Fred and Katie Watson, dear friends of Walter Sutton, noting how well the kids got along, had asked them out for a sail and lunch on their fifty-three-foot, center-cockpit yawl. It was a wooden boat, built in the 1930s and restored here on the island in Vineyard Haven Harbor, in the very boatyard she’d been exploring that morning while they waited for their name to be called at the Black Dog.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” he said, and after a minute of silence and nothing but distant waves, rustling oak leaves and dune grass, he said, “I’d like to look over this morning’s pages, do you mind?”
“No! Please, do. I’ll clean the kitchen.”
“Sure?”
“Yes. I’m so glad you’re writing again.”
“Promise to look at stars on the beach with me when I’m done?”
“Nothing would make me happier,” she said.
*
So many stars in the sky, she thought as she pulled a single bed sheet over herself, such lovely peace. The warm, salty air … She lay on her back staring at the ceiling. She said goodnight when he turned out the light, and he rolled over to kiss her. He’d checked on the boys at the other end of the house (they’d gotten the room with the television and Frank and Karen had taken the smaller room with the queen-size bed and more privacy) and found them dead asleep, exhausted from all the fresh air and sea and sun.
She knew why he was telling her this.
Frank nestled into her. “Mmmm,” he purred.
She had come to bed in cotton underwear and a loose white tank top. He reached beneath it, ran his hand over her soft skin, then slipped a finger beneath the waistband of her shorts.
She inhaled brusquely and held his wrist. “I can’t yet, sweetheart.”
Frank rolled over, exhaled brusquely. She waited for him to speak but evidently he was tired of talking about it, tired of pleading.
She held his wrist and rolled to her side to face him. “Soon, I hope, my love.”
When he didn’t move, she rolled to her back and they lay still, twin figures between cool white sheets.
After long moments, he said, “Of course.” He kissed her cheek, then put a soft pillow over his eyes to sleep.
Karen’s vision adjusted to the dark; she knew sleep would not be easy. When Frank had slipped his fingers beneath her waistband, the nausea from this morning in the boatyard spilled up through her bowels and stomach and into her chest and seemed to twist the muscles of her neck. She knew then what it had been at the boatyard, she’d placed its source. She tried to will herself to sleep, but having recognized where it had come from—what she’d tried for months to keep buried along with all the rest of the awfulness—she couldn’t stop her mind from returning to it, the week after the accident. New Year’s Day.
*
Grant had put the spread of food out by 2 p.m. as promised. Dan Jeffries had chosen to eat standing up in the kitchen, so Karen and Frank had eaten in the living room with three other couples they didn’t see often and so had much catching up regarding everyone’s kids. Karen would have liked to have had a cup of coffee and depart, but she had insisted that Frank stay for at least the first half of the Rose Bowl. Frank had more or less stopped drinking since the accident, a few sips of wine with food. But here Karen stepped in and told him, “No changes. Drinking soda water all afternoon isn’t you. You always drink beer. If you don’t want to drink, at least put some lemon in a lowball glass with ice water and sip that.”
He followed her instructions. She was in the driver’s seat in every way.
By the time dusk fell and the Rose Bowl kicked off, Karen had had just about all the small talk she could bear, and had been considering asking Frank to leave before she’d intended, when Grant, having seen off the last of those not staying for the game, found her in the foyer.
“Karen,” Grant said. “How are you?” He gripped her shoulders and squeezed them. They hugged. She kept her face on his chest. It felt good, not having to pretend.
“Not good. Stressed. As you can imagine.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Thank you, Grant. No you can’t, and I appreciate your realizing.”
“I see you’re drinking water.”
“I feel better, that’s all.”
“I do have something nonalcoholic that might ease the stress, a little, if you want.” He removed a fat spliff from his shirt pocket, raised his eyebrows.
“You know, Grant,” she said with a smile. “I am going to take you up on that. That might help.” Pot had always relaxed her and put her at ease, never made her paranoid or introverted, and right now she’d have lunged at anything resembling balm for her nerves.
