Antrim, Donald - Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

“Uh-huh.”

“Show me?” Hips rising, knees coming upward revealing the backs of Meredith’s legs whitely imprinted with shapes of grass. I wriggled over, got close and lay down beside her. I touched Meredith’s stomach and her shoulder and her hair. I raised her lemonade glass, slipped ice into my mouth, held it melting against tongue and teeth before passing it between my wife’s teeth, into her mouth, where, sucked by her, it dissolved.

“Ah,” she said into my mouth.

“Ah,” I breathed back.

“Ah.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Hmn?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Slow.”

“Mn.”

“Ah.”

“Mn.”

“Oh.”

“Mn.”

“Easy.”

“Sorry.”

“No. Good. Great. Just not yet.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. No.”

“Turn me over.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Doesn’t hurt?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me if.”

“No, no, good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Ah, no, ouch.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay.”

“Mmn?”

“Mmn.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah,” I breathed.

“Ah.” We embraced in the harsh afternoon light. Down the street a dog barked. I looked up, through budding tree leaves, at the windows of our house.

Later, toward evening, we finished the job of burying bamboo in patterns meant to deny trespass. The pit’s wide wet bottom slopped, evening’s air glowed orange; Meredith and I splashed around in loosened, disarrayed clothes, getting muddy. I said, “Look how these spikes catch the sunset.”

“Yes, it’s pretty.”

“I like this pit.”

“Me too.”

“I think you did lovely work with those bamboo points.”

“Thanks.”

“I love the one carved like a miniature beach umbrella.”

“Well, I’d already started a whole beach series, and when you mentioned the water coming into the hole from the ground, it just seemed so right.”

“Yeah.”

“Weird, huh?”

“Kind of.”

“Like getting a phone call from somebody you were just thinking about, or suddenly thinking of someone and then running smack into that person at the store. Do you believe in synchronicity, Pete?”

“I don’t know.”

“A lot of things happen, Pete. Look what’s happening, us digging away, which is fine because we need to, but I’d just thought, doing the designs, doing the whittling, I thought I could make things less like, you know, a pit, because actually the thing that bothers me most isn’t the pit, it’s the way it seems natural, all of a sudden, to have it. Last year if you told me I’d be out back fucking my husband on top of a mud pile with spikes for pillows, I’d’ve said, No way.”

Wind buffeted citrus leaves overhead, agitated green suspended fruits. I told Meredith, “It’s changing times, and we’re changing with them. Besides, I liked that in the mud, it was good.”

“You came a lot. Sweet. Like trees.”

“Trees?”

“That’s not a taste, I guess, but it’s what I think of.”

We went into the house and took turns showering. I said, “This is like when we first met. Remember those walks past the jetty?”

“I do. You used to say, Sweetheart, give me your cunt, and I’d say, Fuck me with your tongue.”

We were in the kitchen. Meredith stood by the sink. I opened the refrigerator and peered into it, visually sorting what I saw there. “How come we don’t talk like that anymore?” Meredith asked.

“Maybe we’re afraid. Hey, there’s soup here. Is last week’s bouillabaisse still good?”

“Sure.”

I brought out the soup in its Tupperware container. Meredith lowered a steamer from an overhead peg. I removed the Tupperware’s green top and poured the soup, carefully, so as not to splash, from container to pot, then ignited a big rear stovetop gas jet, reduced the jet to low, and placed the pot on the burner. “Stir it,” Meredith said. She handed me a wooden spoon from the spoon drawer; and she said, “It’s a shame we’re afraid.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to be afraid.”

“No.”

“But I am.” Fish, scallops, medium shrimp, vegetables — all these things floated up, clung to bay leaves and one another in the crimson liquid, as Meredith confessed, “I’m afraid of you, Pete.”

“Me?”

She leaned against the counter. Evening enveloped us. I said, “Well,” even waved aloft the wooden spoon, danced it in the air, a theatrical gesture emphasizing nothing, making me feel feeble; and, too, I felt despondent in that way that seems naturally to follow sex in the afternoon, when day’s last light rides horizontally down through clouds pillowed low. Surveying the light filtering through window glass to glance off shiny pots and the stove and the enameled freezer chest — clicking on, now, to cool and preserve the right hand, left foot, heart, liver, partial left lung, adrenal glands, intact genitals, and odd other freezer-wrapped bits of ex-mayor — I felt I could empathize with Meredith’s apprehension of me. Of course she was afraid. Day was passing into night, death hung in the air, our happy post-coital sadness was fragile.

“Add water to the soup,” she told me.

“Water?”

“Just a trickle.”

I went to the tap and rotated the knob and held a glass beneath the flow. Water coursed over my wrist and fingers, and this felt nice, so I remained a minute, getting wet and wondering if Meredith had perhaps discovered and unwrapped one of those packages of Jim Kunkel tucked in the back of the freezer beneath the restaurant-sized bag of fish sticks; and if so, which package; and, also, if it might now be advisable to assume the worst and come right out and address the issue, to take, as it were, the initiative. Meredith said, “Honey, be careful, the sink’s filling up.”

Which it was. The drain was congested, and water was rapidly rising.

“Turn off the faucet, Pete.”

“Right.”

“Here,” she said, offering me the plunger. But I told her, “I’ll deal with it after dinner.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“Because I refuse to leave unwashed dishes out all night for the bugs. Which reminds me. Listen, before I forget, I’ve thought about it and I’ve decided that in the future I think I can handle the fifth- and sixth-grade bio sections if we combine grades on field trips. We’ll go to Peterson’s Farm and collect coleoptera for specimen exhibits. Maybe I can get Dr. Peterson to let one of his bees sting him on the finger. The kids always like to see that.”

It was pathetic to be talking about school, when there was no such thing anymore. Nevertheless we did it all the time. We were teachers.

“You’re sure you want to collect?”

“Why not?”

“Local populations are way down. I’d say just observe. Encourage conservation. Teach respect for life.”

“Ha. This from a guy who assigns Clausewitz to eight-year-olds.”

“We’ve been over that. Teaching the history and theory of warfare is a perfectly legitimate method of demonstrating patterns of social reformation in the modern era.”

“Listen to you. You sound like a politician. You should run for office.”

“Maybe I will.” And why not. It was hardly any secret that the present civic administration was little more than a puppet front for corrupt Rotarians like Jerry Henderson and his Better Business Bureau buddies, men with no aversion to sending a town father to his death in the deep of night on a well-trimmed lawn. Sitting there in my lamplit kitchen that smelled of fish, waiting to share a meal with my wife who may or may not have recently chanced upon those body parts lying wrapped and bagged beneath frozen food (and who therefore, lacking any explanation for the presence of wrapped and bagged body parts, may or may not have been experiencing, at that very moment, considerable anxiety regarding her husband’s psychological condition — I wasn’t going to press her on the matter, no way) — sitting there with these concerns and every muscle twitching from a good day’s honest work, it occurred to me that the Hendersons of the world had best watch out, because one day the people of this town would rise up to reaffirm old values of education and social welfare, just as Jim Kunkel surely foresaw when he laid down his life to become a martyr before God.