Colony (62 page)

“
Moi? Un cochon?
” Warrie said, wiggling his eyebrows. I reached out my arms and Grammaude put Zoot into them; he felt as light as a bag of feathers under his flamboyant coat.

He nuzzled up under my chin and closed his eyes and began to knead my arm with his huge soft paws.

“You silly cat,” I said in joy. “I love you.”

Grammaude went upstairs, shaking her head, and Warrie and I started on the dishes. I ran hot water into the pan and he scraped, and neither of us looked at the other. Something was fizzing up like ginger ale in my chest, and I thought I might laugh or cry or simply shout aloud with happiness.

Zoot sailed up onto the sink and sat immobile and imperial, regarding us with enormous bronze eyes. Then he reached a paw into the pan of water and solemnly flicked a spray of it across Warrie’s face. We both dissolved into laughter, and I threw my soapy arms around Warrie and hugged him. He stood still for a moment, and then he put his arms around me and pulled me to him so hard I felt my breasts flatten against him and felt his ribs under my fingers. He was tall; my face fit just into the hollow of his throat. I could feel a pulse hammering there, and the heat of him through his shirt.

I lifted my face up and he kissed me, a long, slow, open-mouthed kiss. It was not the kiss of a friend. It was unlike anything I had ever felt, or dreamed of feeling. I remembered only much later that I had only been kissed once, and then by Mike Willis. This was not like that.

Finally he lifted his head and looked down at me. I thought I could still see the print of my mouth on his. My heart was hammering so fast that I could feel it in my throat.

“You just aged five years,” he said huskily.

“Is that old enough?” I whispered.

“For what?” His voice was just as low. It sounded…dark.

“For anything. For everything.”

“Be careful, Darcy,” he said.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

He went home soon after that. We finished drying the dishes and attempted to be light with each other once more, and on the main did pretty well, but of course something else, this whole other thing, lay trembling in the air between us. He touched me on the cheek and started to say something and then didn’t and went out of the kitchen. I stood staring at the closed screen door, Zoot cradled purring and kneading in my arms, and then took my cat and went to bed. I even went to sleep, Zoot curled along the length of me, purring in the dark.

But I might have known I would not sleep the whole of that night, and I didn’t. I woke about two hours later, and knew without knowing how that he was outside my window; when I got up and tiptoed to it, I saw that the close velvet darkness was broken by the red tracery of his cigarette. He sat on the stone wall that separated Braebonnie’s lawn from Liberty’s, and he was so close I could smell the pungent smoke of his Player’s and almost feel the displaced air from his body.

I ran on tiptoe through the kitchen and out the back door and around the house and came up to him. He said nothing, but opened his arms, and I went into them silently in my soft T-shirt and nothing else. He held me close but loosely, tracing the line of my body from waist to thigh absently with one hand. I trembled all over as if with a chill.

“You’ll have to ask,” he said presently. “I don’t rush women. I won’t rush you.”

“I’m asking,” I said, drunk on his touch.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Then…what?”

I put my face into his chest and held on for dear life, feeling as though I were stepping off the face of the world into a bottomless abyss. Terror and wanting shook me as a huge wind would do.

“Show me…something French,” I whispered.

And he picked me up in his arms as if I had been a child and took me into Braebonnie and laid me down on the big sofa before the dead fireplace, and he did just that. And it tore and savaged me, and flamed me from my mouth to the soles of my feet, and turned my bones to jelly and my muscles to sponge and my blood to lava, and lifted me shrieking to the top of the highest hill in the world and swooped with me down into red nothingness as if a great bird had me fast in its beak. I cried and sobbed and shouted and laughed aloud; I pounded him with my fists and grasped him with my legs and ground at him with my hips, and once bit his mouth until blood ran, and when he came pouring into me and I exploded in fire and nothingness, I heard myself shouting aloud, “I am too old enough! I am!”

