by Lisa Tuttle
He looked a little grim. “I thought there had to be someone.”
“Yes, well . . . you only asked if I was married or living with someone, and I'm not. But we have been seeing each other for about six months.”
“Is it serious?”
“Well—more for him than for me, I think. I never expected it to last forever.” It seemed horribly unfair to Jack, defining the terms of their relationship like that behind his back, to a stranger, but she had to say something.
“Are we likely to run into him if we stay in Austin? Does he carry a gun?”
“Of course not! I mean, he's not violent, don't worry about that, but yes, we could easily run into him, especially if we stayed at my house. He doesn't always call first.”
“Then we won't stay at your house. We won't stay in Austin. Where would you like to go? San Antonio? Dallas? Houston? Or shall we keep on the move, outlawed lovers on the run? I give myself up to your judgment. Are you with me?” She met his gaze and nodded, thinking how romantic this moment should be, but her stomach was twisted with dread.
They went back to her house where she packed a bag and called her boss at home. She was glad he wasn't in, because she was able to lie to his answering machine about a family emergency calling her away for the whole of the next week.
Then they drove to Salado, and checked in to the Stagecoach Inn. Salado was a quaint, pretty little town full of gift and antiques shops, an easy drive from Austin, a popular place for a day out. Her mother had taken her there when she'd still been a student, and they'd had lunch where everybody did, in the huge dining room of the Stagecoach Inn.
Now, sitting at what might have been the very same table, over descendants of the same preliminary hush puppies and clear soup she'd eaten with her mother, she could taste the bitterness of the betrayal she'd felt when her mother had told her she was getting married, and she wondered what had possessed her to return today. Was this where the inevitable, unpalatable words would have to be said?
“What's wrong?”
“I don't know.”
“You look worried.”
“I am.”
“About what?”
“I don't know. About us. About what might happen.” Then all in a rush she began to tell him about the last time she had been in this restaurant, how betrayed she'd felt when her mother told her she was getting married, about the earlier betrayal and desertion of her father. He listened quietly, asked questions occasionally, until she had talked her emotions out. Then they left the inn and went outside to walk through the streets of Salado and along the green banks of the river, holding hands.
That night in bed he held her for a little while but did not make love to her. When she tried to initiate a more intimate embrace he simply stopped her.
“Can we talk about it?” she asked in a whisper.
“No. It's better not. Trust me.”
She was more relieved than disappointed.
The next morning, over breakfast, they discussed where to go next. She had no idea what he expected, what sort of places would appeal to someone from Europe.
“I'm not asking you to cater to my expectations, that's not what this is about. Most people in England think of Dallas when you mention Texas—or cowboys. I'm not that interested in the site of a soap opera or in dude ranches. It doesn't have to be touristy to interest me—better if it isn't. Can't we just sort of drive around and stop anywhere that looks interesting? Just explore . . . that's what I'd do if you were visiting me. And I'd show you my favorite places.”
“Like the bothy?”
“Oh, definitely the bothy!”
“There's a place . . .” She stopped, uncertain.
“Go on.”
“There's nothing to see, it's nowhere, really, just an old house in the middle of the piney woods. I went there the summer I was thirteen and . . . it was magic.”
“Let's go there.”
“It might not even be there anymore—the house, I mean. It was pretty tumbledown. My aunt used to live there. I don't know what happened to her.”
“Maybe she's still there.”
“I guess. . . . I never went back to find out.”
“Come on, let's go,” he said, standing, tossing money for a tip onto the table.
At the car she tested his interest. “We could go to San Antonio, see the Alamo instead.”
“Can't we do both?”
“Not in the same day.”
“Getting cold feet?”
“I'm just afraid . . . it won't mean anything to you. It was important to me, but you might be disappointed.”
“You mean you're afraid you might be.”
The accuracy of this caught her in the throat, and tears welled in her eyes. His understanding made her love him.
