by John Farris
"Ahh," Barry said, tensing. One of his hands was enormous but unmoving, thumb bulging in her gluteal grip, the other edging upward past the rib cage to a well-inflated breast. Then Mark took his hands away, rose, and began to circle her slowly, again and again, pondering musculature, the prim high navel, the sheen of pelvic bones just beneath the opal skin, apparently not well aware of the peak to which he had raised her. After four times around, he came to rest facing her with both hands snug on the staunch outcurve of her hips. She was jolted—there was a nearly unbearable grit of passion behind the reddish cleft mask of her loins. She could barely swallow, the room seemed about to keel.
Barry looked dumbly at Mark in his paint-daubed denim shorts. She whimpered in dismay and tugged with her own hands at his beltline. He was puzzled.
"I want," she murmured, eyes slitted and with a kindled touch of lunacy, "to look at you too." She was on fire to the tips of her ears. She unfastened the belt and tugged at the shorts, forcing them down over his hard-packed thighs, then in a fog reached for the French briefs. She got rid of those as well, leaving him almost as naked as she was, but with an important difference. He was not aroused.
Barry could have cried. She looked at the lengthy indolent penis—splendid, like carved faintly blushing ivory, a truly Corinthian cock that had not, would not work for them. In the brief span of her affair with Ned she had made fledgling love to him three times, never achieving an orgasm, out of ignorance, reticence, or just fear. She had loved, idolized Ned but had never cared for the appearance of his bulky brutish member, with an excess of liverish foreskin hanging down, a cowl over the sweet apple. It had been, in her eyes, ugly as a Gila monster. But Mark's was a real slave driver—just what she wanted and couldn't have.
Barry kneeled, a cheek against his thighs, stroking his cock as if it were a temperamental animal that had snubbed her.
"Oh, Mark! Everything else is so perfect. Why can't we make it work?"
She knew she shouldn't have said anything; it could only make his impotence worse. Time and patience were the answer. She bathed his naked legs in frustrated tears. His arms went around her. He lifted her, then sat down with her across his body, her weight in his lap.
"You want me, don't you?"
"I want to paint you," he said. He always seemed afraid of her tears.
"You can, you can. I'll be all right. It's just that you get me so—I love you with all my heart, and I need—but it'll be okay. It'll happen! I know I shouldn't be like this, so anxious. Will you touch me here, and . . . here? Thank you. Thank you. And there! just let it slip in. Out. So good. In, in. Oh my God! Now take me to bed. Just like this. I don't want to put any clothes on. Don't worry, Dad won't see us. Sleep in my bed tonight. Will you, Marky? Hold me very tight. What would I ever do without you? My love. My love."
Chapter 26
The perplexities of this side of their relationship resulted in a certain amount of torment for Barry.
Although sexual longing was like an unpleasant, nagging beast she had conjured and that shadowed her throughout the day, Mark's clear devotion to her, his passion for creating and recreating her in his sketchbooks and on the large canvas slowly taking shape in Tom's studio, acted as balm. They filled each other's days; no one else was needed.
He had grown daily more accomplished in his art, and more alluring physically. He took time to add to his store of strength, building stamina with weights and running and feats of agility that made her gasp: he could leap like a stag, walk on his hands, nonchalantly juggle a miscellany of sharp kitchen knives without suffering a scratch. He made her laugh with her heart in her mouth and butterflies in her stomach. His love of play not infrequently approached recklessness, as if, like a very small but precocious child, he had no firm sense of his limitations or mortality. He was getting much better at handling Dal's raffish Mercedes at high speeds, but he'd come close to wrecking it twice on the mile-long hilly stretch of disused road beside Caugus reservoir, where he practiced driving. On the second occasion Barry had been with him in the car and it was her life too, not to mention that the automobile cost a fortune.
She had yelled at him, more afraid than angry, and Mark was contrite, but the experience didn't come close to slowing him down. Barry found herself having to sneak off for catnaps in order to have the strength to meet the demands that he exuberantly placed on her.
