the velvet purple of clematis burns for a day or two on the mahogany table in the front hall, in a swirl-ribbed vase of a blue as pale as her eyes. A burst of baby’s breath hovers in a water tumbler placed on the dining-room table, between the silver quail.
While she was off at aerobics, I went out into our woods to visit the boys from Lynn. Behind the barn I startled a deer; with a thrash that set my heart to thrashing he or she— a glimpse of russet flank, a flare of white tail swallowed by the foliage—bounded into the impenetrable area, thick with thorny greenbrier, this side of the Dunhams’ paddock. As I proceeded a bit farther, along a faint path my steps are wearing down the hill, I felt the heat of the creature’s great pelted body lingering in the air. Pieces of bright gray sky clambered overhead between the treetops.
Only Doreen was in the hut, reading a textbook edition, shortened and simplified for junior high students, of that twentieth-century master, John Grisham. She was a brainy girl, it occurred to me, who had put herself only for the time being on a low road. She was sizing life up, ready to experiment with it. Her stockinged feet were up on one wire chair while she sat in another, its metal grid softened by a dirty blanket folded into a pad. In the close heat of the cabin she had taken off her T-shirt and was bare-armed and bare-bellied in a white bra. My shadow, as I entered, dimmed the glimmer of the startling undergarment; her face lifted and also looked shady, smudged, a defensive sneer beclouding her lips. With an intentional gruffhess I asked her, “Where are your buddies?”
“Out, doing deals. José and Ray got themselves suits like you said to.”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Seems to. They say the people treat them more like they treated Spin and Phil. They cough up.”
“Good. Didn’t I say?”
“They look pretty silly.”
“To you.”
Our silence was not as uncomfortable as I would have predicted. With a sigh I sat on a third chair and looked out the square window, to take my eyes from the freckled breadth of her bony upper chest, the glossy rounds of her shoulders like inverted china cups, the single navel-dented crease across her lean belly. The square held an abstraction, a silent still gnashing of sharp-edged leaves and broken rock-faces and stabbing branches and scrabbly shapes of light-soaked sky. The boys had reinforced the stick walls with inch-thick plywood nailed to the vertical members so as to provide a crackless, relatively smooth inner surface for their shelter. This added privacy had imposed a cost: though bugs and prying eyes were better repelled, so was fresh air; when the door to the screened addition was closed, as it was now, an unstirring damp heat was sealed in. I liked it. I have always preferred the closed to the overexposed, the stuffy bed to the stinging shower.
I wondered if the boys had known I was coming. They watched me closer than I could ever watch them.
“So everything,” I said, “is working out. I keep looking out my window to see if Mrs. Lubbetts’ architecturally inappropriate beach house is burnt down yet.”
She took a breath, momentarily erasing the crease on her belly. “They said,” she said, “you could touch me wherever you wanted, but no penetration.”
I cleared my throat in the sticky air, anxious to avoid a misstep. “That’s very generous of them,” I allowed. “Is this instead of giving me my cut of the take? And what do you want, Doreen? Not to be touched at all, I imagine.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t mind too much,” she said, removing her feet from the wire chair and setting the Grisham in their place, marking her place by resting the bigger, unread half on the seat with the rest hanging down. “This book is awful macho and preachy.” She stood up, taller and more womanly already, her blue jeans insolently tilted on her jutting hip bones and so low-slung they bared the hem of powder-blue underpants.
I was frightened, and set my fingers on the white skin of her long waist as if testing a stovetop or iron for heat. She was cool to the touch, surprisingly, and clean-smelling. As my warming hands timidly investigated the ins and outs, the givingness of her waist, the immature firmness of her buttocks, I had no intention of removing any of her clothes; but the