Whipple's Castle (38 page)

He had no answer because he had the same fears for her, and even worse ones. Now she wouldn't let him go, yet she kept herself ill at ease with him. This tension grew with each gesture; she faced him and put her hands beneath her hair and lifted it from her shoulders.

“Oh, dear.” She sighed. “How I wish the war was over and George had a good job, so he wouldn't worry.” And yet her actions didn't seem to say this. She preened before him, and seemed languorous, as though she felt some inner joy. Perhaps she didn't know how to act in any other way. She was embarrassed to be alone in this room with him, the baby asleep in its crib in the dark bedroom, yet she was afraid he might go away.

“Then we'll be back in Ohio, in a real house. I try to keep this place clean, but I told George it's just like scrubbing a cardboard box. The more you scrub, the more it sort of peels off. The paint, that Beaverboard, the wallpaper—it all sort of gets spongy and peels off.” She looked at him, worried that he didn't speak, and he saw her eyes. Their eyes held for the smallest moment, then shied off, full of knowledge they could not decipher. Outside, the dark orange of the sunset faded from the railings, and the room grew dim.

“Don't go yet, Wood,” she said. “Georgie'll sleep for another hour or more. I don't know why, but this is the worst time.” She opened two more bottles of beer and turned on the bridge lamp beside the sofa. “Sit here. It's more comfortable. George said you never get to sit in soft chairs. Come and sit here.”

He sat deep into the sofa, which breathed its musty, used smell around him. Lenore brought him an ashtray and his beer. “There,” she said. “Isn't that more comfortable?” Suddenly she looked unhappy, and her thin hands came together as though she were praying. “Oh, I suppose you want to go do something more interesting than keep me company. I don't blame you. I guess I'm not very entertaining, am I.”

“I'll stay with you if you want,” he said. “I'd just go drink beer somewhere else.”

She still looked sad. “It's just to have somebody to talk to. Just being lonely is all. I suppose it must seem funny to you, but you know we're not used to having friends. We never really had any. Hardly anybody ever came to our house, and then they didn't ever seem to stay very long. I guess we sort of bored people.” She arranged a kitchen chair for their glasses and the ashtray, then sat down on the sofa herself. The sofa moved, and breathed out its history of use. Her perfume, or powder, or whatever it was, moved around him, and beneath it another odor, her deeper one, he supposed, a pleasant warmth with hints of…what? Calluses, shaving soap, skin—alive and nervous.

She was telling him about her family. She was a farm girl. Her father was killed by a Fordson tractor when she was seventeen…

He no longer listened to her words. He watched her. Her little voice with its hesitations and certainties was part of what he perceived of her, yet he no longer followed any strand of meaning. She was forgetting herself, part of herself, and grew calm and even happy. She smiled often, and occasionally laughed, red lips quivering over the bright teeth, her eyes unself-consciously meeting his. It all seemed familiar, and with a small shock he identified the painted lips. How different she was, really, from the girl in his recurring dream. Her dress had moved above her knees, and the round of beginning thigh hovered like a sharp light, though it was soft and dim—a light he hardly dared to glance upon. He was alone with this woman, in a far country hardly less foreign than the violent world of his dreams. Should he object to such a fantasy, or not? He was still here, this was no dream, and he was in control. She had asked him to stay and listen, and he would pretend to listen. In the dream she raised her dress to reveal a darkness he had never actually experienced awake. There was the connection, like warm water in the dark, and the flash, but the actual mechanics remained vague, always separated from the diagrams in books—that kind of knowledge. She was here, complete, and so was he. He had grown enormous, and he held his arm on his lap to shield it from her. She mustn't see that opinion, how it had crudely overtaken him. If she saw it, everything he really meant to feel towards her would be wiped out, and that engorged imperative would define her, though it was not really him.

She had asked him a question, and her words came slowly back, as though they had remained in the air where he could read them.

“How old are you, Wood?”

“Eighteen.”

“Is that all? Really? My goodness, I thought you were older than that!” She laughed. “Eighteen! You know how old I am, Wood? Twenty-three!”