“Come,” Grant said, and led her through the cleared living room and out to a screened porch, empty but for a glass table and metal chairs. The temperatures had climbed into the high forties and all that remained of last week’s snowstorm were the dark melting hills of ice built by the plows. They sat.
“Can I join you?” said a voice, startling Karen.
It was Dan.
“Absolutely,” Grant said. “Anyone else out there wanting to bake?”
“They’re all watching the game.” Dan set a tumbler, filled to the brim with a pale liquid and ice, loudly onto the glass tabletop. “I’ve gotten into your tequila.”
“Reposado is the good stuff,” Grant said.
“That’s what I found!” Dan pulled a chair raspingly out from the table and sat across from Karen. “Hi, Karen!” he said, smiling vividly at her, unblinking.
“Hi, Dan.”
Dan leaned in toward Karen, ensuring she’d look at him, then swooped his head toward Grant, who sat between them at the head of the small porch table.
“You are one bad motherfucker in the kitchen, dude! Now I know why everyone keeps talking about the food! I’m not missing this again!”
“Thanks.”
Dan turned to Karen, his eyes electric, his smile enormous, and said, “Am I right?! Karen, did you taste those shrimp! Huh? Did you?”
“I did,” she said and turned to Grant, seriously, though her stomach roiled from nerves. “They were really good. Everything was delicious.”
“Poached in butter!” Dan exclaimed. “What the fuck? Those things were better than a reach-around! Right?!”
Grant laughed at his friend, who drank noisily from his lowball, and Karen did her best to smile, but she suddenly didn’t feel like getting high anymore.
“Smoke?” Grant said, removing the joint.
“Why do you think I followed you out here?!” he said, grinning at Grant and then at Karen, animated, as if to say: “We are about to have an incredibly great time together, aren’t you excited, isn’t this great?”
Karen tried to inhale only so much as to not call attention to the fact that she didn’t want to get high anymore, but it was strong and she felt it quickly. And then she knew she was high when suddenly, after what had seemed thirty seconds, Grant, as though he’d been there hours, said, “I gotta put round two together.”
Dan said, “Mind if we have a few more tokes?”
“Be my guests. Leave what you don’t smoke here for when I’m done.”
Dan winked and said, “Many thanks!”
As soon as the winter aluminum door shut, Karen pounced: “Did you know we were going to be here?”
“Sure did, got Grant’s email, same as everyone else. Very interesting email!”
Again, that grin, so easy and friendly, but in such an exaggerated way, it sickened her with worry. She remained stone-faced.
“I thought we were ignoring each other.”
“We were, but I wanted to get high and have none of my own.” He swigged from his drink, his green eyes slightly lidded now. “And you’re so … Damn, what’s the word I’m looking for?” She stared at him and watched the eyelids rise to reveal bright green irises completely surrounded by pinkish whites. He grinned and said, “Fetching.”
She held still, watching him. “Yes?” she said. And sh
e was no longer afraid of him. She’d calmed. She was high, but she didn’t know if she were hyperalert or simply stoned and reckless. She asked herself what time it was, then looked at her watch—6 p.m., what she’d guessed.
“You’re not going anywhere, I hope.”
“Why do you hope?”
“Because I’ve always wanted to ask you. Is it true you have perfect breasts?”
At first she started with a blink, not at his crass delivery, just surprised. But she realized what he was referring to and instinctively hid her face with one hand. “Jesus, that was ten years ago.”
“Legendary!” Dan shouted with glee.
Karen shook her head. This would never go away.
