The Precious One (24 page)

Ben took my hand in his and gave it a firm shake. “Friends.”

T
O PUT IT BLUNTLY,
Mr. Insley’s house was not what I’d expected, a two-story brick-front snaggletooth jutting up out of a flat yard in an otherwise tidy neighborhood, not picturesque enough to qualify as ramshackle, no bushes or flowers to soften the crumbling edges. A metal mailbox tilted drunkenly at the end of the short driveway. A cracked, empty terra-cotta planter squatted on the front stoop, and a blanched
NO SOLICITING
sign hung next to the door. Surrounding the backyard, but visible from the road, was a low chain-link fence. A chain-link fence! At a private residence! I had not known such a thing existed.

When Mr. Insley opened the front door, I fear he saw the look of dismay on my face because he said, wryly, “Welcome to my humble, but very humble, abode.” He took my hand and walked me down the worn green carpet runner that led through the house to the kitchen, saying, “I find I’m mostly indifferent to my surroundings, a side effect of living too much inside my head, I suppose. It’s only when others come over, which isn’t often, that I realize how austere my living quarters are. Besides, it’s a rental.”

While
austere
was not perhaps the word I would have chosen, since it suggested to me simplicity and spareness, and Mr. Insley’s house, what I caught a glimpse of, seemed more like dingy and cluttered, I did admire him for not caring.

“Honestly, I don’t care that much about my own room, either,” I told him. “It’s just a place to sleep and do homework.”

It was true. I had never felt especially attached to the room; I’d surely never considered it an extension of my personality. It was fairly austere, now that I thought about it. That it happened to be also quite lovely was all my mother’s doing. The room was planted in the middle of rather a lot of grandeur, but that was more accident than anything else. My father had told me that when he bought the house, he’d simply snapped up the first one that came along that had a place for my mother’s studio; the fact of its fanciness was purely incidental. Still, I didn’t mention the grandeur to Mr. Insley.

I thought perhaps we were stopping in the kitchen, which was bright compared to the rest of the house, but, instead, Mr. Insley opened the back door and we went out onto a small wooden deck. To my relief, the yard was nicer than the house. There was a black metal mesh table and chairs on the deck, some blue ceramic pots of yellow mums, and out in the yard, two more chairs, a low wooden bench, and a copper fire pit full of new logs. Most of the yard was taken up by the shed he had told me about, which wasn’t so much a building as a sort of arched, metal tunnel, like a very rickety covered bridge, open at both ends. Inside the shed, it was dark, but I could see the outlines of what I knew must be the boat Mr. Insley was building.

“This is nice,” I said.

Mr. Insley’s face in the watery sunlight was lean and fair, his eyes the same color as the sky. His hair looked smooth, like he had just brushed it, and I liked the idea of his getting ready for me to arrive. Then, a cloud covered the sun, and I shivered. I wore running clothes, black tights, and a fitted red Gore-Tex jacket, exceedingly unromantic clothing, but I hadn’t had the energy to come up with a pretext for being
dropped off near Mr. Insley’s neighborhood. I wasn’t even sure where I would have had someone drop me, since, apart from a gas station and a supermarket, there didn’t seem to be much around his neighborhood except more neighborhoods. Mr. Insley lived just five miles from my house, but right at the place where both the country and the city gave way to suburb.

“Are you cold, my dear? Let me light the fire, and then, I’ll get you something to put on.”

It seemed that we would be staying outside for now, which was a relief to me, despite the chilly air. It seemed also that Mr. Insley was not, at least immediately, going to reprise the rush of physical passion that had thrown me so off balance, literally and figuratively, the last time I’d seen him, and this was also a relief. Still, while he was inside the house, I had the mad impulse to just run away, but how would I face him Monday morning? Of course, the deeper question was: If all I wanted to do was run away, then why had I come in the first place? But I put that one aside to think about later.

When Mr. Insley came out with a loaded tea tray and a hefty brown sweater, I thought,
Maybe this is going to be okay
. Yes, I was completely inexperienced, but I had to think that a rose-sprigged tea set and a plate of petits fours were incompatible with unfettered lust. I pulled the sweater over my head. Even through my layers of running wear, it itched.