Suddenly she was looking at him differently. Her voice had changed too. It took on the confidence of those years, and was deeper, more knowing—a voice that might even presume to advise. “Eighteen,” she said. “I thought you were at least my age. You seem to be more—experienced, in a way. I don't know.”

“Well, I'm not,” he said. “I'm just a kid.”

“I thought maybe you'd even been married or something. Really. Isn't that strange. Eighteen.” She looked at him searchingly, as if to find evidence of his absurd youth.

“Nope,” he said.

“And you have to go fight in the war.” Her face darkened and her hand moved toward him, quickly, really, but with each smooth inch of its light thrust documented in his mind. Her hand rested on his arm, light but firm, on the arm that shielded him. Each of her fingers seemed to go deep into his arm, deep as the heavy nonfeeling of a needle. She pressed his arm down upon that evidence with what seemed to be concern, and at that moment he came to believe that she was aware of it. She knew all about it, he was certain; but he was not quite certain. He was not certain, but whatever she said or did now was changed. She rose to look in on Georgie, and then turned back toward him, her eyes gleaming in the lamplight.

“He's sound asleep,” she said, and he seemed to look into her mind, where his rigid tuberant sex had printed itself. She knew what it wanted, else why had it grown? But she might not even be aware of it. His intelligence, what little he could still command, seemed rooted down there. He could not command that center; it disobeyed all orders, and pulsed against the taut cloth. Tiny diamonds and triangles of light shimmered at the periphery of the room. She stood for a moment, her thin hips tilted, her dark hair falling along her cheek. With a little-girl strut, somehow an imitation, she came back and sat beside him again. She pulled her legs up beneath her, aware or not aware. The dusky hairs on her forearm were golden-tipped.

“But you must have a girl at home, Wood. Haven't you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you planning to get married someday?”

“I'm not sure,” he said.

“Oh, you'll get married. George and I've been married three years. George's family wondered whether something was wrong because I didn't get pregnant, but there was nothing wrong, we just wanted to wait awhile. Actually we wanted to wait even longer but one time George ran out of those things, and the drugstore was closed, and so we had Georgie. That was all right, because we wanted Georgie and all, but now George keeps those things all over the place.”

She laughed, and touched his arm. “But don't worry, Wood, you'll get married. A man has to live with a woman, and a woman has to live with a man. It's not natural to live alone. It's awful to be alone. I think it's very wrong—I mean even for a little while.”

She looked at him seriously, wisely.

“Well, I've managed,” he said.

“But isn't it hard? How can you stand it?”

“I guess because I never…” His voice trembled slightly as the word, whatever it was, or ought to have been, didn't come. “I guess because I never began,” he said. “I mean I've never been married.”

She looked at him wonderingly, no longer shy. “I know you've never been married, but you mean you've never slept with a girl?”

“Not really,” he said.

“But surely you could have, Wood.”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“I mean, didn't you want to?”

“Yes, in one way.”

“What way didn't you?” She seemed nothing but curious.

“I didn't want to get the girl all…involved. It was because of the girl…”

“Oh,” she said. Her hand rested lightly on his arm again, as if to detain him while she thought. “But it isn't really that important, in that way, is it? I mean it doesn't mean the end of the world, Wood. Two people are alive and warm, and it doesn't hurt anybody.”

He groaned at his knowledge. Like a snake, it had pushed against the cloth, as if it owned him.

“It's just that I think,” she said in a low voice. “I think if it ever wasn't. I mean, if I asked, and it wouldn't…”

“What?” he asked. His heels trembled lightly on the rug.

“I mean if I asked someone, and they didn't. Would you? Wouldn't you?”

She leaned toward him, on her knees, her black hair floating over his face. He breathed her, and his blood seemed to thicken in his lips; all his senses diffused in her warmth. All was moisture, the taste of water, and that gentle merging seemed to prove her right of insistence. When she was sure of him she touched the monstrous part of him, shyly, for reassurance, as if a small bird had landed and quickly flown. She removed herself and drew the curtains across the door, then turned out the light. She could be heard stepping out of her clothes—the slippery tick of silk.

