by Bill Barich
He entertained such thoughts while squeezing cautiously between the vineyard rows. He was involved in a second phase of tillage now, turning over the soil another time to hasten the mulching of decaying weeds and grasses. The ground was harder than he liked it to be and bricked up on him in clayish lumps. He was so beat after his sleepless night and idyllic morning that he had trouble keeping his eyes open. His mind drifted again and again toward sublime images of Anna naked in her bed. Too bad, buddy. He would just have to suffer for a while. That part of it he couldn’t control, any more than he could erase what his field hands, including Antonio Lopez, had witnessed earlier. They had all watched him slip out of the farmhouse just before noon, and as he had slunk past them they had snickered and joked about him in Spanish, a perpetrator of lewd and lascivious acts caught out in broad daylight.
He could see most of the crew from his perch on the tractor, four men thinning and suckering vines in a block of Zinfandel at the foot of a hill. They pinched off every shoot that had failed to produce a cluster of tiny embryonic grapes, rerouting the vegetative energy to the other shoots, the Darwinian survivors. It was a job that most men enjoyed, slow-paced and not very tough, and it earned them some money in a season when work was beginning to be scarce. Lopez was not among them at present. Atwater had dispatched him on a special reconnaissance mission, ordering him to tour the vineyard and check it for frost damage, and Antonio flagged him down at about five o’clock to deliver his report.
“Well?” Atwater cut the motor to listen.
“The Chardonnay got hit.” Lopez held up a black shoot, dead and gone. “The other vines are fine.”
“How many plants?”
“I didn’t count them all. Not exactly. About twenty?”
“Why are you looking at me like that, Antonio?”
Lopez’s eyes shifted into the distance, as if he’d been distracted by an insect flying by. “I’m not looking at you any kind of way.”
“Yes, you are. Did I say something funny?”
“No.”
“Then why do you have that shit-eating grin on your face?”
“Could be I’m happy for you,” Lopez admitted. He failed to rub out the grin with a fist. It was too grand, too appreciative. “Congratulations, amigo. Anna, she’s not above you!”
“Don’t you be congratulating me. It’s none of your business. You better shape up, brother,” Atwater warned him. “Because that shit-eater makes you look like the village idiot of Carson Valley.”
He fired up the tractor and proceeded in a foul and mulish mood to the barn. A trail of clods unfurled behind him, solid lumps that would require another pass with the cultivator before they crumbled. He attended to the Chardonnay vines himself and added up the damage, sixteen plants with varying degrees of injury, some never to recover in time for the harvest and others that still might yield a reduced crop. He retired to his trailer after that, heartened by the sight of a cloudy sky, and phoned the National Weather Service in Santa Rosa to confirm what he already suspected. No frost was in the forecast.
TUESDAY, APRIL 8TH. Lost some Chardonnay during the freeze, nothing serious. Cool today, good for keeping down botrytis. The crew is thinning and suckering. I have to start sulfur dusting soon. I’m behind on it, always behind on something.
While he heated up his supper, he stole peeks at the big house and stared dreamily at the lighted kitchen, a room he had only lately vacated, one that served him now as an emblem of how incredibly sweet life could be. He ate spaghetti and meatballs prepared for him in advance by the fabled Chef Boyardee, second only to the wizard Irish gourmet Dinty Moore in Atwater’s opinion, and reminded himself of his vow to do right by Anna. He would be patient and wait for a mystical bolt of intuition to let him know that the moment had come to make his phone call. Tense and cracking his knuckles, with the chef’s cuisine sloshing around in his belly, he trod a familiar circular path that he had previously worn into his shag carpeting in periods of duress. Sit down, Arthur, he told himself. He did. Rosie joined him and stretched out on the floor, spreading herself like a comforter over his bare feet.
