The Testimony

by Laura London

  She took a sustaining breath. The air was slightly musty, scented of warm wood and the chemical tang of solvents that clung to the neat row of paintbrushes hanging on a pegboard. Lawn tools, ladders, and leaf baskets hunched against the walls at stiff attention, as if afraid they were about to be reviewed by a marine drill sergeant. A high window projected a square of ivory sunlight on the back wall.

  Jesse stepped on a short ladder and pushed open the window, flooding her flushed skin with cool clean air. Climbing down, he bumped a narrow shelf and a spool of fishing line rolled to the cement floor, tossing off yards of thin curls. He bent absently to retrieve it and began to walk back and forth in the small room, his steps automatic, almost unconscious. Pacing. He was pacing. She had seen wild creatures do the same thing in circus cages. Had he learned it in prison, the unthinking defense of an animal to the agony of confinement? A body fighting to maintain its precious store of health, circulation, muscle tone, coordination?

  There had been too much to absorb at first, so she had missed it. His proportions had always been beautiful and long, and spliced together in an easy way that gave his body a coltish grace. Somehow in prison he had managed to lose a few pounds, and the missing weight added a certain ranginess to the flowing lines of his frame, indefinably accenting his sensual bone structure. It made a delicate alteration in his appearance that was strange to her.

  There were other changes too, less tangible ones. He had always possessed that sort of charismatic animation that in women people tended to call vivacity. She could only imagine what a burden that energy must have imposed on him in prison. Here was the product: vitality too long checked had become nervous tension, as a powerful engine left in neutral will idle restlessly.

  She could no longer stop her mind from its merciless analysis. No thoughts rose to comfort her. Only anguish came like a cold knife pressing into her stomach. What have they done to you, Jesse? What have they done?

  Chapter Two

  Jesse became aware all at once that he was not talking, and that Christine was resting against a sawhorse, staring at him. Silence had become a natural condition for him; he had slipped into it as easily as he breathed. He had discovered how to erase thought, so that it became possible to pass hours in a state of white blankness impenetrable to sound and light and the passage of time. As the months passed he had used the skill more often. At first it had been only a tool to fight boredom, which had never been something he’d handled well. But later it became a shield against the crushing claustrophobia, when the sheer tonnage of walls and bars closed over him. In a thousand lifetimes he would never forget that moment this morning when he had stepped outside into air that was fresh and sweet and tinged with city smells, the scents of human activity.

  Prison air was dense. It had an unventilated feel of too many men drawing oxygen from the same depleted source. Odors of food and cleaning fluids never escaped. They clung like wraiths to walls and skin and clothing. The shed’s thick air had been too potently evocative, and a trapped feeling had begun to descend upon him, as though he were lying in the path of some vast gear that was grinding slowly closer. He had steadied himself and opened the window—calmly, he hoped—and then, as he began to walk, the steady motion had seemed to define and throw open space. The claustrophobia had evaporated, and with it, his thoughts. Withdrawal had become a habit. Happy news.

  He wanted to bathe. Lord, he wanted to bathe, but Indy wouldn’t have had time to arrive yet and politely repel the representatives of a fascinated public. They had allowed him to shower that morning, a favor since it was off hours; but that had been prison water and it seemed to stain as it cleansed. It occurred to him to wonder if he smelled. A certain bitter amusement accompanied the speculation, and he glanced back at Christine and saw that her eyes were wide. His silence had frightened her.

  Don’t, love. You don’t have to be afraid. I love you, Chris. That part of me will never alter. And the rest will touch you as little as I can make it possible.

  “Maybe I saw the garden at a run, but it looked beautiful. You must have been working hard.” He chose the subject at random. The work went into making his voice natural and his expression light. Her urchin’s smile was his reward.

  “Mr. Jaroch didn’t think so. He vaulted the fence last month and trimmed the yew hedge. Kinda tossed the cut branches down in disgust, so I guess I didn’t get to it soon enough.”

  “Are you kidding? I suppose that’s what you’d expect from a guy who crawls around his lawn on his stomach pulling crabgrass sprouts out with tweezers.”

