But his was the next moan, not a name but just an incoherent grunt, when I gripped his buttocks firmly and squeezed him even closer, finding my own leverage. Perhaps it was as unfamiliar a sensation for him as it was for me. He met my eyes with his in between soft, lingering kisses, with a look of something like amused wonder. I finally had to close my eyes against it, bite my lip to keep from saying what I wanted to say just then, and only parted my lips to gasp his name as he shifted his stance a little without warning and the change hit something differently, more deeply…
And I found myself tripping off the edge of arousal into another climax. Falling more slowly this time but just as inevitably, deeper and longer and better with him filling me. I felt it spread from my sex and fill my entire body with sheer joy, curling fingers and toes, drowning out everything else but the one thing I was determined to remember.
In the silence of the rainforest night, the calm was broken by my voice in Jack’s ear, not so much moaning as gasping his name when my pleasure was at its height. There was nearly no other word I could have said just then anyway, nothing else I could have held on to in the face of so much bliss. I wanted to say “I love you” but instead I said his name, and it was almost enough.
Chapter Twenty-Three
We had planned a hike for the next day, across Mario’s extensive property to a waterfall near which he had started building a little grotto for picnics and outings. Another storybook setting, from the sound of it, and a perfect addition to his tree-house lifestyle. But the near-perfect weather we’d enjoyed most of the week finally broke, and instead of the picnic and the waterfall we found ourselves stuck inside, watching torrents of rain course over the picture windows and down the hillside while we talked about what to do instead of what we’d planned.
And we snacked, because Marta seemed to feel compelled to feed us all continuously. Once breakfast was done—omelets, light and fluffy and stuffed to order —there was sliced fruit, replaced later by marinated olives and mushrooms. Gabriel turned his nose up at these, while Silvia solemnly accepted olive after olive from any adult willing to part with them.
I was startled at how well behaved the children were, having somehow expected them to be more spoiled. Gabriel spent most of the day curled up not with a video game but with a book. From the cover it was clearly a young-adult sort of novel, but I couldn’t read the title as it was in Portuguese. He was engrossed in it utterly, as only a seasoned reader could be—his eyes never left the page, even when he walked into the kitchen for a drink or a snack.
Silvia got over some of her shyness and spent the morning scampering back and forth between her room, the kitchen and the little “family room” with a succession of activities, creating an increasing litter over the thick teak-block coffee table as the day wore on. Coloring books and crayons, prickly plastic construction blocks, a magnetic cutout doll form with tiny magnetic clothes and an immense collection of stuffed animals and dollies in various states of undress.
The little girl also clearly had a crush on Jack. At first it was most obvious in her shyness, in the way she ran to hide her face in her mother’s or father’s lap whenever Jack was in the room or—heaven forbid!—tried to speak to her or play with her. But by midmorning he had managed to win her over, and Silvia was giggling like crazy at the impromptu puppet show he was staging from behind the coffee table, featuring an argument between a dolly and a teddy bear about whether they should all go out and play in the rain.
“Noooo!” cried the teddy bear. “My fur will get all wet and icky!”
“But it would be so much fuuuun!” the dolly argued, slapping the teddy bear on the arm with a plastic hand. “Yay! Mud fight!”
Silvia burst out laughing and said something long and babbling in her native tongue, which Jack responded to from behind the table. Then the characters resumed their dialogue in high, falsetto voices, this time in Portuguese. I had no idea what they were saying but it was still hysterical. I wondered if there was any blackmail potential in seeing Jack act out Punch and Judy in Portuguese on the command of a five-year-old. When he noticed the flashes of light were from my camera and not from lightning, however, Jack popped his head up just far enough to glare at me from over the table.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Just trying to capture the local wildlife.”
“This is just for my own special scrapbook, right?”
“We’ll see.” And I snapped another shot, Jack’s face framed between the two toys perfectly, his scowl at utter odds with the fact that he was holding up a bright pink teddy bear and a baby doll wearing only a baby-doll-size onesie. I scrolled back to the shot and looked at it in delight, lost for a brief pause in how handsome he was…but then I was jolted from my reverie by Silvia’s voice, squeaky and imperious, clearly demanding that Uncle Jack resume entertaining her.
Still smiling at the sight of Jack brought so low by his tiny “niece”, I wandered back up the short flight of stairs to the kitchen, where Marta was standing in front of an open refrigerator with a speculative look in her eyes. Catching sight of me, she grinned and said in a voice too low for the children to hear, “I would never let either of them stand here like this, letting all the cold air out. But I can’t figure out what to make for lunch.”
“I feel bad that you’re spending all this time in here, feeding us—”
She cut me off with a wave of her hand. “Pfft. This is what I do.”
“I thought Mario was helping you?”
“He had to go see to the road, there was a little mudslide. Nothing serious, I think.”
“Oh. Well, I’m not much of a cook but is there anything I can do to help?”
Marta gestured toward one of the stools lining the far side of the counter where I stood. “Just sit, talk. Tell me about yourself. I know you work for Jack, I hear you can write and I gather you should be back in school, according to Jack and to Mario.”
