by Paul Theroux
“I can feel it,” she said, and became girlish and curious and almost jubilant.
He groaned, for he had emptied quickly and now there was a void where all that heat and muscle had been.
“Let me see it,” she said.
“No.” He was bent over, slashed in half, reduced to a crouching guilty boy.
“It’s on my fingers, it’s all over my nightie,” she said. “Look what you did.”
He was sorrowful, ashamed, exhausted, almost feverish, and he watched with drowsy surprise as she dabbed her fingers, smelled them, put the tip of her tongue on them, and wagged her tongue at him. Then, seeing that he was shocked, she became assertive and shocked him further by snatching his hand and choosing his wettest finger and sucking it. She lay back and trapped him with her laugh.
With a slight catch in her throat from being overeager, Carol Lumley whispered, “Touch me some more.”
Touch me some more, Ava was saying, in a mass of blue silk and ribbons and lace. More.
5
THE TWANGING MUSIC he heard as he approached on the whitish dust of the summer path made the solitary cabin more solitary, yet gave it life. It was a small, rough-wood bungalow with a song coming out of the side porch. Had Tom’s mother left the radio on and gone out? It seemed impossible that she could be inside listening to something so loud, stammering and delirious music that knifed the steamy air like hot metal. Listening to it he seemed to see the sunlight glittering on sharp silver, and he walked faster, toward the melody. The music also seemed to give the cabin a face—eye-like windows, porch nose, door mouth.
“We’re going out with Kenny,” Tom had said at the lake, holding his sister Nita’s hand.
Kenny was a fisherman, Kenny had a boat, Kenny was Tom Bronster’s older friend. Tom talked about him all the time. “Kenny’s got a gun. He’s going to let me shoot it.” Today, Tom’s tone suggested that Slade was not welcome, or at least that he would be in the way. Kenny’s boat was a small skiff with an outboard motor.
Nita was vexed: she wanted to stay with Slade, and yet Tom was responsible for her. That morning on the beach she had said to Slade, “I could be your girlfriend.” She was ten, he was thirteen. Slade was glad to see her go.
“Never mind, I’ll stick around here,” Slade said, knowing he was lying.
As soon as Kenny’s boat sped across the lake, tipping up and plowing white water aside, Slade turned and walked through the pines and up the dusty path by the margin of the meadow where a cow sometimes followed them along the fence. Nearer the cabin—as soon as he saw it—he heard the music, and now he was glad he was alone. Tom was his friend, but when Tom was with him, Slade was distracted. Slade was dreamy, he preferred to be alone with his reveries, he found more pleasure in them than in noisy games. Tom was a talkative, active boy with an exhausting shrieky voice.
Agreeing to spend this week at the lake with Tom and his family meant that he, the visiting friend, was obliged to accompany Tom every waking minute. So he was happy on the path; he liked having a break from the burden of this raucous boy who was always chasing his dog or challenging Slade to bike races or boasting about Kenny.
Through the side window of the cabin Slade saw a flash of white, Tom’s mother in a bra, her thick hair plaited into one braid and fixed by a ribbon. He thought even then how no white was whiter than a woman’s white underwear. She was playing a steel guitar, a table-like instrument resembling an ironing board with strings, plucking it and moving a wooden spindle at one end to create a quavering sound, a sweet hungering he knew to be Hawaiian music. Yearning melodies troubled the fretwork of the amplifier, a black boxy suitcase with a hole on one side.
Tom’s mother, who was always dressed up at night, looked naked to Slade now. He was fascinated by each thing she wore: a bra that made her breasts into two white cones on a harness, loose shorts—her navel showing in her pale flat stomach—and wedge-heeled shoes with fake cherries attached to the straps, painted toenails, her thick braid sliding across her spine as, looking tall, she concentrated hard on her pressed-down fingers, making music.