“It doesn't really matter where we go,” he said quietly. “We're just traveling to be together. Your whole country is strange and wonderful to me. Take me where you will.”
Despite his attitude, she didn't think he had anticipated quite how long it would take to get there or how little of interest (in her opinion) there would be on the way. Traveling cross-country, they took a lot of back roads, and she got lost a few times. She only knew where Camptown was in relation to Houston; recalibrating from Salado was more difficult than she'd expected; all the roads seemed to take them in the wrong direction. But eventually, after a good lunch at a roadside barbecue stand, they reached Highway 59, and almost immediately after that there was a road sign for Camptown, and she caught sight of the turnoff to Aunt Marjorie's place, still a dirt road and still, after all these years, looking almost exactly as she remembered it.
The forest was different, thinner now; that was one obvious change. The last of the original, primeval forest had been cut down during her childhood, and new pines planted in straight lines.
She had remembered the dirt road as a long one, but distance that had taken so long to travel on foot flashed by beneath the wheels of even a slowly driven car. The last little stretch of their journey passed in silence. Her emotions were in turmoil; she was full of hope and fear. And suddenly there in the same clearing stood the old wooden house.
She braked and turned off the car, and listened to the silence of the forest on this hot, windless day.
“All it lacks is the chicken legs.”
His bizarre comment caught her attention. “What?”
“Like Baba Yaga's house. So it could move to another part of the forest. Wrong country, I know.”
Baba Yaga was the wicked old crone in Russian fairy tales. “You think it looks like a witch's house?”
He shrugged uneasily. “It's not the house, it's the forest. I've never liked these pine forests—birds don't like them, either, so there's something dead about them. All the trees the same, planted in regiments. They're destroying Scotland. The great Caledonian forest is gone, replaced by plantations of pine.”
“Pines grow naturally here; there've always been pine forests in East Texas.” She was near tears, feeling his rejection of this place as rejection of herself.
“Conifers are native to Scotland, too, but they don't grow in straight lines and too close together to give anything else a chance except when people plant them that way. I'm sorry.” He touched her hand where it still rested on the steering wheel. “This is your special place; don't listen to me. Let's go in.”
They got out of the car and approached the house. It became obvious as they climbed the steps to the front porch that the house was uninhabited. The screens on the windows were nearly rusted away where they were not caked with dirt, and the windows were smeared and webbed over. Peering in through the murk, though, she recognized her aunt Marjorie's front room, the shape of the big desk against the wall spotted with postcard-sized shapes and curling, crumbling paper fragments.
Graham knocked on the door, and the blows resounded, startlingly loud in the stillness, and made her jump.
“I don't think there's anyone in,” she said.
“No
r do I, but you have to make sure, observe the proprieties. . . . You want to try the door?”
She grasped the doorknob but it would not turn. “I always used the back door when I was here.”
He nodded, and they went down the steps, around the house, passing the cellar door, which was padlocked. The back door was unlocked, and she walked in, feeling his presence at her back.
The kitchen smelled of dust and mold, the odor of unchallenged time. The floor was gritty underfoot, and everywhere she saw dead flies, cobwebs, mouse droppings and other dirt. No one had lived here for years.
Agnes walked through to the front of the house, feeling a pang of loss and anxious about Aunt Marjorie. What had happened to her that she had not come back here in so long, yet had never sold the house? Had she become so successful in recent years that she needed neither the house nor the money it might bring?
There was the portrait gallery of Marjorie's geniuses. Some had fallen off the wall as the tape that held them had perished, one was curled right up like a dry leaf. Her heart began to race as she searched with her eyes for Graham's photograph. She couldn't find it. She crouched and investigated the pieces of paper that had fallen to the floor. Marcel Proust gazed languidly up at her through a mottled, sepia background with nibbled edges. Next she picked up a piece of brittle, curling newsprint. Where the tape had been, something had eaten, and while she thought this was the picture of the young poet, most of his face was gone, and she could not be sure.