Presently he lay beside me, sweat drying on our bodies in the chilly wind off the bay just beyond Braebonnie, smoking one of his cigarettes. He had not spoken since we finished, but I could still remember the things he had said to me, and I to him, and I went

hot with embarrassment at the memory of them. There was no moon, and except for the light from his cigarette, when he drew on it, I could not see his face. I wondered if I had bored or disappointed him; he must have known it was my first time and I had not known what to do. Finally, in a voice that sounded, in my ears, impossibly young, I quavered, “Was I…okay? Was that right?”

He took a long drag, and then he laughed.

“Right?” he said. “
Zut alors!
”

After that I was lost.

“I will never rush you,” he said that night, afterward as he had said before. “I will never push you. Tonight shouldn’t have happened; you’re only seventeen. They probably have laws against that here. And you should have told me it was your first time. They probably have laws about that too.”

I did not reply. Could he not tell? I thought men could, somehow. There had been blood. Was there blood every time, then? And could he really think I had done that awful, glorious thing before and he couldn’t tell?

“So we won’t do it again?” I said in a small voice, not looking at him.

He laughed, and ruffled my hair. “You are a little
cochon.

I didn’t say we wouldn’t do it again. You are delicious, and I am besotted with you. But if we do, you’re going to have to ask. As I said, I don’t push.”

“Then I’m asking.”

“Not tonight. Go home and think about your sins. Oh, God, I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, for I must have looked stricken. I know I felt it. “It’s no sin when it’s that good, Darcy. God made us as we are, and I believe he meant for us to enjoy it. But enough is enough. I’ll walk you to your house. You must be

very careful going back in. Your grandmother would put you in a cage and shoot me.”

I did as he said. I knew he was right about Grammaude.

Guilt rose and flickered, but it was very faint, and it did not last. Surely, surely, she must know this glorious fire. She had, she had told me over and over, been very much in love with my grandfather, and she had been just my age when she met him. But somehow I did not think they had

done…this…until they were married.

At the stone wall he stopped.

“I’m not going to come any farther with you. If she sees you, you can just say you couldn’t sleep and went for a moonlight stroll,” he said.

I looked at him. All I could see was the white flash of his teeth and a white glint that must have been his eyes.

“Are…will you still be coming for dinner?”

“Of course. Nothing has changed. A man still has to eat.

You mustn’t act any differently, though.”

“No. But…Warrie?”

“Yes?”

“What will happen next? I mean, how will we—”

He put his arms around me and held me close and traced a line with his finger from my forehead down over my breasts and to the hem of the T-shirt. His finger felt as if it had been dipped in fire.

“If you’re serious about wanting this to happen again,” he said, “just come knock three times on my door. Any night.

I’ll hear you.”

And for the next week or so, I did just that, and we went on laughing and sparring across the dinner table, and teasing Grammaude and Zoot, and later in the dark night I crept out of Liberty and knocked at the door of Braebonnie and we did those things that he was teaching me, that set me afire and burned me to ashes over and over and yet never consumed me.

He knew a great many. I assumed they were French.

On our second night he used a condom, wryly and with distaste.

“I feel like a sixteen-year-old,” he said. “You can’t imagine what I went through getting these. I had to go all the way over to South Brooksville to the drugstore; Mrs. Sylvester almost fainted when I asked at the store. I have a feeling she thinks the Cape Rosier sheep are in great danger.”

I almost rolled off his bed laughing. I could just see it.

“Warrie, you didn’t ride your bike all the way over to South Brooksville!”

He had no car, but he had found an old Schwinn in the shed at Braebonnie and resurrected it and used it jauntily for his small errands. When I commiserated with him about the bike, he had just grinned. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Everybody rides them in France and Italy. It’s very chic. I’m actually bringing a touch of continental class to this oh-so-Yankee Cape Rosier. I wish I could find a baguette to put in the basket, though.”

“No,” he said that night. “I hitched a ride with Caleb Willis.

Told him it was an errand of mercy. And so it was. But I can’t abide these things. I know it’s ridiculous to think you could get your hands on pills up here, so I’ve called a friend in New York and there are some on the way. You must take them. They’re much safer, and they won’t hurt you.”

