Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

Getting fucked was so interesting, seen from the peculiar detached mental moment that could descend on her during the act. She felt a flash of fellowship with all women getting fucked, the ones getting fucked carelessly or badly or cruelly, the ones fucked decently or brilliantly. She thought of the shadow of night sliding around the globe endlessly, and with the fall of night the clashing of a million cymbals sounding and representing the coming together of males and females in the Continue Humanity project, this colossal enterprise. But that was enough. There was too much blood in her head.

She let herself relax off the wall. She lay with her knees up for a while, and then turned on her side, sensing suddenly that something was wrong. One of the towels was moving. Where it had been clenched between the sash and casing, something was dragging it minutely to one side leaving naked glass along the edge of the window and then there was an eye and part of a face in that space and then that was gone. It was gone before she could gasp. She was freezing. Violently she caught the sheets up against her and in the process woke Ned.

He hadn’t run this fast since his last field day at Frick Junior High. He was running in an attempt to lay hands on the only child of an old friend who was dead. Life was unusual.

Peeping at naked people without their permission was a crime. He could understand an adolescent doing it, but still. When he’d realized what it was Nina was trying to tell him he’d jammed himself into his clothes. His loafers were meant to be worn with socks, not bare feet.

He stopped to finish buttoning his shirt and to get his breath. He could see Hume. This was a lower part of the hill where the lawn had given way to brush, down past the place Douglas’s life on earth had ended. His quarry, which is what Hume was, appeared intermittently. He was on the opposite side of the stream that was roaring its way toward the flatlands. Hume was scrambling nimbly up and away through the vegetation. Douglas would have been proud.

He was tired. He’d scared Hume, which was all he could do for now. He didn’t know if there was something generically wrong with the next generation or not. You can’t lift a cheesecake with an iron hook, somebody had said. Hume was tearing his way out of sight. He was gone. Ned turned back. Nina was coming to join him.

Sex with Nina was so … great. And there was no work to it. Claire had thought of her own body as a votive object.

“I wish you wouldn’t run,” she said when she reached him.

“Why not?”

“You could fall. People fall and die around here.” She swept her hand in the direction of the raging brook. There were slick boulders spaced across the brook that only an idiot would use to cross over. She pointed at them. “Look, you might have tried to jump on those youyouyou, my man of action, my man of action guy. Good thing I came … What’s wrong with that boy?” She was wearing a man’s engulfing white terrycloth robe and flip-flops.

“I don’t know. What Joris said is that they were going to try homeschooling again. Hume told his mother he’s a follower of Odin. They’re a pagan group and their religion is based on Norse mythology. The whole deal is right wing.”

Nina was a proud person. He had to remember about not over-explaining things to her. She was self-conscious about her two-year community college education but she knew more than anybody, really, and certainly more than Claire, and Claire had a PhD. It would be good not to spend too much time thinking about fucked-up children. Only children, like Hume, seemed to be the biggest risk and their child was likely to be a one and only.

She said, “You must be cold.”

Here it came. She had a fixation about being dressed warmly at all times, not only herself but the world. There was nothing annoying about it, or there shouldn’t be, because it came from nothing worse than out-of-control empathy. It was part of her character. She was also crazed about bedclothes, blankets. She tended to want more coverage than he did and she would frequently insist or at least imply that she knew better how comfortable he was going to be with his choice of blanket layers than he did. She laughed when he accused her of making too many blanket statements.

They came to a decision. They would go back to the cabin, where he would scotch-tape paper towels onto the windowpanes, two layers if he went outside and could see anything. They would make tea.

She led the way back. She was doing something. She was torquing around in the cavernous robe she had on. She was making good time.

Her underpants dropped to the ground and she kicked them to the side, striding straight ahead. He picked them up, noted the teardrop-shaped wetness in the crotchpiece, balled them up, and put them in a pocket.

They strove upward in silence. A couple of moments later, it was her bra. It was black, a new one. He retrieved it.

“I’m smiling,” he said.

• • •

She was in the bathroom.

After a moment, she said, “Shit.”

“What is it?”

“I’m marveling at the feebleness of this shower and how much I don’t care anyway.”

He went to see. The water spraying out of the showerheads smelled old or stale. It wasn’t foul. Later he could unscrew the fixture and make the flow normal. He assumed the odor would go away, with use.

He considered her there, in the shower stall.

“My breasts are looking at you,” she said.

She was trying to keep him cheered up. After a baby the areolas of her perfect small breasts would take up more of the divine surface. At least that was what he expected to happen. Because she would nurse. That was already decided on. She’d once asked why men thought undressed women were not considered really naked if their nipples were obscured. He didn’t know.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Well. Quoting somebody, A pleasant despair in the region of the loins.”

“Why despair ?”

“It’s just a quote. Post coitum triste, maybe, but I don’t really feel that. In fact I think maybe we struck pay dirt.” He thought, You’ve struck gold … fool’s gold : that’s from something. He said, “But it’s the female who gets the intuition, isn’t it?”

“I’m not telling,” she said.

She positioned herself so that the spray was playing directly on her face. Her hair was so long that he could grab it tight at the nape of her neck, twist up the fall, and mock-lash her with it, now and then.

“Look how much I’m not complaining,” she said.

“Look how much you’re repeating yourself. And get the fuck dressed. You have to meet people.”

“I’ll look nice. I’m putting on makeup.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No I mean the right amount, about as much as for work.”

“ That much?” He said it gently.

He was sorry for women. Nina had a rather gnarled little toe she didn’t like him to look at and she was standing awkwardly with her good foot on top of the toes of what she called her awful foot.

She pointed at his crotch. “Do you think you’ll have time to give me my just deserts again, one more time?”

“That remains to be seen,” he said, leaving the bathroom.

“Wait, my breasts are still filthy,” she called. But he ignored her.

Nina was malingering. Some day someone would explain to her why everything had to be so difficult. She was supposed to be actively calm. And what if he returned with that juvenile delinquent to deal with.

Ned was competent. The windows were satisfactorily covered. And he was interesting. He’d asked her if she thought it meant anything that his favorite toy as a child had been a little tin periscope. She’d said she didn’t think so. And then he’d gone on about how long he’d been willing to secrete himself behind a sofa and wait for something to happen in the living room. And she’d said Well it shows once again your long attention span, but frankly, re a child, it was about as interesting as saying he was fascinated by secret passages and buried treasure. He wanted to tell her things. And then there was this: there had been a girl in the third grade named Lynn who wore a locket he was curious about. She was flirtatious, as in making an undue number of references to her behind, but with everybody. And she flaunted, if that’s the word, her locket, during these suggestive behaviors. And nobody knew what was in the locket. And then this and that had happened and he had gotten closer to her than the other boys had, and she’d said she was going to show him something secret — the contents of her locket. And what had been in the locket was, she’d explained, a collection of her desiccated scabs, from wounds that had healed, and he’d said that there had been something intimate about it and that in fact he’d felt like running around the play yard in some kind of triumph. Ned was increasingly into telling her the truth about everything. It was no wonder, because he’d been living for years with a piece of statuary. His mind was jammed with unshared reflections, memories …