Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,15

skin, and my heart is going so fast that I’m not sure I’ll be able to remain conscious. He swings my banana bike into the back of the truck without comment, without recognition.

We get into the cab, our old positions.

‘This is hard, isn’t it?’

I nod.

‘I’ve just been moving very slowly,’ he says, pulling out onto Memorial Drive.

We head west to Route 2. He wants to go swimming at Walden Pond.

‘Loraine told me she told you.’ Loraine was the painter. ‘It’s only on paper, Casey. It’s not like . . . I’ve had other girlfriends and she’s had . . . other men. For all intents and purposes—’

‘Do you have a girlfriend now?’

‘No.’ He shifts into fourth too early and the truck shakes and he shifts back down. ‘Not really.’

The whole drive to Concord I want to get out of the car, but when we park and stand on the hot tar I just want to get back in. There’s an ice-cream truck rumbling in the lot and a cluster of kids with their heads slanted up to the sliding window. Their bodies are bouncing, their bathing suit butts drooping from the water and the sand. We step into a shady stand of pines and I nearly crash into Henry Thoreau. He’s in bronze, a diminutive man, the size of a twelve-year-old boy. Behind him is a replica of his cabin. The door is open. I step up into it.

It’s just one small room with an army cot to the right covered with a gray wool blanket and a sloped desk to the left, painted green. On the far wall is a brick hearth and a potbellied stove in front of it. All I can feel is the effort of reproduction. Nothing of Thoreau is here.

Luke takes my hand and tugs me to sit on the bed with him. There’s a dead spider on the blanket whose legs look woven into the wool. He would like that. It would probably end up in a poem. I take pleasure in not showing it to him.

‘We always seem to end up on a cot in a cabin in the woods.’ He smiles and looks at me in the old way and I know if I lean toward him the slightest bit he will kiss me and I won’t be able to control anything after that.

I get up and step down onto the yellow pine needles.

We cross the street and join a stream of people walking down the path. Below us on the small beach, bodies swarm. Children cry.

‘It’s so crowded,’ I say.

‘It’s better than usual. Last month there was an hour wait just to get into the lot.’

Last month. He was here last month. The month he did not call me. I’m so heavy I can barely move. It takes so much effort just to follow him around the bathing beach to a trail in the woods around the pond. A wire fence runs along the water side of the path, and there are signs prohibiting people from going off the path and destroying the fragile ecosystem. But people have disobeyed, and all the small patches of sand you can see through the trees are taken so we keep walking. We find an empty little beach and crawl between the wires and down the steep embankment to it. We spread our towels a few feet apart. He gets up after a few minutes and sits on mine with me. He brushes some sand off my knee and bends his head down and puts his teeth on my kneecap like it’s an apple.

I don’t touch the pale back of his neck or the boyish bolts of his spine.

My body aches from my throat to my groin. I want him to slide his fingers into my bathing suit and make all the heaviness and misery go away. I feel like a hag in a fairy tale, waiting to be made young and supple again.

I get up and walk into the water. It’s warm and clear. I’ve never been to Walden Pond before. I read the book in high school, when I lived less than an hour from here, but I never thought of it as a place that still existed. I drop into the water and push out from the shore on my back. He stays on my towel and gets smaller and smaller in his white T-shirt. The shirt smells. I remember knowing that he smelled when I first met him. Then I stopped