But it was silly to feel sad about the loss of a picture when she had the living subject right here. She straightened up and turned around, letting the meaningless scrap fall, and there he was. He had taken his glasses off as if expecting to have his photograph taken: this was one of his small and touching vanities. She was about to ask him why he'd done it when she was arrested by the expression on his face. He had never before looked at her with such profound tenderness, such unmistakable desire, and her body responded almost before she consciously understood. She took a step and went into his arms.
Very gently he removed her glasses and set them down on the desk. He looked seriously into her naked eyes as if reading what she wanted, and then he kissed her. Previously his kisses had seemed perfunctory, even impersonal, an empty form or a means to an end. This kiss, though, was an end in itself, gentle and lingering, a voyage of discovery.
She became hot and dizzy with desire. Her legs turned to water and she clung to him.
Their kissing became fiercer and more urgent and they ground their bodies together. A little time later, as they awkwardly attempted to shed their clothes while still holding each other, she half-pushed, half-led him into the next room. The bed, Marjorie's bed, smelled chokingly of mildew, but it was softer than the floor, and she thought as long as they stayed on top of the covers it wouldn't be too bad. She was beyond caring, anyway, all discomforts minor details easily ignored.
They got their clothes off as quickly as they could—Agnes almost wished hers would be torn as a lasting sign of the passion which had overwhelmed them. It was a quickly passing thought; all thoughts passed quickly, jumbled and overwhelmed by sensation. Everywhere his naked skin touched hers there was electricity. She was breathing hard and seeing flashes of light.
She lay back, and he began moving down her body, kissing lightly all the way. When he parted her legs she tensed, dreading a dutiful little licking session and hasty retreat, but this didn't happen. He licked and sucked at her as if he had no agenda, no aim beyond the moment, and soon she was lifted and carried away by waves of pleasure. The waves became choppy, closer and closer together, and she came suddenly, too quickly, a physical explosion before she was emotionally ready. She was disappointed and felt her body had let her down, but luckily he did not take her climax for any sign of ending but went on stroking and kissing until she was almost unbearably excited.
They changed positions, and the taste of herself on his lips and his cock stirred her arousal. When he finally slipped inside her it was with the most profound sense of homecoming, as if they had been separated long ago and had spent their lives yearning for each other. Now, with him anchored in her, she felt complete. She closed her eyes and held his warm, lightly sweating body as tightly as if by pressing close enough they could become one. For a long time they barely moved, breathing in rhythm. His warmth, the feel and smell of his body, made her happier than she had ever been.
Their first sexual encounter, in his hotel room, seemed no more now than a bad dream. Although she knew it had really happened, she understood that because it had happened too soon, in the wrong place, it had been a mistake. This was the reality. Then, they had been two strangers: he had done things to her which she had accepted or resisted. They were only really lovers now for the first time, understanding each other with their bodies, hearts and souls.
She moved her legs, and he began to thrust into her, in a steady, smooth, achingly sweet motion until she was crying out and clutching at him, begging him to stop and never to stop.
She had no idea of the time. They made love, and rested, and sometimes fell asleep still joined, and woke, and made more love, and slept again and dreamed of making love. She lost track of her orgasms, where she was on the ever-shifting plateau of arousal. It didn't matter; she was in that paradoxical state of bliss combining extreme sensitivity and arousal with a dreamlike remoteness from reality. They did everything together she had ever wanted to do with a lover.
Although on their first night together he had insisted on darkness, he had no objection now to being looked at for as long as it was light. When night fell, taking them by surprise, they coupled in darkness, half-asleep, and when dawn awakened them the grainy, gradual brightening of the room brought new discoveries.
They slept again and woke again to full daylight, and Agnes realized she was starving. She fended off his embrace, resisting her own desire with a great effort. “Come on, we've got to go get breakfast. If we don't, I'll end up eating you—and don't say you wouldn't mind!”