  “The Jarochs do have a terrific lawn.”

  He dismissed this piece of fair-mindedness with, “Big hairy deal.”

  “Big hairy deal?” Her grin was off center.

  “Right.” The lazy stretch of his arm captured a bright curl, and he cupped it against his palm while using his forefinger to brush the soft crease that cornered her smile. Her cheek tilted to rub a kitten’s caress on his hand, and somehow that simple gesture, so typically Christine, so free from calculation, brought a good hard knot to his throat. Six months. Six precious months of his life with her were lost and never on this earth would they be restored. He had a sudden acute struggle to keep his feelings from expressing themselves in the way he had been taught from childhood was not permissible for a man.

  “Jess?” Her blue eyes had grown solemn.

  “What, love?”

  “I don’t know how to ask this… Jesse, I don’t want to blast things out of you that you’re not ready to talk about but I have to know…” An uncertain pause. “How much haven’t you told me? Was prison… was it horrible?”

  Was it horrible? she had asked him. There she stood in her silk knit sweater, her Gucci shoes, and one of the expensive skirts she wore that clung, but never too tightly, to her slender thighs, asking him if prison was horrible. Her eyes were serious and bright with the fetching sincerity that seemed like such a poor defense against the darker aspects of life and that, paradoxically, always made him want to bare his soul to that uncallused sanity. The soft skin over her nose and cheeks shone slightly in the highly filtered light, paling her freckles, giving a fragility to her face with its combined suggestion of sturdiness and sensitivity. He would have thought four years of marriage might have banished any unease he felt about what a sociologist would label the “class difference” of their backgrounds, yet looking at her now, he had never felt it more strongly.

  He’d had his own nose rubbed firmly in reality at a young age because there were plenty of things about his tough South Side neighborhood that his Hungarian immigrant parents never realized. But the woman he loved had been raised in the exclusive womb of upper-middleclass America, sailing not always blithely but certainly securely from the house with the white pillars and circular driveway to the academically prestigious private school, to dinners at the country club and private dancing lessons. Indy had said once that Chris had learned everything she knew about life from watching television talk shows, and there was probably a certain cruel truth in that. Prison was alien to her—thank God. Everything she knew about it came from the carefully preselected things he’d told her in their short telephone conversations, when there had always been some other poor sucker waiting desperately for a turn. Where else? Sources like photo essays in mass-market newsmagazines, well-meaning but aseptic, their choice not innocent of aesthetic considerations. They could tell you how a prison looked, but they could never touch the smallest part of what it was like to live inside one.

  Was there a line that stopped somewhere between caring for someone and taking care of her? If shielding Christine was patronizing or arrogant, he couldn’t help it.

  There was a reel of fishing line in his right hand. Where had it come from? The window shelf. He let her thick curl slide from his fingers and walked slowly to the shelf, reaching up to replace the roll, letting the motion hide his face while he spoke.

  “It was a little horrible.” He leaned his back against the workben
ch, gripping the edge. Gently shifting the focus away from himself, he said, “Was it a little horrible here without me?”

  “It was a lot horrible here without you.” The admission seemed to relieve some of her tension. “Not that I’m proud of being so dependent on a man, mind you.”

  “Say three Our Fathers, two Hail Marys, and read six months of back issues of Cosmo. Go in peace, Daughter, and sin no more.” He gestured a blessing. Then, putting a palm lightly over his own heart, he added, “I had the same thing. Desolation.”

  “You missed the daily dose of me?”

  “I missed the daily dose of you.”

  Her toes turned inward, freckled fingers threaded anxiously together. The round chin dropped and she gazed at him from under her lashes, a mime of bashfulness.

  “So here we are—alone at last,” she breathed.

  Sometimes mime was a game for Christine, sometimes a refuge. In college she had joined a small troupe that passed a hat in the city parks. To combat her shyness, she still used it, retreating as though to the anonymity of whiteface and costume.

