White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,30

and walked around looking for him. She went down one path then another. The place stretched out in all directions, shacks and cardboard houses as far as you could see. She was ashamed she didn’t even know his last name. One day, she thought she saw him on the road. She stopped the truck, rolled down the window and shouted, “Dumela, rra!” A stranger turned his face to hers, and that’s when she stopped her search. He’d come back, or he wouldn’t.

Gradually, the mud subsided. The orioles and their sweet song disappeared.

12

Lawrence left for a ten-day work-related trip, and Alice returned home. That same night, between ten and eleven o’clock, she walked up the driveway of a house she’d promised herself never to enter again. She couldn’t have explained to herself or anyone else what she was doing, or why. All she knew was that Hasse had sought her out at work and asked her. Yes, she’d said, thinking of Beethoven. Yes.

Erika was also out of town, maybe with Lawrence. She didn’t know and she didn’t want to know. Hasse and Erika’s wolf children were in bed. Hasse was in the bath when she arrived. He asked her to come in, as Lillian had. She wasn’t in the habit of watching people bathe. It felt like something better done in private, but Alice stood in the door watching his beautiful Swedish cock floating pink and innocent just below the surface of the water. His glasses were on, gently steaming.

She slipped off her shoes at the doorway. In her Cincinnati mind, she was only there to talk about the situation. In her un-Ohio mind, she knew what she was doing and what would happen. He got out of the bath and dried off. He wrapped the towel around his waist. The towel was pure white. They padded into the kitchen together, where he took two glasses and a whiskey bottle down from a shelf. He opened the refrigerator and took out a floppy plastic packet of milk, snipped off a corner, and poured the contents into a jug. “I have an ulcer,” he said. “I drink my whiskey with milk. Do you want to try it?”

She nodded. Deep laughter lines played at the edge of his eyes. He must have been at least ten years older than Erika.

“Egg in yours?”

She laughed. “No.”

He held her shoulders and looked into her face. “You are quite beautiful,” he said. He ran the back of his finger down her cheek and over her lips, moving her hair back with the palm of his hand. He looked at her fondly, paternally. The tips of his ears were rosy from the bath. He smelled of soap. He poured whiskey into both glasses, more in his than hers, then filled them up with milk.

“Skål!” he said, clicking her glass.

“Skål!” she said back. It occurred to her that what she was doing was wrong, but it was a passing thought, unimportant.

“Come,” he said, taking her hand and leading her to the bedroom. He put his hand on her shoulder at the threshold of the room. “You want this, don’t you?”

She nodded, a lump in her throat like loss.

They set the drinks down on the bedside table. He undressed her slowly, appreciatively. She took off his glasses and unwrapped the towel from his waist. His cock, so indolent and pink in the bath, had woken. They climbed into bed. Somewhere, a dog was barking. A small light shone in the room, on his side of the bed. His body was square and firm, his back broad. His touch on her skin was light, as though he cared for her. There was a blue vein in the middle of his forehead under the thatch of hair. The thought came to her, I don’t know this man.

He asked her which way she liked things. She didn’t know what he was asking. His English was perfect, but his thinking was Swedish. His hand grazed her thigh, indicating that he’d like her on top. She felt young, self-conscious, lacking prowess.

He felt it and said in her ear, “It’s all right, you can do whatever you like.”

She loved him then. And what she did came from her heart, all of it, for those moments.

But it was over. And after the strokings and murmurings, they sat up with their backs to the wall and drank the whiskey and milk. He searched for his glasses, and she put them back on him. He looked like the conductor