His own phone rang. That was a rarity, except when his creditors were after him. The sound affected him like a stick of dynamite exploding under his butt, and he leaped almost three feet into the air. Don’t answer it, Arthur! He let it ring a few more times, allowing his pulse rate to return to normal and assuring himself that he could deal with it if it should be Anna. Nonchalantly, as if he had been on holiday in Greece and had only that minute arrived home, a jaded bon vivant to whom no message, however obscene or blasphemous, could be upsetting, he lifted the receiver.
“Hello?” His voice cracked like a juvenile’s, all deception fled from it.
“Is this Mr. Arthur Atwater?”
“Yes, it is.”
“This is Darlene at the Valley Herald. How are you tonight, sir? I’m calling about the half-price subscription offer we have going on right now? You can win a brand-new home and garden patio set from Wallace Furniture simply by—”
Atwater hung up. Darlene was history. He started walking the circular path again, round and round, and noticed that Anna’s kitchen had gone dark. He pictured her reading in the parlor with a fire burning, the smell of woodsmoke in her hair. What would she be wearing? Had she taken a shower and put on her robe? Probably. He imagined her that way, anyhow, sitting by the hearth with the robe open slightly to reveal a little of the creamy, upturned, small-nippled breasts he had sucked, licked, and gently bit that morning. His cock began to stir. Sit down, Arthur. Be still! He did and was. He ridiculed himself for acting like a teenager and behaving precisely as he had in junior high school when his hormones went utterly wacko and forced him to jerk off three times a day, too frightened of rejection to speak a single sentence to the girl he most coveted, Sharon Somebody—her surname was lost in the mists of the 1970s—who had the desk next to his in algebra class and let her skirt ride up so relentlessly that he was nearly crippled by a perpetual hard-on.
Get a grip on yourself, man! He waited another ten minutes and picked up his phone. He dialed five digits and put the receiver back. He picked it up again right away, replaced it, went into the bathroom, combed his hair, brushed his teeth, peed, and burst out of the trailer to rush with gigantic plummeting strides toward the big house, where he knocked loudly on the door and heard his nervous breathing and the alarmed cry of a great blue heron startled somewhere in the downriver night.
Anna was at the door in an instant. Her eyes were very green and innocent. She had put up no barriers between them—he could see right into her, in fact. “Listen,” he began, his head lowered in a semblance of shame, “I feel real bad about this morning. I—”
She came into his arms, her cheek against his chest. “Don’t talk,” she said softly. “Don’t ruin it.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Atwater was stunned by the passion he felt. The press of her body against his eroded the infinite space of his loneliness, and he held onto her tightly, clutching her to him as if she and she alone could save him from some awful destiny. She took him by the hand and led him into the parlor where, by the fire, she unbuckled his belt, knelt, and took his cock in her mouth. He wasn’t used to such directness and anxiously stroked her hair, thinking that this was the most beautifully undeserved experience he’d ever had. He couldn’t contain himself and tried to push her away, but Anna wouldn’t go and instead held him forcefully, gripping his thighs, her fingers digging in. He was surprised by her strength, by the many dimensions of her power.
“I want this.” She looked up at him with those innocent eyes. “It’s for me.”
“All right,” he said, as his legs went weak.
He was completely in her thrall, without any will of his own, a captive of the senses. She walked him upstairs afterward and lay next to him in her bed. He could feel her skin so hot everywhere and her cunt against his thigh dripping wet, and soon he was hard again and ready to fuck her. He did it in a way that surprised hi
m, unguardedly, for his own delight. He had not been aware of the depth of his hunger and worried for a brief few seconds that he might hurt her, but her tongue lapped at his neck in encouragement, so he went at it faster and faster, flying out of his brain, each new thrust causing Anna to moan and scratch his back as his pelvic bone banged against hers almost painfully, and when he came this time he felt emptied of something long in need of release.