Not long after Frank and Karen had moved in, their neighbors (lesbians they didn’t socialize with much anymore) had had a welcome-to-the-neighborhood barbecue for Frank and Karen, including a mixed social set of both couple’s friends. It had started early and gone late, and Karen stumbled into a conversation by the swimming pool in which two women she didn’t know were arguing over who had the better chest. Karen said a slurry, “Puh-lease,” and removed her shirt. She held out her arms like a religious figure. After a stunned moment, one of the women said, “Win!” and walked off. Others nearby cut conversations short to regard Karen as she turned in place for all to see, the men astonished and delighted, their wives simply astonished. Frank had seen it, too, when the hush fell, people stopping mid-sentence to gawk. He hurried to cover Karen. She tried to push him away but was too drunk. Frank said a courteous thank you and mouthed “I’m sorry,” as he bundled a topless Karen through a break in the hedge and led her across their driveway to their back door.
When she woke to a painful summer Sunday morning, Karen was dismayed that it had not been a dream, but Anne had been the first to phone Karen and say that what she had done was “fucking hilarious!” And “Good for you.”
So the story had now become legend, and Karen was rumored to have the finest breasts in the city, or at least among those in their set.
“Yeah?” she said. “Well that was ten years ago and it’s a judgment call anyway.”
Dan grinned, then he stared at his drink, and she tilted her head, regarding him. He drank.
She said, “Want to make the call?”
He took his eyes off his tumbler and looked at her, his eyes alert, no longer lidded, grinning happily. “Not with other people around.”
“Where can we go?” she asked.
*
Dan had moved with sober efficiency. They’d headed up the back stairway, out of view of a dozen or so in the den watching the game, as though toward the billiard room. But instead of taking the second staircase up, he directed Karen toward what was clearly Grant and Becky’s bedroom. They went into their bathroom, remodeled into a huge bathing salon. Dan closed the door and locked it. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that was too good an offer to pass up. I’d never forgive myself.”
“Okay,” Karen said, leaning against a double vanity. She pointed at him and said, smiling. “No touching, okay?”
Dan only stared at her, his large chest heaving.
“Okay?”
He said nothing, but she lifted her dark sweater and the shirt below it over her head, let them fall to the carpet. She reached behind with both hands and unfastened her bra—delayed tensely by hands that had begun to tremble—and let that fall to her right on the shirt and sweater. He stood a yard away, staring at her chest the way a starved man stares at butter-poached shrimp and grits.
“Well?” Karen said, holding her palms out.
“Good Lord,” Dan said and, almost not of his own volition, moved toward her. Though she said, “Whoa,” once, she didn’t push away the hand that clutched one breast, then the other. His hands were calloused and scratched. The squeeze was powerful, definitive, and soon she felt his heavy lips on hers, the scratch of his whiskers and his thick tongue, the faint taste of tequila.
Karen grabbed first for his crotch, then pulled his buckle toward her. She began to undo it, but he took over and she undid her own as well. She had only one leg out of her trousers before she felt herself lifted off the ground and set roughly on the vanity between the two sinks. She didn’t even get a good look at his cock before it slipped abruptly, shockingly into her—she gasped, it felt huge—and she had the strange sense of watching this from outside herself, stoned, and yet still feeling the unfamiliar piston hitting new parts of her insides. He’d lifted both her thighs to pull her into him, her shoulders falling back so that she reached to support herself, knocking over and shoving tubes aside, a toothbrush and cup rattling into one sink. She heard herself grunting as if it were someone else. She looked at his face, his green eyes staring at her tits, which bounced with his thrusts, staring at her neatly shaved, demure bush, and his cock entering her and entering her again, thrusting harder and faster each time, until he looked up and their eyes locked and he shivered with a final thrust. She had enough traction with one hand to reach the other over her lifted left thigh and clutch his upper back to hold him in, to keep him inside her. Their eyes remained locked, their mouths agape. A few more concluding thrusts, the final spasms of an animal already dead, and it was done. He fell out of her, stumbling back, pants at his ankles, till his calves felt the divan situated by two windows, blinds closed, and he sat, leaning back. She had slid off the vanity and now stood leaning against it, naked but for her socks and the pants and underpants attached to her left ankle. She regarded him in full, his large dick already retreating, his satisfied smile, which seemed also friendly and warm. She did not return it. She walked to the toilet and sat down, pressed her knees together, put her elbows on her knees and looked at him. Then she pulled four squares of thick toilet paper from the roll and spread her legs, examined herself, and wiped, slowly, with delicate care.
