11
Later that moment stretched and grew as gilded as Klimt’s The Kiss. The summer semester was giving her plenty of other things to do, but she craved those panels like an addict, working on them whenever she could. Dwelling on the hiker’s touch was its own palliative to her fear, so she gave her imaginings free rein. And nature conspired with her, for by now capricious spring had morphed into pregnant summer, and the sun bore down all day through diaphanous haze, egging her on. Standing on the trail while the boy hunted for treasure she felt dazzled and addled, dull and maddened by the slow creep of time. She thought about the cold rigidity of isolation, its rationality and reflectiveness undisturbed by urges or recoils, and where once it had felt like safety, now it felt like death.
She met with her advisor outside on the green, both of them sharing a bench beneath the trees. So early in the morning it was not hot yet, and between the light and the birds there was enough stimulation that she found even despite her advisor’s physical proximity she could understand his words, and mostly what he had to say was interesting. He criticized some aspects of the new panels she had made but offered ideas for them too, including suggestions for additional artists with whose styles and techniques she might experiment.
When their meeting ended she went to the art store for the supplies he’d suggested and then the library seeking his references, where she settled in with a tall stack of art books to draw through the heat of the day. She used Bonnard for Pub Chaos, whose remarkable range of colors and strokes, her advisor had pointed out, made his interior spaces feel so close and intense. The hiker she drew in black and white as ground, but everything else in the pub resounded with the colors of her new pigment sticks, cadmium reds and apricot yellows, sapphire blues and viridian greens, and all those colors were reflected back through his eyes. She used Cezanne’s watercolors for Eden, trying with translucent washes to make the hiker’s garden feel spiritually transcendental while the artist’s style of fine pencil lines underneath the washes made feral the expressions on the hiker and bobcat woman’s faces.
For the night forest scenes in Bobcat Nocturne she experimented with graphite cut through beeswax and then tinted over with colored chalk, the layering process similar to a grisaille and glazing technique, creating a radiance like looking through stained glass. Hot temperatures softened the beeswax and made it easier to blend, and so she was working on these out in her yard when the hiker’s truck turned down the lane the following Saturday afternoon. Near blue, purple becomes red, and near yellow, green becomes blue, she thought, and then put down her sketchbook and stepped out from the maple shade into sunlight that struck like a fever.
The hiker got out of his truck. After drawing him so many times she could read the motions of his body like a language. The way his shoulders came forward and his stride extended as he grew nearer, so that it seemed as if he were not walking but gliding, the way his nostrils went from a flicker to a dance and his mouth opened and began panting. And then it all became part of the same fever as he reached her and his hands gripped her and his head bent and hers raised, everything coursing and coming off her in waves as their mouths finally met.
The rowboat looked even older than his truck, strapped to its bed with the gate down and a red rag tied to the end. Its wooden hull was worn to a silky gray and its flat bottom was bare but for a rope and two hard benches. But he pronounced it seaworthy, and after loading it onto a little homemade boat dolly, he handed her a pair of oars from the truck and extracted a small pack from the camping gear in the back, and then they headed down the trail to the river. There he left the dolly and dragged the boat into the water. They boarded on the other side of Thinking Rock and pushed off into the current. Slowly then, the hiker began rowing them upstream. For a long time it seemed as if they were rounding the same bend, its thin spill of shore hemmed in by pines, but finally the land straightened out and the riverbank steepened, and above it the pine clearing appeared. From that distance it glimmered like a jewel, a tiny oval carpeted in orange needles. For an instant she thought she saw the bobcat slinking along its back, but then it was gone, the clearing was behind them, and the river stretched ahead, glossy and endless.
Hardly any time seemed to pass before the hiker aimed back toward the side again, heading for a shady scooped-out hollow. The river was still deep where it met the steep bank of dirt and stone shot through with thick tree roots. One of these arced out over the water and the hiker took hold of it as they approached and tied the boat’s bowline to it.
