The Testimony

by Laura London

  Stirring in soft circles over the upper curve of her thighs, his fingers were moving slowly inward. “Oh, I don’t think you will.”

  “If you leave it on long enough”—she gestured to the TV, her breath halting just a little at his treatment of her legs—“cartoons come on at six in the morning.”

  “Why is it that whenever I let you convince me I’m a TV addict, I come home in the middle of the afternoon to find you watching ancient segments of Green Acres?”

  “Rural humor has a strong historical tradition,” she said primly, leaning her cheek against his collarbone, letting his chest warm her.

  “Speaking of things sylvan, I wanted to let you know that I’m glad you bullied me out of staying home today.”

  “I didn’t bully you.” The crush of his shoulder on her cheek muffled her voice.

  “You did. But I’m glad.”

  “You know you’re fortunate to have a family that cares so much about you.” She didn’t like the slightly sad note in her voice. But it was there. “It’s a head start on happiness.”

  His arms closed around her. “You have a lot from your parents too. It’s just not as easy to see because they’re not overtly…”

  “—affectionate.”

  “I was going to say ‘imperative.’ ”

  “Hmmm. I’ve never seen your parents behave imperatively.”

  “No. You don’t see it,” he said. “But it’s there. A set of standards that locks you into certain paths…”

  She slid her arms around his neck. “What do you think I got from my mother?”

  “Poise, and a strong sense of self. Sometimes her methods are a little inverted, which I don’t think she can help. But here you are at twenty-six”—he gently squeezed her thigh—“muscles like a rock, character like a rock.”

  His words meant more to her than he could have known. “You think so? I thought you didn’t like my mother.”

  “When she’s unpleasant to you she’s not high on my list. But every once in a while I get this vision that snaps open like a shutter and I see parts of you in her and it makes me like her more.”

  “Even after what she and Dad said about your decision to go to jail?”

  “More than ever after that. What kind of parents would they be if they weren’t mad at their daughter’s husband for getting himself thrown into prison like a jackass?” His palms brought up her face. She was flushed, and the skin around her eyes had a pulled look, as it always did when she tried to talk about her mother. Yet she was smiling, and he wondered if it had anything to do with the moment when her mother had come to her as they were getting into their car. She had given Christine one of those careless embraces that made him want to take the woman aside and say, “For God’s sake, touch her gently. She’s strong, but she’ll never be tough.” And just as he was feeling that familiar zing of anger, Sylvia had said, “Christine, I wanted you to know.… I’m proud of you too.” It was the first time he had ever heard her say anything like that to Christine.

  He ran the back of his finger over her cheek. She was very warm.

  “It’s too hot by the fire for a sweater,” he said. “Lift your arms.”

  “Ahem. You asked me what I have on underneath? Nothing.”

  His hands roved down over the sweater, tracing her firm muscles until he reached her back pockets. He spread his fingers there, cupping his hands full of her, and dragged her close to nuzzle his way under the big loose sweater. He felt her breath surge as his tongue wet her nipples and then left a light trail down her midriff before he emerged, his hair disheveled.

  “You’re right, you don’t,” he said, drawing up the sweater from the bottom. “God, I love marriage.”

  That was enough to make her put up her arms, her small breasts pointing upward, the nipples rosy-pink under the cotton caress of the rising sweater. When it was off, her hair was mussed too and she felt slightly giddy and alive, in love with the clean intoxication of the sensual intimacy. She wound closer to him, her legs curling into his, her head alight in the hard cradle of his arm. One of her breasts was squeezed into his side; the other, untrammeled and sprinkled with chestnut freckles, lay lightly against his chest. His skin was smooth and fresh beneath her lips, scented with the herbal pine warmth of the fire.

  He had been waiting for her, marking time with television until she came, and now with her so close, like another part of himself, he looked wonderingly back on the weeks he had nervously anticipated this moment. Suddenly it was as if he had never been away, and this closeness felt so good, so right to him; and the thing he had thought was going to bring him wrenching agony, the opening of his damage to another human being, seemed only the simple and natural consequence of his love.

