by Sharon
She had begun to laugh, the sound like many quick sighs, her eyes closed, rubbing his cheek with her nose, her lips trembling against the side of his jaw. "This is the only thing that makes sense, you said. But I feel crazy when I'm with you."
He touched his mouth to her underlip to catch the tremors of her laughter. "I feel crazy too."
"Good crazy?"
"Very good—but very crazy." His spread fingers made a nest that cradled her head; his forearm supported the arch of her back as he lowered her, lying her on the welcoming field of fine rose wool that was the quilt's backing. Her breast brushed his chest as he followed, and he pulled impatiently at his shirt, and his inhalation divided into two sharp parts when his nakedness touched her there. His mouth found hers again with urgent heat, and his soft words were also urgent. "Susan, I can't wait anymore. I've got to have you,, darling."
Flying inside, passing into the turbulent universe where only he could bring her, she drove her hands into his hair, clinging to the kiss. When he drew her hem upward, she wanted only for it to happen faster. She received his knee between her thighs, fascinated by its exquisite inquiring pressure, then frantic from it. He slipped a hand beneath her thigh, trailed it higher, making entrance under the final layer of cloth, his palm sweet on her bare bottom, holding her against him, holding them together where they both stung for each other, her skirts in a drift over his thighs and pelvis.
She was deaf to her own whisper, but he heard the repeated words clearly. "Please, Alan. Please…" He shuddered with arousal, scattering her face with kisses, tracing the shell curves of her ear with his open mouth, finding and lightly, shakily massaging her pulse points with his fingers. Her skin had grown warm, silken in tone, as it might have during a fever. He had to look down at her face one more time before he undressed her. Pulling back, he gazed down through the gauzy mist that was the creation of his desire, loving with his eyes the deep passion marks of color on her cheekbones, the shiny distended smile, and her eyes, overbright, brown as wet cinnamon, direct in their trust.
Then he felt it. His blood stilled like ice in his veins as he felt the frosty tentacles of despair curling up through the thousand empty places in his spirit. The act he had contemplated so long with her was never going to be enough.
The desire that gave him no peace remained, pitiless in its heat, and a now-forgotten nerve command led his hand to her bodice to open it. His abstractedly searching fingers discovered no buttons, no zippers—she used straight pins to bind her clothing. He knew, but had forgotten. The Amishness of it struck him as it never had before. How separate she was from him. One by one he could remove each innocent pin, and bury himself in the heat of her innocent body…
Despair had risen higher, shoving at his throat. He was never going to get close enough to her, not even through physical penetration. He was never going to know how to protect her enough. He had chosen all the wrong goals.
Too late, he understood. He wanted what he couldn't have. He wanted to be with her a lifetime.
His thoughts were in no way rational, but even then, far inside, he knew he had made mistakes there would be no way of righting. He had done her terrible intrinsic damage, something he could never wash away or heal, or even palliate. It gave him strength to pull himself away from her, to sit up nearby, facing slightly away, his knee up, one arm straight to the ground, the other balanced on his kneecap. His pulse ran with fury, questioning the decision. Fresh shudders began in his spine, radiating outward, making his- shoulders ache, forcing his lungs hard against his rib cage. Shock set in, a kind of resounding surprise with himself that after everything, after all this time, he would not carry her this last step. The reawakened life inside him was like a stranger he was meeting for the first time. Why couldn't he have foreseen this moment?
In time he completed the painful process of bringing himself under control, and when it was done, he could look at her again. She had drawn herself together, her knees up and close to her body, with her skirts organized to cover them, her arms tight around her shins. She looked small and battered, like a sick wren ruffled into its feathers. His heart seemed to leave his body.
"Love, what's going to happen to you?"
"Apparently not what I thought." She was trying to sound brave.
"Susan—"
"When? What will happen to me when?"
"After the movie goes into general release."
"Oh."
"People will find out. Do you understand that? Even your people. Even Amish. They'll know you've been with us and that we've—that we've filmed you."
