by Dylan Hicks
He put a few more seconds into the job. “Better?”
She made a shrugging sound.
“Do you need me to get your back?” he asked, and she turned around.
Franklin Beach, she discovered, was less gradual than the resort’s main beach, the water colder and rougher, which made sense since it was the Atlantic not the Caribbean. She shrieked when the first splashes reached her thighs. “Do you hate it when people say that cold water is ‘nice once you get used to it’?”
“Would you like it if I shared your irrational hatred for this innocent expression?”
“Yes, it would mean a great—”
While she was talking he dived in with a yawning bellow that seemed to emanate from the Ghost of Christmas Future. She followed, and they trod water not far from each other. “It’s nice once you get used to it,” he said.
“It really is.”
She tried to slacken her features into their most invitational positions.
The beach wasn’t as remote as promised, in that once in a while boats sped or sailed by in the middle distance, and sometimes small planes flew overhead. She got out of the water first, without saying anything or looking back at Archer. He followed her. She set her sights on a spot behind a huge rock, craggy and brown. Her swimsuit rode up her ass as she walked to the rock, but she kept herself from pulling the suit down, not sure if that was the right move. TJ was forever extolling her ass, urging her to present it in specific ways (“Oh God, baby, arch your back, arch your back!”). She sat on a smaller rock in the shade of the big one. Archer was walking slowly and uneasily, his trunks failing to screen his erection. When he caught up to her, she pulled the straps of her one-piece suit off her shoulders and looked up at him.
All the guys now—TJ and one of the others, at least—seemed to want dramatically salivary blowjobs sometimes performed in odd positions, so she concentrated as best as she could under the circumstances on that, taking Archer deep in her mouth and at one point crouching in a crablike position, letting a strand of drool drip off her chin onto her breasts. His penis was somewhat hook-shaped and sprang back toward his navel whenever he pulled out of her mouth; she almost expected to hear a boing. For a while they were situated so that much of his weight was on his left leg, with only the ball of his right foot touching the sand, and because of that, or because of his excitement and the slight chance of exposure, or because he was cold (though that didn’t seem likely), his right leg started shaking like a washing machine in its final spin. She tried to hold his tense thigh to still him, but she didn’t really want it to stop, and she liked what the tenseness did to the muscle around his femur. She loosened her grip on his leg, lightly tracing the seam of his testicles with her fingernails.
“I’m shaking,” he said shakily.
“Mmm.”
“I wish we had a condom.”
“I know,” she said. As it happened, she did have a condom in her backpack. She had brought two of them on the trip, just in case, though she usually let the guy deal with that. When she learned that Archer and she would be hiking alone, she had returned to her cabin to discreetly tuck one in the pack. She hadn’t really considered, though, how she would explain, even silently, the condom’s presence, and she perceived now that retrieving it could be destructive.
She stood up and they kissed, at first with enough force for her to feel it in her teeth and jaw. He pushed her hair aside to kiss her neck, instinctively choosing the more sensitive side, and before long she found herself lying in the shade on the gritty sand while he licked, rubbed, and fingered her. He had a good sense for delay, knew for the most part when to concentrate directly on her clit, when to increase pressure, when to add another finger. They were very long, his fingers. She vised his head with her thighs when she came and trusted that the speedboat passing by was too far away to see them, much less to record them and post the results on the internet. It all felt more urgent than rushed, though as they sat looking out at the ocean again, close enough to touch each other but not touching, she knew that the urgency, or any other part of the experience, wouldn’t be repeated, wouldn’t even be spoken of, and she started to regret that their probable one time hadn’t been a more extended once. A night, a weekend, a long weekend.
Real sadness and guilt might have set in over a long weekend, though, and she was visited by little of that now. A trace of melancholy, yes, but mostly pleasure and some relief. And it was perhaps better—considering Gemma, considering everything—that in the Clintonian sense they hadn’t even had sex.
“I sorta don’t want to go back,” he said.
She was slow to respond.
