Circle of Three

by Patricia Gaffney

  “Did she ever meet the father of her child?” I asked.

  “Nope. S’pose to be a sweet little Angus. You want to breed a new girl to a little guy her first time out, so her calf’ll be small. We’ll just see now, Sophie, won’t we? We’ll just see what happens.” Mr. Green reached over the rail and slapped Sophie affectionately on the behind. “Who’s next?”

  “Two-forty-one,” Jess said. “Carlene.”

  “Carlene!” He went off to get her. I’d never seen Mr. Green so animated before. Either he really liked artificially inseminating cows or he was having some fun at my expense.

  “You look a little green,” Jess noted while he thawed a tube of something, presumably bull semen, in a pail of ice water.

  “Me? Oh no, I’m fine.”

  “Going to stick around a while, then?”

  “Well, I probably should get to work. Eldon says he wants a Guernsey.”

  “I heard.” We smiled at each other.

  “Did he like the ark, Jess?”

  “He did. Very, very much.”

  “He loved the animals, too.”

  “I know.”

  Mr. Green came back with Carlene, who was huge, definitely not a new girl. I made a short speech about how much work I had to do in the other barn, and escaped.

  But I couldn’t concentrate. I leafed through my cow calendars and cow books, looking for just the right Guernsey, then remembered what Eldon had said about waiting till the end. Good idea: I might’ve had enough of cows for one day. But I couldn’t keep my mind on my wild boar cutout, either. I felt restless and keyed up. I caught myself pacing. I wanted to be sad about Eldon and happy about the ark project with someone, and there wasn’t anyone. Plus I wasn’t dressed right, I felt awkward and hampered in the straight skirt I’d worn for the Pletchers’ visit. And it was beautiful outside, the most perfect spring afternoon. What I really wanted was to be with Jess, and he had his arm up a cow’s butt.

  Hopeless. Finally I gave up and went outside. If I couldn’t work, I should just go home. I could clean the house, which was an absolute wreck; I could make Ruth a real meal for a change, not a slapped-together casserole or last-minute microwaved leftovers. I could go visit my mother. I’d been avoiding her, because she didn’t like me much these days. She was mad at me for something I hadn’t even done yet.

  Yet?

  I went for a walk. One of Jess’s dogs followed me, Tracer, the smart one. We took the dirt lane that zigzagged uphill for half a mile and deadended in a high, empty meadow. Wild apple trees bloomed in a tangle along the edge; I found one with a smooth trunk and a rockless, rootless base and sat down under it. Below me, a deep-cut creek, blue-brown with the sky’s reflection, meandered between Jess’s farm and Landy’s, forming the boundary in some places. A tributary of the Leap, it came close to drying up in the hot summer, but today it almost overflowed its steep-sided banks. Cows, nearly indistinguishable from boulders at this distance, sprawled under a cover of early willows arched over the creek like chartreuse awnings. Birds chirped, bees buzzed, grasshoppers hopped. Tracer ran off and left me for a more interesting adventure in the meadow. Was I prejudiced or was Jess’s farm prettier than Landy’s? Landy’s stony fields didn’t slope as gracefully. His cows didn’t look as contented. Even the color of Jess’s fields was sweeter, a mellower yellow-green: gold ochre and chrome oxide. Jess had the Italy of farms, I decided. Landy had the Ukraine.

  Everything was Jess today, I couldn’t get him off my mind. Burgeoning, bursting, swelling, stirring spring didn’t help, either. Ruth had taught me a meditation of Krystal’s involving the repetition of the phrase “Who am I?” on slow, calming exhales. You were supposed to answer, I’m a woman, or I’m a mother, then contemplate those responses in a deeply relaxed, nonjudgmental way. When I’d tried it, I’d gotten stuck on I’m tired, and I’m late. I’m wasting valuable time here. Still, it might be worth a second try, to calm my mind. Get Jess out of it. I slumped lower on my tree trunk, closed my eyes, clasping my hands lightly over my diaphragm. Breathe in, breathe out. Who am I? Who the hell am I?

  I fell asleep.

