Late in the Season

by Felice Picano

  He remembered quite clearly how it happened, could work out minisecond by minisecond what had led them finally together: her hurt toe, the ride in the wagon back here, her going into the shower while he fixed dinner, how he suddenly thought he’d heard her fall and shut off the burner and run into the bathroom, thrown open the door, expecting to having to lift a bloodied unconscious girl and begin dialing for the police to send over an ambulance or suddenly use a towel as a tourniquet or begin pumping her arms and chest to restore breathing. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, nude, both hands up to her long hair as she toweled it dry, one foot forward, the little bandage on her toe soaked, the look of surprise on her face, his stammer, his attempted explanation, then how he’d stopped, gone over to her, lifted her off her perch, carried her into the bedroom, tossed her onto his bed, and without even removing his own clothing, mounted her.

  Now she was turned over on her stomach, yet not completely, with one hip tilted up, and one buttock uncovered, soft as a newly molded scoop of peach sherbet.

  What a lovely creature, he thought, almost not real. Her youth accounted for much, he knew. He suspected that if she were a boy, he wouldn’t have waited as long as he had to make love to her; he would have succumbed in a day or so. Even so, it was her androgynous youth that kept him interested in her. Her exposed skin didn’t so much reflect light as it absorbed it, absorbed it and seemed to hold that light inside it, allowing it to softly glow. Her facial skin was like that too—as though the various layers of epidermis hadn’t yet decided which was outer and which inner. Even through a tan, he could see a rosy infusion begin to manifest itself on her cheeks—or paleness draw all color suddenly from her forehead. It was amazing how young she was, really, only a few years older than Ken. She’d come to him like some kind of not quite human creature—a nymph or seashore deity—and had installed herself rapidly into his affections, his arms, his life, his schedule, and his attentions.

  And she was easy to have around. She was completely responsive to him yet considerate of his need for privacy too—something Daniel had never come close to achieving. He’d already grown used to forgetting she was even in the room with him, she was so quiet, sitting for the longest time as he composed, for example. He would get up from his table or from the piano, facing another choice, another tiny block to his progress. He would step outside, tap his pen against the glass door for a rhythm, grumble, even walk out onto the beach, before sitting down again to continue. Often he would go find something to nibble on in the kitchen, or suddenly remember to make a phone call. Meanwhile Stevie would be reading, or working on some sort of list in a notebook with marbled covers she’d picked up in the grocery store, or slowly making dinner. And yet, if he wanted her company—no matter how instant, how seemingly arbitrary the wish—she was ready to go out for a swim, to take a stroll along the beach, or on the boardwalks of the increasingly empty resort, now that it was late September, and midweek. Then she would suddenly disappear back into her family’s house for several hours, without any explanation, and as suddenly reappear with an idea for lunch, or a question about something she was reading. She read voraciously these days, surpassing even Daniel in the month before he went to London, when he seemed to have emptied half the city’s public libraries of their biographies and histories of the early days of the American presidency. There were gaps all over the bookcase from her rapid selections. Bright Stevie, pleasant, and intelligent too.

  She rolled over a bit in bed and looked up at him.

  “Getting up?” she asked.

  “Already up,” he said. He held out the half-full coffee mug to her.

  She reached for it, sitting up in bed. He sat down on the edge of the bed and watched her sip. She lapped it up like a puppy, all the while looking not at the mug, but at him.

  “The phone rang,” he explained.

  She didn’t ask who it was. She didn’t say, “Oh, Dan again,” or anything like that. That was part of Stevie, part of their thing together, whatever one might call it—relationship, affair, love; he didn’t put it into words. Whatever it was, it was designed of a fine network of questions not asked, and so not requiring answers; of problems not discussed, and so not recognized as problems; of difficulties never alluded to, and so invisible; of differences never mentioned, possibilities discouraged, futures disdained. Delicate as a spider’s web, that fragile and complex was their togetherness. Not too delicate for sex, certainly, but far too delicate for emotions. He had to admire her for allowing that. It belied a maturity he’d not expected, and expressed a sensibility he’d hardly anticipated. All ideas of shotgun weddings were vanished, made to seem ridiculous. She was quite the lady in waiting, she was so beautifully mannered. Jonathan had almost forgotten how finely tuned a woman’s courtesy could be.