“That was so lovely,” he heard her say, as if from far away. He was exhausted himself and dropped immediately into a heavy slumber, waking later in a daze, staggered to find himself in her bedroom again. Anna was asleep by his side, her legs tangled in the sheets. He nudged her shoulder with his lips, but she didn’t move. It was nearly midnight by the bedside clock. He set the alarm for three A.M. and slept solidly until it rang, smothering the buzzing with a pillow. He was already up and dressing, aching in muscles long unused, when Anna reached out to him blindly in the dark, her hand fumbling about behind her.
“Don’t go, Arthur,” she urged him. “Stay the night with me.”
He didn’t want the crew to make fun of him again in the morning. Caught out once you were a philanderer, he thought. The second time you were a fool. “There might be a frost,” he said as an excuse. “I’ve got to go out and see.”
“Come back when you’re done, will you?”
He crouched by her and petted her forehead. “This is all wrong, Anna,” he said without much enthusiasm.
“Only if you want it to be.”
“I can’t be sleeping here. The men already know about us. Everybody in the whole valley will hear before long.”
“Do you care?”
He searched his heart. “No. Not really.”
“Kiss me, please,” Anna said, a finger to her lips.
Atwater leaned down and tasted her mouth, all sour and fuzzy from their intimacies. He drew away from her then, laced up his boots, and marched out to patrol the vineyard. The porch thermometer was stable at 43 degrees, but he stomped around for a while anyway, alert to the flow of cold air and making sure it remained below the level of his knees before he permitted himself to go back to his trailer, where he collapsed into bed in his clothes.
He didn’t see Anna the next day. He was busy with minor emergencies in the fields and felt the need when evening came to establish some distance. He was reluctant to impose on her and still fighting his emotions, denying their legitimacy. Yet he missed her so badly in the morning that he stopped by her house on his lunch break, sheepish about his lust and expecting her to send him packing, but instead he floated upstairs with her in a helpless, swooning surrender. They were lovers after that by tacit agreement. All pretense of the accidental fell by the boards. There were never any discussions of their affair and no formal rules of engagement. Sometimes they wouldn’t talk for a couple of days, while at other times they couldn’t bear to be apart. Whatever was going on between them had a rhythm of its own, as well as an intensity that was very nearly overwhelming.
Atwater’s emotions were all over the map during the following week. By turns, he was thankful, astonished, fretful, and perplexed. He had a farmer’s desire for simplicity and order and wondered in his idle moments where the two of them were headed. Anna was unlike any woman he had ever met. She was flighty, independent, aggressive, and full of surprises, capable of evoking both his bliss and his wrath. She tested him and pushed him to his limits, drawing out a part of him that he had never investigated before. It was, he confessed to himself, a thing of beauty, but he still had a superstitious fear that it would end in disaster. He couldn’t say why this should be, except that he felt in some general sense that he did not merit her attentions. She would tire of him, sooner rather than later, and would be forced to dump him. What did he have to offer her, really? He was nothing but a passing fancy to keep her occupied until she departed for New York.
Then Atwater would catch himself in the midst of such dour deliberations and realize that it was all in his head! Anna gave him no cause to worry. Lighten up, buster! In fact, she was a ceaseless pleasure. He was like a giddy kid around her, a balloon tethered to the earth by the skinniest of strings. So smitten was he that he even cleaned up his act on her behalf, changing his underwear regularly and laying in his first-ever supply of dental floss. His impulse to lavish gifts on her was extreme in spite of his paltry budget. He bought her a box of Mrs. See’s finest caramels and a fancy old-fashioned silk scarf that he saw in an antique store window. He drove her over to Geyserville one night and took her to his favorite Italian restaurant, where the recipe for ravioli was purportedly a secret of such international repute that wars had almost been fought over it somewhere in Sicily. In his rapture, Atwater could not be roped in. He bought her flowers, of course, and a funny key chain in the shape of California and gave her his goofy pup for company. Anna laughed at his excesses and named the little dog Daisy.
Their fucking remained incendiary. They usually got together at the big house because it was a lot neater and more comfortable—the sort of place where an adult might live, Atwater often reflected—but Anna visited him at his trailer once, too, arriving unannounced on a drizzly evening. She held an umbrella over her head and wore a threadbare raincoat buttoned up to the neck.