He’d planned this, it seemed, for now he opened his backpack and pulled out a veritable feast. He’d made three different cold salads and each one of them surprised her, for their tastes were at once familiar and unexpected. He smiled at her reactions and his nose seemed to tease, so that after a while she closed her eyes to sharpen her focus and tried to guess their secret ingredients.
“Nuts,” she said finally for the potato salad, ignoring the obvious fact that its main ingredient was blue.
“Mm,” he said, nodding. “Almond butter, actually.”
Fruit salad came next, the fruit finely chopped and drenched in a rich speckled cream. After a few bites she put the container to her nose.
“Christmas,” she said, “and flowers.”
“Nutmeg. Rosewater.” He smiled.
Noodles, finally, shiny and translucent, and all tangled up with slippery green threads. She ate some, poked at it, and then ate some more.
“Licorice . . .”
“Star anise.”
“. . . and ocean.”
“Ha. Dried bonito flakes.”
They both laughed then, and she spent the rest of the meal feeling extraordinarily pleased.
Back on the river. Back in the sun. They were sipping from a thermos now, passing it back and forth between them, inside it an icy mango lassi he’d lightly spiked with rum that was without a doubt the best thing she’d ever tasted. The boat moved steadily against the slow current, with a strange effect of relativity as they continued upriver that made it seem they were still and only the scenery moved. She watched it pass, attuned to all the minute rhythms, the tug and glide of the boat through the water and the quiet splash of oars, the hiker leaning toward her and pulling away again, the pulse of his nose and the drop of sweat that slipped from his temple and fell at intervals to the floor of the boat. So lulled was she by these reiterations that she didn’t even notice the small dock they were approaching until the motorboat beside it roared to life.
It sped away and then she had to hold on while their own boat bobbed and shuddered in its wake. The hiker said nothing but he stopped rowing, his nostrils white with distaste.
Hardly had they started moving before his nose flared hard again.
“Is it coming back?” she asked, but he only shook his head. They were rounding a wide curve, and his nose was working frantically. Soon she saw why; there were dozens of people in the water just ahead, swimming around a wide dock emblazoned with a large green M. With no more trees intervening, their laughs and shouts carried toward the boat, punctuated by a frenetic pulse of house music. Males cavorted in the water and submerged, diving after footballs or each other, ignoring the rowboat weaving through their midst. Females lay sunning themselves on the dock, and the hiker, trying to avoid the swimmers, rowed the boat so close to them that Laurelie could see their minute changes of expression as they spoke and each adjustment they made to their bodies and hair.
Then the dock was behind them, and the river valley stretched unbroken again. But something lingered, in the water and air. Like the motorboat, the Montague students had left a wake. And yet oddly, though it had shaken her, she did not feel it as a threat, but rather as something almost quaint, a possibility of being that was lost to her now, although not regrettably.
The hiker’s eyes, however, were streaming, and his nose still skittered with a hectic beat. He seemed to fight the current now, mouth-breathing with his muscles locked as he dragged them foot by a
gonizing foot farther up the river. He did not speak and it seemed to her that he wanted to bear his pain privately, so she looked away and pretended not to see, but still it colored everything.
Then he stopped, and settled the oars, and slipped backward into the river. When he surfaced again he was already yards away, flicking the hair from his forehead with a twist of his head and running large brown hands down his face. His expression was calm now, soft. He looked at her, and she thought he was waiting. So she took a deep breath and jumped in.
The cold of the water was heart-stopping, even despite the heat of the air. Surfacing again, she treaded in a slow circle, feeling the current’s invisible pull. The dark river was completely empty but for the boat, still rocking, ghostlike, from her exit, even as it too drifted downstream.
He was under there, somewhere. Closing her eyes, she let herself sink. Her face passed beneath the water two long beats before her feet hit the bottom. She stayed down, slowly letting go of her breath until she could take it no longer, and then burst back into the air and opened her eyes and he was there, inches from her face.