  “Want your own cup?” he asked. “There’s more.”

  She shook her head no, and sank back into the pillows. “I dreamed again. About talking to my parents.”

  “Was it better or worse than the real thing?”

  “I can’t remember. I mean in the dream it was grim. But it’s been so long in real life.”

  He let that go. Why stop it?

  “Weren’t you talking to them yesterday?” he asked. She’d been on the phone for a while.

  “That was a friend from school. Rose.”

  “They know you’re here, don’t they?”

  “Here?” she asked, looking around the room. They both laughed. “They know I’m at Sea Mist. I’ve sent them a postcard.”

  “So Rose reports in for you?”

  “No. She’s at school. She doesn’t speak to them.”

  He was suddenly concerned. “You mean you haven’t talked to them since you’ve come out here? Not even to tell them you’re alive?” He realized he sounded like a parent himself, which hadn’t been his intention.

  “Especially not to tell them I’m alive,” she said. “I want them to think I’m suffering beautifully, against a backdrop of crashing waves.”

  She frowned. “Do you think I ought to?”

  “Maybe not,” he hedged. “Maybe the fact that you dreamed about them is enough.”

  “Or maybe that’s why I dreamed about them?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you think I ought to call them?” she asked timidly.

  He didn’t answer. He felt he’d already gone too far in advising, admitting she had a life beside this one, four days old, with him. He hated admitting it, because it meant he had to admit he had one too.

  “Jonathan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked up surprised.

  “You asked me something?” he said. “You said my name.”

  “Did I?” she said and relaxed back into the pillows. From her slight perplexity just then, he realized she’d said his name not to continue questioning him, but unconsciously, as though it were a talisman, or phrase of prayer. “Salva me.” Fiammetta of Florence would do such a thing. Not Giustina, the servant girl, the realist, but the lovely, spoiled, idealistic aristocrat Fiammetta—destroyer of wooers’ wits and hopes with her madly exaggerated image of a falcon that never existed. She would whisper the falcon’s hallowed name unconsciously in her garden, between the lemon trees, and Don Farnace would try to win her hand, cunningly, by overhearing her and calling his own ragged gyrfalcon by the same name.

  Being with Stevie had helped him review those characters, revising them almost daily, it seemed. He also came to understand their aunts and sisters and grandmothers, and girl friends too. Stevie could be a little girl, then in a twinkling—“ein Augenblick,” Heine would say, the flick of an eyelash—she would be a mature woman, or a more distanced older woman, speaking and acting from decades of experience. He’d already written two new choruses and rewritten another madrigal commentary in the show into all woman pieces, divided those into various parts he’d seen in her, and come up with a complexity of harmonics and tone he really liked. She was an inspiration too: a little Seven Siste
rs Erato.

  “It’s sunny out,” he said. “Sunny and hot. Surprised?”

  “Glad.”

  “Why don’t you get up and go to the beach? I’ll join you in a little.”

  She began to get up out of bed, and he was moved to take her right there, not to let her up, to cover her with himself, to have her warm and soft and receptive from sleep.

  He let it sweep over him, then let her pass him, and went and stood as she walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

  This was crazy, he thought. It couldn’t go on much longer. It couldn’t increase so continually, could it, this desire to have her all the time? His head was filled with thoughts. His shorts sprouted an erection.

  He saw her get into the shower and wave, then heard the fine spray of the shower go on, then blast with greater force, its regular pulsations broken now by flesh under it.

  In the bathroom, he slipped off his shorts and got in the shower too.