Had she not been playing the instrument she would have seen Slade at once. Carelessly dressed, her braid swinging, she seemed playful, younger, like a very big girl. Steadman stayed at the window, looking at her bare legs and her white shapely breasts. She was half faced away from him, but she looked so lovely he found himself staring. He was dizzy with meaningless heat and numb fingers. He loved looking, but as minutes passed she became less and less Tom’s mother and more and more like someone whom he knew a little and had never seen like this.
Imagining himself touching her eased his mind. She had sallow skin and green eyes. Mentally he placed his hands over the cups of her breasts and stroked them slowly. The thought so possessed him that he stepped away, ducked beneath the cabin window, and went back to the lake to wait for Tom and Nita to return from the fishing trip. Still, even sitting on the grassy bank with his feet propped on the exposed roots of a tree, hidden by bushes, he felt guilty and excited.
“You missed it!” Tom called out from the skiff when he saw Slade on the embankment. Tom held up a dripping foot-long fish.
That night, Tom’s mother wore a pink pleated dress with short sleeves and white sandals. Her long hair was unbraided, combed out, hiding her neck. Each night she dressed differently. He loved her clothes, their color and variety, and he saw in her joy in dressing up how attractive she was. But it pleased him to know that he had seen her that afternoon in her bra and shorts. She was kind to Slade. She watched him eat and complimented him on his manners.
“And what a good appetite.” She said to Tom, “I wish you’d eat like Slade.”
“You’re a good cook,” Slade said, and saw the effect of his praise—the way she smiled, the way she leaned over and asked him if he wanted more. He averted his eyes from her neckline, but he got a glimpse of the bra.
Nita whispered to her and then clapped her hand over her mouth.
“And you’ve got a secret admirer,” Tom’s mother said.
In the bunk beds that night, almost pained by the thought of the woman and needing to talk about her, Slade whispered in the darkness from the top bunk, “Tom. You awake?”
“Yeah.”
“Your mother’s nice.”
“Bull.”
“No. She really is.”
Slade wanted to have a conversation about Tom’s mother, find out more about her, or at least just talk to console himself.
“She’s horrible. She’s a wicked nag. Always making me babysit Nita.”
Tom wouldn’t say any more. Soon he was asleep, and Slade saw how Tom was selfish and immature, no fun to talk to, a disappointment who was a burden as a friend.
The routine was the same every day. Up at seven, and after breakfast, the lake. Hot dogs and milk at the cabin for lunch, then bike riding or back to the lake in the afternoon. Supper at six, the meal Slade looked forward to, because Tom’s mother would be dressed up. They played in the meadow until the mosquitoes started biting. Then to bed. The house smelled of its pine floors and newly sawn timber, and at night there was always a radio playing, Tom’s mother downstairs alone, leafing through a magazine, Collier’s or the Saturday Evening Post.
The next afternoon, Slade left Tom at the beach.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
He returned to the cabin, delighted when he heard the familiar music. He crept toward it, his head down, and he took up his place at the window to watch the woman in her white bra and shorts, to listen to her playing. He had been there only a minute or less when Nita stepped from behind the side porch. She had obviously followed him from the lake.
Fearful of revealing his secret interest, feeling discovered, Slade started to walk away.
Nita said in a whisper, “You’re spying on my mom.”
“No I’m not.”
“Don’t believe you.” She squinted at him and smiled and in a wheedling voice said, “Want to see my special h
ouse?”
“Sure,” he said, to humor her and avoid any more questions, and as he agreed it occurred to him that Nita looked just like a monkey.
Nita bent over and slipped under the porch, duck-walking into the crawl space. Slade followed her, hearing the mother’s music, like bright light blazing through the cracks in the floorboards. The crawl space was cool and smelled of cat shit and sour dust; the shadows were thick with cobwebs. At its edge was a banner of sunlight, for the cabin was on blocks, no basement, only the crawl space and the splintery wooden underpart. Slade felt disoriented by stepping under the house and hearing the music from the room above, and by the insistent beckoning girl among the shadows and the smells. He was dizzy and distinctly felt that he was doing something wrong.