“You’ll never guess why I’m here,” she said, a coquette if ever he saw one.
“Cup of sugar?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll put out the dogs.” He rounded up Prince and Rosie and shoved them onto the deck. “Okay, I’m ready for instructions.”
She stood before him, a challenge. “Unbutton me, then.”
His fingers fumbled with her coat. “My goodness!” he said, a stagey hand to his cheek. Anna wore lingerie such as he had only seen before in catalogs and magazines, a lacy bustier and black net stockings that the devil himself might have designed to snare such wayward souls as Arthur Atwater. “Where in the world did you find that outfit in Carson Valley?”
Anna leered at him. “That’s private, mister. On or off?”
“On, definitely.”
“I knew you’d say that!”
He knew things about her, as well. He had begun to master the subtleties of her body and was learning to satisfy her in a number of ways, fast or slow, delicate or nasty, back or front or sideways. He did her bidding gladly, heroically, every ounce of him dedicated to it. She had to guide him at first and teach him what she most preferred, but he had gone on from there to invent new forms of gratification, a prize pupil whose own cleverness elated him in secret. He had never thought of himself as the artistic type, not when it came to the old in-out, yet here he was performing the erotic equivalent of cartwheels. The sex was always very good, always feverish and sloppy and crackling with electricity, and it left them entirely satisfied. It resolved their differences, their essential opposition. It was their common ground.
Atwater sipped a glass of water, his head pillowed on Anna’s breasts. They were both dry on the inside and slippery wet on the surface.
“Everything about you is pretty,” he said, tracing a line below her navel, a scar from her ectopic pregnancy. “Even this.”
“I could do without it.”
He kissed her there. “Poor Anna. Nothing bad should ever happen to you again.”
“Did you and your wife want to have kids?” she asked him.
“I was the kid,” he told her.
“No, really. Be honest.”
“We never discussed it much. Not that I can recall, anyway.”
He could recall, of course. There were many such talks. Laura would bring up the subject, and he would duck it with a stock set of semivalid objections. We don’t have the money, Laura. We’re too young. It’d tie us down. It’s too much responsibility. He had nothing against children per se, just a mental barrier in the form of a lingering memory of his own difficult childhood. Sometimes he thought the stumbling block was that he had known intuitively that his marriage wouldn’t last. Such things were po
ssible, the mysteries were abundant enough to account for it.
“I wanted a huge family,” Anna said, lazily stretching her arms. “I can’t imagine why, but I did. I must have got it from books or TV or something. I planned to be the perfect nuclear mother with three perfect nuclear children. I even had names picked out for them.”
“Let me guess.” Atwater pretended to concentrate, his eyes closed and his index fingers jabbed against his temples, as if to consult the spirits. “Could it be Samantha, Jessica, and Dylan?”
She laughed. “Pretty darn close, Mr. Atwater. You can be a wicked fellow, can’t you? I swear, you don’t take me seriously half the time.”
“Okay, what were their names?”
“That’s much better. Now you’re being nice. I approve of you.” Anna paused to sip from his water glass. “Nora, Nicholas, and Susie.” She broke down and laughed again. “I find it hard to believe myself.”
“Two girls and a boy. How come you didn’t give the third kid an N name?”
“Probably so people would ask me about it,” she said. “That was my idea of being exotic back then. Nora was intelligent, Nicholas was dashing, and Susie was supposed to be the hell-raiser her mother never was.”
“You never raised any hell?”
“Not until I met you.”
Atwater shrugged off the compliment. “This is just a tiny bit of hell,” he told her. “Big-time hell-raising gets hairy.”
“Be that as it may, Arthur, I must tell you that I thought you’d never show your cards. You were the most tightly wound man I have ever seen in my life, bar none. You walked around as though you had a poker up your ass.”