"Oh. Oh, then."
"You told me once that your community is very conservative, even for Amish. You've broken—what's the word?"
"Ordnung?"
"Yes. What will they do?"
She shrugged. A little smile passed over her mouth. "I'm too old for the buggy whip."
"What instead?"
"They'll think I was a pretty big dope, I guess. Maybe they'll say something like: 'What for did you do that, Susan? You're such a schussel. Do you have it so in the head? Your feet haven't touched the ground since the day you were born.' Something like that."
"Love, the truth."
She sighed. Her cheek dropped to her forearm. "Some I care for will be hurt. That I dread."
He dealt in a practical way with his increasing nausea, closing his eyes, correcting his internal balance, taking an iron hand to his biochemistry.
He heard her say, "Don't be so guilty. I wanted your money."
The room around him was redolent with her scent. It clung to his clothes, his hands, surrounding him. "I wish to God I'd just given it to you. You don't understand what it will be like. When you star in a movie, people become interested in you. Nice people, not-so-nice people…"
He opened his eyes again and saw she hadn't moved. The compulsion to take her in his arms was too powerful to be trusted, but he knew she needed to be touched. Moving closer, he stroked her hair slowly with his palm, every cell of him alive to detail, to the way each hair shaft swelled against his hand. Damp wisps on her brow brushed the side of his thumb. He removed his hand and said softly, "I apologize deeply to you for the defects in my conscience. Don't be afraid. I know it doesn't solve errors to compound them."
Her head lifted, and she stared at him curiously. "Don't be afraid… And me like a jelly jar all set to go out of a canning bath, and here there isn't a strawberry left in the house…" She blushed, laughed painfully, briefly dipped her hot cheeks between her knees. He was forced to savage himself inside, to smother his violent yearning for her.
"What changed in your mind?" she asked.
She was hurting, he could see that. It made it much, much worse for him. "One night wouldn't be enough. I'm not sure that all the nights in my life would be enough. I know now that from the beginning I wanted more from you than—I can't believe I'm saying this—more than lovemaking. I'm so sorry. Even in an amoral world, some people have to be exempt from pursuit. The sexually innocent, the sexually inexperienced—"
"Which am I, do you figure?"
Her kapp had fallen earlier. He picked it up, trailing the strings through his fingers. "For me to love you now would be…" All the wrong adjectives sprang to his mind. God, how he wanted to hold her. "Everything I've done with you has been wrong. Because of who you are. You see? You have to watch out for people like me in the world. There's a lot of bad out there. 'E-vil,' as they say on 'Dr. Who.'"
"Dr. Who?"
His smile burned the tense muscles in his jaw. "I can't have you. I can't. If I did, that would make me…" More inappropriate adjectives. "God knows. A sidewinding four-flusher."
"What's a four-flusher?"
"I don't know. Worse than a three-flusher."
"Twice as bad as a two-flusher."
For a moment, he listened to the night song from the window, the rhythm of her breath, the whisper of his heartbeat. He lifted her hand, found the streak on her palm where David had struck her, a fai
nt smear like a grape stain. There he placed a kiss, with all the new, brilliant tenderness in his soul. "Poor little hand."
She had been watching his face closely. When he released her hand and began to stand up, she said, "What's the matter?"
"Headache. I get them."
"Then I'll pray for you. It will be better by the time you get home."
He smiled. In the doorway he stopped, facing her. He touched his heart, then extended his palms in a miming gesture, offering it to her. She extended her two palms in acceptance, drew them close, bending her head to place a kiss in the air above them.
But it wasn't until he was outside and alone that he said, "I love you."
Stepping from the car in the deserted garden near his room, he realized that his headache was gone. Puzzled, he looked into the sky. Windstrewn clouds stretched out under the stars. In one place they were rent, torn like woven fabric into a network of shimmering threads, with the moon immense and yellow as a jonquil behind.