  She began to lather his skin with a sponge and soap. She was very meticulous, very thorough. He kept on slowly bringing her hands down to his front.

  “Here?” she said. “Now? I thought it had passed a moment ago, when I was in bed?”

  “Don’t be so sassy,” he said. “Besides, what do you have against being clean?”

  Leaning against her, he let the water shoot between their faces.

  Later on, on the beach, she started to laugh without any apparent cause, and then blushed to explain: “You’re taking away all of my fantasies. This morning, in the shower, that was one. What will I do when none are left?”

  He didn’t answer her; certainly not to say anything similar to her, for that would be an untruth, wouldn’t it? The last thing they could tolerate was untruth.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The letter from Bill was short, but really rather touching: it was sad without being sentimental and only evoked her guilt over mistreating him a little bit. She wasn’t surprised he’d sent it: she was surprised that’s all he’d done. She’d really expected to see him waiting for her on her deck, or inside the house one weekend afternoon when she returned from the beach.

  There was no other mail for her, but there were two more letters for Jonathan.

  Barbara didn’t say anything; she didn’t even raise an eyebrow when Stevie asked for Mr. Lash’s mail. She simply handed it to her, and went back to her reading. The two little girls were asleep in the back of the shaded, cool room. Not a mention of Stevie’s foot she’d helped mend, nothing to make Stevie feel she had to explain why she was picking up his mail. Nothing.

  She went out to the harbor and sat down, and reread Bill’s letter. It remained noncommittal and touching.

  What was odd was that she’d also dreamed about Bill last night. He was in the room when she met her parents, sitting on the sofa, not saying a word.

  She’d only begun to think of Bill Tierney again in the last few days—in fact, since she’d begun sleeping with Jonathan. That was one of the odd side effects of their actual physical contact she’d so much desired. The following morning she’d almost called him Bill once, and when she thought about it later, she knew she felt disloyal to Bill.

  There were other side effects too: a sudden cessation of tension, as though all she’d really needed was to get laid, horrible as that was to contemplate. Not a reduction of passion, but rather an evening out of the sharpness of her desire. It would rise to meet his own passion, naturally. But was otherwise dormant. She was content. She had gotten something she wanted, and that made a huge difference since it seemed that for the last year or so she’d gotten nothing she wanted—hadn’t even known what that might be. But poor Bill! He was her past, and he already knew it. She hadn’t meant to break so badly, so fumblingly; but she supposed it was better this way.

  She would call Bill when she returned to town, of course; she would make it clear that what he suspected was true. She would ask Rose how to do it; surely Rose Heywood had broken off with lovers before and could tell her how to do it graciously. She suspected Rose would be wonderful at such things; she was positively Jamesian at times in her dealings with the students—her mixture of hidden disdain and complex compassion made her enviable and aloof.

  Stevie folded the note and put it in her pocket and went off to do her grocery shopping.

  As she was on her way home, passing along the edge of the little harbor, the blond man stopped unloading the tall, dull gray canisters of natural gas all the houses at Sea Mist used and said, “What did you do to your foot?”

  “Tore it on a nail,” she answered. She’d been thinking about dinner later with Jonathan, candlelit in his dining room, the fire going perhaps in the other room. She was only half-conscious of the man inquiring. But now he lifted himself out of the flatboat and onto the deck beside her.

  “Did you get shots for it?” he asked.

  He was surprisingly young. She’d thought him mid-thirties or fortyish before. Now that he was so close, she saw that he was only a few years older than she, his face hidden behind a deep tan and a wild blond and brown beard.

  “Barbara at the post office took care of it. She put some kind of antiseptic on it,” Stevie said, then continued on.

  He caught up with her. “Maybe you shouldn’t be walking on it.”

  “It’s all right. It happened a while ago. It’s almost healed up.”

  He continued parallel to her around the harbor.

  “I could carry your package for you. That must be pressure on it.”

