Bay of Souls

3

HE MADE a racquetball date with Lara for the next day and served ace after ace. Time and again their bodies touched, so that their match was compounded for him of brief sensory impressions, each one leading him to anticipate the next: her breast against his arm, her wrist linked for a moment with his when she retrieved his racquet.

"Call it yours," she said.

"No, yours."

In the shower he was inflamed, frightened and guilty. That morning he and Kristin had enjoyed a laugh together over the paper. Some droll, forgettable bit of buffoonery in an editorial. Their shared jokes had become infrequent; it had been heartening, a good omen. But no scalding water could wash away the shimmer of Lara's touch.

"C'mon out," she said when they were showered and dressed. "Let's go."

The assumption was that it was her house they were going out to. He climbed into her Saab. On the way, he ran his palm over the leather armrest. His eyes were on the warm turns of her thigh against the seat beside him. For God's sake, he thought, for once in your life, know the difference between what it is you want and what you don't. It had not been long ago since he had been reflecting on his capacity for happiness. Of course that had all been desperation.

"What other sports do you like?" she asked him.

"I like to swim. Every summer I dive wrecks up on Lake Superior. We've been through the Virginia Giles stem to stern."

"Really. I dive as well. Have you ever been in tropical water?"

"Once. On a charter to Bonaire."

"Like it?"

He shrugged. "There are no words for it. It's sublime. But the sunken vessels are what I really like. I went through the length of a German submarine off Block Island. I'll never forget it."

"I prefer coral reefs," she said. "Too many ghosts in wrecks."

It was a clear, nearly windless day. She parked beside the barn. He followed her and watched while she unbarred the doors. It was a six-stall horse barn and two of the stalls were occupied, one by a handsome chestnut, the other by a gray. Both of the horses had plain faded blankets. They turned at her touch, the gray snapping at her fingers until she withdrew her hand. The horse's breath vaporized in the freezing barn.

"Do you tend them yourself?"

"Mainly, but there's no shortage of farm girls at school if I need help."

She took a brush from a peg and began to brush down the chestnut's coat. This time she had troubled only to throw a ski jacket over the spandex workout gear she had played in.

"I exercise them in the morning. Are you an early riser? Come on out and watch."

"In the morning I'm feeding my own small animals sugar crunchies."

"Of course," she said. She walked into the next stall and brushed down the second horse. Then she hung up the brush and led him out of the barn and over to the main house.

"Want a fire? The makings are there."

While he was crumpling pages of L'Express and gathering shavings, she said, "I'll make one in the bedroom too."

He lit the kindling. On the living room wall, over a sideboard, the senator's picture was in place. In the next room, Lara sang to herself in French, a simple, familiar tune he had heard before. Perhaps a children's song.

He brushed the wood shavings off his hands and went into the bedroom, where she stood beside the stove and put his hands under her ski jacket and pulled him against her. She closed her eyes, smiling slightly. The feel of her body took his strength away gram by gram. The tan and white column of her throat, her strong firm breasts, the curve and cleft at the warm silky seat of that spandex under his palms' caress — blindness, vertigo. Mounds of earth, vault of sky, purity, corruption, incorruption. Heaven, the grave. Flesh as violation, bliss, freedom, offal, oblivion. Bury himself in her and fly, turn her into his own will. Her hair was damp and fragrant. It was all certainly what he wanted. Had wanted for so long.

Everywhere he touched her inflamed him; he shivered in the heat. She disengaged his hands and held them at his sides; he was looking into her strange aloof smile. Then she bent his wrists behind him, like a prisoner, and stood on his feet so that she was an inch or so taller. She kissed him on the mouth. Releasing his hands, she ran hers over him, pushing her thumbs in his armpits, fondling his erection.

"My dear," he said. It was an absurd thing to say, and quite properly she laughed at him.

In bed, she laughed at him again when he asked her if she had come.

"Several times, cheri. Yes, yes really," she insisted as though he doubted her. "Only tell me this," and she giggled softly. "This wife of yours, the Chaucerian, didn't she tell you where her clit is? Because" — she led his hand to the top of her vagina and brought his fingers to the button—"because it's here. Voilà, eh?"

Michael felt a rush of humiliation for himself, for Kristin, whom he loved.

"Or maybe she doesn't know, eh? This good and faithful one. When Mr. Norman Rockwell comes in the evening to paint you, ask him to show her where it is."

"I don't like it," he said, "when you demean people I love. I don't mind your putting me down. I know I'm an idiot."

"Ah, ah," said Lara, "I've been a bad person. I've insulted virtue, eh, which I wouldn't know if it hit me in the ass. So," she said, "punish me."

He saw that she was holding a strap like a dog's collar in her hand. She had taken it from under the pillow or somewhere about the bed.

"Go ahead. Punish me."

It was an odd little instrument, the strap. It had no buckle and apparently no holes to insert a metal tongue. Lara handed him the thing and threw her head back on the bed so that her throat was rampant, her forehead bent back. She showed him the whites of her eyes and stretched her limbs out toward the four corners of the bed, turning her arms upside down at the elbow.

"I've been bad, eh. I've insulted your little half-a-virgin of a wife." She put the strap around her own throat. "Go ahead, all-American boy, punish me."

He looked at the beautifully muscled structure of her throat, its strength, its perfect skin, and twisted the strap around it.

She looked him in the eye and cursed him in a French of which he understood not a word, and he twisted the strap until she had to stop. Then he held it tight against her throat a few moments longer. Her eyes widened. All the while she held her four limbs drawn stiff toward the edges of the bed.

There were red welts in the beautiful columns of her throat when he tossed the strap aside. She touched them with her fingers.

"Like it?" she asked.

He liked it. This time he had no trouble with her clitoris and they licked each other as if they were trying to dry off, thirsty, like dogs.

They lay in silence a long time after.

"Oh, God, baby," she said.

It had got dark outside. It was dark in the room, except for the light of the fire she had made.

"Oh, God, baby is right," Michael said.

"It's late. You're late."

"Fuck late."

She sat up and slapped his shoulder.

"Oh no! Don't be a child on me now."

"No? I can't be a child on you?"

"No. Uh-uh. You go and wash and go home to dinner and Mr. Rockwell." She moved across the bed and sat beside him and took his face in her hands and kissed him. "Or I'll have to send you away and you'll never come back and that will be that. Get me?" She nudged him hard in the ribs. "Get me, pal. Eh?"

"That hurts."

"Ooh," she cooed in mock solicitude, "poor bébé. Tough shit."

He went into her bathroom, preparing for his shower. Could he have lived without what had just happened? Done without her? The answer was yes, he could have done without her fine. He might so easily, now in retrospect, have been a person of principle and never let it happen. Too late now. He stood under the force of the water. Washing, washing, washing all day long. Baptized into pleasure, he thought. Free again.

She drove him back to campus to pick up his car. All the drive home, he pictured Kristin's suspicion and anger at his being late. It was nearly eight, too late for supper with the others, too late to help Paul with his homework.

When he had parked the car, the first thing he saw was Paul's vaguely worried face at the kitchen window. It had started to snow. When he went inside to the lingering savor of the night's meal, he realized how fiercely hungry he was.

"I put a few slices of lamb in the lower section of the oven," Kristin said when she walked in. "They'll be pretty dried out."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I got involved in the Phyllis Strom committee." The academic career of Phyllis Strom had its thorny aspect as an alibi.

"Really?" Kristin asked. "How's life on the Phyllis Strom committee?"

"Never a dull moment," Michael told her.