John Casey - Spartina

E lsie shocked him. Not because they’d gone to bed, though that too put him in a state of shock. He understood that state of shock, felt the form of it, absorbed it. He knew that he was absorbing it willingly, that he was being bad, that he was going to come to Elsie’s house again, that he would be harmed by what he was doing, that he was willing.

But in addition Elsie shocked him in a way that he hadn’t foreseen: she didn’t hide anything. It was more than that — she as much as said that now they could say anything to each other. What she looked forward to as much as making love was telling him things and giving him the run of her house and in the same way the run of her whole life. He wasn’t sure about taking the invitation. What it turned out to feel like was that he was the one being opened up, that he was the one being penetrated by what she told him.

It was little things at first. The next afternoon he came to give her a ride to the Volvo dealer to pick up her car. When she climbed into his truck she laughed and said, “I certainly couldn’t have ridden my bike today. I forgot how stiff I feel after, I mean when I haven’t done it for a while.” He must have looked startled. She added, “No, don’t feel bad, it’s nice, I hobbled around all morning thinking of how nice.…”

He thought, Why shouldn’t she say that? But that “haven’t done it for a while” came from a distance.

Another time, several days later, they went swimming in her pond. They managed to squeeze the two of them into one large inner tube. They floated around, kept on floating even after it began to drizzle. She tucked his arms under her shoulders. The drizzle was a little warmer than the pond, it made his body feel oiled.

She said, “When I first slept with a boy — I was still at the Perryville School. My girlfriends who’d done it warned me I’d be disappointed. And I was in a way. But in another way I was amazed. I thought, What a wonderful way to get to know someone. I wanted to go to bed with all the men in the world.” She laughed.

They drifted into the rhododendron branches. Elsie reached up and shoved against a branch. They spun slowly to mid-pond.

“I mean, it didn’t take long at all to stop actually sleeping with everyone I liked. It was why it wasn’t a good idea that puzzled me. And I’m still glad I thought that thought. And I’m glad that later on I thought, Why have sex at all? Almost the Catholic position. So to speak. Sex is just to have babies and the rest is a bad French novel. That was theoretical too. I still had my share of bad French novels.”

Dick didn’t feel he could complain. He just wished she wouldn’t talk that way. He also felt ashamed that he wished she wouldn’t, since he was doing what she was talking about. And he was equally ashamed that he was glad she talked that way, since it let him off the hook, he was just one more of her bad French novels.

He liked talking to her about almost anything else. He even liked hearing her talk about sex when she got off the topic of her sex life in general and just talked about the two of them. “I noticed the way you looked at me at the clambake,” she said. “Admit it. That was just plain lust. I understand — it was early in the summer, you hadn’t seen anyone in a bathing suit for a long time.”

“No,” he said.

“Be honest, now. When I was helping you with the clams, wearing my bathing suit and your old rubber boots, and my thighs were turning pink from all the steam. Come on. Just for an instant you had evil thoughts. Say it. ‘I had evil thoughts.…’ ”

He said, “Hell, Elsie, I thought you were being a good scout.” It drove her nuts.

“You jerk!” She regrouped to get the better of him. “Too bad for you, then. There were at least five guys at that clambake who thought I was cute as hell.” She started to count on her fingers.

“Okay, okay.” He would have liked to think that when she pulled on the boots and waded in to help him she’d looked good by accident. He wished it all to be an accident. But he could give up that little clambake accident. What he really didn’t want to hear was that she’d drawn the look Charlie gave her, that she’d enjoyed Charlie’s look. “You’re right,” he said. “I burned my fingers twice on account of looking at your legs.” But that was just a cloud of ink he squirted so he could slip away.

This was one of the many times he felt her urge to draw everything in him up to the surface. The farther down it was, the more she wanted to get at it. Sometimes he felt the pleasure of it, he liked the feeling that she put all her skimming and diving into getting at him. But, once in a while, he felt a third, completely different way: that all the skimming and diving, all her sexual eagerness (which could get as edgy and probing as her conversation) were just the small broken-off pieces of her that swam to the surface — that really she had a quieter, larger nature in her. He still liked all that top-water busyness, he was still charmed by her tern-self — and so was she, it probably felt good, as good as flying and wheeling and swooping. But he also got a sense of that part of her that wasn’t so sparkling with seizures and escapes. Far below all the different things that she thought she was, that she wanted to be, that she feared to be, there was a part of her that was more gently defined, more easily receiving and more easily flowing out, defined less as a shell or carapace or hard shore against the waves and more as a bay as it becomes deeper and vaguer, undefining itself into the broader sea.

That sense of her, but also his connection to her childhood (sharpened by their talking, and splintered into their sexual thrill), and his tender admiration and liking for her were all troubling thoughts. So then he would think of the thoughtless fainting of their first falling into her bed. If the whole thing had stopped after that time he wouldn’t have felt so guilty. It had washed over him, a freak wave.

He still didn’t know what he was doing, but he did know he was coming to Elsie on evenings he told May he was going to the Neptune, and on afternoons when he said he was going to get something for the boat.

Now the sex was sex. Variable but recognizable. In that sense, he knew what he was doing. It was talking with Elsie that kept changing. He still told her she was nosy, he still kept his mouth shut about some things — Parker, for one — but he told her a lot about himself he’d never told anyone, not even May. He told himself that he’d never told May because May hadn’t ever asked. But in truth he knew that May would like to know everything Elsie pulled out of him. He told himself that that was just the way it was, that Elsie was good at asking questions. And he could tell Elsie stuff he’d done, stuff he’d thought, and Elsie wouldn’t get upset. Even when Elsie found fault with stuff he’d done, she didn’t come down all that hard, perhaps because of what she’d told him about herself, but perhaps because she imagined herself doing it, good or bad. May would have held it at arm’s length, would have sounded warnings.

It was when he drove away from Elsie’s house that he felt full guilt. He’d stomp down on the gas and drive fast out her driveway, bottoming out on the crown, whipping the sides of his truck with laurel branches that cocked on the wide wing mirrors.

His work habits gave way. He barely touched the boat for days, just did the wiring with Eddie and told Charlie how to put in the wheelhouse windows.

He talked to the boatyard owner about using the owner’s new trailer to haul the boat to the yard, about using the old marine railway to launch it. The owner said, “You got her finished?” Dick said, “No. I’m just planning ahead.”