  “Chris… there’s something I’d like you to know.” He felt her move slightly against him. She became alert as he continued. “I had a deeper reason for refusing to cooperate with the John Doe. Deeper as in more elusive. It’s not something I can explain in a clear way, or lay out in a formula.… That’s why I always talk like some damned pedant about principles and ethics, but that doesn’t begin to touch the way I feel.”

  She was quiet. Then she nodded. “It has to do with Hungary, doesn’t it?”

  She knew. Of course she already knew. What a futile, foolish thing it had been to close himself to her.

  “When I was in jail, these bits and pieces kept coming back to me—things I hadn’t thought about in years. Kid’s memories.”

  “Tell me.”

  He relaxed his head against the cushions, his hands winnowing her damp hair, watching the play of the hearth glow in it, letting the warmth of the fire take the wet darkness from it to reveal the scarlet highlights within.

  “In 1956 we were in Budapest with my father. He was a cavalry officer then, and we lived in this little apartment across from a park. Sandy used to walk me over to the duck pond, and we’d feed the baby ducks crumbs from our breakfast. And this one day, there was all this noise and excitement in the street and Sandy grabbed my hand and there was a huge… just a huge brown tank in the street.” He hesitated, trying to capture that long-ago feeling. “I was only four at the time, so you can imagine how it looked to me.

  “Anyway, my father and some other men were riding way on top of it and they were singing about freedom, something about whether we would be free men or slaves. All I thought was that it was exciting, like a holiday or something, and when I asked Sandy what was happening, he said that it was a Russian tank and that Father had taken it from them. I was about to ask him if that was going to make the Russians mad when I saw my father unfurl a Hungarian flag. It looked strange to me because it was the same flag I’d always seen, but this one didn’t have the big red star in the middle. My mother had come out and she took me up in her arms—she was laughing and crying at the same time. I’d never seen anyone do that before. She said, ‘Look at it, little one. It’s the real flag of Hungary.’ ”

  He drew a heavy breath and straightened his back. “She was still holding me when we heard this terrific roar. People started diving into doorways and screaming, and airplanes came roaring out of nowhere low over the rooftops, and you couldn’t hear anything but this thundering noise. My parents tried to drag me inside but I was thinking—wow! airplanes!—you know, how a kid would, and I went running back outside again to look at them. My father came after me—it was the only time he ever struck me. All around us dust seemed to be exploding and our windows began to shatter, and—”

  He took another powerful swallow of air. “Looking back, I realize that the planes were strafing the streets with machine-gun fire. When I went to the park again with Sandy, we found this tiny duckling under a bench, and it had been shot. I didn’t really know what death was, but it was ugly. Very ugly. I asked Sandy what did this and he said the airplanes. The Russian MiGs. And in my little child’s mind I was angry, Christine. I was so angry because I thought, Why did they kill the little duck? Years later, even when we were in Milwaukee, I would loo
k up when I heard a jet and think, Is that a MiG? and feel the return of this terrible anger.”

  His voice trailed, as though the primitive force of his child’s anger was beyond his power to describe, and Christine realized that she had enclosed him in her arms. Fear thrilled through her for the little boy he had been, and she said nothing, just held on. Presently he said, “Has this made any sense?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see that what I did had nothing to do with—I don’t know—political ideology, I suppose. I only went to defend one thing, and that was the right of people to express themselves without fear. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Because it’s the only civilized way.”

  That simply, he felt himself shed a corner of that inner darkness. They had stared for a long time into the fire in loving silence before she said, “I’ve always wondered if you remember anything about crossing the border out of Hungary.”