“All right,” I said dubiously, and when, in a few days, the little packets came in to the post office, I did take them. But I never liked doing it. It felt…contrived. Cynical, somehow.

I could no longer pretend to myself that I was being swept off my feet night after night.

One evening near the end of July, Grammaude was waiting on the sun porch for me when I came in from the yacht club.

Her face was strained and pale, and she did not smile.

“Come sit a minute, darling,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

Oh, God, she’s found out, I thought, heart beginning to pound. Somebody saw me. I sat down silently on the hassock to the big willow rocker and looked at her, small and erect on the chaise. Beside her Zoot grinned his Etruscan grin up at me and turned over on his back, his big feet sprawled in the air. I did not speak. I waited.

“I heard something today that upsets me very much,” she said finally. It was obvious that the words were costing her.

“Mrs. Winslow’s granddaughter—well, you know little Gretchen—met Warrie in New York just before she came here, at some party or other, and she told her grandmother that…that his mother had sent him over here because there was a very ugly business in Rome earlier this spring with the daughter of one of our embassy people. The child was only sixteen, and there were drugs involved, and an abortion that nearly killed her. I believe it could have been a criminal matter because of the girl’s age, but her father agreed not to press charges if Warrie…left. I think you will see we cannot have him here for dinner any more. And I cannot let you as-sociate with him in any way. I know you’re fond of him—so am I—but this is way beyond the acceptable.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said calmly, around the ringing in my ears. Ice was forming around my heart.

“Darling, I know it’s hard. I was inclined not to believe it either, at first, because he’s been so dear to us, and there’s been no evidence of anything, and it did come from the Winslows, but I had to check. You must know that. I called…I made some calls. Petie knows a good many of the embassy people in Rome through the bank, and he told me who to contact. It looks as though it’s true. I’m terribly sorry.”

“It’s a lie. Somebody’s lying. People always will, about a man that attractive,” I said numbly. “I can’t believe you’d just…take anybody’s word for it…without asking him. Go on, ask him. I dare you.”

I could hear my voice rising. I fell silent. This was not real, of course. She would talk to Warrie and he would put it all right, and the dinners would go on. My life would go on.

“I intend to,” she said, looking closely at me. “I wouldn’t take any action without doing that. But until I do, I mean what I say about your not seeing him. You must obey me on that. I would hate to send you home, but I will if I have to.”

“And just where do you think I’d see him if it wasn’t here at dinner?” I said bitterly, daring her with it. “Do you think we make mad love down at the yacht club on my lunch hour?

Or in the dark of night in his little white bed?”

And my heart gave a great lurch, for he did indeed sleep in a narrow white iron bed, with white sheets and a white cotton plissé coverlet.

But she only shook her head tiredly and said, “Of course I don’t think any such thing. I just…I want so much to keep you safe, my dear Darcy. I wasn’t able to do that with my daughter. I hoped I could with hers.”

My anger faded. Numbness flooded back in. Soon it would all be well.

“I know that, Grammaude. But Warrie wouldn’t hurt me.

Go ask him. Just do that.”

She did do it, almost immediately. I waited on the sun porch, cradling Zoot in my arms, while she went around the house and over the stile to Braebonnie. Around the great humming in my ears I heard her call, “Warrie? It’s Maude Chambliss. May I come in a moment?” and after that I heard nothing but that profound, faraway
shushing
roar that always seemed to

me to be the very music of the earth. You could hear it on Cape Rosier when the air was very calm. I sat still and waited.

Soon, now, and then a gear would slip forward and life would flow on.

She came back and her step was heavy, and I knew he had not convinced her that the story was a lie.

She stopped before me on the porch and said, “Warrie will not be coming for dinner any more. The story may or may not be true—I believe it is—but he is a danger to you. His mother has always been unstable and a danger to others, and I believe the same is true of him. It’s a terrible, terrible pity; growing up the way he did, he probably could not be otherwise. But I cannot change that. We will not speak of it again.

If you disobey me and attempt to see him I will send you back to Saint Anne’s immediately.”