by Sharon
Maybe now, with Alan, she should let be.
The funny thing was that as soon as she was done figuring it out, Alan said, "All of a sudden you're quiet. What are you thinking about?"
"I was deciding not to ask you what you had on your mind."
After an amused pause he said, "That's probably wise. Which way should I turn at the crossroads?"
"It doesn't matter. Right'll get you there. So will left."
She could see he had a little trouble accepting that. Daniel had said once it was that way for city people. They thought about directions in right angles. Going from one place to another was following set after set of ninety-degree turns. Around here, the roads curved, hopped over little hillocks, scooped down knolls, coiled along the crest of puffy ridges like a stripe down the back of a grass snake.
"Which is quicker?"
"Right."
So he took the left fork. They went slowly, and she started to tell him how this family lived in that farm, that family in this one, and a little about them, some of the funny things, some of the sad ones. Dusk gathered in the eastern sky, making shadows grow together, strengthening her sense of being close to him. The cool, fading light was good to her eyes, which were itchy from a day of bright lights, makeup, smoke and tears held back.
He noticed aloud that one of the farms had electricity. She told him it was an English neighbor, Ben Hosely, and that Ben and Mary his wife milked at noon and midnight, unusual hours, because they liked to go into town and polka two nights a week when a band came to the tavern. She pointed out their new house, just up two years, and told him about how fancy it was inside, how they had a matching gold-colored stove and refrigerator in the kitchen and how the bathroom had paper on the walls with flying ducks on it, with the same color carried on in the fixtures. Alan had that smile, the delighted one, as if he were enjoying what she was saying out of proportion to how interesting it was. She was wondering if there was something humorous to him about her notion of what was fancy, when the smile left his eyes.
If something was wrong, he didn't say. Only, "I met Ben at the auction."
Her own home lay in darkness. Gloom clouded the partly open barn door, dusting the threshing floor.
She couldn't figure out the car door, but sat pressing and pulling on parts of it while he came around the other side and held it open for her. Standing by him, she called out, "Daniel?" A bit louder, "Luke, you here? Anna?"
She listened to sleepy cluckings from the hen house and the murmuring cattle sounds from the barn. Beyond that, even the wind was quiet.
"The young folks must have gone on home. I guess Daniel is out." She ought to say good night. She formed the words in her mind. Good night, Alan. It wasn't so easy to tell him good night, because it wasn't what she wanted. It might be the right thing, but it was hard to think of Alan in terms of right and wrong. She was charmed by the way he was looking around, interested and awake, as though every detail of her home were important to him.
Not planning it or talking about it, they began to walk together, on the slope of her yard. There were a good two acres of lawn around the farmhouse. To him there was a storybook quality in the rural images: the strawberry beds mulched in straw, poplars skirting the dark sparkle of a brook on the side ox the property, the weedy, dry ditch in front, the heavily crowned shade trees. It had a free-spirit country look, kept up, but not tutored into submission. Clover made a fleece of white tufts through the spring grass, which sent up its own fragrance, ripe and organic.
More often than not when he thought about Susan, he placed her here, not on the set, and though this was not the same place his imagination had conjured, it was near enough to lend it the quality of a daydream; Quiet excitement passed through him, something gentle and rapturous. Emotions were no longer segregated into orderly regions for him, some cerebral, some physical. He wanted her with his body; he wanted her with his being.
Walking at his side, she seemed to him unusually slight, uncertain, defying the uncertainty. Here were the results of his careful, careless cultivation of her ambivalence. He had taught her to want him, and now she did. Her body was new and alien to her. Desires resided there that she could neither quench nor control. He could see too much in the way she carried herself, each step exact, with a barely perceptible stiffness, as if her flesh were infinitely fragile and it would hurt to move the wrong way. Her smiles were restless, full of ardent whimsy and alarm.
The tautness in his body answered hers; his own stark hunger driving him. He needed to have her. Now.
On the north side of the house she grew wild flowers, transplanted from her parents' woods, where they grew in abundance, she told him. He bent down, cupping a yellow blossom in his hand. "What is it?"
She knelt beside him. "Lady's slipper." He gave a slight smile, taking pleasure in her. She misinterpreted the source -of his smile, for she said, "I'm glad you like it. My mother used to say men ought to enjoy flowers. She raised the boys that way. We all had our own part of the garden when we were old enough. We could grow vegetables, but we had to grow flowers, too, boys and girls. Some of the neighbors thought it was strange, that boys shouldn't care about those things, the way girls should, but that didn't worry my mother."
He had plucked a buttercup near the pump, spinning the stem absently between his fingers. Smiling a little, he brought it up to stroke it gently under her chin, the gesture testing, curious. She had no resistance to it. None at all. He could see it in her eyes. Susan, utterly vulnerable to him, undefended.
He stood first; breaking the tenuous contact.
She joined him. "It frustrates me, not to know how the world looks through your eyes. It must be another earth."
"Not one you'd think was friendly." In the dying light he saw the airy shadows her lashes cast on her tense, pale cheeks.
"What do you make of this?" She swept her hand to the side.
"Your home?"
"Yes."
