The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  By dark he and Bonnie were alone in the parsonage, Hadasha having found a ride to Fresno to see his mother.

  They had another beer, which seemed to make Bonnie more talkative, and he wondered if it had made her mildly drunk. He could never really believe in drunkenness in others; they always seemed to be imitating its symptoms rather than having them.

  “So what do you feel?” she said. “Like you’re a sort of explorer out here? Like you’re doing research on the natives? Because I could tell you all kinds of things. For one thing, hardly anybody’s from here—we’re all from someplace else, like you, so maybe it’s the sunshine that does it. Is that what you’re going to say in your report? But why shouldn’t we try to make it nicer here than it was back there, wherever it was?”

  Again there was an edge of resentment. When he didn’t answer quickly enough she finished her beer and went out to the kitchen to get another, still talking. “Why shouldn’t we? In a way it’s like going to heaven coming out here—at least until you find out what it’s really like. You want another beer?”

  He’d followed her, and said he would. They went back to the brown living room, its brown velvet drapes pulled against the windows. The amber wall lamps suggested an antechamber in a mortuary, the monochrome of formality and unuse. In the deliberately somber room Bonnie placed her glass on a crocheted doily, then took off her suit jacket and folded it with care. Her white blouse, frilled at the neck and wrists, took on the amber light. He felt their aloneness in the house and the danger of words. All the death that had been considered today made him feel that this was a dangerous place in which he was quick and strong.

  Bonnie looked at him and said, “Are you always thinking and not saying what you think? What are you thinking right now, for instance? I mean really thinking?”

  He thought. She leaned toward him from the davenport. He sat in one of its matching chairs, leaning forward too. “I can’t catch up with thoughts,” he said. “But I remember thinking that I felt alive. I was thinking that. You really want to know?” Danger here, a constriction because he might be about to lie, and then nothing would matter. Maybe his thoughts would be what he said, but in the choice of whatever words he might say was an area of untruth. One spoke to manipulate; there was no way to get around that, so every word had in it the lie of choice. “Bonnie, do you really think you can know what somebody else is thinking? We’re alone inside our heads, like we’re alone when we’re dead.”

  “How can you live like that?” she said. “How can you live in a world like that? What’s the reason for going on living in a world like that? It’s all selfish and hopeless!”

  In the amber light, in the brown room, she was like an ancient picture in rotogravure, a beauty of another age, time separating them as much as their ideas of the world. The handsome blond Christ over the mantel gazed over their heads, suffering serenely.

  He wanted her to come back from that distance and at least listen to him, so he said with some exasperation, “But do you actually believe Ozzie can be three places at once? Do you believe Prince Grégoire Ushant is ninety-five years old? Do you believe in prenatal astrobiology, the Healing Echelons and the Ovarian Apocalypse?”

  “I believe in belief!” she said defensively, tears glinting in her unhappy eyes.

  He felt responsible for the tears and leaned forward earnestly. “But what’s wrong with just living, as long as you can?” he said. “Why do you have to have all this mumbo jumbo in your head?”

  “Your trouble is you can’t love!” she cried. “You don’t know what love is!”

  This might be true, but she had changed the subject. Urban had said to him on the roof peak of the Church Ovarian Apocalyptic, “You can not be sure of what you think, but you can’t not be sure of what you believe.” Did that make sense to Bonnie’s way of thinking? It seemed purely backwards.

  “Tell me what love is, then,” he said.

  “If you don’t know I can’t tell you.”

  “Just because I don’t use the word all the time?”

  “Don’t you ever say what you really feel?” she asked, her words distorted by gasps of unhappiness. He thought of an umbrella suddenly going up, that sound and instant shroud, as if a black dome had appeared over her. In his guilt he went to her and put his arms around her. She moaned, partly as if in pain or frustration, but then melted against him.