  Scooping up her hair, spilling it through his fingers, he said, “It was late in the year, and we had to walk—I’ve no idea how far. My mother was carrying Indy. My father carried me. The ground was dotted with land mines and they didn’t dare put me down or I would have been all over the place. My poor parents. I was crying because I wanted to walk. Sandy was crying because he was tired of walking.” He rubbed the back of Christine’s neck with a broad palm. “See, there were people living along the border who were willing to make a little extra on the side helping refugees get across. We were supposed to go across in the back of a feed wagon under a blanket, and to keep quiet so we wouldn’t alert the dogs and border patrols for ten miles around.” He began to laugh. “My father gave us brandy. It was supposed to make us sleep. But we all got hiccups instead, and hiccuped our way over the border. We were bouncing around under the blanket like jumping beans.”

  She could feel the tension slip from him, washing away in the vacant air.

  He went on. “In Austria we stayed in a refugee camp where we had to sleep on straw. That was great. Straw fights. My mother wrapped Indy in a white blanket, and when she tucked him to sleep in the straw, she said, ‘See, doesn’t he look like the Christ child escaping to Egypt?’ ” He smiled. “Not a very prophetic image, was it?” After a thoughtful silence, he added, “That’s all. It doesn’t change anything. I just wanted you to know.”

  She shifted to see his face and to let him see in hers everything that words were inadequate to express. “Szerelem,” she said, inexpertly using the Hungarian, and kissed him.

  “I love you too, Christine.” His hand wandered in a slow line up the length of her arm. “Say, what was all that about between you and Beth? When you had your heads together laughing while we were cooking mushrooms?”

  “Ah…” she said. “Your girl friend from Pulaski High.”

  “What girl friend?”

  “Charlene Czerwinski.” She rolled the name lovingly off her tongue. “The first girl in Milwaukee to come to school braless.”

  Jesse groaned.

  Warming to the subject, she said, “And she wore tight fuzzy sweaters.”

  He collapsed sideways and hid his face under a pillow. “Stop torturing me. I’d forgotten the girl completely.”

  “And a good thing too!” She lifted one edge of the pillow. “Did you have sex with her?”

  “No.” was his muffled reply.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s the truth,” he said, emerging. “My dad took one look at her and put me on the pill.”

  She put her face nose to nose with his and pulled the pillow over them both, her slow-burning grin almost touching his. “I’ll bet you lost your virginity to Charlene Czerwinski.”

  “I’ve told you, I was a good Catholic boy until I got to college. My father said that we could make up our own minds once we were of age, but until then we had to go by the rule. Same rule for boys and girls.”

  “What was it?”

  “That we could do anything we wanted on a date, above the waist or below—”

  “Heavens!”

  “But we couldn’t unfasten our jeans.”

  “Really?” The sensual smile spread wider.

  “Really. I thought you knew about that rule. From the state you were in the first time we made love, I thought you were a staunch practitioner of it.”

  The pillow was quickly transformed into a weapon as she took it up and began pummeling him with it. “Oh, a comedian, eh? Eat feathers, Hungarian meatball! How would you like to be reduced to a pot of goulash?”

  He twisted the pillow from her grip and stuffed it back under his head. Catching her waist in both hands, he moved so that her thighs spanned his hips, and as that part of her was gliding over his pelvis, she felt the insistent sting of her own desire. Love tingles swept upward in her spine and her lips began to respond with a pouting rush of erotic pressure.

  With a pounding heart, she asked, “Am I being treated to your old high school technique?”

  “It’s improved a little since then.”

  “Says you.” She knew her lucent, fluid gaze was telling him everything.

  “Never doubt it.” His fingertips were kneading her inner thighs, tracing over the seams, creating ravishing sensations inside her jellied nerve endings. “Follow my father’s rule,” he breathed, “and you learn all kinds of things about how to achieve ecstasy in denim.” He slid his palm upward slightly, pressing in a slow circle, fanning his fingers, lifting very gently into her. The hot, pulpy feeling rising in her chest made her breath increasingly shallow.

  “Somehow,” she whispered, “I think Charlene Czerwinski had a much better time in high school than I did.”