“This is my kitchen. I could fix you a meal. This is my living room.” She had a hoarse husky voice. “Bedroom’s over there.”
The places she named were just sun-striped portions of dust and cat shit, littered with stones and blown leaves, an overturned bucket serving as a stool.
“And this is my bathroom,” she said.
Slade was half kneeling because he was so much taller than she was and there was so little headroom.
“You can use it if you want,” she said.
“Use it like how?”
“Like what do you think, silly.”
She slid her panties to her knees and squatted, defying him with her mother’s green eyes, seeming to hold her breath while he watched and listened. He stared at her, the little bare-assed monkey with the wicked look squatting in the dust, but all he heard was her mother’s music slashing through the floor from the cabin just over their heads.
Even crouching, Slade could see nothing more of Nita than her bulgy small-girl knees, for she was compact and squatting. But when she stood up and straightened, with the same defiant look, leaving her panties at her ankles, he got a glimpse of sunshine through her legs, but little else, and it seemed a mystery. What was she hiding? When he went closer he saw the subtle, slightly parted mouth of what seemed a secret incomplete face, a simple frowning mask at her crotch. Only then did she tug up her panties, as though as an afterthought.
“Your turn now,” she said, and hiked the panties up tightly.
He found he could not speak at first. He had a reply but couldn’t utter it while transfixed by the way the slit-like frown under her belly showed through the panties. At last he said, “You didn’t do anything.”
“At least I tried.” She was irritable. “Go ahead, fraidy cat, no one’s looking.”
The demanding sharpness in her tone aroused him and worried him at the same time. He wanted to linger, he wanted more of her. To be alone in the shadows of a summer cabin with a willing wicked girl was like a dream. But her body was skinny and incomplete, she was too small, she was reckless. The danger of her recklessness excited him but made him afraid, and in the seconds of trembling there he felt only panic. What if someone saw or heard them? He bent over and tried to rush out of the crawl space, but not bending over far enough, he cracked his head against a low board under the cabin floor, and then was on his hands and knees in the sunshine, his head ringing.
His sensation of having been deafened by the knock on the head was heightened by something else that was wrong: the music had stopped. In the instant he realized this, still groggy, he saw a pair of sandals approaching. They were trimmed with fake cherries. He struggled to his feet and came face to face with Tom’s mother, who was bent over—she was taller than he was.
“What’s going on here?” she said, and the mother’s demand had an echo of the daughter’s scolding voice.
“Nothing,” Slade said, but he glanced behind him and saw Nita climbing out from under the porch.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at the beach?”
But Tom’s mother was not speaking to him; she was addressing the little girl, who sulked and walked away. When Slade started after her, Tom’s mother said, “Not you. You’re staying right here where I can see you.”
Slade went hot with blame, and looked away from the woman’s face, and dropped his gaze to her shoes, the wedge-heeled sandals. The fake cherries on the straps were chipped, but her toes were lovely with pink polish.
“What would your mother say if she knew you were misbehaving?
“I don’t know,” Slade said miserably. He could not keep the tone of guilty pleading out of his voice. “I wasn’t doing anything.”
“Under the house with Nita,” she said. “I think you were being fresh.”
Slade was terrified. He knew he had no control over what Tom’s mother was saying. He could not contradict her, and he hated the little monkey girl for tempting him.
“Come in here,” Tom’s mother said, and she stood aside. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mrs. Bronster.”
Only then did Slade notice that Tom’s mother was dressed as she had been the day before, in a white bra and loose shorts, the same blue ribbon on her braid, her winking navel in the sallow skin of her bare midriff. The steel guitar was set up where she had left it, the amplifier like a battered suitcase, the sheet music on a metal stand.
“I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on you,” she said. “I don’t think I can trust you.”
