T. Boyle - San Miguel

She’d heard it said that people could get used to anything, like the Arctic explorers who had to butcher their dogs just to keep from starving and then wear their coats around as if the animals who’d inhabited them had never been their companions and confidants, or the prisoners in solitary confinement who made do with a rat or roach for company — or even Robinson Crusoe, who got so inured to his island he didn’t want to leave it — but to her way of thinking adaptability was a curse. She sank into the usual and the usual had nothing to do with her life. The evenings were hardest. During the day she was so busy with the chores she hardly had time to think and when she wasn’t cleaning up after one meal and preparing the next she made time to get out and away from the house, tramping the dunes and ridges of the island till she became as strong and fit as an Alpinist and her mind ran free. (If she saw a lamb that had been abandoned she left it where it lay bleating and if Jimmie or her stepfather came across it, they butchered it and ate spring lamb and she didn’t think twice about it. She wasn’t a sentimentalist, not anymore.) But in the evenings, after the meal had been served and the dishes washed, the emptiness overwhelmed her.

She made a fourth for whist most nights, glad for the distraction, and more often than not chose Jimmie as her partner (“Excellent choice,” her stepfather would say, always in his best humor at the card table, “pitting the young folks against the old once again, isn’t that right, Adolph? And who do you think’ll win this time?”). Jimmie wasn’t much use as a player, though — he was too busy gaping at her or gazing off across the room as if he’d been hypnotized and he never gave a thought to protecting his cards so that her stepfather always seemed to know what suit Jimmie was going to bid before he did himself. Still, once in a while they did win a hand, and on rare occasions a game or two, and when they did she couldn’t help taking satisfaction in the way her stepfather’s face froze up with disappointment. There was the Ouija board too, but without her mother there to guide them, the messages seemed bland and obvious (Spirits abide; Sheep money; Treasure comes horizon ) and though they were all eager to hear from the beyond, her mother’s spirit never entered the room. The men didn’t much care for the game in any case and after two or three attempts, she put the board away and never retrieved it again.

But God in heaven was she bored! She took up with Jimmie where they’d left off — she the mistress, he the slave — but it wasn’t the same. She’d seen what life was now, Ida exiled, her mother dead, her stepfather set in place to rule over her and all her prospects rubbed off the board as if her own life were a game she’d already lost, and their play-acting seemed to take on an intensity she hadn’t felt before. Jimmie had changed. He wasn’t content to be her foil, not the way he once was. He was stronger, more sure of himself, and he understood perfectly well that her pool of companions had drawn down to one. “I’m the ram,” he said, giving her a look. “And what does that make me,” she said in return, “the ewe?” His eyes jumped away and then came back to her again. “Yes,” he said, drawing out the single syllable as if this were a philosophical proposition he was mulling over at length, “that’s right. That’s it exactly.” She was bored. He was bored too. And when her stepfather tried to discourage them from spending time together, from hiking, beachcombing, swimming — anything out of his sight and control — they came together all the more determinedly.

It began almost at once, in the very first week. Jimmie was in the kitchen, helping her put things in order — she had him up on the stepladder driving nails into the high beam so that she could hang things there and get them out of the way — and she’d just handed him the cast-iron stewpot when he sprang down off the top step, laughing aloud in a sudden excess of spirits, took her in his arms and danced her across the room to a madcap rhythm all his own. The first few steps were awkward, almost as if they were grappling, but she let herself go and followed him and they went round the room two times, three, both of them laughing now. Everything had been grim — everything was grim — and here was this burst of exhilaration to take her by surprise. She was alive after all, giddy suddenly. And when she pushed him away — pushed hard, as if they were children roughhousing on the playground — and then pulled him to her so that they were breast to breast and their faces inches apart, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to kiss him. On the lips. And this was a different sort of kiss altogether, qualitatively different, nothing at all like when he kissed her hand like a courtier or she’d made him press his lips to her feet, her ankles, her calves and thighs — this was mutual, a partnership, ram and ewe, and she could feel the heat of him burning and burning as if she’d gone right inside of him to live there like Jonah in the belly of the whale.

After that, they began meeting whenever they could, when her stepfather was out riding with Adolph or when he’d sent Jimmie into the fields on one pretext or another and she sneaked away to meet him there. At first, they explored each other through their clothes, fumbling and inexact, stroking and squeezing and feeling what each had to offer, and then she wanted to see him — see what it was, the male organ — and she made him strip naked before her. It was in February, three weeks after she’d arrived, and conditions were hardly ideal. The ground was wet, the day steely and brisk, with a low cloud cover and a wind that sang through the chaparral. They’d found a protected place, deep in one of the ravines, where the rocks hemmed them in and the bushes that had escaped the sheep had begun to flower and sweeten the air. “I want you to remove your clothes,” she said, “ all your clothes.”

He dropped his jacket on the ground, making a sort of bed of it, and he pulled his shirt up over his head, eager, grinning at her, his eyes focused and daring. Off came his boots, then his trousers, so that he was standing there in his union suit and stocking feet. “Everything? Even my socks?”

“Go on,” she said, and her eyes were fixed on his. “No malingering. What are you waiting for?”

He reached behind him for the buttons, his arms elbowing out, then pulled the garment down to his waist so that she saw the black tangled hair at his nipples and his navel — a sort of Christ’s cross of it there — and then he was bent over, stripping the fabric from his groin and legs as if it were a second skin. When he rose back up to stand before her in a confusion of limbs and a torso bleached white as flour where the sun had never touched it, there it was, the male organ, standing out rigidly from the dark nest of his groin as if it were an arrow that had been shot into him and stuck there, wooden and hard. But it wasn’t hard. Or it was, but it was soft too. She took it in her hands, chafed it, squeezed, rubbed, slid her fingers beneath it, at the root, thinking of Ida. This was what Ida had taken inside her, this quivering veiny blood-engorged thing that was like an animal itself — that had been how the baby came to grow there, and even then, even with Jimmie standing before her and moving to her touch with his mouth hanging slack and his eyes pressed shut, she refused to admit or even consider who had been the second party involved, though she knew, she knew .

But Jimmie, Jimmie was her plaything. He was no ram, he was only Jimmie — Jimmie with a whole new set of needs and weaknesses — and she’d been fooling herself to think their relationship had changed. He did whatever she said. Did it gladly, beseechingly, abjectly, no humiliation he wouldn’t endure for her sake. As the weeks fell away she became expert in manipulating him till the white fluid came spurting out of him and very gradually she allowed him favors too, though she would expose only one part of herself at a time and never removed her dress or underthings no matter how furiously he stroked or how deeply he kissed her or how much he begged. She was curious. Of course she was. And he satisfied her curiosity — and more: the touch of him made her blood race, though she wouldn’t admit it, not even to herself — but this wasn’t a pact and it wasn’t reciprocal and she was the mistress, always, and he was the slave.