She sometimes felt as if she were caught up in a fandango that dimmed the senses and blurred her perspective, and she regretted that she did not have the power to resist the flow of time, cherish at greater length the most satisfying moments they, spent together.
After daybreak thunderstorms, Friday turned into a day of noble-looking cumulus and racing cloud shadows across the dark inlay of pond where Mark and Barry coasted in a dented aluminum rowboat among islands of tangled sedge. Meanness rode with them in the bow, barking at a splayed snapping turtle that dived down into the tea-colored depths ahead of the boat. Mark had taken his shirt off for greater freedom as he rowed. He was tireless: they'd been around the large pond three times already. Barry had made a nest of flotation cushions in the stem where she lounged, drowsy, trying to read aloud, lulled by the delicious sounds of oars lightly stroking through the water. She read from Yeats. Caught in that sensual music . . .
From time to time Mark shipped the oars to pick up his sketchbook and draw something that excited his bump of artist's intuition.
"Who was Dionysus?" he asked idly, tuning in to a snatch of poetry.
Barry yawned and put the book face down in her lap. They had come to one comer of the triangular pond, a place roughly two-thirds of a mile distant from the gristmill, where there were rock ledges and tranquil willows alight with a simmer of sun like Japanese lanterns. Low hills rose from the pond. On the other side of these pine-covered hills Tuatha de Dannan ended and Kinbote began.
"Dionysus? Oh—the Greek god of wine and, let me think, drama. Something else. Fertility."
"The Greeks had a god for everything. The Irish only have one." He had been with her to Easter mass and she had tried to explain her religion, but Catholicism was still a mare's nest in his mind.
"The Greeks had honey and wine; the Irish got beer and potatoes, freckles and sin."
"If you only have one god and he doesn't like you, I guess you're out of luck. What does sin mean?"
"That which is hateful in the eyes of God and contrary to His laws, according to my catechism teacher."
Meanness was barking again and rocking the boat, as if he meant to go overboard; Barry sat up shielding her eyes with the paperback Yeats, looking up into the hills. She felt a cold rush of dismay.
"Oh, no."
Mark looked up at her, puzzled. "What's wrong?"
"It's Alexandra. I think she sees us. Why don't we row back home before—"
But the unguided boat had bumped against the embankment. Mark turned on the seat, also looking at the hill where Alexandra Chatellaine strode energetically with her black cane, threading her way downhill between thick trees on a needle-cushioned path. She raised the cane and waved it in a relaxed, carefree way. She was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat with what looked like a beekeeper's net attached to it.
"Why?" Mark asked.
"You know why. I haven't recovered yet from Tuesday."
"Oh, the ghost. You said that you decided it was your imagination."
"I said probably it was my imagination. It wouldn't surprise me if I was drugged. I don't think I like her, Mark. Let's go."
"No."
She saw he was going to be stubborn, so that was that. Meanness had leapt up to a rock ledge and he stood there quivering. Scents he was good at, he could bark with the best, but aggression wasn't his long suit. Mark stood, picking up the bow line, and stepped ashore with it. Barry rankled silently. It had been a fine mellow afternoon in their hectic life; now, prematurely, it was over. She had the sickly superstitious feeling that there would never be another like it.
Alexandra came dow
n beneath the glowing willows and flung aside the veil that kept the sun from her milky skin. Mark held out a hand to the doyen and she took it gratefully, inched down over the rocks to the ledge at the level of the boat, looking closely all the while at his face. Mark smiled toothsomely.
"You've changed a good bit since I last saw you! Filled out. And what a glorious head of hair. You mustn't ever cut it. You'll be like Samson."
"Samson?"
"Hello, Alexandra,"' Barry said icily from the boat.
"Hello, Barry." She sounded somewhat winded. "I believe I've walked farther than I intended today." She held a hand to her heart and gazed at the pond, the shallow massing of cloud reflections, a repeated tree line. The water vista rippled and vanished in fathom darkness, reappeared tremulously at the dying-down of the wind. "You've been rowing? What fun."