“But we should,” he said. Partly to wash away the evidence, they took another swim, and in the cool water she felt deliciously slippery.
June 2011
Karyn stood in the passageway between the kitchen and the dining room, holding out a four-dollar can of carbonated energy water. “Seems late for energy,” Lucas said. Rejecting a coquettish response (“Is it?”), she fetched him a spotty glass of tap water. He was standing at the table behind Maxwell, who for two weeks had been designing uniforms for his alternate-universe football league. “Ooh, Barracudas,” Lucas said. “That one’s off the chain.”
“Thanks. It’s my third favorite.”
Premature, surely, to suspect Lucas of launching a stepfather audition, but the thought occurred to Karyn. If so, he had a knack for it; his friendliness toward Maxwell, at least, didn’t seem especially exhibitive.
“I was gonna do silver pants,” Maxwell said, “but then it’s biting the Lions.”
“Try white with a blue stripe.”
“Color it white or just paper white?”
“I’d color it.”
His text had come through on her lunch break. Could they, he had wondered, get together, maybe tonight, to talk about her play? She considered responding with caveats: she wasn’t interested in lengthy, in any, discussion of her essentially private play, nor was she up for cooking dinner. In the end that seemed overwrought. She wrote, “Sure, drop by at 8.”
Lucas gave Maxwell one last helmet suggestion, passed through the archway to the living room, and, establishing a certain familiarity, took a seat near the center of the two-cushion sofa. Karyn joined him as he pulled out the play from one of his vinyl bags, this one decorated with zebras.
“That one’s off the chain,” she said.
He thanked her. For fun, she guessed, he pronounced zebra in the British way. He tapped the play’s (un)title(d) page. “I love it,” he said.
“I’m not really—”
“I know you’re not looking for praise or pointers or anything. I just want to say I love it.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s funny, I started kind of mechanically writing notes, but they were, I don’t know, mostly tangential.” He rested his foot on his knee. “Like the scene with Derek and the patched-up overcoat got me thinking ’bout this guy from Bright Lake, the Gum Man.” Karyn had a vague sense of Bright Lake, a Twin Cities exurb that must have been more of a farm town when Lucas was a boy. “He was this hunched old man,” he said, “not homeless, ’cause he had—it was a shack. Maybe not dictionary shack, though I think probably. He would shuffle down Main Street tossing sticks of gum at the towns-children’s feet. We’d pick them up and eat them. Which seems so strange now—that the transaction wasn’t hand to hand, that our parents looked on as we stooped for our gum like urchins.”
“They were wrapped though, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, silver foil. Wrigley’s. Stale. I guess with stick gum staleness doesn’t much matter after ten seconds, but you don’t want it to snap or crumble when you first put it in.” He paused. “I’m still not sure if throwing the sticks on the ground was the Gum Man’s way of being subservient, presenting himself as a kind of untouchable. Or if it was more the opposite, like, contemptuous.”
“Chew up, you little fucks!”
“Or just super low pressure: Hey
, buddy, I’m gonna toss this gum here. If you want it, great; if not, that’s cool too.”
“And he wore a patched-up overcoat?”
“Well, it seems like he would have. Later, I thought the whole thing must have been a gift-economy situation, you know, where he’s tossing the gum in exchange for handouts from the parents, like stealthy”—he finished the thought with his hands. “But I asked my mom about it a few years ago, and she said no, as far as she knew that wasn’t it.”
For friendship or otherwise, Karyn hadn’t often been attracted to voluble people like this. On the contrary, she was often turned on by reserved, word-sparing men. Her only perfect one-night stand unfolded nearly in pantomime at the end of her twentieth summer, a summer spent in Germany drinking too much while learning too little of the language. Her host family had brought her along to a resort on Norderney, one of the East Frisian Islands, where she found herself watching the sunset near a man who had sidled closer to her over the preceding minutes. He seemed old at the time, though he was probably under thirty. Looking straight ahead, she said, “Der See ist sehr schön.” She didn’t have the linguistic resources for a more inventive opener. He agreed, said something about salmon, or laughter, and asked in English about the length of her stay. Though his English seemed flawless, they said almost nothing else. His chest was shaved.