“You can trust me,” he said in his pleading voice. “I didn’t do anything.”
In her thick-heeled sandals she loomed over him, and she turned on him and said sharply, “Your knees are filthy. Look at your hands. You need a good shower. Get over here.”
She beckoned him to the back of the cabin where, on a slatted platform, there was a shower stall—a plastic curtain, an overhead pipe and nozzle. She turned on the shower and the water spattered and splashed on the boards.
“Go ahead.”
Slade wanted to please her yet he hesitated, his hands on his shorts.
“I suppose you think I’ve never seen a naked man.”
When she said “man,” Slade did not think of himself; he thought of Tom’s father, who was never there.
“Now make it snappy.”
He turned away and slipped off his T-shirt and dropped his shorts. He entered the pouring shower, hiding in the torrent, his back to the streaming shower curtain.
But he could tell from the way the water splashed that Tom’s mother was watching, crowding the shower stall entrance. Then she stepped away and the water fell straighten Slade soaped himself, still trying to please her, and after he had rinsed off he saw her at the bathroom door, holding a towel.
“Here,” she said, and dangled it, but when he walked toward her, naked, she held on to the towel, gripping its corner as he dried off.
“You’re certainly not putting those dirty clothes back on,” she said, and kicked his shorts away as he reached for them. She gave him a small limp handful of soft silk.
“Put those on.”
He was uncertain, almost afraid.
“Do as I say.”
He drew them on, black lace panties, consoled that his nakedness was covered yet feeling foolish. But the woman’s seriousness helped him. She was matter-of-fact; she could have teased him but didn’t.
“I want to trust you,” she said.
Slade did not know what to say, but he thought, Test me, try me, I will do anything to earn your trust. The panties he wore were so flimsy he imagined that she could see through them, but when he looked down he saw he was covered.
“They’re mine. They’re silk,” she said. “Sometimes you have to improvise. Make do with what you have.”
He could not tell if she was smiling, but her voice was kinder than before.
“You’ll find that, as you get older,” she said. “What are you looking at?”
She touched her own shorts at a place where the side zipper had worked open, the gaping slot showing a blister of pink panties.
“Want to zip me?”
Eager to please her, he used two hands, one to pinch the zipper together, the other to lift the fastener into place, closing
the gap, and as he worked on it, Tom’s mother touched his fingers, patting them, and then smoothed the seam when he finished.
“You’re good at that.”
He said nothing.
“Now unzip me.”
He was aware of being barefoot in damp panties, his head still wet from the shower, this woman in her sandals much taller than he was. But he obeyed, working the zipper open, and when it was down the woman plucked at a button and the shorts opened onto swelling pinkness. She tugged at them a little and they dropped to her ankles and she stepped out of them.
Feeling like a geek, he was looking away from the woman, toward the front door of the cabin, the blinding afternoon sunlight pouring through the squares of glass, when she stepped behind him. From the touch of the fabric on his shoulder it seemed as though she were draping him with a scarf.
“I think you need this.”
She lifted the soft cloth to his head and wrapped it, blindfolding him. And just as she knotted it, he sensed a slight effort of her hands and arms, and got a whiff of her body and with that, contradicting it, the odor of her perfume on the silken softness against his face.
“Can you see anything?”
He shook his head, hardly daring to breathe. Yet as soon as he was blindfolded she was gentler, even submissive.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be frightened,” she said.
She must have noticed that his voice was thick with fear, because it was then that she touched him, holding him like a baby, and led him slowly across the smooth floorboards of the cabin to her bedroom. His feet shuffled, hardly leaving the floor, as he moved blindly, guided by her. He knew when they entered her bedroom from the sweetness in the air, the softness of the pillows. Then he was fearful, alone on the bed, but she had left him only to shut the door, and a moment later she was holding him again.
“Baby, baby, baby,” she said, her hands on him. “Isn’t that better?”
He lay slightly crouched in apprehension, not knowing what to say.