Their first kiss had been a fever. The second was a cleansing. A kiss blinded by light and with water coursing down their mouths, his hands on her and his legs brushing through hers, his skin blessing hers everywhere they touched, filled with an awareness beyond itself, as if part of a far larger embrace between the river and the sun.
Once out, how did one get back in a rowboat drifting down a river?
He’d made it look easy, but at the same time unreproducible, grabbing the rim with both hands and then, in a single fluid motion her brain captured as a photograph, pulling himself up and over into the rowboat, arms taut, waist twisting, legs folding as he dropped out of sight.
Alone then, the river was no longer a caress, but rather a vast open mouth, swallowing the horizon and the deeply forested banks. The walls of the rowboat towered above her head. She peered up at their bowed planks, imagining her skin catching on fat splinters as she clawed her way over. Then he called out, and with a deep breath she reached up and took hold of the rim. It came down fast, dipping so low that some of the river spilled in. He was helping from above, shifting his weight, first toward her and then away again. She hooked one knee over the edge, and then scrabbled the rest of the way in. Once landed, she stayed down, curled at the bottom studying the grain of the boards, focused on their gentle flexing and the way the hot air above them glittered, and the contrast of their grayness with the pink of her own skin. Once her pulse had slowed, his fingers began gently stroking her hair, trailing softly down the long wet strands.
She might have remained there forever, but for the enormous flying insect that tried to land on her arm. She waved the limb but the insect only banked before resuming fast darts, now at her face. Once more she swung and this time by pure chance crushed its body between her hand and the side of the rowboat.
She sat up then. “I thought,” she said, flushing at the smear of wings and entrails, “that it was going to sting me.”
She imagined the hiker would be angered by the unnecessary loss of life. But when she looked at him his eyes were half-closed and his nostrils soft, with a lock of her hair still pressed beneath it like a mustache.
“That looks like a proboscis to me,” he said.
She scraped the carcass over the side and sat back again, grateful that at least it hadn’t been defenseless, but stricken now by the terrible harmony of life having to feed on other life, and so all of it having to feel that pain.
He said nothing else about the insect but after a while started telling her in a quiet voice about weeds. How morning glory would cross half a mile of shade to choke off all of its competitors, how goutweed stayed alive without sunlight for decades and crabgrass could flourish in a thin crack of asphalt and cutting knotweed only made it spread and if you left even an inch of its stalk or root lying around somewhere else in half a season you’d have an acre there.
His hands left her then and pulled a harmonica from his bag, black-toothed and silver-backed, its body rubbed shiny with use. Leaning back, he sounded a few sighs into it and then began to play. Some snatches she recognized, others she did not, one bleeding into the next with no pause between them. He played with his eyes closed and his nose keeping time as the melody surged and trembled and fell. It made her want to move and so she took up the heavy oars and rowed until her arms burned like hot pipes, but it was a good hurt, and a good motion, fusing her to the river and the hiker’s music.
The first few spatters of rain startled them both. They stared up into a hazy leaden blue, and then the hiker took the oars back and rowed like it was a race, with his eyes fixed on clouds that came from nowhere and steadily thickened and darkened above. As they passed the barren Montague dock there came a distant rumble of thunder and the boat jerked ahead with renewed speed. She shivered, for without sun the temperature had fallen and the wind was picking up, tousling the water’s surface and shaking the trees, asserting its own wild song. Now rain began in earnest, fat drops that smacked noisily against the bottom of the boat and merged into a thudding downpour more solid than particulate, shattering the river into billions of overlapping rings. Then finally they were gliding up to Thinking Rock, and the hiker was steering them around to its shallow side. He let go of the oars, looked down at his hands, and grimaced. But when he looked up at her, he grinned.