Is something up there? He was not expecting an answer, and none came.
From his desk he phoned the cinematographer. "Max, can you go out and get me a shot of the moon?"
Pause. Then, "You want the moon, Alan?"
"I want the moon."
Chapter 17
For once, she'd beaten Daniel out of bed. Most of the night she'd been awake, sitting in the darkness on her bedroom floor, gazing at the stars through her window, wrapped in the quilt, her finger tracing the patterns of stitchery, tulips in baskets, eight-pointed stars, hearts.
Sometime in the starlight she'd gone to the barn for Daniel's old bicycle and ridden into town to the public telephone by the slow-pitch park. Her skirts dark and heavy with dew, her black shawl around her shoulders gave her a pleasant feeling of freedom, one dark, invisible object in an ocean of indifferent darkness. She tried to place a call to Alan, picking out the numbers, as he'd coached her once.
Like most mechanical contrivances, the telephone was touchy and erratic. She got Joan instead, groggy but patient, diagnosing that the reason they couldn't hear each other very well was that Susan was speaking into the receiver. Susan hadn't realized it made any difference which end she spoke into.
Joan explained that Alan wasn't there anyway; he'd taken a late flight to Los Angeles, something to do with soothing the investors. A story had appeared on a television news show that Alan and his star were coming to blows on the set. He'd return soon, in a day or two. Less, maybe. He'd probably call. Was there a message?
"Would you please tell him that I said I think he's only about a one-flusher?"
"Tell Alan about Juan Fletcher?" Joan sounded as if she were talking with her eyes closed. "Won flesher? Unflush her?"
"About a one-flusher."
"Oh. Got you. Right. Susan, is something going on? You sound like you're excited about something."
"It's going to be a beautiful morning, Joan. Fresh. I can feel it. The air feels like it was drawn from God's first breath."
"Susan, where are you? I'm coming to pick you up. You need to talk to someone."
"I've got someone to talk to. If I let loose of the earth, I could soar like a swallow. I'm fine. I feel… full up with myself."
"I think you've been full up with Alan."
"No. Remember."
After a murmur of bedclothes, Joan's voice came stronger, as if she'd sat up. "He's only about a one-flusher?"
"Yes. And now I think he knows it."
Back in her kitchen, Susan made oatmeal, doing everything without light, all by touch, sound, and memory, pretending she was sightless, like Grandmother, sharing the void.
She ate the oatmeal on her porch swing, one leg tucked under her, the other cold on the spongy dampness of the wood floor, setting the swing into motion when she felt the need to be rocked. The ceramic bowl was warm in her palm. She watched a horizon appear, lightening tones of gray from crepe-paper black. When it was pale light all around, she stretched, arching, greeting the day.
The back of the spoon was warm and sweet from oatmeal and brown sugar. She licked it, then rubbed it against her lips in circle after circle, thinking about Alan's mouth.
Her stomach got hot. She sat back down on the swing.
A cat jumped into her lap. Whiskers skimmed her arm. A tail flicked her earlobe.
Footsteps upstairs. Daniel was getting up.
She took off toward the barn, thinking to surprise him, as a joke, by getting started on things. Some steps she was running; others were flying skips over grass weighted to the ground with dew and slick stones. Passing the peony bush, she grabbed off one of the huge blowsy blossoms.
The barn door was open, clanking in the unpredictable rhythm of the breeze. She had left it hooked, the bike inside. And Daniel was upstairs. She stopped.
"Hello? Who's there?"
The dogs came milling around her, happy tails working the air like reed grass. They must have been out for an early gallop. Their panting droned under the early birdsong and the clamor from the barn, where the calves had begun to wake up and bawl. One-Ear, Daniel's old tomcat, arrived like a shadow to make her an offering of a field mouse, depositing it with finicky precision on her bare toes.
So normal. Yet she knew it was not. Instinct scratched a warning.