“Take off all your clothes,” she whispered from the dark.

“I didn't come here to…” he said.

“Won't you?”

He wondered why Stefan did not seem to be hurt at all, why he wasn't there at all. “Yes,” he said, and she was there, helping to make him naked.

She was of a smoothness he could hardly believe, like eels, silken, like cool water. He could, was allowed, was welcomed against her smoothness. With shy delicacy she moved beneath him, he amazed that the hugeness of him could be so welcomed into her slender body. She sighed and pulled him into her, giving little warbles and mews of pleasure.

She stiffened, suddenly. “Oh, wait, Wood! We forgot!”

But it was too late. From the waist down he melted, as though his hips and thighs had turned to liquid and gallons of him poured upward into her.

After a moment he pulled away, exhausted, empty, full of remorse.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “We forgot to use a rubber thing. And you came so quick. My goodness!”

He moved off her and sat on the couch, his feet on the floor. She knelt beside him and put her arms around him. “Don't worry, darling,” she said. “Dearest, my darling.” The words seemed out of a foreign language. They meant betrayal of her husband, whom she seemed to have forgotten entirely. “Oh, my big man,” she said with a kind of innocent, uncomplicated joy.

Miraculously his sadness began to change, then was gone. He turned, seeming to fall lightly until they were in that position again. So easily. “Oh, oh, that's right,” she cried softly. “This time it'll be so much better, darling!”

When she next fed Georgie he waited, a madman staring at the remains of a family, this bit of destruction he had caused. He lay naked, waiting for her.

At dawn, after sleep, she said she was actually a little sore. The baby was quiet, and he took her again. Afterwards in the dismal light she held him in her thin arms and told him she loved him so much she was crazy, that she would do anything for him, anything in the world. She called him by so many names of endearment he had to stop listening, saying to himself that he must never come back to this place, never.

But during the next week, leaning against his pack in the dust during ten-minute breaks, he felt her warble of pleasure in his ears, like a voice from childhood—from somewhere when touch was more important than breath. As soon as he could get a pass his feet carried him back, up the leaning wooden stairs, where she greeted him with smiles and kisses.

The summer lost its breath, and the maple leaves grew enormous about the house, so that only the four towers rose above the leaves for a view of the undulant green cloud that Leah had become. In only two months all the gray bones had fleshed out in green and darker green. Kate stood at her tower window and gazed across the soft town. From below the strata of leaves came the scything whirr of the lawn mower, a dry sound muted now by the rich grass. A hungry sound, as though those teeth were famished for all the moist green, and no matter how long they cut the swathes they were still bright and eager. She could almost see them down deep in there, Horace grimly leaning them forward, the steel blades coated by the mint-green blood of the dark grass. The heavy air was furry, velvety with the smells of summer, and from an eave paper wasps shot like bullets, out and away. Those coming in suddenly appeared, stopped, as though they had hit an invisible target, then turned to prove they were alive and had an intense purpose. They knew exactly what to do, and she was full of respect for their authority and knowledge. The summer was thick, night and day, with such insistent business. The robins' stiff ceremonies were only jaunty and impertinent until you saw the cold knowing eye, and the colder green eyes of Tom the cat, watching from the top step.

Wood was away, and they all felt incomplete. With her it was a slight breathlessness, as if she were about to call to someone who wasn't there. Wood had always been there, or at least somewhere not too far. He was part of them, almost as if with all their arguing and fighting and independence they were one, really. One organism, and you couldn't take a part away. Someone else had said that. Was it Peggy? But Peggy missed Wood so much, with such tender nervousness. She said she was writing him a letter, but she seemed to be having a hard time of it. She had a funny little habit of biting her lower lip when she sat down to write, as if that helped force the words off the end of her pen, or forced her hand to write, and her dark little face squinched down upon the task. Right now she was in her room, writing to Wood, but could she say what she wanted to say? Wood was Peggy's hero. Once she had said, in a sudden outburst, that Wood was the best person in the world.