We sat in the chairs near the fire, with the tea tray on the wooden bench before us. Mr. Insley talked about his hero Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Rossetti’s muse, a woman named Elizabeth Siddal, which led to a general contemplation of muses and of how being the inspiration for great art was just as important as making great art yourself. I was just so glad to hear him talk the way he had in the old days, the days before he put his finger in my mouth (I had begun to view this as a dividing point, like the birth of Christ: BF and AF) that I didn’t pay that much attention to what he was saying. In the moments when I tuned in, I found myself vaguely disagreeing with him, but I didn’t care
enough to argue, and I didn’t want to rock the boat, especially when it was drifting upon such flat and translucent waters. We sipped our tea; I smiled; Mr. Insley looked dashing and fiery-eyed, as he always did when he discussed the Pre-Raphaelites; and from time to time, he got up to poke the fire in the fire pit. It was so easy to love him right then, to feel dazzled and proud to be with him and only a little nervous.

But the mood of the day shifted before I even realized it, and those petits fours—white with tiny rosebuds like the tea set—turned out to be not so innocuous after all. Mr. Insley had been being so careful, circling me so tentatively, that I was lulled into relaxing and failed to notice when the circles began to get smaller.

Then, he broke off in the middle of a sentence having something to do with Elizabeth Siddal’s long, white, inspiring neck, and said, in an alarmingly low and husky voice, “Willow, my girl, you haven’t tried a petit four.” Before I could say that I didn’t want one (I loathed fondant, although I would not have told him that for all the world), he had picked one up, bitten it in half, and then, licking his upper lip, stretched his hand out in the direction of my face. At first, I thought he merely wanted me to see the inside of the petit four, and then as his hand went lower, I thought perhaps he wanted me to smell it, and I thought,
Oh, I hope it doesn’t have marzipan. I loathe the smell of marzipan,
and all this happened so fast that before I knew it, he had pressed the cake to my lips.

He was feeding me. Feeding me! Like a mother might feed a child, except the look in his eyes was not maternal. Not at all. Automatically, I opened my mouth. And after I had closed my lips around the thing, Mr. Insley rested his finger against them for one second, two, three, rising from his seat, moving to kneel in front of my chair, his finger on my mouth like it was stapled there, and then his face got close, closer, and he moved the finger away, and was kissing me. His mouth wasn’t rough. It was as soft as a butterfly, covering mine with flutters and tiny tugs, and it wasn’t scary. But maybe it was the suddenness or because I was worried about what to do with the lump of cake on my tongue (Chew—unobtrusively? Swallow—whole?), but I found I was too distracted to
like it, and this made me sad. It was my first kiss, and I wasn’t even paying attention.

Which is maybe why, when he finished and pulled his face back, I gulped the petit four, leaned forward, and kissed him again. This time, I made sure to concentrate. This kiss lasted longer and became more complex, our mouths slightly open, clinging and unclinging, his tongue flicking around a bit. What interested me is how isolated an event it was, involving only our two mouths. There had been times in the past, mostly when we were driving, when I’d feel his eyes on me, and his mere gaze was enough to make the hairs on my neck stand on end. But now, this kiss felt dreamlike, a pleasant grappling between two sets of lips, two tongues, four rows of teeth. Mr. Insley might have been anyone. The rest of my body might have been anywhere.

When we finished, Mr. Insley smiled at me and said, “Now, you have to come look at my boat.”

As we were walking to the shed, I noticed that the grass under our feet was mostly green, but there were some places where it was dead and brown, not patches, though, as you’d expect, but lines and curves. Oh, I was an odd bird! I’d just had my first kiss—my first two, but I had decided to only count the second—and was walking hand in hand with my beloved, and I was noticing dead grass.

“What are you looking at, my love?” asked Mr. Insley.

“The grass,” I blurted out. “It seems to be dead in places.”

My psyche writhed with mortification.

Mr. Insley gave me a sidelong, quizzical glance and then looked at the grass.

“You’re right. Looks like weed killer gone amok, but I never use the stuff. A couple of my neighbors have complained about the state of my yard; perhaps this is retribution. Ah, the obsessions of the bourgeoisie!”

I did not mention the team of gardeners who showed up at my house every two weeks.