This was her home, a place of cordial spirits and rest, not omens and foreboding, and any one of a hundred friendly faces might await her inside. Why was the barn suddenly so full of menace?
She picked up One-Ear, stepping inside the vaulted blackness with the cat's purr thrumming through her chest.
The animals stared back at her, their eyes flickering spots in the dimness. Beyond them, she was alone.
Another spot glistened farther in, high, out of place. Coming closer, she saw that it was a piece of paper, no bigger than a dinner plate, curled in upon its shiny inner surface. It had been speared on the lantern hook with some force. The hook jutted like a tusk through a jagged, star-shaped rip.
"What is it?" She spoke aloud, hearing herself form the words in German. One-Ear twisted in her arms, impatient with being held. She released the cat and unhooked the paper.
A photograph. A girl's photograph. Across the print in rough capital letters was scrawled a word.
Standing near the window, she watched the dull silver light make the image plain.
The girl's dark hair was curled, her dress in the antique English style. Her expression was sober. That expression—they'd had to work some for that. Alan's voice came back to her: Susan, don't smile for this one.. .just let your mouth relax. Okay, it's coming. Susan, give me this with your mouth, like this... That's it. Nice. God, that's nice.
The girl in the photograph was herself.
And the single scrawled word was ADULTERESS.
Sadly she said, "Oh, boy."
In the farthest corner of the haymow she hid, clasping the picture, holding the peony to her face, the petals growing wetter and wetter.
Though she was perfectly silent, Daniel found her. He knew her places and he knew her ways, how she could be outflung one moment, throwing herself to the world, and the next be drawn in like a flower that folds itself back into a bud when the sky grows storm clouds.
Cold and desolate, she was crouched under a straw stack. Descending draperies of light came through the cracks in the barn walls in layer upon layer, and behind the many transparent folds she seemed to have no more substance than a spirit. Seeing her there, he had a stray memory of Rachel; once he had found a secret book of hers, by an English philosopher, and when he asked her what it said, she had thought it over and replied, "It says that God is a sadist."
He wondered if Susan knew the word. When he wiped her face with his hand, bruised petals clung like wet feathers to his fingers. He held her face.
"You saw Alan's car last night," she said.
"And the light from the window. I waited in the barn."
She nodded, her eyes helpless. "I thought you must have. You came in so soon after he left."
"I should have brought the shotgun."
"That would have been something." She slid her arms around his chest and laid her head down there. "It wasn't needed."
"I know. Or he wouldn't have left you so early."
She twined her fingers in his, getting his smeared by the moisture as well. "If you get after Alan with the shotgun, I suppose I'd better get after Joan too."
"Do you mean because I had her out for a buggy ride, showing her around last week Wednesday?"
"Last week Wednesday, last week Friday… She must be shown around so good by now, she has the county memorized. What do you do when you're together?"
"Mostly be surprised we don't run out of things to talk about. Susan?" He felt her brace herself because of his tone of voice. "I had to tell Luke and Anna that you were in the movie."
"Oh, Daniel, no. I wanted them to know last, so they wouldn't have to lie."
"I didn't have any choice. They were going to come into Greyling and bring you lunch for a surprise with Mother yesterday. I had to tell them so they could help me keep her away. The two of them took it pretty well. You'd be surprised. It made them feel important to be told. You know how kids are, prone to admire anything involving risk. Luke said that he thought Dad and Mother would be secretly relieved that Rachel had money, even if they could never admit it."
She squeezed his hand and relaxed against him. "You know what?" she asked. "These are the only times I feel safe."
His throat hurt with the force of his frustration. "Why don't you let me help you more?"
"Too much needs doing. Too many bits and pieces."
"Piece by piece, I'll help you."
"No one can help. It's come to be like a rock high up on a mountain that's begun to roll. Nothing can stop it, and it's just going to roll until it rolls itself out."
Was this how it would be? he wondered. You grow up, then older, and watch the people you love slipping away like wind taking the topsoil.