Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

“You’re such a surprise,” she said, when we finally ceased for a moment. “Come with me.”

She got up and started walking the path again, in the direction we had been hiking.

“Where are you going?”

“Where we were headed.”

“But what’s there?”

“You’ll see. Just come on.”

She was going more quickly than before, almost running, and soon enough we found ourselves in a silly bit of a chase, her slowing down until I could reach and touch her and then rushing forward again, the two of us acting a third or perhaps a tenth of our years. She disappeared around a turn and when I reached the spot, she was no longer ahead of me. I called out and she answered, and when I looked down I saw a small opening within a thicket.

“Come inside,” she said.

“Shouldn’t we go back? The nursery man must be there by now.”

“Please, Franklin. Don’t be a spoilsport.”

I got on my hands and knees and crawled in. It was a small place, open to the sky, a lair that must have been used by deer. Mary Burns sat on the tall, matted grass.

“I think high-school kids sometimes come here at night,” she said. “But don’t worry. I sit here all the time, and no one has ever come by during the afternoon. Today’s a school day, you know.”

Of course I did know. I’d decided, for the first time ever, to close the shop after a half day in order to be with her.

I said, “I’m not worried at all, Mary.”

“Then let’s sit next to each other again, just like before.”

And so we did. And we began to kiss, and eventually our hands were purposefully exploring each other, lingering and caressing and soon enough undoing buttons, clasps. It would have been scandalous in town had someone caught us. But it didn’t seem that we cared. We were only half-clothed in the open-air cloister, and if it hadn’t been so patently unshaded and bright we might have done something right there and then that was quite extreme, and perhaps even wonderful. For I am almost sure she wanted me to make love to her, this by the open, willing character of her body, and then by the strength of her limbs, the way she so tightly wound my legs with hers. It was as if a vast store of energy had been held inside her, bounding about in a terribly long, great waiting, such an abeyance really being the most lovely thing to me, and harrowing as well. For I did desperately want to make love to her; she was so wonderfully pretty lying there beneath me looking up, her silvery-streaked flaxen hair loosened from the headband and splayed against the grass like a fan of shimmering, threaded light. Beautiful, too, I thought, were the many fine creases and lines in her rosy face, the supreme paleness of her lips, and then the fresh smell of her, faintly sour-sweet like unripe plums. I felt awfully young, touching her, and the wanting I had wished never again to know was rushing back to me, a disturbing shiver in my fingers and in my mouth and in my eyes.

I stopped everything then, perhaps too abruptly, for Mary Burns had the impression that she had done something terribly offending or wrong, and I knew I could not convince her otherwise, at least for the moment. We quickly dressed and without speaking hiked back to the cemetery entrance, where the delivery man was waiting with two pairs of evergreen shrubs. He insisted on helping us wheelbarrow them inside, and doing some digging as well, and I was glad that he was there, and even Mary Burns seemed relieved. In fact we never spoke again of what had happened. And though in near time we did sleep together (with a genuinely pleasing, if sober, conviviality), I came to think of that first interlude with a somewhat sorrowful fondness, for I saw that our days together were perhaps sullied from the very beginning and all the way through, right up to the last.

* * *

NOW, MY GRANDSON THOMAS, overfilled with energy and pluck, runs up the short beach holding out his inflatable water wings and dumps them in my lap. He doesn’t need them anymore, he insists, this after a mere week of pool-going. Soon enough he’s practically performing for his newfound friends, as he holds high aloft a bucket of sand and with some ceremony dumps it on his face and neck and chest. I’m a bit alarmed, but the other children laugh at this, and Thomas repeats the action and I realize I’ve seen this from him before, how he often makes a buffoon of himself for others. At the roller rink last week, he spilled wickedly several times, falling flush on his back as he tried to whip around a group of children his age, each wipeout a bit more thunderous than the one before. They snickered, but then seemed more frightened by him than amused; soon after they were ushered off by their mothers. As I was watching from the stands I could only shout my warnings to him, but once they were gone he was perfectly fine as he skated, whipping past my spot with aplomb and cool abandon, his stout little figure apparently unaching, unhurt. Another time, in the toy store, a floor display of boxed firetrucks fell over on him, though I suspected at the time that he had meant to cause it, if not expected them to fall directly on him.

But now I’m deeply worried, having sensed the strangeness in the pattern, his obsessive, self-taunting behavior, and I get up from my folding chair and go over and hold him as I brush the sand from his hair, his thick eyebrows and lashes. He pulls hard away from me.

“What are you doing?” he says, jerking his arm away from me. There’s a flash in his eyes that perhaps only I as his mother’s father can recognize, a cold light of refusal.

“That’s not good for you,” I say, lamely. “The sand will get in your eyes. It could injure them.”

“I’m having fun,” he answers resolutely, filling up another bucket. For the first time in our two weeks of knowing each other I am not having so much fun, though still a great part of me wishes him to go on, to do whatever he wants no matter what I might say.

“Perhaps we should get back to the water. Why don’t we all go in? You and your friends can have a splashing contest.”

“Hey! We don’t just splash, mister, we swim just fine!” one of them shouts, a girl with hundreds of white plastic beads woven into her hair.

“That’s right, mister,” Thomas pipes in, though now sweetly again. “We’re all going in the water, aren’t we? We’re going to have a swimming contest.”

“You got that right!” the girl replies.

I begin to peel off my shirt but the girl in braids shoots me a stare and Thomas immediately cues on this, holding up his solid little hand. “Sorry, Franklin, but it’s just kids only.”

“Yes, Thomas, I understand. But I promise I will remain off to the side. Or I’ll swim in the deeper water, if you don’t mind, and watch from there.”

“Adults have to stay on the beach, Franklin,” he tells me, as though it’s out of his hands. And he points to my folding chair with a silencing finger and an almost wry smile, and it’s all I can do but sit down again as they stomp and leap their way into the water.

One of the mothers declares to me, “You don’t have to worry, Gramps, they’re all like little seals,” though this only serves to alarm me more, as I know exactly what Thomas can and cannot do. I tell him to go no farther out, and he nods. But he’s already chest deep, and one of the boys is behind him, pushing down on his shoulders in order to dunk him. I call out for them to stop, but against the din of play and constant reverberation along the shore my weak voice thins, and I lose sight of who’s who among this brace of kids roughhousing in the water.

“Hey, there!” I hear, and I turn to see Liv Crawford, wearing oversized cat-eye sunglasses, stunningly trim in a cream-white one-piece, a batik wrap smartly knotted about her waist. “You look really good, Doc. This convalescence is doing the job.” She quickly scans about. “Are we really sitting here?”