I sat where she’d indicated, a little flustered at the idea of disclosure. “That’s a fair assessment, I guess. I do work for Jack, I also hear I can write and I know Jack does think I should be back in school.” We laughed together, but she clearly wanted more. She just looked at me expectantly as she continued working, assembling ingredients from the refrigerator, a freezer drawer I hadn’t noticed before and the huge walk-in pantry.
“Let’s see, what else? I’m from Houston and my family all lives there, so I moved back after college. I went to school in Austin. Both degrees, even though they say you should do different schools for undergraduate and graduate work.”
“Not always,” Marta said cryptically. “And why didn’t you continue?”
“I couldn’t decide on a dissertation topic.”
She shrugged. “Nobody has a dissertation topic at the start. Some think they do, but…” Another dramatic shrug, the large knife in her hand lending importance to the gesture.
“I know that now,” I said. “And I think I probably will go back. It’s starting to seem more plausible recently.”
“This week?” she asked, with an astuteness that caught me by surprise.
“Um, yeah,” I admitted. “This week has been—”
“Too fast.” Her disapproval was mild but evident. “You should give it some thought when you get home. With a clear head.”
I felt a little automatic resistance but tried to stifle it, remembering she’d known Jack a lot longer than I had. And remembering she was, herself, half of a clearly happy marriage that Jack obviously admired. “And Jack should think things through with a clear head as well?”
Marta laughed softly. “No, Jack should stop thinking so much and trust himself for once.”
“That’s probably what most people who know me would say about me. This is…this whole thing has been completely unlike me.”
Her look was a little speculative, a little amused. “Maybe your wild week was a good thing then.”
Somewhere in a distant part of the house, a door closed loudly and we h
eard Mario calling out, asking where everybody was. The children squealed past and returned a few minutes later with their father, who was mopping himself off with a soaked, muddy towel. He looked disgusted with something and I wondered at the severity of the mudslide. The cheerful expression I had already grown accustomed to was replaced with grimness, and he rolled his eyes and shook his head gently when Marta looked his way.
“We have more guests coming,” she told me quietly, and began chopping an onion with rather frightening accuracy and determination.
And then, through the archway from the hall, two identical young boys came slouching uncertainly into the kitchen—and Marta’s tightly pursed lips melted into a compassionate smile as she ran to embrace her nephews.
* * * * *
I heard Marisa before I saw her, a low and intense voice speaking in impassioned Portuguese to her brother, who merely sounded exhausted as he replied to her.
Drama. That was what I heard, and that was what I saw when she finally joined the rest of us in the kitchen. Drama and glamour, gilded with perfectly highlighted caramel-honey locks and mascara that remained firmly on her eyelashes despite her somewhat extravagant grief.
Not like my mascara which, on the rare occasions when I actually wore it, was often smeared under my eyes by the time I next saw a mirror even when I hadn’t been crying. I somehow doubted Marisa’s mascara had ever smeared.
She wore a safari-style chemise dress that was smooth and unwrinkled even after a long drive and a walk through the rain. Somehow her impeccable grooming struck me as grossly unfair on top of the fact that she was, quite simply, beautiful. But the important part was the attitude, the air of command, of expecting an audience for whatever she chose to say or do. I hadn’t really understood, until seeing her, why the relationship would have affected Jack so strongly. But charisma counted for more than beauty. She was the sort of woman who would always be the life of the party, compellingly attractive, the one whose bad jokes men would always laugh at.
All that I got instantly, and in the next second I understood what the attraction must have been, why Jack would have stayed with her even when she treated him badly. She would have been maddening but enthralling, and her very elusiveness would have pricked at his determination to conquer her.
And she was my polar opposite.
Then, like a bad dream, Jack was springing up from his seat behind the coffee table with a small smile and a hesitant wave, and Marisa was turning toward his voice as though she’d never quite forgotten it, and they met somewhere in the middle in an embrace I really couldn’t watch. I was too busy smiling politely through the surrealistic moment, choking back the sickening surge of jealousy and anxiety that had lurched up into my throat when I’d finally realized who the new arrival was.
It was ridiculous to feel this way—and I told myself so repeatedly over a lunch, which was probably restaurant-quality but completely wasted on me because I couldn’t taste it.
Antonio and Oscar, the two boys, turned their noses up at the food, even resisting the evident requirement of the house that they at least try one bite of each dish. They were sullen and petulant. Determined that they eat something, Marta eventually made them peanut butter sandwiches, for which they did not thank her until prompted by Marisa as if it were an afterthought.
Marisa didn’t seem perturbed by the crass behavior of her children. In fact, she had barely noticed the interactions between the children and Marta, from what I could tell. Her full attention seemed focused on Jack, whose head had been tilted toward hers throughout lunch as he listened to what I assumed was her tale of woe. I couldn’t hear the words—she was speaking in Portuguese and in a voice that was too low for me to hear, although clearly fervent.
