Paul walked lightly ahead, bearing her luggage. He seemed as eager for her to leave as he'd been to see her at first.

  She wondered about his plans. She wasn't about to inquire. She thought, Let him play the gentleman then and pick up the tab. The inn's dutch door, already swung open, admitted the mild, waning, rural Sunday afternoon. Paul walked out to the great outdoors. The other milling people melted away, and Jeanne put all her attention into watching Paul's torso from the back as the distance between them lengthened. She imagined going to sleep and waking up again to this, years hence.

  She paused just long enough to remember it, Paul growing smaller and smaller as he left her. He'd gone to put her bag in the car, but she had the keys. He was waiting placidly when she arrived. After she popped up the trunk and he stowed her bag, he bent to touch his face to hers.

  They were deliberately casual out in the open where no one knew them. "I'll be seeing you," he said, and winked, then stepped back so she could get in the car. No admonitions or promises—what he spoke was scarcely more than an intention. He assumed she'd be okay alone. In her rear-view mirror, Jeanne took another look at Paul as he turned away while she pulled out. If she were leaving him, it seemed he'd really gone first.

  She drove cautiously, as the roads became wider and carried more cars. She was going south, beside the sunset, and she turned down the windshield visor. Her heart skipped when her engine did. She didn't really like to drive alone if anything was wrong, but she hadn't told this to Paul. He saw her as independent, and she wanted to keep it that way.

  Safely in Greenwich, Jeanne hailed the mechanic at the garage and told him her problem. They settled it between them that she would telephone on Tuesday afternoon for an estimate. She collected her bag, handed over the keys, and the mechanic drove her car inside the garage while she watched, her legs stiff, her skirt ridden up on her hips from sitting.

  Just as the car moved away, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the rear window, her hair ruffled and dishevelled, and a suffusion of color in her face, as if it were alight. A consciousness of the beauty which she had attained, if ever how briefly to possess, was given back to her. Her own image in the mirroring glass appeared as a fleeting form to tease her out of thought. Less than ten years ago, she had travelled these same streets with boys. She remembered the advances she had submitted to then and the ones she had fended off. The woman delighted in what the girl dimly desired under a great shyness.

  Her weekend with Paul was over, and she felt its recession like the fading twilight as she stood at the intersection waiting for the red light to change and herself to cross. Clouds billowed over her head, pale against a brooding sky, and mist blown through her hair left a fluffy promise of rain and a cool freshness. It was an evening to be expectant in and not for dwelling on partings. She excused herself from a filial visit, admitting to herself that she was still in a state and didn't want her parents to guess what it was. She made herself hurry over the damp sidewalks. Inside the train station, the ticket window was closed. Outside, on the platform to New York, a few people stood waiting for the 6:07 under the glow of the lamps.

  Under the open sky, the rails were dull as pewter. Jeanne watched for a gleam in the distance, but nothing was coming to keep her focus. She looked up above to the veils of mist blowing over roofs and the tops of trees, a river flowing over air, like the shape of a sonorous music that makes up in tone for what it lacks in melody. The evening felt mystical to her then, just before she boarded the train. One star had waited behind the swirling cloud cover for her to notice it. Eons of distance away that star had exploded, bursting from all the borders of itself, and yet its bequest to her was a steady, quiet glow. Then she heard the muffled blast that announced the commuter train's emphatic approach.

  In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

  That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

  As on the death-bed whereon it must expire,

  Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

  Jeanne was considering all the fervor of the train's headlight that glowed like a single widening eye as it drew nearer, when the quatrain said itself inside her head. Earlier she had warmed herself at an elusive fire, and now, with that light diminished down in her to its skeletal ember, she anticipated the train's arrival.

  Electronic doors parted for her to come inside to the fluorescent glare of a car surprisingly full of people of a generally more elegant cast than she was used to on this commuter route. When she stepped into the crowded train, the misty night instantly retreated. The doors closed. Standing inside in the center of the car, she looked down to her right. Every seat was taken. To her left she found four places empty, all in seats that turned to each other. To the left of the aisle a couple was sitting together, while across the aisle a couple sat opposite from each other.