A crack split the air over their heads as they dragged the boat from the water. They left it there and ran up the trail with a long brontide of thunder still threatening. When they burst through her door, the boy cat ran down the stairs meowing piteously. The hiker scooped him up and they stood together at the picture window watching the storm toss the forest, waiting for each flash of lightning, so stark in the premature dark, listening in the aftermath of each sonic boom to the soft scratch of the cat’s tongue licking the rain from the hiker’s skin. And Laurelie imagined it as an ending and a beginning. As if the lightning signaled the end of the world, but at the same time charged them with an infinitely precious substance from which a new one would be born.
That night he reached for her hand as they lay together in the dark, so that his warm fingers were the last thing she felt before falling asleep, and the first thing she felt upon waking. Opening her eyes, seeing his mouth so close, she felt a stab of longing to kiss him. Closing them again, it seemed like a dream when she felt his lips touch hers.
Kissing then. Fingers intertwined. Sunlight creeping over them. Two mouths exploring this new place between them like a forest, acclimating to all its paths and scents and textures. Until her stomach growled, and his answered, and then his lips smiled against hers, and he rose.
Before he left, he checked on the tomato plants. True to his word they hadn’t died; in fact they’d grown so large that they sagged now under their own weight. Water too had bent and parted their stems, but otherwise they were unharmed by the deluge of the day before. Dozens of globes hung from the fragrant leaves, ranging from pale green to deepest orange. One fell off into her hand when she touched it, and its fruit was sweeter than candy on her tongue.
The hiker had trotted around to the back of his truck and returned now with two large spirals of metal. Carefully lifting the head of each plant, he slid one of the spirals down over it, and then bent and slowly circled it, threading its branches through the wires with gentle hands.
Watching, she imagined him in his own garden. She pictured a cabin in a sunny clearing surrounded by woods, beside it a small and very neatly tended patch heavy with ripening fruits and vegetables. And it seemed he’d been thinking much the same, because when he rose he brushed his hands on his jeans and, looking down at the ground with his nostrils fluttering, invited her to visit him the next weekend at his home in Maine.
12
Everyone was talking about it, the hottest July on record; she heard the words repeated everywhere she went. She tried to imagine six months of winter and it seemed everyone else was doing th
e same, because firewood and wood pellets were being delivered to yards and porches all over town. But the concept of cold had no meaning surrounded by so much life, and all those dead piles of potential energy looked vaguely ridiculous, as if the very air forged hotter than they ever might.
Everything was thriving, gorging on life, including the boy she babysat in the afternoons. Daily he devoured her tomato crop, plucking any fruit that was even slightly yellow and popping it into his mouth before she could stop him, until finally some internal limit was reached. Then he’d drop whatever was left in his hands, and they’d wander over to the elementary school, where all week a fair was being assembled in the front field. The eighteen-wheeler parked there sent him into paroxysms of excitement. He examined its undercarriage, from which protruded bolts and pipes and axles and myriad other parts—sidewinch, cistern, turnkey—whose names and purposes she had to invent for him, based on how they appeared to her.
Beyond the field was a shady playground, and there they would climb to the top of the jungle gym and watch the fair come to life. First the bumper cars and other revolving rides, then the game booths, and finally the food stands, and all of it so full of promise, coming alive like the most improbable dream.
The physical labor was performed by short dark men, who moved ponderously through the field with the bottoms of their T-shirts folded up, exposing their broad bellies in what seemed, in that sweltering heat, a perfectly appropriate solution. They took breaks in the shade of the playground not far from her and the boy, sitting quietly talking to each other and nodding or smiling whenever she looked their way. The lilting spill of their language transported her and the boy in their play, so that each slide and bridge and ladder became a passage to foreign lands.
Then finally it was Friday, and the fair had opened. But up close the dream shattered, for the cotton candy was melting and the hot dogs were gray, the prizes were dusty and all the rides were old and rusty, and their blaring sound and light displays only made the boy afraid. The white men with prison tats that manned them had a similar effect on her, eyeing her in an over-bright way. So she took him away to the air-conditioned bookstore in town, where they played on the model train table for the rest of the day, pretending they were making deliveries to Bar Harbor, Maine.
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