Marta kept up a distracting string of bright conversation throughout the meal with Mario and the children, asking the two grumpy nephews about school, about their friends, about a dozen other little details of their lives I never would have thought to question. They answered in monosyllables, squirming in their chairs uneasily, and then Mario would fill in the rest for them with a slightly overblown bonhomie. At a few points during lunch I could see Marta’s smile falter and tears brighten her eyes. Whether they were tears of compassion or frustration, I couldn’t tell, only that she was clearly at her wits’ end with the whole situation, and that the last thing she wanted was to play hostess to this woman and her two ill-mannered children.
Little Silvia had clammed up again at her aunt and cousins’ arrival, and barely picked at her lunch. She watched Jack with Marisa furtively, sensing she had lost her recent conquest to another. I wanted to pick her up and hug her, commiserate with her, because I knew how she felt. I was giving them the same stealthy looks while I tried to eat and make appropriately meaningless conversation with our hosts. Once or twice I caught Jack’s eye and he gave me tiny, tight-lipped smiles before turning his attention back to Marisa. Whether he was displeased with what she was telling him, or the distraction from it, I couldn’t tell.
It was one of the most bizarre meals I’d ever sat through. Nobody, with the possible exception of Marisa, was saying what they meant.
Afterward Gabriel took his cousins into the snug and attempted to draw them out. If they were spoiled brats, he was, by contrast, a gracious young prince, playing the consummate junior host as he offered books and activities and eventually even the video games I had known must be hiding somewhere in the house. He was a bit over the top but seemed determined to succeed, and kept glancing to his parents for approval. He received it, in smiles and touches and nods. But the two cousins resisted his attempts to entertain them and ended up retreating into the private worlds their little handheld video game players provided. I could see his father in Gabriel, both of them nearly falling over themselves to try to haul their guests into enjoyment. It was hard on them, being good natural hosts, to have such resoundingly bad guests.
Strangely enough, it was Jack who pulled the two boys farthest out of their shells, and he did it incidentally. Gabriel, giving up on his cousins, had asked Jack to play a video game with him, braving a glare from his aunt to make his request. And Jack obliged, to my surprise, leaving Marisa’s side on the couch and plunking himself down on the floor next to Gabriel in front of the television that had been cleverly concealed behind a panel in the wall next to the fireplace.
He turned out to be quite astonishingly good at the game, which involved a snowboarding race of some sort. Slowly the two other boys began paying more attention to his onscreen antics than to their own games, until they ended up seated on the floor behind him and Gabriel, cheering him on through turns and gates and impossible freestyle jumps. The computer-generated snow was a sharp contrast to the scenery outside, but the whole scene in the room soon began to develop a wintry feel, the group starting to feel cozy by the fireplace while the rain poured outside and the little characters on the screen schussed and leapt their way down their cybertronic hill. There was cheering, there were high-fives, and at some point Silvia snuck into Jack’s lap and sat curled there while he stabbed at the controller with practiced fingers.
“I’m sorry about this,” Marta said gently to me as I stood at the archway leading down into the little room, watching them, watching the rain still sheeting down the window, feeling like the grayness of the day was all too appropriate. Feeling miserable and trying not to look it. “She’s…we’ve known this was coming, but for it to be this weekend…”
“That’s quite all right,” I said, smiling falsely and regretting it instantly. I could see Marta’s kind face harden just a little. I didn’t want to be churlish, didn’t want to lose her approval.
But I was watching the man I’d come to realize I’d loved for two years, the man I had only started to grow close to in the past few days, do his best to make overtures to the boys that might have been his. Boys that clearly might still become his, if Marisa had anything to say about it. And I didn’t feel nice, I didn’t feel pleasant, I felt sick down in the pit of my s
tomach and I suddenly wanted so badly to go home that my throat was choking up hard with the thought of it.
I wished I knew the full extent of what was going on with Marisa, of what had Marta and Mario so distraught, but I had no idea how to ask, so I resigned myself to finding out by degrees as I pieced things together.
“In all of this, who my greatest feelings for are those two,” Marta went on, her emotion getting the better of her grammar for once as she nodded toward her nephews. It would be the only slip, the only syntactic awkwardness I would ever hear from her. Her English was usually much better than my own. “They were never happy children, but now…” Her gesture was futile, resigned. “I’m so grateful for my own children.”
“Your children aren’t happy by accident,” I said firmly, and it turned out to be a good thing to say. Marta hugged me impetuously. But then she frowned again as we heard raised voices from down the hall, where Mario and Marisa had disappeared to talk once Jack became caught up in the game.
Antonio and Oscar, who had been discussing the finer points of play in increasingly enthusiastic voices as Jack worked up through level after level, fell ominously silent. As I watched, they seemed to shrink back into themselves, looking as though they wished the thick wool rug would open up and swallow them whole. Marisa’s voice carried, a little shrill but very insistent, and when she preceded Mario into the kitchen, she saw us standing there and switched to English, never missing a beat.
“I don’t have to hear you, Mario, because you make no sense! It is through, it is finished. I thought you would understand, or at least offer some support for me, for your nephews. But obviously I do not have your support. We will go to the ranch once the road is clear tomorrow. We won’t trouble you longer than this one night.” She was imperious, magnificent, eyes snapping and hair tossing back over her shoulder, but it was too much, like a soap opera.
When in Rio Page 22