"Come with us,"' Mark invited.
"If you promise I'm not intruding."
"You're not intruding." He was more than polite; Mark seemed genuinely taken with Alexandra. She was an old flirt, and Barry felt a ridiculous spate of jealousy.
So Alexandra came aboard with Meanness, and they all set out in the twelve-foot. boat, with Mark in the middle seat at the oars, facing Alexandra, who delved into his sketchbook. Barry studied the play of muscles in Mark's wedge-shaped back, occasionally reaching out to flick away a mosquito, to let her fingers trail lovingly down the bumpy groove of backbone. Dragonflies coursed around them. The wind rose. Alexandra's sun veil fluttered. Her face was indistinct except for what might have been a smile, but her eyes pierced through.
"I love to draw and paint," Mark told her. "I want to be as great as Tom is."
Alexandra closed the sketchbook. "Now that I've seen you again, I have no doubt you'll realize your every ambition."
The wind suddenly picked up the hat from her head, whisking off the veil, leaving her with a wan, surprised expression as the hat went sailing a dozen feet to the surface of the pond and floated there. Then, the muslin taking on a heavy load of water, Alexandra's hat looked as if it might sink.
Mark hastily brought in the oars and stood up, which caused the boat to rock violently. Before Barry realized what he was going to do, he did it, jumping in after the hat.
"Mark!"
He sank like a stone. They were in the deepest part of the pond, and although she leaned out almost far enough to throw the boat over, Barry couldn't catch a glimpse of him. There was nothing but bubbles and froth.
"Can he swim?"' Alexandra asked, alarmed.
"I don't know!" Barry wailed. She sat down and pulled off her shoes, ready to go in after him. She'd had lifesaving at camp and knew what to do, unless he got mired on the bottom. Then it would be dicey.
She was unbuckling the belt of her jeans when Mark reappeared eight feet away, floundering, looking shocked but laughing too as soon as his head broke water. Meanness began his distinctive deep belling, a sound that provoked goose bumps in fugitives and the bereaved. "Mark, are you crazy?"
"Alexandra's hat," he burbled, looking around for it.
"You don't know how to swim!"
"What do I do?" he said, beating at the water with both hands, holding his chin high. But he didn't sink again, and he didn't seem panicked. "Hey, it's cold!"
"Of course it's cold—you're right over a spring! Can you make it back to the boat?" He couldn't. Barry picked up an oar and held it out to him. Mark seized it with both hands and relaxed, and she was able to pull him back. When Mark was beside the boat, Barry helped him get a leg over, and he rolled in without capsizing them.
"I'm sorry," he said breathlessly to Alexandra, whose hat had gone under.
"Don't worry about that old thing"
"Mark, it's more than twenty feet deep here!" Barry said. The sun had disappeared and his teeth were chattering. He looked at her and just shook his dripping head.
"I didn't think. Sh-show me how to swim."
"When it gets a heck of a lot warmer. Let's go, before you turn into a chunk of ice."
Mark insisted on rowing, which was the best thing for him to do; the exercise kept him warm, and his skin soon dried in the intermittent sun. But his shorts were soaked. They had left Dal's car by the gristmill. Mark tied up the boat at the dock below the mill. Barry dropped him at the house for a hot shower and a change of clothes. She took Alexandra home.
"He is so well spoken. Manly. And so full of life."
"Yes," Barry said, driving faster than she normally would go, anxious to be rid of Alexandra.
"I must say, I think you've worked a miracle."
"Thank you." She tried to hold in her bitterness, but couldn't. "I thought we were friends. Why did you do that to me?"
Alexandra was silent for a time.
"Perhaps it was not well advised," she conceded, looking at the grim jut of Barry's jaw.
"How did you do it? What was it I saw?"
"I am, among other things, a gyud lama, well versed in magic ritual. Producing the double is not difficult. It was, not a literal double, of course—I dressed her up. As an attention getter, you might say. Call it showmanship."
"Why?" Barry repeated.