  His hands left her burning thighs, skimmed her sides, and then let the erect tips of her breasts make a fiercely exciting caress down his fingers and palm as he lifted his hands to her hair. He held her head in a light grasp, watching her mouth as he drew her closer to receive his open kiss.

  “With you,” he said softly, “it’s always been different.” He pressed his mouth to her moist parted lips. “This means I love you.” His mouth trailed to her throat. “And this means I love you. And this…” His voice faded to a whisper, more breath than sound, and she felt the tip of his tongue probe her nipple, and then his lips lightly tugging. His hands were kneading her shoulders as he pulled her closer, and her heartbeat capered in her throat. She held him to her, transported with sensual reverence, her hands in his thick hair.

  “And this means what?” Her words were a shiver.

  Huskily he said, “It means you’re about to get yours, kid.”

  She started to say, “I’ve been wanting to get mine all day,” but the words were lost in the tangle of her leaping senses. His hands were strong and steadying on her hips, supporting her so that his kisses could stroke down the muscular curve of her stomach. He shifted, laying her beside him, and the pressure of his mouth continued over her waist, over the denim, and down. She was lost in love, in the spinning sensations he was building in her, her hands working into his hair, her tingling fingers flexing through its flood of warmth. And then she was beneath him, his hands briefly touching the snap of her jeans, and she felt the wonderfully liberating wave of her zipper being gently lowered, and the soft, loving movements of his lips and tongue over the sensitive, quivery skin beneath. She felt her jeans falling away, drawn down by him with all the naturalness of a spring breeze drawing at a flower petal. He laid her back on the cushion of her hair, and she gloried in the touch of his hands and his lips, melting for him, making it easy for him; and his slow coming into her was blindingly diffuse, a sweet stage-by-stage slipping into the grip of a dream—two become one, one heart, one body.…

  When at last they slept, they were twined together on the tumbled cushions, sharing the same pillow.

  Chapter Nine

  In the morning, after Jesse went off to watch the governor meet the first-shift workers at a meat-packing plant in Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley, Christine realized that she wasn’t going to spe
nd another night without him in their bed. Last night he had slept soundly on the cushions beside her. Perhaps the insomnia was over, perhaps it would return. Either way she wanted to face it with him. She had been alone too long.

  She might simply have told him, “Tonight you’re in with me, Ludan.” But the giddy joy of their night together clung to her, making her think of all kinds of silly ways to tell him. Driving home in the afternoon after a day of dance classes, she wondered if he wasn’t planning ways of telling her too. She stood in the spare room staring at the extra bed. It needed something. A boarder? A fifty-foot python? Dramatic gestures. Funniness. Laughing softly to herself, she found her upholstery needle and nylon thread and spent the rest of the afternoon hovering over the bed sewing spread to sheets to mattress in so many places that sleeping in that bed was not something anyone was going to be doing for a long time.

  She had just emerged from the shower in a peacock-blue bath towel, feeling wily and festive, when she heard Jesse’s car in the garage. She made it downstairs in time to see the front door fly open as if pushed by a mighty wind, and Jesse stalked in, slamming the door behind him. His jacket sailed across the room in a ball of cloth that toppled a lamp before coming to rest in a corner, and he threw himself down full length on the couch, one hand over his eyes. Standing still, feeling like a fool in her towel and her descending exhilaration, she said, “So how was your day, dear?”

  Jesse lay quietly, trying to control his chattering tension, trying to push aside the curtain of blackness that had descended after the strained discussion with his editor this afternoon, when his unformed worries about what they intended to do with his career had become fact. Now he wished he didn’t know. He wished he could go back to his springtime morning mood, because another day without this crazed stress would have been so good for him. And for her. He could practically taste the uncertainty in her voice as she said, “Do you think—are you coming down with something?”

  “Terminal irritation. Tell me something, Chrissie. Why is the world so screwed up?”