T. Boyle - Riven Rock

They didn’t stop at a roadhouse, lunchroom or restaurant, but went straight up Hot Springs Road and into the hills of Montecito in a hurricane of dust and flying leaves that didn’t abate till she swung into the tree-lined drive of the villa and glided up to the garage. She killed the engine and he wondered if he should go round and open the door for her, but she didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and in the next moment they climbed separately out of the car and headed up the walk in front of the house. The place was deserted, no servants or gardeners or washerwomen, no eyes to see or ears to hear, and she took him by the hand and led him straight up to the bedroom. He knew what to do then, and as the afternoon stretched into the evening and the sun crept across the floor through the French doors flung open wide on a garden of ten-foot ferns, he used his tongue and his fingers and his hard Irish prick to extract all the pleasure from her he could, and it was like breaking for the goal with the ball tucked under his arm, like swinging for the fence, one more empty feat and nothing more. He didn’t love her. He loved Giovannella. And he thought about that and how odd it was as he thrust himself into Dolores Isringhausen with a kind of desperation he couldn’t admit and the sun moved and the woman beneath him locked her hips to his and he felt the weight slip back down again, hopeless and immovable, till it all but crushed him.

He must have fallen asleep, because when the phone rang in the next room it jolted him up off the sheets and she had to put a hand on his chest to calm him. He watched as she got up to answer it, her legs and buttocks snatching at the light, and not a sag or ripple anywhere on her. How old was she, anyway — thirty-five? Forty? He’d never asked. But he could see she’d never had any children — or if she had, it was a long time ago. He took a drink from the flask and watched a humming-bird hovering over the trumpet vine with its pink cunt-shaped flowers and listened to her whispering into the receiver. And who was that she was talking to — tomorrow’s lay?

She came back into the room in a susurrus of motion, hips rolling in an easy glide, and straddled the white hill of his knee. He waited till she’d reached over to the night table for a cigarette and held a match to it, and then he said, “So your husband — he isn’t back from the War yet, is he?”

“Who, Tom?” She twitched her hips and rubbed herself there, on his knee, and he could feel the warmth and wetness of her. “He’s never coming back — he’s having too much fun pulling the trigger on all the whores of Asiago.”

“Does he know about you? I mean, that you‘re—”

“What? Unfaithful? Is that the word you’re looking for?”

He watched her eyes for a signal, but they were as glassy and distant as ever. She merely shrugged and shifted her thighs to accommodate the angle of his knee. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess.”

“What do you think?”

What did he think? He was a little shocked, that was all, to think how loose her morals were — and her husband’s too. He wouldn’t put up with that sort of thing, not if he were over in Italy fighting the Huns or the Austrians or whoever they were. He didn’t say anything, but she was watching him, working herself against his shin now, the tight little smile, the bobbed hair, the gently swaying breasts.

“Better I should lock myself in a nunnery till the great warrior comes home?”

No. Or yes. But he’d leapt ahead of her already, and he realized he didn’t give a damn for her or her husband or what they did with their respective groins — he was thinking about that half-Italian baby in the perambulator and the pale wondering face in the crumpled-up photograph. “You mind if I ask you something?”

She gave him a look he couldn’t gauge and he felt her body tense, though she shrugged and said, “Sure, go ahead,” and let the smoke seep out of her nostrils in two ascending coils.

“I was wondering — you never had any kids, did you? Children, I mean?”

“Me?” She laughed. “Can you picture me as a mother? Come on, Eddie.”

“But how—?”

“Ah,” she said, twisting round to snub out the cigarette in the hammered brass ashtray on the night table, “I see where this is going. She had the baby, didn’t she, your little peasant girl?”

He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Yes.”

“And it’s yours?”

“Yes.”

And then she laughed again, and the laugh irritated him, made him feel that spark of anger that always seemed to go straight to his hands. “You think it’s funny?”

In answer, she collapsed on him, pinning his face to the pillow and forcing a kiss that was like a bite, and then she rolled off him and lay sprawled on her back beside him. “I do,” she said. “And it is funny, because you’re like a baby yourself, like you were just born and still kicking. Sure, give me that look, go ahead, but to answer your question, I use a Mensigna pessary, Eddie,” and she reached between her legs to show him.

And now he was shocked, and maybe a little frightened too. She held the thing up where he could see it, a black rubber tube all slick with her juices — and his. It was unholy, that’s what it was, a murder weapon, a mortal sin you could see and feel and hold in your own two hands.

“It comes in fourteen sizes,” she said, enjoying the moment and the look on his face. “The only problem is,” and she was coy now, coy and already moving into him, “you have to go to Holland to get one.”

The rains that winter seemed unusually heavy, one February storm alone dropping eight inches in a single day over the sodden town and its sandbagged saloons, lunchrooms, barbershops, corner groceries and cigar stores and converting lower State Street into a chute full of roiling mud that inundated all the first-floor shops and dwellings. The dark sucking river that rode atop the mud washed a whole flotilla of cars out to sea while the incoming waves cannonaded the harbor and drove half the boats moored there up against the shore until there was nothing left but splinters. The sky was a torn sheet, gone gray with use and flapping on the line.

O‘Kane enjoyed it, at least at first. He missed weather, real weather, the nor’easters that roared in off Boston Harbor on a blast of wind, the thunderstorms that ignited the summer sky and dropped the temperature twenty degrees in the snap of two fingers, but after he ruined a new pair of boots beyond repairing and had to drink at a Chink place in Spanishtown for a week because Menhoff’s had six inches of mud all over the floor and creeping up the legs of the chairs, he began to feel afflicted. The rain kept coming, and everyone felt the burden of it, even Mr. McCormick, who announced he’d go mad if he didn’t see some sunshine soon. It was a trial, a real trial, but the rains made the spring all the sweeter, and by March you’d never think a drop had ever fallen or would ever again.

Dolores Isringhausen went back to New York the morning after. St. Patrick’s Day (which she didn’t spend with O‘Kane), Giovannella began to soften toward him and even let him in once or twice when Guido wasn’t looking to admire the baby up close, but no kissing and no touching, and Mr. McCormick improved to the point where he was more or less rational at least fifty percent of the time — and this despite Dr. Brush’s retreat from active intervention to a strictly custodial role. Or maybe because of it. Just leave the man alone, that was O’Kane’s philosophy, and if he wanted a two-hour shower bath, let him have it. Why not? It wasn’t as if he had a train to catch.

And then it was June, and Dr. Brush, all three hundred and twenty-seven pounds of him, was called up to serve his country behind the lines with the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. He left his wife with a cousin (hers) on Anapamu Street, had a long talk with Mr. McCormick about duty and patriotism and the conduct of the War, and headed out on the train, the only member of the McCormick medical team to be called to active duty. They stationed him in England, and O‘Kane pictured him tucking away an English breakfast with two pots of tea ard then sitting around under the elms with a bunch of spooked one-legged vets and asking if their fathers had spanked them.