Toby Olson - Seaview

Then his hand moved, in the imagining, up cheek to ear, and the hard, gold bullet in the post driven through her lobe scraped against the pad at his hand’s edge, and she came back to him as who she was. He backed up slightly, lifting his eyes up from her shadowed chest. She shifted as he moved, and their linked actions brought her right breast into the light. And she was symmetrical and ordered again and conventionally lovely.

She tossed a fold of his robe to the side, exposing him; she put the tips of her fingers under his scrotum and ran them out to his tip. She shook her breasts a little, and he reached down and took the whole of her right breast in his hand. He was hunched over, his left hand in the air above them holding the bottle, his right arm fully extended as he held her breast. Her head shifted a little, her lids still half closed over her eyes; her breath was very shallow. She brought her hand to her mouth and stuck out her tongue a little and wet her palm and her fingers. He watched her mouth, straining in himself in his position. She was weak and fading; she was half conscious, but the corner of her mouth was up, half twisted, leering, beautiful, and spacy. Were it not sickness it would be drug-lust, he thought. Or lust from desire he imagined; lust after desire fulfilled, lust from thankfulness, from the purest kind of relaxation. He squeezed her breast harder, ran his index finger over her nipple. She moved her wet hand and took his penis, her fingers cool and slippery. She pulled gently, watching herself do it. He watched her breast in his hand, her face, her hand moving. He looked to the glass doors and saw the rain and the shadow of the car and a new shadow the size of a man standing. The hair on the inside of his thighs raised up, though he was not sure of the shadow at all. He looked back at her breasts, her face, and her hand. His semen began to flow out, the first drops falling to her wrist, the rest running down her hand to reach them. As he came, the bottle high in his left hand was quaking; it was lighter, almost empty.

“Almost empty,” he grunted softly, and when she looked from her hand to his face, he nodded up to the bottle, directing her eyes there. She followed his look, and when she saw the bottle she got the point and shook a little in weak laughter. He laughed softly with her; he was still shaking and quivering, still coming, his penis lurching. And then the lurches had more space between them. He glanced at the glass doors. The figure was gone. They stayed as they were for what seemed to both of them a long time, his body bent over, her hand holding him, the semen slowly drying, the bottle in the air.

After a while he said, “Let me get a Kleenex, before it dries.” She had drifted off to sleep, but just to the edge of it, and she woke up without much transition. She let her hand fall from him.

“Let it stay there,” she said weakly. “I want it there.”

He got up carefully. He had some muscle pains. His left arm was stiff, and it hurt at the elbow as he lowered the bottle.

He clamped the tubing off and placed the bottle on the bed beside her. Her sweat had loosened the adhesive, and the tape came off easily. He took a piece of cotton from the alcohol container on the floor at his foot. When he withdrew the needle he pressed it against the point of exit to keep the blood in, the hematoma from forming. After he had pressed it there for a while, he used a piece of the adhesive to secure it. She was sleeping, her breath regular and shallow again. The semen had begun to dry into crystals on her hand and wrist. He closed his robe and tied it. He adjusted her pillows and her robe, put her right hand over her left on her stomach. He stood back from the bed, the bottle and the tubing with the needle in the end of it in his left hand, the metal alcohol-sponge container in his right. For no good reason he could have articulated, he smiled, and then he bowed to her, deeply and from the waist. As if she knew somewhere in her early sleep that he was doing something odd and possibly extraordinary, she shifted a little and she smiled too. He walked to the glass doors, the materials still in his hands. It was still raining, a little harder than before; the glass doors were sheeted and running with it.

He could not see the car beyond them. He put his face close to the glass, trying to see out. He could see nothing. He put his forehead against the glass. The glass was cool, and it felt good.

After he had put the Laetrile materials away, he took a shower, missing the feel of the golf balls around his feet, and dried and dressed himself. Then he got paper and pencil and wrote a note to her:

Melinda: had to go out. you know. be back by seven. Call Bob White if you need anything. I’ll get dinner. I love you of course. Allen.

He put the note on the pillow beside her head, then changed his mind and propped it up with a glass on the motel room table. He got the gun from between the folds of white towel in his suitcase. He loaded a clip into it carefully. He looked at it, then took the clip out and checked the chamber; it was empty, and he pulled the trigger. It did not click. The safety was on, and he made a note of its position and snapped the clip in again.

He put the gun into the pocket of his raincoat and put his arms into the sleeves and settled the coat on his shoulders and buttoned it. It hung heavily to one side, pulling the collar against his neck. He looked around the room, checking, a thing he always did before leaving a place. He looked down at peaceful Melinda sleeping. Then he turned away, opened the door, and stepped out into the rain.

BY THE TIME HE HAD LEFT THE STONES AND TURNED onto the blacktop, the rain had diminished, and after he had driven for a few minutes it had stopped. The radio told him there were some flooded cars, a few had slid into the washes, a bus with children coming home from a summer trip had skidded and fallen over, but no one had been injured. His wipers were off, and he passed people with hoods up and rags in their hands, working to dry plugs and points. The road leading out of the city to Route 80 was still fairly empty. At one point he had to slow and wait while the cars in front of him crept, wheel deep, under a viaduct. There were some people in yellow slickers walking along the roads. When he hit the highway and started the slight rise out of the city, all evidence of the rain fell away. He could see the edge of the cloud cover ahead of him; he pushed the car up to seventy, and before long he drove from under the clouds, entering the sunlight, the shafts of which made the highway in front of him sparkle. The sky was clear, but there were no heat waves shimmering on the road in front of him. He opened the vent and felt the warm, dry desert air come in.

In twenty minutes he slowed to enter Vail, and after he’d passed through it and come to a place where the shoulder widened, he pulled off the road and got the Tombstone matchbox out of the wheel well in the trunk and put it under the front seat. While the trunk was open, he decided to put the gun in it, and he took it out of his raincoat pocket and slid it between two of the towels on the trunk floor. He had bought the gun in Los Angeles, on impulse, and he had later thought that the reason he’d bought it had to do with a slight sense of romance in the delivering of the cocaine, a kind of vague old-movie, underworld feel. He knew better than that, but once he had gotten the gun, he had kept it; he hadn’t wanted to let it go. And he hadn’t wanted to let Richard go either, once he had gotten back in touch with him. He knew he could have gotten the Laetrile elsewhere; he need not have agreed to the bargain that had him here on his way to deliver the Tombstone matchbox of cocaine. Something about Melinda’s wish to go East, to head back into something, urged a need in him that had to do with Richard and his own past. This need, like his need to keep the gun, was at this point only pictorial for him, vaguely emblematic, not at all clear.