  Only for a few minutes, but long enough to wake up cranky from a confusing dream about thrashing palm fronds in a rain forest or a jungle. I stood up and brushed the dirt and grass off my skirt, rolled the crick out of my neck. Might as well go home.

  I went in Jess’s house first for a glass of water. In the kitchen, fresh coffee perked in the machine on the counter. I walked out to the hall and listened, and presently I heard Jess’s voice coming from his office. I poured myself half a cup of coffee and drank it while I waited for him, staring out the kitchen window. He needed to pay attention to his flower garden if he wanted his perennials to grow higher than his weeds this year. Me, too; my garden at home looked like the seediest corner of a vacant lot. But at least we would get an ark launched, and that’s what counted.

  Tired of waiting, I poured another cup of coffee and carried it down the hall to his study. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, talking on the phone to someone about fertilizer—I assumed; I heard “nitrogen content” and “percent potassium.” He smiled at me when I handed him his coffee. I stood in front of him. We looked into each other’s eyes while he said, “Yes, but I need it now, I can’t wait till the end of next week. Well, that would be great. If you can—right. I’d appreciate it.” He still had on his barn clothes, but his face and hair were damp, shirtsleeves rolled over his elbows, as if he’d just had a wash. I smelled soap, hay, cow, coffee. What would he do, I wondered, if I put my hand on his jaw, or touched his neck? Pulled on his ear?

  I kept my hands to myself. But when I sat down on the arm of the easy chair in front of the desk, I crossed my bare legs slowly to see if he’d look at them. He did.

  After he hung up, he sipped coffee for a while without talking. I couldn’t decide if it was a comfortable silence or not. “What’s up?” he said eventually. “I thought you were working.”

  “Couldn’t seem to make any headway. Restless, I don’t know why. What are you doing?”

  “Phone calls. Business.”

  “You have a strange job,” I said.

  “Do I?”

  “Maybe not. Part of it’s earthy, part of it’s not.”

  “Most of it is.”

  “I’m sad, Jess,” I said. “I didn’t know I’d like Eldon so much.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s so frail. What if he can’t make it to the seventeenth? Poor Landy.”

  He bowed his head and nodded, rubbing the heel of his hand down the long muscle in his thigh. “They’ll sail the ark anyway, Landy says. No matter what happens.”

  “I’m glad.” But what if Eldon thought his salvation depended on sailing it while he was alive? What if he was convinced that, by not fulfilling his promise to God on time, he’d doomed himself? “Good people are too hard on themselves,” I said.

  Jess smiled. “Sometimes. Landy says his father’s got a lot to repent.”

  I resisted that. I didn’t want to imagine Eldon as a great sinner, a man who could do damage to his family out of selfishness or thoughtlessness, or worse. Not that sweet old man.

  Jess looked at the clock on his desk.

  “How’s Sophie?” I asked, to keep him.

  “Resting comfortably.”

  “Do you ever breed them the natural way?”

  “Sometimes. Landy’s got a bull stud who’s sire to about forty of my herd, one way or another.”

  “He told me he can’t stand to ship his cattle.” Ship; that was a euphemism for sending them to market—which was a euphemism for butchering. “I remember how you used to hate it, too. Do you still?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you do it.”

  “Sure. Well. Mostly. If you don’t count Martha.”

  “Martha?”

  “She’s twenty-six.”

  “No!”

  “She quit giving milk about thirteen years ago, but I couldn’t ship her. Wou
ld’ve been like killing my elderly aunt.”

  “So you put her out to pasture. Did I ever meet Martha?”

  “I don’t remember. She wasn’t famous then, she was just a cow.”

  “How long can they live?”

  “Twenty-eight, thirty. That’s if you treat ’em like goddesses.” He picked up his cup, set it down when he remembered it was empty.

  “Want some more coffee? I’ll get it.”

  He crossed his arms, looked at me curiously. “What’s behind this urge to take care of me today?”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to hover.” I stood up, a little hurt. I wanted him to say, “No, I like it,” or something, but he just looked at me. “What time do you have to start milking?” I asked.

  “Four. Same as every day.”

