Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“If it happens, would you move away?” Kat asked.

Melissa turned toward her, frowning slightly. “I think not. Some years ago, yes. But now it is too late. This is where I brought my boys when they were small, and where the last one was born. We have planted so many things and cared for them so long we love them too much. Those trees of gold there, and the silk oaks. The house suits us too well, Kat.” She smiled. “We’ll have to learn not to look at the bay so much. I’ll miss it. The light is always changing. Maybe all Chinese are peasants. This is my land, and it is more important than what it looks out upon.”

“More talk of defeat,” Dial Sinnat said, joining them. “What’s the matter with all you people?” He stood close to Kat and put his arm around her casually, the hard warm weight of his hand against her waist. As always, his apparently unthinking touch created in her a strange indecision; a small despair. It made her feel like a fool, quite unable to cope with something so obviously innocent.

When Di Sinnat was near her, he touched her. It was that simple. He did not paw. There was no innuendo. He was fond of her. And he was evidently a man who automatically sought the tactile gestures of affection. But each time it seemed to freeze her. She had never liked being touched in casual ways by casual people. And people seemed aware of this trait, instinctively respecting that apartness in a crowded world. Yet Di seemed oblivious of the tension he created. She never knew exactly how to handle it. When he put his brown paw on her waist, her shoulder or the nape of her neck, she breathed in a constricted way, and mentally rehearsed the moves she could make to get away from him, yet could not move freely or casually. She did not want to be touched, yet she did not want to hurt him or, more importantly, create any special awareness between them by making such a point of moving away. So usually she endured it until there was some plausible excuse, and felt relief when it was over. She had tried to talk herself into paying no attention to it, but she could not accustom herself to it. And she was always aware of how very good Di and Claire had been to her since Van had been killed.

A few times she had even wondered if Di was deliberately sensitizing her to his touch, the way animals are trained by slowly acquainting them with the touch of their handler. But she had dismissed this as a paranoid idea which presupposed too much deviousness on the part of Di Sinnat. It was true that he knew women well, and that all of his wives had been beautiful, and that he was vividly male, but he did not seem to have the requisite subtlety to build toward seduction in such an unanswerable way. Somehow she had let pass her chance to stop him in the very beginning. She wished he would change the casual touch into a caress so that she could then stop him without loss of face.

Yet she was wise enough about herself to know that even though it might be the furthest thing from Di’s mind, he was sensitizing her in a way that worried her. He was an attractive man. When he rested his hand upon her, it seemed at the time to have no sensual significance to her, yet twice in the last few months she had awakened abruptly from odd erotic dreams about him. In the last dream she had been alone on the beach down near the Pavilion, sunning herself, yet the beach had become so enormous that she was a tiny figure in a sandy waste, the Pavilion a tiny dot on one horizon, the Gulf a blue distant line opposite it. She saw an insect figure walking toward her from the Pavilion, taking a long time to approach across the sand. At last she recognized Di and was glad to see him because she had something important to say to him, but she could not remember what it was. He sat beside her on the blanket and began talking about Claire’s plans for a studio over the big carport for his daughter, Natalie. Then, still talking, smiling, nodding, he put his hands on her breasts. In the dream it was the same as when he touched her casually, affectionately, at a party. She did not feel she could move or protest. She felt she had to say the right things about the studio for Nat as he described it to her, pretending she did not notice that he had pushed her back, loosened her swimsuit, and was working it down off her hips, pulling it off entirely. Still talking, chuckling, he forced her thighs apart and his face was huge over hers, blotting out all the blue of the sky. She knew that if she could only remember what she was supposed to tell him, then she would be able to scream and make him stop and he would understand. She awoke, shuddering and sweaty, hearing the echo of her own night cry.

Now the warmth and shape of his hand came through the frail material of her blouse, and though it gave her no pleasure, it seemed to muffle the sounds of the conversation on the Jennings patio and make the colors of the early evening less bright, as though all other senses had become subordinate to her complete awareness of that unwelcome weight.

After the emptiness and the desolation of the first few months without Van, she had begun to wonder about herself and the need for sex, if need there was. Van was the only man who had ever known her. For the first year of marriage she had thought herself to be so cool as to be able to find only meager pleasures in the act, but in order not to be a disappointment to Van she had pretended the eagerness she thought would please him, and had doggedly and strenuously acted out the completions as she had read of them in various novels. But in time it became only half false, and at last it became entirely true, and like nothing she could have guessed — a gloriously sweet madness, inexhaustible.

The world seemed to believe that a woman so conditioned by a good marriage would be either unwilling or unable to accept a young-widow continence. She examined her own reactions with somber concern. Sometimes, in the empty night, her body would so yearn for Van’s embrace it was as though ten thousand minute arrows pierced her flesh, poisoning her and sickening her. But it would always go away. She thought of all the men she knew, and imagined them, one by one, giving and receiving the pleasures she and Van had known, but instead of any fragment of curiosity, any crumb of desire, she felt a rising, curdling nausea.

On a previous February evening, Sammy Deegan had confirmed her suspicion. Other men had made oily little hintings, dropping little clues as to how well they could keep any secret, but Sammy, full of vodka confidence, had made the direct approach. His wife and his sister were out of town. He claimed he had seen her light. The kids were in bed. Thirty seconds after he was inside the house, he was fumbling at her, nuzzling her, murmuring to her, frightening her with his clumsy drunken strength. When she had wrestled loose and he had chased her into the kitchen, she had snatched a tack hammer from the countertop where she had left it after fixing a nail in her sandal, spun and chopped him squarely in the middle of the forehead with it. It made a deep gash and burst a vein. The alarming jet of blood sobered him and terrified her. He had lowered himself to the kitchen floor in a gingerly way, stared wall-eyed at her through the running mask of blood and said in a hushed voice, “Good Christ, Kat, where is there to put a tourniquet? Around my neck?” By some miracle she had managed to avoid hysterics. She took him to the bathroom. She found a place where she could press with her thumb and stop the regular pulsing. She made him hold his thumb on the place while she cleaned the gash, cut small strips of tape and crisscrossed them to pull it together. It stopped the bleeding. He was so full of guilt and shame he cried, but he tried to cry without moving his face very much, so it would not start up again. He walked off into the night with extraordinary care, as if he had a wineglass balanced on his head. After she had cleaned up the blood she went to the bathroom and vomited again and again. It was not the blood which had sickened her, or the fright. It was the memory of his wet wanting grin, and the rough fumbling of his hands, and the blunt, questing bulge of his sex against her when he had held her close. Sammy had answered the next-to-the-last question for her.