Chris Adrian - The Great Night

He was celibate but not asexual. He didn’t get out much and had not, since college, met anyone who sustained his interest enough to date. If his literary imagination had been as active as his sexual imagination, he would have written a dozen novels by the time he was thirty, instead of just one little book of short stories. And yet it took a long time for Carolina to work herself into his solitary sex life. Again, he thought it must be the tree, because for a while she was the tree: he couldn’t think of one without the other, and he wasn’t one of those arborists who had sexual thoughts about trees, though he knew those men and women existed, people who discovered in preadolescence that it felt nice to sit on a tree branch and move your hips just so and then never recovered from the pleasure.

When she did make an appearance, it was a bit of a shock. He was fully immersed in Pirate’s Passion , having adopted the role of the cabin boy, and was thrusting away when he opened his dreaming eyes and saw Carolina’s face under him. They were at sea: there wasn’t a tree in sight. She smiled at him, a carefree smile of the sort he had never seen on her actual face. He had stopped his vigorous pirate thrusting in the fantasy, and stopped stroking his cock in the real world, but he came anyway, a small but debilitating ejaculation that actually made him groan. He sat there with cum on his face, feeling immensely embarrassed. A neighbor across the courtyard gave him two thumbs-up.

By that time, he and Carolina had gotten to know each other fairly well. He was making visits to the garden two and three times a week. For the first week she had only watched him from the multiple doorways and windows that faced on the courtyard, but then one afternoon he turned around to find her standing behind him with a cup of water.

“Hi,” she said. She hurried away as soon as he had taken the cup, but in the following days she brought other cups, filled with water, then tea, then blended juices and complicated smoothies that he could see her at work on through the kitchen window. The last time she brought him one of those, she had bits of fruit in her hair, and she stayed and talked to him while he drank it. The day after that, she brought out two bottles of beer and sat down with her back against the tree as soon as he had taken one. She patted a space to her left, between two roots. Will sat down, not too close, suddenly aware of how sweaty and smelly he was.

“How’s it coming?” she asked, though it wasn’t really necessary to ask. She could have just looked around to see how things were different. The tristania and the pear tree had been neatened up considerably, and the laurel was starting to recover from its blight. He had planted, here and there, in the places he had cleared, a new fern pine and a mayten and a bottlebrush that stretched over the pond. He had learned not to consult with her about any of it, because the first few times he had asked for her opinion about something she had shrugged her shoulders and said, “Do what you want. I trust you.”

“Pretty good,” Will said, “except for Mr. Peepers there.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the oak, which was a bit neater-looking but not really any healthier. He had pruned it, marveling at the bright silver sap, and patched up a crack in the north side of the trunk, but none of the pastes he’d applied seemed to make any difference in the progression of its disease. The silver leaves were still turning brown and green, and even the leaves that retained their color were getting the rubbery quality that felt so ugly compared to their natural unnatural texture. “But I’m trying,” Will said. “I have a couple of ideas. I’ll do my best, anyway.”

“Funny how that’s never enough,” Carolina said, and then she startled him by dropping her head onto his shoulder. She let it fall heavily. It hurt a little, and made him think of falling coconuts. He sat very still, clutching his beer bottle, suddenly feeling like it would be a bad idea to breathe. “Ryan loved that tree so much,” she said, and went on to talk about him for half an hour, not taking her head off of Will’s shoulder even to sip her beer.

It became customary, over the next two weeks, for her to bring out the two beers and to sit next to him and to put her head on his shoulder. She didn’t only talk about Ryan, and he didn’t always talk about Sean, but the conversation always seemed to come back to them, since they touched on everything and had to do with everything, something she seemed to have come to understand without his having to write a book about it. After the incident aboard the captured HMS Pussywillow , it became a different experience for Will to sit next to her with their shoulders and hips and legs touching, aware of the way his sweat was getting on her skin. Her head was a very particular weight on his shoulder, and he turned intermittently to talk into her hair.

The tree, in the meantime, began to do a little better. Will wasn’t sure why. He had a new malathion spray, which he was putting down twice a week. And he had tried a fungicide from Davis, but that seemed actually to be killing an ironwood under his care in Laurel Heights, so he stopped using it. Still, one whole side of the tree, the one they sat against when they talked, was taking on the appearance of something like health. Will spent a number of hours walking around and around the trunk, or standing at the border of healthy and unhealthy, his hands clasped behind his head, whistling tunelessly and trying to figure out what he was missing. He had finally started to consider bringing in someone else to look at the thing, to see if someone could recognize it in person though no one had been able to recognize it in pictures, and to see what sort of ideas others might come up with since he had nearly run out of them himself. But for a while he had been feeling possessive of the oak, and of the whole garden, which by this time he had officially transformed. He didn’t want to share it, or its owner, with anyone.

One evening, just as he had started to compose in his head a letter, not of resignation but of resigned incompetence, she brought out twelve beers instead of two, six in each hand, swinging the cartons as she went.

“What’s the occasion?” Will asked as they sat down.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a nice afternoon. And everything looks pretty.”

“Yes,” Will said. “It does.” Before they had even finished the first beer, she was kissing him. He was pretty sure she had a plan, that the beers were premeditated and part of a plan they didn’t need. He had been fucking her in his head for the past six weeks, in the shower at night, at two in the morning when he couldn’t go back to sleep without whacking off, in the morning when he woke up on his belly with his boner almost jacking up his pelvis. The real thing was more awkward and he was ambivalent about it, as it proceeded, in a way that he never was when he was just pretending. He kept kissing her and smiling, running his hands up and down her back and holding on to her neck. She wasn’t smiling. In fact, she looked like she was on some sort of mission, and there was something very no-nonsense about the way she tore his sweaty shirt up over his head.

“Oh, you have a nice everything ,” she said, exploring around in his pants.

“Umm … yeah,” he said, and she finally smiled, and laughed, and it got a little less awkward. What came next came next. They both knew what to do, even Will, and it had been years since he had had sex with anyone outside of his imagination. Oh , he kept thinking, over and over, that’s what it feels like , while she sat on his lap and he pushed his hips up off the grass, sure he was about to launch her up into the tree, and when he turned her over and fucked her between the two roots. There was something about the angle they made, and the way his forehead, extended over her shoulder, pressed into the bark, and the way the tree seemed to be leaning over them, that made him feel a little like he was fucking the tree.