  The clock said 2:20. How did you make a move on a man you’d said no to so many times, he’d quit asking? No had become our theme song; over the years we’d learned to dance to it with a certain amount of grace. How could I tell Jess now, out of the blue, that I wanted a new song?

  I couldn’t, of course. You had to lead up to something like that slowly; you dropped girlish hints; you flirted. You changed the temperature gradually, so nobody’s system went into shock.

  “What if you had an emergency right now,” I said. “So you couldn’t do your phone calls or your business. Would anything terrible happen?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I don’t know, I just thought—maybe you needed to relax.” My God, I sounded like a call girl. This was completely wrong; I pushed the whole idea out of my head and changed tacks. “Sometime when you’re not busy, would you like to go out to dinner? With me?”

  What was he thinking? The outline of him seemed to get sharper, better defined, more distinct from the desk and the wall behind him, like a bas relief. He steepled his fingers in front of his face, hiding his mouth and nose. “Yes.”

  “Good. Then sometime we should do that.”

  I was on my feet, I had delivered my exit line. But instead of leaving I said, “Do you miss being married? Not—I don’t mean do you miss Bonnie, but do you miss having someone? To be with?”

  “Yes.”

  “I always wondered what broke you up.”

  “You know what broke us up.”

  “I do? No, I don’t.”

  “Carrie, what’s going on?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why did you bring me lunch? Coffee. Why did you show me your legs?”

  I blushed. I considered getting huffy—I have no idea what you’re talking about—but I said, “I don’t know what’s going on,” truthfully. I was full of wanting him, I was bursting out of my skin with it, and I had no idea how to tell him.

  “Are you…lonely? Is that what this is about?” He said it kindly.

  “‘Is that what this is about?’” I repeated, laughing. Now I was insulted. “Does the widow need a little consoling, you mean? The answer’s no.” I moved away. “I’m not lonely, not at all. But thanks for asking. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember when I’ve been less lonely. I really don’t need a thing.”

  I stopped at the door to the hall, keeping my back to him. “Oh God, I’m just so bad at this.”

  “What?”

  “No practice, that’s the problem.”

  “Bad at what?” He sounded baffled. But hopeful.

  “Telling you I’m ready,” I said, turning around. “But I’m not lonely, honestly, not anymore—I don’t know why. I don’t need you, I just want you. There—you said to say it in words.” But now I’d panicked myself. I was afraid he’d touch me, afraid he wouldn’t.

  He did neither.

  “Did you just look at your watch?”

  He laughed, a glad, real sound. “Sorry.” Still laughing, he came and put his arms around me. Kissed me. Held me, pressed me against the wall, put his hands on me. Happy ending.

  Was it like high school, the dark, electric-smelling utility room? Maybe; because I thought of it, I made the association. And there was a familiarity in the feel of him that I wasn’t prepared for, I thought everything would be new, strange. Molecularly speaking, doesn’t the human body change completely every—so many years? I didn’t expect our bodies to recognize each other. “It’s the same, isn’t it?” I said between long, deepening kisses, but he said, “No, it’s completely different.” So I don’t know.

  A little later, I caught him sneaking another glance at his watch, behind my shoulder. “Look, if I’m keeping you from something…”

  “I have to make a call. Two seconds.”

  He left me to call and ask if a Mr. Turnbull could come to the farm tomorrow afternoon instead of today, same time. He must’ve said yes, because Jess thanked him profusely.

  “Who was that?”

  “A.I. tech.”

  Artificial insemination technician. “And his name is Turnbull?” Everything was so funny. We laughed our way up the stairs and into Jess’s room, and I was so relieved when it wasn’t his old bedroom, the one I used to do my homework in. Glad too when it wasn’t his parents’ big, gloomy room, still cluttered with dark, old-fashioned furniture. Jess’s room was the old sleeping porch at the back of the house; he’d enclosed it and added wide, ceiling-high windows. I could see a silver ribbon of the Leap through tree leaves at the bottom of the long, grassy flood plain.