I am not really a boat person, and this boat was not really a boat,
more of a ribbed wooden husk propped up on sawhorses, but Mr. Insley’s pride in it was touching. His eyes grew misty; he ran a hand along its side, fondly. The shed was really quite horrible, cobwebby with some messily stacked firewood, a lawnmower that was evidently seldom used since it was wreathed in ratty webs, and a can of gasoline. Nearer to the boat, there were some tools lying around, along with a couple large containers of wood varnish, but even so, the boat seemed to not have been worked on in some time. There were cobwebs strung across it, dead leaves scattered around inside it, and what had every appearance of being a nest tucked into what was perhaps the stern, unless it was the bow.

Suddenly, it struck me that the boat had the distinct look of a project that would never, ever come to fruition, and here was poor Mr. Insley, loving it so dearly. I looked at him, with his doting expression, his tweed overcoat and old brown wingtips and felt that, at the center of Mr. Insley’s life, there was a great empty space. No one should live that way. Pity swelled my heart. Impulsively, I hugged him, the first embrace between us I had ever initiated. He said, “Oh!,” and hugged back.

“Isn’t it marvelous?” he said.

“Yes,” I lied. “Very.”

We stood, arms around each other, staring at the boat.

“When it’s finished,” he said, gleefully, “you and I will sail away, and the wind will send that hair of yours streaming!”

That’s when I heard what sounded like a cough or a laugh coming from just outside the fence at the other end of the shed, followed by a crackle of leaves and twigs, what could have been the sound of someone running away, someone who had been standing there. Watching us. Mr. Insley rushed over to the fence, but there was no one in sight.

“Damned neighborhood kids,” he said, returning with a reassuring smile. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Of course not,” I said, but my hands were shaking. I pulled the long sleeves of the sweater down over them so Mr. Insley wouldn’t see.

He wrapped me in his arms and then let go.

“This damn sweater,” he said, with a mischievous grin. “I can’t even feel that you’re there.”

And, in one quick motion, he took it by the bottom hem and pulled it over my head and off.

“That’s better,” he said.

He wrapped me in his arms again and then, again, let go. He patted my lower back.

“What’s this?” he asked.

My cell phone, zipped into the back pocket of my running jacket. I took it out.

“I thought you didn’t have a phone,” he said, his smile turning slightly wooden.

“Oh, I didn’t,” I said, hurriedly. “It’s new. I brought it with me so that I could ask you for your number.”

His face relaxed.

“Ah. And you must give me yours.”

I swallowed hard. The only numbers I had were Taisy’s, my home number, and Luka’s, which I got when we were doing the project. I wasn’t even sure why I had stored Luka’s number, except that it was the only other cell-phone number I had in my possession. But no one but Taisy had mine. For some reason, I didn’t want to give it to Mr. Insley, but there he was, taking out his phone. I gave him the number, and he called my phone from his, which evidently meant that his number was now on mine, imprinted, maybe irrevocably. It was strange how I felt more bound to him by this than I had by the kiss, which seemed to dissolve into the ether as soon as it ended. I understood very little about such things, but I imagined our relationship riding radio waves, bouncing off towers. I imagined satellites spreading the fact of us through the blackness of space and all over the earth. Wearily, I wondered if there were a way to undo it, an app to erase it all.

“I should go home now,” I said.

His arms went around me again.

“All right,” he said, smiling. “I’ll drive you home on one condition.”

“Oh. What’s that?”

“That you promise to come again, soon. Come in the evening, and I will make you dinner.”

“Well, that might be hard.”

He squeezed me tighter, smiled wider.

“Oh, well, then I’m afraid you’ll have to stay,” he teased. He lifted my chin with his fingers. “Now, promise.”

Neither fear nor lust nor joy coursed through me. Instead, unaccountably, I thought about the unfinished boat, the
NO SOLICITING
sign, the dark house with its threadbare floor runner. The wingtips. The fence. For God’s sake, the
fence
. I rested my hand against his cheek.

“I promise.”

I HAD HIM DROP
me off a mile from my house, and I ran home, fast, to remind myself that I was I and that all of it was mine, legs, arms, rib cage, streaming hair. I pulled the sweet fall air into my chest and let it scrub my face clean.