  “No, thanks,” she said, then went along to where the main boardwalk began, and continued walking.

  “I have a key for the truck,” he said, still alongside her. “I can give you a ride.”

  She was feeling annoyed now: he was persistent. Perhaps she’d sensed that as a potentiality in him right away, that first day here at Sea Mist. Maybe that’s why she’d placed him lurking in the darkened corners of her family’s ill-lit house during the night of the thunderstorm.

  “It’s not far.”

  “You’re Jerry Locke’s sister, aren’t you?”

  “So?”

  “We were friends. Jerry and I. A couple of summers ago,” he said.

  How transparent he was being, she thought, to take that line.

  “Really! Well, then you’re the only male friend of Jerry’s I ever met out here.”

  “What?” He was confused.

  “I believe it was said of my brother that he’d sleep with your wife as soon as shake your hand here in Sea Mist.”

  He became more confused than ever. “I don’t have a wife,” he protested.

  Jonathan would have laughed at her quip, gently, with irony. The poor thing… “Forget it,” she said.

  “Wait a minute. My name’s Matt. What’s yours?”

  He wasn’t going to leave her alone.

  “Why don’t you call me Jerry’s sister?” she said. Lord, she was halfway home and he still wasn’t letting up.

  “Do you mind if I walk you home?” he asked, stopping and touching her arm.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You mean it’s okay?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I do mind.”

  She’d meant it to be clear. It was. His face colored over, a deep unhealthy red that she took at first for blushing, until she saw it was equally composed of anger.

  “Just because you go to college, that doesn’t make you better than me,” he said, thickly, loudly.

  “I never said I was.”

  “Well, you sure act it!”

  “If you’d behave like a gentleman, I wouldn’t have to act it.”

  “I’m not a gentleman! I’m a ferry hauler!” he said, pride and shame mingled in it. “But I don’t have to be a gentleman. I’m honest. And I’m clean. And I know what this is for,” he said, suddenly gripping the crotch of his pants.

  His intensity, his roughness, and especially that last gesture startled her. For a second she was certain he was going to strike her, knock the groceries
out of her hands, grab her, and pull her off the walk into the yard of an unoccupied house, and there beat and rape her. He was trembling, on the edge of something, some kind of violence or impulse or breakdown, she didn’t know which. If only Jonathan were here. He’d offered to come with her. Or if only…who? Her father? Lord Bracknell? Or Bill Tierney? Those fools would rip this guy apart first and ask questions later.

  She was alone now, on her own, as she had wished. She had to try to handle this disturbed man herself, or scream and run and attempt to find some kind of help from him among the dozens of vacant houses surrounding them. Thinking that helped her somewhat: she really only had one choice. Her panic subsided.

  “Hey, Matt,” she said, trying to put all the sympathy she could gather into her words, “I didn’t say you didn’t know what to do.”

  “You sure acted like it.” Stubborn.

  She tried reasoning with him: “Why should it make any difference to you what I think or act like?”

  That stumped him for a second. Then, honest as he said he was, he blurted out, “Because I like you.”

  “I like you too, Matt,” she said. “But I don’t worry about how you think or act.”

  “I mean,” he began hesitantly, the anger ebbing, the embarrassment continuing, “I like you a lot.”

  “Well, thanks, Matt. But you know, I’m seeing someone.”

  “He didn’t come out here with you.”

  “I’m still seeing him. I’m not leading you on, am I?” she asked. “Is that what you think?”

  More hesitantly, “No. I guess not.”

  “Is that the kind of woman you think I am, to be seeing someone and to go around leading on other guys?” She hoped this would disarm him a bit, allow his confused ideas to settle, rather than incite him further.

  Hesitantly again, “I guess not.”

  “Good!” she said, more brightly this time. “Then why don’t we be friendly, instead of arguing over nothing. All right?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Would you want someone coming on to your girlfriend?”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”