  “This room isn’t ugly,” I said, feigning surprise, glancing around at the plain oak dressers, the sturdy bed—unmade; manly navy sheets in a tangle—both bedside tables covered with magazines and books. “What went wrong?”

  “Hmm. Guess I thought your mother would never come up here.”

  We took off each other’s clothes like brand-new lovers, smiling and reverent, practically glowing from gladness. Underneath the excitement, it felt like coming home. I don’t know why I wasn’t more self-conscious, why I wasn’t paralyzed with nerves. The familiarity again, I think. Not a sense that this had happened before; more a feeling that it should have. I did mind that my naked body was twelve years older than the last time Jess had seen it. But he didn’t. He told me I was beautiful, so fervently that I believed him. How it was to be with him came back to me quickly, and the best was the way he could make me feel that nothing I did was wrong or clumsy or tentative or silly. With Jess I was lovely, I was a pretty fish gliding through water, all certainty and grace.

  He was what I knew he would be, passionate and tender, undisguised. Lost. “I promise not to leave in the middle this time,” I whispered to him—in the middle. Questionable timing for a joke, but if we were both remembering our last time together, I thought, we might as well speak of it. Dig it up and disarm it.

  It took him a moment to react at all; I could actually see his eyes clear, shift from absent to present, and I remembered that that absorption, that mindless departure into the nothing of sensation was one of the things that had frightened me away from him so long ago. I was a girl then, I couldn’t lose myself the way Jess could—that was a goal to spend your life chasing. At least I wasn’t afraid of it anymore.

  “I wouldn’t let you this time,” he said, poised above me, his hair backlit, a coppery halo. “That’s been the problem, me letting you go.” He didn’t smile; he wasn’t joking. Could that be true, could it really be that simple—the “problem”? I wanted to talk to him almost as much as I wanted to make love to him. And then I wanted to paint him.

  In patches of nostalgia, I remembered what it was like to lie in bed with a man, the thrill of someone else’s ceiling, a different scent on the pillow, another slant of light from unfamiliar windows. My mind drifted to old lovers—not to Stephen, but men I knew before I knew him. No one in particular; just the sensation of newness, excitement, what it was like to be naked for the first time with a naked man, the lawless, liberating feel of skin on skin, the sense of boundless physical possibility.

  It was like that with Jess, and then it was more. Everything between us multiplied, compounded, like mirrors reflecting us in the present,
and then an infinite number of diminishing images of our past. We had now, and we had everything that had happened before between us. The most extraordinary combination. Exactly the same and completely different—we were both right.

  Afterward, I lay with my head on his chest, listening to his heart beat, feeling his hand in my hair. Our heavy, word-less silence felt right for a time, the only appropriate response to what had just happened. But I was impatient. I wanted answers to all the tantalizing whys—why did he love me, why did he like sleeping with me, why did he pick me and no one else. And how could he want me again after the last time, after all the other times I’d disappointed him?

  “If it only rains every twelve years, you don’t curse it when it finally comes,” he said. “You curse the drought.”

  An analogy. My farmer, my cow herder, my dairyman made a metaphor about me. I sank in deeper, seeded in love, planted. “But why did you ever even like me?” I was recalling the eighteen-year-old virgin, the overachiever, mama’s girl.

  He said the nicest things—that I was brave, I had a loving heart, I was kind to him, I liked him even though I didn’t understand him. “Caution” ruled me in the end—that was the word he used, caution—but by then it was too late, he said, he already loved me.

  “It’s not wrong to want to please everybody, Carrie. It doesn’t work, but it doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  No, just a weak one. But the last thing I wanted to talk to Jess about right now was my mother.

  “I always knew you loved me,” I said. “It was a secret I tried to hide from myself, but I couldn’t, I kept it with me all through the years. I can’t imagine my life now without it. Such a gift.”

  I wanted to know about his wife, but I wouldn’t ask. In fact, I wanted to hear about all the women in his life, and I wanted him to place me among them. I would’ve liked a chart, frankly, a detailed graph of the hierarchy of all Jess’s women, with me at the tip-top. Not because I was that needy and insecure—I just felt like celebrating. Doing a dance on top of the pyramid.