"To further your education. Reality is, in every instance, in every moment of your life, what you wish it to be."
"Mental hospitals must be full of people who believe that."
"The mentally deranged, poor souls, have suffered loss or impairment of angkur."
"Self-empowerment, you called
Alexandra beamed. "You were listening. If there is no organic brain damage, they can all be put right again, but physicians specially trained in this healing art are required, and few of them exist in the world today."
"Why did you—your double just float away when I touched it?"
"That is the agreeable nature of a double—to serve, to do one's bidding unfailingly. Tulpas, however, are more complex. Not all of them are so accommodating. They take on a life of their own and can be reluctant to let go of it. I told you about my little monk."
"Yes."
"After he became lifelike, and to move around, and others became aware of him, he changed. He grew taller and thinner. His face assumed a diabolical character. He had a more commanding, sinister appearance. He began to leave my control, to rule my life I rather felt, when he looked at me, that he intended doing away with me in order to achieve total independence."
Barry suppressed a shudder. "You were hallucinating."
"Strictly speaking, hallucinations may not exist outside of the mind. Remember, others with no knowledge of his origins gave credence to my mind creature, passed the time of day with him, in all respects found him a most engaging fellow. So, to save my own life, I determined to dissolve the obstreperous phantom."
"How did you do it?"
"My mind was stronger, better trained than his. Of course, being of my mind, he had psychic awareness of my decision, and I had to be quite devious in my strategies."
"That's spooky."
"I can tell you, it was a suspenseful and fatiguing few months before he vanished."
"Vanished?"
"Poof. Solid one moment, the next gone as if he'd never been. I was forced to take to my bed for a number of days until I recovered from our duel of wits."
"Reminds me of imaginary playmates," Barry said thoughtfully.
Alexandra smiled. "Childhood is rife with such creations. Fortunately the little tulpas are not imagined with sufficient strength to become apparent to others. And they do not persevere as human children mature, become preoccupied with the demands of society and their coevals. It is interesting to speculate about what might happen if these phantom children grew to adulthood. Those tulpas I have heard of are totally without inhibition and have an unending appetite for power. They would, however, have to reproduce by mental parturition. It is one of the failings of tulpas. They are asexual creatures, as neuter as mules."
"Here we are." Barry stopped in front of the cottage on Kinbote estate. Alexandra got out with her cane, pau
sed with a hand on the door of the Mercedes.
"I hope you'll forgive me for saying, but I sense a great deal of pain in your relationship with Mark."
"You're wrong. It couldn't be better."
"Good. My intuition, I presume, has begun to fail with age. He is what you've always wanted. Dreamed of."
"Yes," Barry said, meeting impassively the strong green eyes.
Alexandra smiled and nodded. "I can't thank you enough. Until tomorrow night. I shall look forward to meeting your family."
Barry drove away feeling, again, ambivalent toward Alexandra. The old woman was alternately, infuriating and spellbinding. It was just about impossible to be cold or cutting with her. Alexandra merely smiled indomitably, gracious crinkles around her eyes, a song in her heart, and left Barry feeling like a pile of shit.
She was a witch, a philosopher, a mesmerist probably—that aspect of Alexandra Barry didn't take to at all, even though she had always accepted ghosts and associated phenomena. They were a part of her heritage and upbringing: her mother's no-nonsense attitudes about the world of faerie, her father's powerful, creative mind, his love of nature and the hidden, motivating forces of the world.
What bothered her, and would continue to be a problem, was Alexandra's ceaseless prying, her avid interest in Mark—frequently Barry was left dry in the mouth for answers, a defense of her feelings. She sighed. Face it. They were neighbors and, unavoidably, she was going to be seeing more of Alexandra.
At least Mark didn't seem to mind having her around.
Chapter 27
The Mercedes was almost out of gas and was looking grungy. Barry drove the car to the Shell station where they did business and had it spruced up. When she returned home there was an unfamiliar sedan parked in the drive; she thought it probably belonged to Niels Finnstadter, who looked after their orchards, or the farmer who leased acreage from them.