John Casey - Spartina

“The Buttrick girl told me you saved her life,” May said. “That was summer.”

“Oh, that,” Dick said. “That wasn’t—”

“She told me what happened. So don’t put Charlie out in the skiff. You keep him on board,” May said. She added, “The Buttrick family ought to have that in mind too. They …” May cut herself off. She knew you didn’t mention help of that kind. You salvaged ships, not people. If your life was saved, you were grateful; if you saved a life, you claimed nothing.

Dick was glad May bit her own tongue. He was too stung with shame by his other thoughts to correct her.

He pulled the plastic curtains shut across the front end of the shed. He didn’t want to look at the boat. He shouldn’t touch her, he shouldn’t even go near her in his condition. He should go out to sea in Parker’s tub.

B ut still Dick didn’t put out to sea. His temptations continued, though their tone and nature changed. He resisted these no more successfully than the first.

Their sexual encounters had changed rapidly from the initial weightless cloud-tumbling-into-cloud. The second time he’d come to her house, the day had been clear, the light harsh. He’d come back on purpose. But she kept the lead. In the cab of his pickup on the way to pick up her Volvo she’d been chatty and cozy, leaning against him until he had to say, “Look, Elsie, I know about half the guys driving pickups up and down this road.” She moved way over to her side but still punctuated what she was saying by sliding her bare foot up under the cuff of his pants.

On the way back she passed him in her car just before the turnoff to her little arc of access road. She practically forced him onto it, but he charged after her and took the turn up her driveway so close he could hear fine gravel pinging his bumper, then green branches hitting her car and his bumper in one sweep. He could see all this from far off — there he was, a crazy teen-ager. She seemed to know it — she jumped out of her car and ran around toward the pond, laughing, and, come to think of it, pretty nimble for someone with sore muscles. He rushed after her clumsily, as if he was running through a thicket, batting away briars and vines, the last threads of his good sense. She ran herself into a corner of the tiny lawn between the bull briars and the pond. Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man. Her underpants and sneakers became teen-age litter on the grass.

The day after, he’d left Eddie doing the wiring in the wheelhouse, Charlie and Tom painting. He reminded himself to tell the same lie to May and to Eddie. In up to his chin now, planning his craziness.

Once again, Elsie stayed a step ahead. She had a little lunch tray set for them, little napkins folded under the forks. “Would you like me to fix you a drink?” And she seemed to have a touch with the way time moved, as though she could pull time out of the air and wind it round him. He felt immobilized, but not at a loss, since nothing else could move either. When she loosened him, let a little time writhe down his wrists and ankles, he moved, but only inch by inch. When they finally stretched out on her bed, he was naked but subdued, balanced between pleasurable impatience and pleasurable patience, happy to let her control him, tilt his urges against each other. She knew what she was doing, he said out loud she knew what she was doing. With her fingertips and then with practically nothing but her breath she kept him up in the air as if he were a plume of down. She’d send him up and then let him sink, eddying and side-slipping back down. Then back up higher, a little higher each time.

She reached up to his mouth once with her hand — turned her head to say, “You’re grinding your teeth, don’t grind your teeth”—and slid her fingers into his mouth, just touching his side teeth and gums in a way that made his jaw go slack. He heard his breath, felt his breath as though she’d made him part of his own breathing.

But afterward, while he was still astonished by her physical delicacy, she roughed him up before he was quite ready for it. She said, “You know what I like about having you come in my mouth? I feel like a blind person — you know how they say blind people feel with their faces so they can practically see a building? Same thing … Now I’ve felt it this way, the next time you come in my cunt I’ll practically see it.…”

He was just getting over the effect her words had had and understanding what she meant when she laughed. “You should see your face now. You’re really shocked. I should think you’d like the idea.… Or is it another hippie girl with hairy legs?”

“No …”

“You’d just prefer a prettier piece of poetry.”

“No. It was just sudden. I’d just as soon have stayed a little lazy.”

“Well, yes.” She took his head between her hands, but then sat back on her heels, her eyes turning beady as a bird’s. “You know, I once asked a doctor if a shot of sperm had any nutritional value. He said, ‘Certainly, it has about the same number of calories as a slice of white bread.’ ”

“Now you’re doing it on purpose.”

“I am. I can’t help it, you make it so worthwhile. When I shock you, I feel as if I’ve shocked a whole layer of granite.”

He tried not to think about her when he wasn’t with her, but of course he did. One of the most unsettling thoughts that came to him was that the things he liked about Elsie were at odds with each other. That wasn’t how it was with May, May was a single settled person. He stopped there — he didn’t want May and Elsie getting together in his mind.

After the first delirium — a word Parker used to describe his shore leaves, along with lotus-eating and postcoital amnesia — phrases Dick found leaking into his thoughts no matter how often he bailed them out — Dick and Elsie fell into an odd mental intimacy, which, like the other stuff he liked about Elsie, had its opposed charges. It was cozy but high-strung, idle but energetic, aimless but part of a design. She could be absolutely sympathetic (“Good God, Dick, I don’t see how you could stand it!”) but absolutely remorseless about drilling into him for the facts and the tone of his life. The rhythm of her inquisition was vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t place it for a while. They spent a couple of afternoons just lazing around. Dick was secretly relieved that the sexual schedule was less urgent, though there was still an erotic shimmer to just coming up to her house. It occurred to him at last what the rhythm was: A blue heron wading in the marsh on her stilts, apparently out for a stroll — suddenly freezing. An imperceptible tilt of her head — her long neck cocking without moving. No, nothing this time. Wade, pose. Abruptly, a new picture — a fish bisected by her bisected beak. Widening ripples, but the heron, the pool, the marsh, the sky serene. The clouds slid across the light, the fish into the dark.

He told her about this picture. She said, “I liked it when you thought I was like a tern.”

“You’re like a tern. You can be all the birds you want. You …” He bit his tongue. He’d been about to talk about her croaking like a shypoke.

“I was certainly an ugly duckling.”

“Come on, Elsie. You were kind of a tomboy, is all. You weren’t ugly. I remember seeing you and Mr. Bigelow go out in the blue canoe, come surfing in over the sandbar. It looked nifty. You were a cute kid. Brown as a berry. Your hair coming out from that Red Sox hat you used to wear all the time. It seems to me you wore that hat everywhere. Except when you went in the general store, then you’d clutch it in front of you.”