“Here I thought you were a provincial little high school art teacher,” he said, beaming contentedly. “Karen. You are one helluva fuck.”
She ignored him, but stared at the toilet paper, folding it carefully.
Then she looked at him, remaining seated, and asked, “Do you have a good marriage?”
“I do.”
“Do you love your wife?”
“I do, very much.”
“Then why did you do what you just did?”
He smiled a waggish lidded smile, his electric power clearly spent. “I don’t know. I’m a baaaad man.” He watched Karen remove some more toilet paper. “The sight of your breasts,” and he grinned wide now. “Like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction!” He chuckled.
“You heard me say no touching, didn’t you?”
“You hardly resisted.”
“But you heard me, correct?”
He nodded with a cautious smirk.
Still seated, she wiped herself a third time, then, still clutching the folded toilet paper, slipped her right foot into her pants, pulled the pants up her leg, then stood and fastened them.
“More to the point is why you—” and he stopped when, rather than tossing the three tightly folded wads of paper into the toilet, Karen stuffed them into the pocket of her jeans. “Ahhh,” he said.
“I’m glad you value your marriage,” she said, fastening her bra. She bent to pick up her sweater and shirt. “Frank and I would hate for your wife and kids to find out what you just did.”
He stood, shaking his head, and pulled his jeans up, but fell back dizzily before he could fasten them.
“You didn’t have to do it,” he said.
“Yeah, I did.” Now she was completely dressed. “One hundred percent, remember?” She looked at herself in the mirror. She found a brush and brushed out her hair. She lifted the white cup and toothbrush out of the sink, put brush in cup and set it back on the rim of the sink. She surveyed the wreckage of tipped lotions and soap bottles and hair gels, but left them. She turned to Dan and said, “I value my marriage and my family, too, more than anything in the world.”
He didn’t rise when she
moved across the room to the door, unlocking it.
“You are good,” he said.
“You didn’t realize what I was doing?”
“I guess you could say I wasn’t thinking.”
“And here I thought you were so smart.”
“Not as smart as you, apparently.” She opened the door. He smiled a lidded, mischievous smile and said, “Hope it was worth it.”
She stared at him without malice and said, “You’ll make sure of that, yes?”
His smile conveyed a hint of admiration, but he said nothing. Karen departed, closing the door behind her.
*
Karen took the back steps, went to the closet for her coat and Frank’s. And there she smelled it again. The canvas Carhartt work coat Dan had worn to their house just the week before. It filled the closet with the smell of cedar and sawdust and machinery oil, a smell on which it all hooked in her mind.
She went to the den where ten people were spread out on couch and floor. Empty plates were stacked on the chest that served as a coffee table. Frank was stretched out on his side on the carpet, propped on one elbow, staring at the game.
“Frank, I’m not feeling good—would you mind driving me home?”
He quickly stood, as did Becky, who asked, “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” she said, “Just a little lightheaded. I need to rest.”
Grant entered from the kitchen and scanned the room, perhaps looking for Dan, then to Karen said, “Leaving? I’ve got more food coming.”
“Yes, I’m sorry, I don’t feel good.”
They said quick good-byes and departed. Karen handed Frank the car keys as they descended the front walk. “You mind driving?” she asked.
*
After an hour wide awake in the dark, the cottage silent but for Frank’s soft snoring, Karen left the bed and took a Valium she still had from the ones her father’s doctor prescribed in January. She hadn’t needed them in several months, but tonight her mind hummed. She went quietly downstairs.
Fuck it, she thought. She found Frank’s cigarettes. She looked in the fridge and, finding no open bottle of wine, poured herself a vodka. She sat on the front steps of the cottage to enjoy the first cigarette she’d smoked since she became pregnant with Nick.
In Short Measures Page 26
