John Casey - Compass Rose

So she was next. He held her shoulders, kissed the side of her neck, lifted her hair — all the preliminary attentions. When he kissed her, her mouth felt faraway. She was impressed by the way he unzipped the front of her bicycle suit and slid it down both her arms at once. When he moved his hands down her bare back and inside the suit, she clenched her buttocks. That reflex of vanity was the only bit of response her mind provided. When she’d been the girl in the red dress her thoughts had woven through her, little strands of commentary that made her shiver as much as skin on skin. Now her mind was blank. She certainly felt this and that — she felt his unpeeling the suit down her legs. She may have lifted one foot and then the other. Another set of attentions and she felt herself divided into more zones — his hands on her rear keeping her upright, his mouth ranging up and down her front, and her own breath brushing the roof of her mouth. Nothing on the screen of her mind, although she could tell that her hips were moving. And soon enough her breath was stuttering out of her, and then she was being tipped onto the bed. She felt her hand touch the bare mattress. For an instant the hand was distinctly hers. Then it disappeared from her mind as abruptly as it had appeared.

After he made her yelp he propped himself up on his hands and knees. She felt the air on her skin as one more touch urging her on. It was then that the word thorough occurred to her. He rolled to one side and lay still.

When he began to touch her again, her head felt heavy, but her skin tightened. She closed her eyes. Her brain felt stoned, but her body began to jitter again, a circuit of nerves humming in the dark.

This time, when she thought thorough , the word seemed coarser.

The sun was almost down. She lay on her side along the edge of the narrow cot. She looked for her bicycle suit. In the dimness the red looked black. She stretched her arm out. She couldn’t reach it. She didn’t feel like moving. She let her hand rest on the floor. Her stomach growled. She put her hand on it and realized she had to pee. She went down the hall, feeling her way to the bathroom in the windowless dark. When she came back she put on her bicycle suit. She thought, Well that’s that. It was a surprise to hear herself in her own mind. She thought that she’d never noticed the noises she made. She tried to remember the noises she used to make. She must have made noises, because one time someone had put his hand over her mouth. But now, as if there were an echo in this strange little room, she heard herself yip.

The late light from the sky filtered through the leaves of the copper beech. There were no shadows, just a steady half-darkness.

She used to do this sort of thing and then fly away. Now she felt like a ghost of herself — there was her body, and she couldn’t get back into it.

She used to do this sort of thing and go home laughing, laughing at how she’d made a man lurch out of his well-tailored life, at how the hand that knotted his tie and signed the letters on his desk had trembled to touch her.

Now she was the one lurched out of her life. The body down there was enjoying the aftereffects.

He sat up and ran his hands through his hair. Had he been asleep? Or had he watched her tugging her bicycle suit back on? He got up and went down the hall. Of course, he knew where the bathroom was, he’d worked on it, he’d carried the armoire up the stairs. She’d been his boss.

That should have done it.

She heard the toilet flush, the faucet run, his hands splashing water. What a ridiculous set of sounds to pay attention to. But apparently not for her nerve ends. When she heard his footsteps in the hall, her breath caught in her chest and she couldn’t stop the whir of what would happen next.

Here it was well into spring, pretty near official summer, and it didn’t feel like it to her. She felt as tight-packed as unturned earth. She’d been busy enough — got the house in order; put the woolens away; repainted Rose’s boat and revarnished the oars, since Dick kept putting that off; got the tomato vines staked.

It was more than just being by herself, doing and making lists to do more. What she was doing didn’t jibe with what the rest of them were up to. She wanted them all back in the house, and at the same time she couldn’t pull back from being at odds with them. Tom with his get-rich-quick ideas, Charlie sticking with Deirdre. Dick going off to the bank, buzzing with the same desperate energy as when he was building the boat but more dangerous now that he had more to put at risk.

They’d been pulled together in the house when Charlie was here and Tom brought Rose to visit. It made her wish for winter again.

Dick had come back from the bank, sat down at the kitchen table, and said, “They wouldn’t make a loan on Spartina . Just on the house. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, but I told them that the last time a hurricane came by, Spartina just needed some paint, it was the house needed fixing. I told them I built both, I’m the one ought to know. They think the house and lot are worth something. They’re worth something because of what Jack Aldrich has done at Sawtooth. And it’s not so much the house, it’s the lot. Funny damn world where it’s not my work — it’s someone else’s work next door that makes them hand over their money.”

May had said, “Well, a boat is more like a car. It goes down as soon as you drive it off the lot.” She added, “I mean, that’s how they think,” but it was too late. Of course, she saw how Dick was insulted, how what he’d put his mind to and what he’d made with his hands and put to use for sixteen years got weighed on a scale in a bank office and barely made it tip. It wasn’t until now, with Dick five days out, that what she herself felt rose up in her. She felt slighted. She didn’t expect anyone up at the bank to know anything much about her house, but as offhand as you please, Dick weighed the house as less than his boat. Just another thing he’d made out of wood when he had time to spare. Put the shingles on and go out to sea again. She was the one who felt every inch of it in her fingertips.

If there was a balance between the two of them, her house had to weigh as much as his boat.

She wished she wasn’t alone now, now that she was finally delving into herself, turning over what she’d kept buried. She’d been reproaching herself for having driven Charlie away, for being cranky with Tom … She’d been worrying that that was why she felt like a stony field. What she turned up now was that she didn’t forgive Dick for driving to Boston without her. And clinging to that — she wasn’t sure just how — was that Dick got Charlie to go out on Spartina with him. They didn’t make peace here in this house, not here where she lived, where she’d got over her pain, where she’d let them see that she’d come to love Rose. Dick had taken Charlie where Dick was in command, where Dick could forget everything but the sea and hope that Charlie would melt into that forgetfulness with him.

And now Dick had gone and put her house at risk. He’d got Tom looking at the accounts, gone off to Mr. Aldrich’s bank — got himself mixed up with all that machinery of invisible money. And then put out to sea without another word. At least he knew what he was doing out there. Though this time, as if to show how tangled up he’d got, he’d taken Mr. Aldrich’s son along — not that that would make a difference if he couldn’t make a bank payment.

She stayed angry, fiercely angry, until midday. She took a mattock and dug a slit trench just outside the wire fence around the garden. She buried a band of chicken wire in it. Something, likely a groundhog, had been getting under the fence. She took some pleasure in thinking of his frustration. He might end up cutting his paw or getting a claw stuck.