"It seems like an imaginary place. Can you show me inside?" Her eyes held for a moment a saint's longing, a saint's despair, along with, unexpectedly, some self-mockery and humor, and it struck him inside. Amish boys and girls with eyes like Jesus. So you intend to take the lady, Wilde, take her into her modest little house, take off her handmade clothes…
"If you'd like. There isn't much to see… I have some quilts I could show you."
"Quilts?"
Under the rose-tipped sun flush, another, deeper band of color marked her cheeks. She put one hand there, stroking the spot as if she didn't understand it. "That's what we usually show English visitors. They always want to see the quilts. We're known for them, I guess."
Her front porch was deep, with a swing hanging in cottony grays. Inside the house it was warmer, darker, with the closed-in scent of warm woodwork and a faint ethery tang from the mint plant in her window box. She seemed closer to him indoors, enclosed in a hushed crucible with their unresolved passion.
"You don't lock the door?"
She didn't look at him. "We never have. What have we got to steal?" Flame from a match head made a blue streak in the dimness as she lit a propane lantern, flooding her half-turned face with smoky light. "What's the matter? Does it worry you? There's no one to bother us out here in the country."
He said nothing. She seemed more fragile now, more restive. Stretching her arm, she settled the lantern on a ceiling hook. Honey-colored light swept over her and spread in an expanding circle, not reaching into the corners. She looked around in it, bewildered, as though she'd entered a strange land.
He wanted to say the right thing to her, but his thoughts began to have a way of evaporating under the pressure of wanting to take her in his arms, bring her close, closer… He gave himself a minute, walking around touching the plain furnishings: the cupboard, with its few pieces of decorated china, the splash of bright colors of preserved goods in the Mason jars on her counter, the straight-backed chairs around a table with a faded red-and-white-checked cloth.
She r
oused herself, going to the cupboard and lifting out a cardboard box, and took a handmade puppet from the box, an Amish girl with embroidered eyes and a miniature kapp. Slipping her hand inside, she said, "From Daniel's sock. I made it for the little ones at school."
Her dark eyes were fierce with panic, though she was smiling. He was acutely conscious of that smile, that mouth, of the shape and color of her lips, how they would have the taste of damp satin under his, damp satin and panic.
The puppet was perusing him curiously, its head tilted. He had to smile at it. While she was sliding it back in the box he noticed the pile of blank report cards, and took one to look at.
"Is it like yours?" she asked.
"Only in the basics—arithmetic, geography, spelling. Maybe we don't call it geography anymore; maybe it's social studies now. I like these…" He read aloud, "Singing, deportment, poetry, inclined to mischief, comes poorly prepared. Shows courage… Does it frustrate you to see them drop out in the eighth grade?"
She seemed to sense the judgment he'd been careful to keep out of his voice. "Some aren't too fond of school. They'd as soon be out."
"And others?"
She stepped backward. "What's there for them to go on to study? English culture. English ideas. English literature, English music, English painting…"
"Agriculture—"
"How to grow a tomato with no taste to it."
"Law?"
"Writ after writ of it, and what's it given anyone? In the Bible there are only ten, and people Can't even abide by those."
"Susan—"
"Maybe things should stay mysterious. Why do people have this urge to learn and learn and learn? No one can learn all there is to know anyway. In all the universities in the world, is there anyone who knows everything? No one can change the weather, or stop war, or make life come from dust. People are still hungry and fighting, and frightened…"
A moment of quiet passed before he spoke, very gently. "Are you frightened now?"
"Yes." The brown eyes held fast to his. "I never thought I'd come to like it so well."
He felt a chill of desire and sympathy, hot sparks, cold prickles in his blood. She stirred fitfully, her eyes unconsciously wooing him. She didn't know how to begin what she was desperate to have begin. Not seeming to know that he could see, she put her hand on his forearm, rubbing him. Modest and needful, the gesture erased all but the heat.
He took the ribbon trails of her kapp, one in each hand, and followed them down until they were stretched taut, with his fingers barely above her breasts. His smile was soft.
"Where are your quilts?"
Her bedroom was at the top of a steep stairway. The aged wood was springy underfoot, mewing and creaking, reanimating images from children's poetry for him, A. A. Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson, children on their way to bed wearing pajamas with feet and carrying glass-chimney lamps. When you lived the classics maybe it became less important to study them.
There were no closets in her room. Her few garments hung from hooks behind a single bed and table. She set down the lantern and knelt on a braided rug before an oak chest.
"My father made this." Her hand swept lovingly over the lemon-colored lid before she hauled it open. She tipped her head forward, looking inside, and his attention fastened on her neck, its gracious curve, the uncovered skin of her nape, the subdued shine of a few escaping tendrils of hair. Lightly he touched his knuckles to the hollow of her neck, moving up and down, letting his fingers drift just under her gown. She drew a single, sharp breath, her shoulders quite still, almost rigid.
"Lovely neck."
Her mouth quirked at the corner, doubting it. He came down beside her, and touched her cheek with the back of his hand.
"Your skin feels cold," he said.