  He could feel the anxiety pent up in her. Show me you’re all right, Jesse. Something elemental in his life seemed to hinge on his comforting her. He searched desperately for the self he had been before prison, trying to clone the person she would know and recognize and feel safe with.

  “Alone, and in such romantic surroundings,” he said, taking a step toward her. His heel touched a shovel blade, sending a shiver of reaction through the nervously perched lawn implements that lined the wall. Some interesting quirk of physics kept them upright except for one rake that came whacking to the floor at his feet. “Ah, the hazards of these secret liaisons! We’ve got to stop meeting like this—the gardener is beginning to suspect.”

  “The gardener I can handle, but when a man in his prime is nearly cut down by a rake…”

  “A dangerous rake.” His voice lowered. “This, my dear, is Milwaukee’s most notorious rake. More women have surrendered their virtue to him than to the legions of Caesar.” He lifted the rake tines upward and made it walk toward her, giving it a lascivious whisper. “Don’t fight it, cara. Your body was made for love. With me you can experience the fullness of your womanhood.”

  She laughed at his notion of the things rakes say, garnered three years ago from a teasing thumb-through of a certain deliciously fat romance novel that she had meant to keep better hidden. Raising one hand dramatically to ward off the rake, she said, “Leaf me alone, lecher!”

  The rake took an offended dip and marched back to the wall in a huff. “Reject me if you must,” it said in a wounded tone, “but must I endure a bad pun about my honorable profession? I thought women were supposed to love a rake,” it added hopefully.

  A smile hovered near the edge of her husband’s mobile lips. Christine recognized a certain quality in it that made her heart beat harder. As his hands came lightly down on her shoulders, her lips parted without her will and her gaze traveled up to meet the shadow play of desire in his eyes.

  “Some women prefer their very own husbands.” There was a slight breathless quiver in her voice, and the throb of tightening pressure in her lungs.

  “Hot damn. A compliment.” Jesse let his thumbs slide down the front of her shoulders, rotating them with gentle sensuality over the soft flesh that lay above the rise of her breasts. She had begun to tremble under the sure movements of his fingers, and her slipping control brought back to him all the warm nights they had shared, the tangled sheets, the pungent musky air. He remembered the rosy flush of her upraised nipples and the way they felt on his lips.…

  It had been so long, more than six months, since they had been together, six months since he had even seen a woman. He wondered if she realized that, or guessed how her nearness made his senses skyrocket. He wanted her to give up her body to him, to offer herself to him like an expanding breath for him to touch and taste and fill, to watch her bluebell eyes grow smoky with rapture. But though he drew her close so that he could feel the lovely fullness of her small breasts pressing into his ribs, he made no move to lower his hands or to take her lips. She seemed entrancingly clean, like a just-bathed child, and as pure. The damaged part of him came to her almost as a supplicant, unwhole before her wholesomeness. Can I touch you, love? Tell me it’s all right…

  She couldn’t have heard his thoughts, or seen them, because he had learned too well to disguise them; yet her hands came to him like an answer, her fingers entwined behind his neck, pulling him toward her warm mouth. He took a breath as her lips skimmed over his, and another much harder one as she stood on her toes to heighten the contact. Her tongue probed shyly at his lips and then forced an entrance, her body twisting slowly into his, a sinuous shock against his thighs.

  He murmured something, random words of desire he couldn’t remember as he said them; the pressure of her lips increased, and he felt thought begin to leave, and a growing pressure behind his eyelids. His hands were drifting over her blindly, as in a vision, until a shuddering fever ran through his veins and he dragged her close, pulling her hard into him, holding her there with one arm while the other slid under her sweater, his fingers spreading over the powdery softness of her skin. A surprised moan swept from her mouth into his lips as his hand lightly covered her breast. His palm absorbed her warmth, her delicate shape, and the thrillingly uneven pattern of her respiration before slipping to the fine heat and velvet distension of her nipple.