“But there might have been some less immediate quid pro quo,” Lucas said. “One time my mom and dad brought the Gum Man a turkey, which was pretty admirable since my dad was having all these musculoskeletal problems at the time, so he was still doing carpentry but not much of it. I’m pretty sure we were on assistance ourselves.” He pulled his shirt away from his chest. “Sorry, this story doesn’t have a point.”
“They don’t always have to.”
“Or any real bearing on your play. That’s why I stopped writing notes.”
“Well, I’m glad I let you read it.” Too shy to look at Lucas, she stared into the dining room. Maxwell seemed to be arranging his drawings into conferences.
“We should do a scene,” Lucas said.
“How do you mean?”
“Act it out.”
She hesitated. She wondered if his idea was planned or spontaneous, and if that mattered. Probably she spent too much time wondering if people were being “natural” or not.
“Like, I love the part”—he looked for the page—“where Callum wants to cut Anisette’s song from the record. ‘It has nothing to do with quality, it’s simply a matter of conceptual cohesion.’”
She was sheepish about smiling over her own line. “I thought about having ‘Kissing Bug’ become a fluke hit,” she said, “their signature song. But.”
“No, too pat.” He flipped back to the start of the scene. “You have an extra script?”
“I’m off book.”
“Wow, okay. Want me to do a Scottish accent?”
“Um, sure.”
He broke off in the middle of the scene’s first line. “That’s not quite Scottish, is it?” He resumed in his own voice, and Karyn answered in Anisette’s.
“What are you guys doing?” Maxwell said from his workstation.
“Your mom and me are mummering.” He turned to Karyn. “Sorry, I’m not profesh.”
“You’re fine,” she said. “In this setting, you probably don’t need to project so much.”
“Ha, yeah. Sometimes, the harder I try, the worse I get.”
“That’s how it was with me and the violin,” Maxwell said. “I was really good when I was just messing around.”
That wasn’t true at all.
They ran through several scenes twice, doubling up on roles where necessary. Though she had recited some parts of the play a hundred times, hearing Lucas read uncovered a few ungainly phrases, and they explored variations. They seemed to be working toward something, which was fun but worrying; the project thrived as art and therapy because it had no aspirations. It was vulnerable to even the most fleeting ideations toward production.
She had sworn to end the evening by ten, but it was Lucas who, at quarter to eleven, let out a sighing, “Well.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You too, Maxi Priest.”
“She doesn’t actually call me that,” Maxwell said, getting out of his chair.
“Cool kicks,” Lucas said.
Maxwell looked confused.
“Your shoes. Those new?”
“No, I just stopped wearing them for a while.”
“It’s a dope color,” Lucas said.
“Thanks!” He trotted up the stairs.
“So, I have a job interview tomorrow morning,” Lucas said to Karyn.
“Hey!”
“Yeah, I’m amped. Marketing director at this company, Aria, that makes hot-air dryers.” He walked toward the door. “Lot of times I’m a wipe-my-hands-on-my-khaks guy, like I’m too busy or something, but these are the most effective”—he described the dryer’s innovations. “Check it: I vividly remember the first time I used one—MSP airport men’s room, probably the same one with dude and the foot tapping.”
“Larry Craig.”
“I figure that’s a good story for the interview,” he said, carrying his bike off her porch.
“Maybe not with Larry Craig, though.”
“I’ll leave him out of it.”
She leaned down to pick up a damp newspaper from her stoop. “Thanks for coming over.”
“Yeah, it was nice.” He started to pedal.
Perhaps for the first time in her life, she said, “Bon chance!”
“I don’t speak French,” he said, looking back and smiling, “but wish me luck.”