  “I’m so unhappy!” she said. She kissed him hard on the lips and then turned her face away, though she still leaned into him. They were like this for a long time, while his guilty feelings were slowly overcome by love, or lust, or whatever demanded further union.

  The telephone in the hall rang and she got up, rubbing her eyes, and went to it with long graceful strides, her hips and legs too thoroughbred for him, beyond his ordinariness.

  After a while she came back and said, “That was Oval. He’s two hundred miles up the coast, in Cambria, he says. Just driving,” she said with a grimace. “Ho, ho, just driving. He’ll be back tomorrow, so don’t worry, don’t worry about a thing!”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “He’ll be back, won’t he?”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  “My mother always said he was ‘charming and irresponsible.’ ”

  “Charming? Oval?” She tried to laugh but couldn’t quite do it. “He’s not irresponsible, either. He’s just exasperating.” Her expression changed into the oblique near-squint of a certain kind of curiosity.

  “What’s she like, anyway? How could she say that?”

  “What’s she like? She’s untrustworthy, but I didn’t always know it.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “She’s small, blond and supposedly cute, or she was once. No, she’s still cute, I guess, for her age. She’s forty-two and still cute. The main thing is that she thinks she’s totally above the law. Any law of God, reason, or even of physics. I can’t really explain such a creature. She thinks she’s great, charming, generous and that she’s to be totally forgiven for any possible errors. Her promises mean nothing. Words, unless they praise her, mean nothing. She told me when I was thirteen how she cheated on Amos when she went to some kind of convention, and how great this guy was, how satisfying he was—that he reminded her of my father. I mean she is strange. Once she called me, when I was nine or so, into the bathroom where she was in the tub. She proceeded to stick her rear end into the air to show me her bleeding piles. It seemed very odd to me then and still does. Sometimes I wonder how I can be related to someone whose customs are so different from mine.”

  Those were actually his thoughts, connected instantaneously to the words he surprisingly uttered. But if your mother did this sort of thing, and you were nine, it had to seem, in a way, normal.

  “She showed you her hemorrhoids?”

  “Yeah. Maybe Amos didn’t want to look at them. Don’t ask me. They were her hemorrhoids, so I guess they were the most important hemorrhoids in the world.”

  “But you must not like her.”

  “I don’t trust her, that’s for sure. I don’t think she’s got any limits, somehow. But in her fashion, if everything goes according to her rules, she’s very generous, and always has been. She wants to make everybody happy. Figure that in.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “The word doesn’t seem to apply.”

  “It’s good she left him.”

  “God knows,” he said. He wondered why he’d told Bonnie about this, except that it had seemed an antidote to his sneaky desires, a change of subject. With it came relief from all of the implications of his cheap urges. Poor Bonnie, whose life was complicated and her own. If she let him have her she wouldn’t be her best proud self. It would be a sort of relapse, and who was he, anyway, to presume that she might want him? By her own words she wanted his father.

  “John,” she said, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it was good your family broke up when you were a little boy! I didn’t mean that!”

  What she did then he couldn�
��t at first believe because he still had some lingering faith that he knew something of the mysteries of women and their logic. Were they not somewhat rational in their urge to give? She tipped off her shoes with her toes, came to him and pulled him to the davenport’s wide lumpy cushions. They lay side by side and kissed, the weight and exotic substance of her beside him, her perfumed white skin and dark hair astoundingly offered. She held him, saying nothing, until his hands presumed too much and she said, “No, no.” But after a longer while she let his hands do what they wanted. He looked up again at the serene Christ in the Protestant room, his own secular fingers fishing for things—a garter belt, strange rig for catching eels, silken skins from pale depths where there were caverns. He knew she would wake from this unbelievable trance and stop him; his trembling would give him away. But she didn’t. Surely she would now, but she didn’t. Then, when he was about to enter her, she said in a whispery voice,

  “Not here. Let’s go upstairs and I’ll put in my diaphragm.”