  This time he heard his own whisper, the unchosen words coming in huskily slurred Hungarian, telling her that he loved her, that she bewitched him, and then repeating her name again and again with the rhythm of his mouth and tongue. He was overcome, lost in her elemental femaleness, his pulse hammering through his body. Leaning her back, bringing his mouth hard against hers, he poured his kiss into her until their rapid breathing came together and he could feel every silken inch of her with the front of his body.

  A keen breeze rattled the roof of the shed. It might have been the sound that brought him back, or perhaps some inner thermostat of his own, but he became aware suddenly that he was going to take her here in old man Jaroch’s toolshed. And then he thought, Oh, Christ, how hard have I been holding her? His own muscles ached from the force, and he brought his head up to examine her upturned face. Sleepy lashes dusted her cheeks. A contented smile curved over damp and swollen lips. Her skin was lustrous. He pulled her into the curve of his arm with a relieved sigh, cradling her while he tried to contain his overwhelming appetite. Not here, Ludan. Not like this, with half your mind on freeze.

  Kissing her once on each eyelid, he steeled his self-restraint and put her very gently from him. Her eyes flew open; her gaze leaped curiously to his.

  “Heart of my heart, I’m sorry,” he said softly, smiling at her, “but if I don’t take my shameless hands off you…”

  “I might end up experiencing the fullness of my womanhood in a toolshed?” she finished for him. Her returning grin had a sexy sweetness that tested his resolution. “It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

  But it is, Chris, he thought. Because enough of me hasn’t walked out of that cell yet to make what would happen between us into an act of love. And the trust I see in your eyes would never allow me to give you less.

  Chapter Three

  The sun was a silver blaze in a dense sky when Christine awoke the next morning. The newspaper said that it was an atmospheric condition caused by forest fires in Canada. The spring had been dry, but in a few days the breeze would wash the residue to the east and the sun would shine on Wisconsin again. Maybe. Forest fires. Drought. Other natural disasters. Jesse hadn’t come to bed with her last night.

  The sheets had the cool, unnourished feel that a body alone can give a double bed. If he had been with her, she would have known, even in sleep, and treasured it.

  There was no evidence to show where Jesse had slept. The spare bed hadn’t been touched. There were no hastily folded blankets stuffed in the cedar chest to impli
cate the living room sofa, though he had sat there to read. Several books—his—lay on the glass side table. She picked them up, handling the worn bindings lovingly. She studied the title pages: Sándor Petöfi, Attila József. Hungarian poets. All she really knew about them was that Petöfi was a national hero who fought to liberate the serfs and died in battle in the nineteenth century at the age of twenty-six; Jesse’s older brother was named after him. József was a revolutionary who wasn’t many years older when he committed suicide by throwing himself under a train. Jesse would have winced at that characterization. He would have said it would be like calling Abraham Lincoln a Civil War-era party boss who was shot in a theater.

  She stared down at the pages, frustrated by their incomprehensibility to her. They were words written by idealists, men like Jesse. But Jesse said that English translations of Hungarian poetry were pretty much useless, and a working knowledge of Hungarian wasn’t just around the corner. In four years of marriage all she had picked up were scattered phrases. Hungarian didn’t hail from the Indo-European family of languages, which meant that the words weren’t cousins to English. Jesse frequently tried to tell her Hungarian was easy because the words were pronounced phonetically, with no grammatical genders. Possibly. But their alphabet had about forty letters, give or take a few letter combinations. The transitive verbs had complicated conjugations. It used postpositions instead of prepositions. And the words that stared innocently up at her were so complex that their own mother wouldn’t have recognized them. She set down the book.

  In the kitchen she found a note. “Chris: I’m off to the paper. There’s an omelet mix ready for you in the refrigerator. U R my”—and he had drawn a small smiling sun.

  The sun notwithstanding, there was little illumination there. That he’d gone back to work immediately was no surprise. From the beginning he had said that he would, and the stubborn gesture was so characteristic of Jesse that she had never doubted he would carry it through. In a way she could understand the need to quickly reestablish the normal course of his life. It might even have something to do with replenishing the self-esteem that must have been draining away with icy certainty while he was imprisoned. That fear alone had stilled the fierce protests she would otherwise have made.