November 2009
Not only did skipping out on Thanksgiving relieve Sara from impending brushes with John Anderson and cranberry sauce, it freed her to spend the day guiltily, miserably alone. By midafternoon she at least summoned the strength to turn on internet-blocking software, for fear that she would spend the rest of the day looking at pictures of turkeys baked by peripheral friends, most tantalizingly one served less than a mile from Sara’s apartment to a table of unmarried creative types not native to Buffalo. Two weeks ago, when Sara still planned to join the reunion in Lammermuir, she had turned down an invitation from her friend Emily, whose household had recently burgeoned to five. Thanksgiving there might place too much emphasis for Sara’s taste on giving thanks. She was willing to take that chance but didn’t want to admit to Emily that she had shirked her familial promises, nor did she want to perpetuate the lie about her pressing deadline.
“Who,” asked Donna Crennel three days later, “sets a deadline for the Monday after Thanksgiving?” Or she wanted to keep the lie in the family. Her mother was standing at Sara’s stove, making an exploratory incision into a Cornish hen. Sara had her own apartment now, the rented upper unit of an Elmwood Village Victorian whose first floor was a consignment shop.
“I’m sure it’s not unusual,” Sara said, shaking almond slivers over the green beans, “but I set the deadline. I needed an extension and couldn’t push it more than a week.”
A tsk. “I’m sure your father and grandfather were disappointed. I’m giving the hen another ninety seconds. Oh, speaking of your work, I mentioned you to Tom’s kid brother—of course he’s no kid.” Donna had just returned from meeting her boyfriend’s relatives in Little Rock. “He’s getting ready to shop around a novel of some kind. About the outdoors, he says.”
“The outdoors?”
“I think he means hunting. He wore a camouflage hat—not during dinner; he was very polite.” She picked up two plates and a gravy boat. “I said you’d be an excellent freelance editor.”
Sara followed her mother into the dining room, a small, lopped-off hexagon with white trim and robin’s-egg walls. “Did he seem to have money?” she said.
“He’s a male nurse.”
“You don’t need to clarify that he’s a male nurse, Mom. That’s like ‘lady doctor.’”
Donna may have been silently count
ing.
“Anyway, I’d hate to take advantage.”
“He’s not a child, Sara.”
“Most of these books don’t have a prayer. Maybe tell him—”
“I gave him your e-mail, so you can patronize him yourself.”
“Mom.”
After a moment, Donna asked, “Is your deadline for Lord Bondarenko?”
“No, proofing an academic book, a history”—she improvised—“of railway timetables.”
“I suppose I can see why you blew the deadline. I love this dining set, honey. So sleek.”
It wasn’t a set. “Scratch-and-dent sale,” Sara said.
Donna followed Sara’s finger. “You hardly notice.”
Sara had gently taken a tack hammer to the table on the day it was delivered. She mainly concealed her money through the no-fun trick of not spending it, but subterfuge was sometimes necessary; she had inflicted moderate do-it-yourself damage to several pieces of exorbitantly expensive furniture, all purchased with a future, more modern residence in mind. She sometimes thought of buying a house while she could afford to, though that would entail explanations far more elaborate than scratch-and-dent sales, since everyone except Archer thought she was precariously balanced one or two rungs above plasma donors. There wasn’t a strong argument, anyway, for acting quickly. Buffalo’s real estate market had so far been stable—no boom before the recession, no bust during—and, despite her new weakness for high design, Sara wasn’t convinced that she would take much pride in owning a home or much pleasure in maintaining one. She had always imagined buying a house with someone else, or pointedly not buying a house (or a home-entertainment system or a Baby Björn or a rake) with someone else. TJ had left her (and, presumably, other members of his seraglio) to get shockingly, hurriedly married, and Sara’s on-the-town, wild-oats experiment had lost its sheen. She was letting herself become increasingly isolated. Before her mother arrived late this afternoon, she had passed not more than ninety minutes of the last ten days in spoken communication with the rest of the world, the majority of those minutes spent in fits-and-starts dialogue with a lethargic representative of an internet-service provider.