He laughed, kissed her, and let her go. She wrinkled her nose at the smell in the room—sex and mildew and dust—and went off to the bathroom for a cold water wash before dressing in the clothes she'd scattered about the bedroom the day before.
Breakfast was in the first roadside cafe they came to on the way to Houston. It was too soon to go to Houston, they agreed, but it was the simplest and most obvious route; she didn't feel up to tackling maps and back roads again so soon. Over their stacks of pancakes, with bacon and hash browns, grits and biscuits, they decided to drive straight through Houston and on down to Galveston. She'd gone to Galveston every summer as a child, but hadn't been back in years, and it seemed to her an appropriate place to take a visitor as well as being something they would both enjoy.
“There's lots of historical old buildings,” she explained.
“My dear, I come from a land of old historical buildings—that's not what I look for in America.”
“Well, it's pretty, anyway. And there's the beach, and lots of good seafood.” She met his eyes and had a frisson of sexual memory. “But it doesn't really matter where we go, does it?”
“Just what I've been telling you.” He reached across the table to cover her hand with his.
“We could have stayed at Aunt Marjorie's.” With her renewed desire for him she was on the verge of suggesting they turn around and drive back, but, with an unconvincing laugh, he wrinkled his nose and shook his head. His eyes were uneasy. “Hardly,” he said. “It wasn't the most welcoming habitation.”
She felt let down by his response. It was honest, if you thought of the smell of mildew, the spiders in the corners, the lack of civilized comforts, but it was ungracious, considering what had happened to them there. She looked away, so he wouldn't see the hurt in her eyes, but he noticed, and gave her hand a squeeze.
“Come on,” he said. “I know it was special to you—but it was your special place, not mine. I feel more comfortable—and much sexier—in a room with cl
ean sheets and no insects.”
She met his smile, and was going to remark that she didn't think her heart would stand any increased sexiness, but the waitress was there to refill their coffee cups, and the moment passed.
But that night in a Galveston motel room, although she embraced him with enthusiasm, he had become a stranger again, or she had, and they were clumsy and uncertain with each other. Her body still remembered the passionate intensity with which he'd explored and claimed her the previous night; she didn't know how to cope with his diffidence now. Had he, during that one long night of intimacy, exhausted all of his interest in her, or his tolerance? Did she smell bad, despite her shower? Did she have bad breath?
“It's not you, honestly. It's me. I've never really liked kissing; that's all.”
“But—” She remembered the long, searching, knee-melting kisses of the day before. “So . . . you only do it to please me? Because you think I expect it? Or—”
“It generally is expected. Look, I'm not saying I hate it or we can never kiss. I'm only telling you, I'm not that comfortable with it unless I'm already aroused enough not to feel self-conscious.”
Then what, she wanted to ask, had aroused him to such a pitch before she ever touched him at Aunt Marjorie's house? But before she could ask, he said, “Now, do you want to talk, or to make love?”
“Can't we do both?”
His sigh was answer enough; she shut up and began to touch and stroke him, trying to stir up an urgency she did not feel.
It was no good. The magical electricity which had sparked between them with every touch had gone, and she no longer found the texture and smell of his naked skin uniquely intoxicating—it was just skin. Ordinary skin against skin when they embraced; awkward, uncomfortable sex. She faked an orgasm—for the first time in her life—just to get it over with.
Never again, she thought. It doesn't work. What had happened between them in Aunt Marjorie's house should not have happened. Somehow, she had made it happen—unconscious wishcraft, witchcraft—she didn't know how, but it was beyond her conscious control, and it was dangerous. She had done it once before, in her teens, with Alex—and Alex had no memory of it. She wondered what Gray thought had happened, what he remembered, if he remembered anything. What had been a happy, glowing memory all day now frightened her. She didn't want to think about it. She closed her eyes and tried to wish herself to sleep.