  Toward morning he withdrew from her as if from a soft fist and went downstairs, his naked and responsible self, to gather up the glasses and their clothes, destroying evidence for what court? He took her clothes up to her room, where she lay in the lamplight. He reached out and touched her hip, letting his hand flow down the slim increase of her belly, ivory shading to pearl, to silk, a live, smooth thing. She turned onto her back, her knees drawn up and open, her caverns rimmed with silky fur. He eased himself into her like a thief.

  “Oh, John, John, I love you,” she murmured, her cool hands feathering his hips and back. “Yes, yes, good, yes, yes, more like that, oh, God, you fill me…” She had to speak while he was in her, having to signal with her voice all the changes. He wondered if a man had taught her to do that, or if some, or most, actually talked their way through it. He remembered clearly a fantasy from very early childhood in which women were passive, safely entranced so they could be touched everywhere and could not speak at all, so they could never object to curious little hands.

  But while her voice instructed, it didn’t complain, and over his skin flickered a near-painful ecstasy that interfered with language. Maybe her habitual chatter was part of her exotic, freaky perfection—the proving flaw that allowed this beauty to be his.

  And now her vagina ran with his semen, her perfect waist was measured by his common hands, her breasts printed by his lips. Nothing of her was not for his use and pleasure.

  “Don’t go back East,” she said. “Stay here, why not? There’s a hundred colleges around here. You can cancel your airplane ticket easy enough.”

  “And stay here?” he said, meaning the parsonage.

  “There won’t be a parsonage very much longer, or a CSW either, I’m afraid. The people here are wonderful, but no new ones seem to come in. I don’t think Oval can support it much longer. I’m sure that’s what he’s driving around thinking about.”

  “What will he do, then?”

  “I think he wants to be a farmer. Why not?” she said in exasperation.

  “He’s tried everything else in his life. I’ll tell you what he’s good at. He’s good at getting people to love him and trust him. That’s what he’s good at.”

  She sighed and slid her arms around him. “Anyway, look,” she said.

  “We could get an apartment, or rent a little house. I’ve got six thousand dollars in the bank. I’ll work and you go to school. If anybody objects we’ll say you’re my brother.”

  He got up on his knees to look at her, wondering how in the world he had the right to touch a woman of her kind. It was as if it weren’t John Hearne whose desire she once again aroused, but a whole class, or generation. She was meant to be the mother of the race, the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley. Thou are all fair, there is no spot in thee.

  She touched him and he seemed to snap taut, like a sail in a jibe. “Oh, my!” she said. “Come, come, oh, my God! Wow! Wait a minute. Slower. Easy. Eeeeasy. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! My God, I had about ten in a row. My God, you’ve got muscles. I love muscles. Feel those muscles! What an arm! What a neck! The muscles in your back, they’re like arms inside your skin! John, you’re just beautiful with your clothes off!”

  He loved her but he watched and listened, making his usual internal comments. She offered him a life, for a while—maybe she meant much more than a while. Every night in her arms, the constant luxury of her astounding beauty, but a beauty that was official, or universal, defined by some vast cultural authority he wasn’t sure he approved of. No matter, he was enthralled, insane in his tissues, spent but knowing how soon he would not be spent. He would live with her and listen to her describe her pleasures. What a simple life, no idea of a future, just flesh and passion. California as the everlasting rainless present.

  “No, stay. Stay in me,” she said. “I know a place for rent. I’ve been kind of looking in spite of myself. It’s over on San Jacinto Road, sort of a little bungalow, I know who owns it. It’s got a bedroom that could be your study, and another one for us.”

  Thinking of the life she offered made him want a cigarette; he had to pull away and look in his clothes for one. She watched him, waiting for him. “Give me one, too,” she said.

  They smoked, that grownup hiatus in which one could consider all things. She gave off energy that seemed to come from him, too, as if rays came from their nakedness and sharpened their eyes. Next to her all other women would seem like midgets, runts, culls.

  “I’ve lived without a man too long,” she said.