  Jeanne chose the empty seat facing the couple who sat side by side, riding backward. As she approached them, she saw that the woman, who sat next to the window, was taller than her male companion, who had the aisle. The woman's hair was a heavy rich auburn, carelessly pulled back in an elastic. As Jeanne took the seat by the window, she scrutinized her unobtrusively. She was tall, slender, elegant, and casual. She's beautiful, Jeanne thought to herself. She was wearing tailored black wool slacks of a fine flat weave and a long-sleeved, ivory blouse in a heavy damask material, like a tablecloth's, with a row of buttons on the left side camouflaged by a flap of cloth, and a large brooch of a scarab in gold, enamel and amber fastening its high, round collar.

  The woman was adorned with jewelry: diamonds in her small but rounded earlobes, the brooch, a precious-looking ring of seed pearls and rubies in a band of very yellow gold on her long finger. It was not a wedding ring, and she wore no other.

  How old is she? wondered Jeanne. Her skin seemed soft to the point of loosening, but the faint fan of wrinkles around her dark eyes enhanced her beauty, even spiritualized it. Save for the first light, a late one is often loveliest, and perhaps Jeanne found the fine lines already etched in the woman's face desirable because she didn't have them yet herself, but expected that she would.

  Jeanne glanced across the aisle. This couple was old, and the man and woman were both asleep. Their feet, clad in slippers, were propped softly at each other's side. Her iron-grey hair was carefully coiffed and his was combed. Their figures were firm, their complexions tan and supple. There were worse alternatives, they seemed to be saying, to aging like them.

  So far Jeanne would agree. The train's motion and its slight vibration lulled her, too, though not to sleep. Her hands loosened in her lap. And then, in front of her, she saw—she couldn't help but see—the man's right hand insinuate itself across the woman's lap, between her trousered legs. The man did not look up. He appeared engrossed in reading a magazine that lay open on his knees.

  His companion laid her hand over his in a gestur
e that was milder than encouragement, but not quite restraint. Her loose clothes did not disguise the lovely span of her back and the grace in the flare of her shoulders as she turned to say something low in the man's ear.

  He opened his thighs wider, pressing against her. His trousers fitted snugly to his compact body. His magazine slipped between his legs. As he retrieved it with his left hand, Jeanne saw from upside down that its pages were not print but printed pictures: so he carried along a comic book.

  It was a game he played, to pretend not to know what he was doing. When he spoke aloud, it was to laugh and point at a picture and caption. His light eyes had not once lit on Jeanne's. In his total disregard for her presence, she found a behavior that was actually hostile because it was also her own privacy he was violating with his immodest touch of this other woman. It was because he pretended Jeanne wasn't there that his hand disturbed her as if it were her flesh he felt for under those clothes.

  Well, to a point. Perhaps if he looked at Jeanne as he did his comic, she'd blush. She felt a fine strain of nervousness run over her like an electric current. They had passed Port Chester. From fifteen feet down the aisle, the approaching conductor announced their arrival at Rye, and Jeanne opened her handbag to buy a ticket.

  As if in conscious antithesis, the woman stared fixedly out the window, at the small lights that flashed through the charcoal darkness. "So many houses." She spoke aloud and then sighed, without lifting her eyes. The conductor sold Jeanne a ticket; then he punched it and split it, handing her half back to her. The man's hand was still. The conductor moved on, and, with his absence, Jeanne sensed a new sort of suspension between the three of them, one in which this time she felt complicit.

  The man squeezed his companion's thigh and held his grip. She was stirring. The train halted. The lights flickered, and she turned away from the window. The melting look on her face made Jeanne smile. She was open, if not unguarded. Jeanne could see in her lit face that she was proud and in her prime, not past it. Her eyes were like candles. She'd go far, very far, to give herself. But not right now. Even as she showed him a wanting and willing face, her head tilted away.