"It does that sometimes, It can change in a minute, hot to cold, cold to hot. It's in the family. Some of my aunts have it too." She was pulling out the quilt, her hands tense from the weight of it. "My grandmother worked this one when she was a young girl. We call it the Diamond. The quilting around the edge here, she calls the pattern . 'feathers and leaves,' see…" Spread outward, the massive central diamond took shape on the floor, royal purple on crimson, the colors brilliant, almost neon, like op art.
"It's beautiful," he said. "The colors are striking."
"You know why that is? I read once in a book about our quilts by an English woman that we like to use bright colors because our lives are so dull out on the farm." The satin mouth developed a fascinating, sardonic curl. He could see she thought it was pretty funny that the English had the idea their own lives were richer and more exciting than Amish lives.
"And this…" A second quilt floated in undulating coils over the first. Warm air puffed against one strand of her hair, lifting it prettily, dropping it where it could tease her collarbone. "My mother made each of us a quilt to take to our new homes when we married. It's a—I don't know how you'd say it. A bridal quilt? She made one for me when I married John. When he died, she made another one, this one. We call the design Sunshine and Shadow. See how the colors are the shadows of one another. I think she was trying to tell me: Remember, after a dark time, the sun will come out again. It's part of life, the dark and the light."
In the small pause that followed, she was thinking, What nice silences we have. Enclosing her hand in both of his, he carried it to his mouth, his own palms open as they would have been if he were to sip water from a stream. His breath came, blowing gently, warming her hand and then touching her thumbnail, the inside of her wrist, and, moving her thumb gently, in the scoop between it and her. first finger. With his lips he repeated the pattern, and each stroke marred the rhythm of her breath.
She whispered, "You touch things. Things and people. I've noticed it before. Why do you like to do that?"
He was absorbed in her hand, following the contours with his fingers. His voice was soft, as hers had been. "A habit. I have a visual sensory prejudice. Maybe from the years of taking moving pictures of things. Appearance is the only thing that matters, not taste, not scent, only visual texture and moving colored light. I don't know why I touch. Maybe to remember that things have substance. Maybe it's a habit I started as a child. I did a lot of magical thinking."
He had' gotten the relaxed smile she loved, the one with the parenthetic marks snuggled close to the corners of his mouth. There was humor, too, in the fierce desire in his gaze.
"What's magical thinking?"
"The little spells you concoct when you're a kid. Not all children do it. 'If I walk through the field, I'll make a new friend. If I run my hand along this picket fence, my parents will forget to make me practice my violin.' I never used to ask for anything specific, only that something good would happen. And if I touch here"—one long finger considered the undercurve of her chin—"and here…" His fingers spread slightly, palm upward, and made fractional contact with the base of her breast, caressing from side to side, moving slowly upward while he watched her eyes. "Something good…" His voice was more than a breath, less than a whisper.
His mouth tipped her nose with a play kiss before it descended, bypassing her mouth, and he leaned forward, nuzzling the underside of her chin with his face, then lower. Her smile tightened and her breath became quick, like his, jumping in meter, a rapid, feverish sound. One of his hands continued to clasp hers, massaging her fingers, the sensitive skin between them. The other pressed gently against her breast in different places. She shivered when his lips found her nipple, caressing it through the fabric.
"Are you still cold?" He brought the quilt around her like a cloak, covering even her hair, settling it in tender, uneven movements. But the shivering went on, coming in waves.
"I had a special way to touch things when I was little too," she whispered. "I never could feel enough through my fingers. I always wanted to put things next to my lips." His hand had grasped the quilt near her throat, and she dipped her head to stroke with her mouth across the heel of his hand, where the skin was tight
and fragrant, a light, pithy sweetness from his hand soap and his cotton shirt. She put her mouth there, then her cheek, and then tried to find all the ways she could fit against his skin, every variation in form against form, warm, curving flesh, startling humanness. First he moved not at all. Then he began to help her, putting his hand this way and that against her face, giving her his wrist, then his fingers, and, when she parted her lips, letting them come barely inside, where they tasted dry and sweet to her.
He drew her to him slowly, his hands on the quilt, the quilt dragging her closer like a seine until her breath came quickly on his mouth in a motionless kiss. His grip began to shirt on the quilt, pulling one side, then the other, varying the kiss in texture and pressure. Flesh slipped against flesh, into flesh, becoming moist. His hands through the Quilt made yearning motions behind her, kneading her shoulders, the small of her back, below. Saying her name as if it were a sonnet, he brought them together so that she was enclosed in a cocoon of warmth, his body in front caressing her chest and belly, the fabric behind veiling her from sound and ambient sensation, and all she knew were his hands, his mouth, his exhalations making delicate motifs on her flushed skin.
Too strong, he thought. This is too strong, like a drug anyone would have to be insane to experiment with. No matter how close he pulled her, he couldn't stop the pain of wanting her in his muscles. The sheen of the lantern reflected off her lips, made her skin look hot and golden to him. He was unaccustomed to the light. It seemed special, elfin party light, shed of the weary, purposeful romanticism, of candlelight, retaining the splendor of day, the mystery of night. Glint by glint, he wanted to lick it from her lips.