  A man? A strange abstraction that didn’t quite seem to apply to him.

  “Don’t you want to?” she said. “Wouldn’t it be lovely to sleep together every night?”

  “You really mean it?” he said.

  “If you want to. Do you, John?”

  He couldn’t make up his mind. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t make up his mind. The reasons for not staying here and sleeping with a goddess every night were vague yet looming. He’d told Dory he wasn’t looking for “romance.” He told her that clearly, and meant it. But why hadn’t she written?

  “But you won’t, will you?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I know I want to.”

  “Why don’t you, then? Because you promised your little girl-woman in New Hampshire you’d come back to her? Do we have here a specimen of the honorable man? Is she prettier than I am? Just because you seduced her you feel responsible, is that it? You deflowered her, you cad, so you’re going back to make an honest woman of her.”

  “Maybe, someday.”

  “Someday! The first thing you’ll do when you get back is jump in bed with her. Then she’ll get pregnant and you’ll get married. It’s the same old story. And pretty soon you’ll be fooling around with your friend’s wife, or some woman or other. I know how it goes. And meanwhile she’s got a full-time job taking care of babies. Do her a favor and don’t go back.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “You don’t believe for a minute I’m right. You think she’s pining away for your fantastic personality and your perfect body.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Oh, John. Well, you do have a perfect body.”

  “Thanks.”

  “All night I loved you more than Oval.”

  Window light was just overcoming the light of Bonnie’s table lamp when they heard Oval’s car come into the yard. He insisted on hurrying back to his room, and she seemed wryly amused by his flight.

  The light in his room grew like an accusation. Morning light fed his familiar critical demons, now with a breathtaking half-memory. He opened the drawer in the bed table and there was the card he hadn’t mailed to Dory because he was going to write her a letter instead. The forgetting of it, the false memory of having sent it along with the others—how false was it? In what way false? Because she had deserved more than that flippant message, his conscience had made him not send it. But what quality in him had made him not write the letter? He trembled with anxiety an
d shame. What she must think of him. It was intolerable and it could not be undone.

  His father drove him into Los Angeles to the airport. His night driving seemed to have cured some of his nervousness, but he looked pale and a little grimy. The wrinkles around his youthful eyes were deeper, with more minor ridges and valleys. On the Arroyo Seco Parkway he took a breath and said, “Johnny, I don’t deserve such a fine son. You were so kind to Bonnie and Thelma. And Urban, too. He thought the world of you. Did you know that? You’re a good man, no matter who raised you.”

  You’re a seaworthy ship, Jonathan. Sure. You’re a submarine.

  The plane wasn’t ready, they were told, because they were trying to fix the hot plate so they could serve hot coffee on the flight. He led his father to a bar partitioned off from the rest of the terminal building by a low fence of beaverboard, and ordered a rye and soda. His father ordered a Coke.

  Bonnie had come down to the kitchen tying her bathrobe, flashing them a pretty, pink-nippled breast. Then she kissed John and hugged him, comradely, sisterly, motherly, and hoped he and his wonderful girl in New Hampshire would be so happy.

  The rye tasted like pencil lead, the soda water like water without water’s protoplasmic necessity. His father was shy and quiet, but after a silence he said, as if he had to speak, “We’ll miss you, Johnny. You were a great help and strength to us, you know.”

  “Me?”

  “It’s been a time of trouble and sorrow, and you were there. Bonnie told me when I came in how you were so loving to her last night.”

  “Loving to her? What did she say?”

  “Why, that you made love to her. It’s all right. She loves you and wanted to give you what you wanted.”

  Christ, what he needed was Leah, dark under its hills, where men and women kept their own guilty counsel. His father said, “What’s she like, your girl in New Hampshire?”

  “Small and plain.”

  “I’m sure she’s intelligent and beautiful.”

  They were silent, Dory a powerful wraith, non-benevolent, with stricter requirements than all this amorphous love and forgiveness.