Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I said as much to T.C., who laughed and said he didn’t want anybody else but me looking at him bare-assed.

“Why not?” I said. “You have a wonderful body. I do, too. I wonder why I never thought I did before. Right now I don’t care who sees this magnificent body, and I don’t know why you do, either.”

“Have you ever seen an old movie called The Enchanted Cottage ?” he said, tracing the line of my hipbone with a fingertip. “Where those two supposedly ugly people look perfect and beautiful to each other, as long as they stay in the cottage? I think that’s happened to us. Anybody else seeing us would point and laugh and holler, and then call the cops. We’re a walking pair of skeletons, two long, bony middle-aged loonies flitting buck naked through the redwoods, patting each other. Don’t kid yourself. Life is real and life is earnest.”

“Bull. You no more believe that than I do. Life is perfect. You want to stop a minute and jump dese bones with dem bones?”

“Wait a while. We’re here. Look, right through those laurels. Let’s see what happens to dese dry bones in water.”

It was a deep little pool of dark water, cupped in rock and thick with giant ferns, green and swaying as a tropical kelp bed, where a small silver creek fell from a ridge and paused before running on. The embracing rocks were huge and flattened and gray, and the tops of them lay in sun, but the lichened sides lay in shadow, and where they cradled the pool was far down and bearded with the ferns. Over them the great trees leaned close, so that only the peculiar shafts of thick golden light reached the forest floor and the water. The silence and stillness was so complete that only when we parted the curtaining laurels and stood on the rocks did we hear the sturdy chuckle of the creek and the little falls.

“Oh, Lord. Oh, how magical. What is this place? Does it have a name?” I breathed.

“I think it has some pedestrian name like Smith’s Creek, or something. I did know, but I forgot. It’s not on the park maps, I don’t think; I’ve never seen anybody else down here. I hereby name it Merritt’s Creek. You want to go in?”

I did a foolhardy thing; I scrambled down a rock, found a level place, and dove into the dark water. Only later did I think that I might have broken my neck. An older, deeper part of me knew the pool would take me gently.

“I’m in,” I gasped against the breath-stealing cold. “What’s keeping you?”

He dove in, a long flash of brown in a sun shaft, and when his seal-sleek black head bobbed up beside me, he gasped, “That was stupid. I don’t ever want you to do anything like that again.”

“You did the same thing.”

“I knew it was deep and free of rocks and logs. You didn’t.”

“Well, somehow I did. Maybe water talks to me like the stupid fault does to you. Don’t preach at me, T.C. I’m not a child.”

He spat water and grinned.

“Today you are. Are we having our first fight?”

The water felt wonderful all of a sudden, the deep, aching cold gone, the lingering soft chill effervescent against my body. Looking down, I saw that he and I both were outlined with tiny, silvery bubbles.

“No,” I said. “I feel too good for that. Look at the bubbles. It’s like swimming in champagne, isn’t it?”

I swam up against him, backing him against a submerged rock. I pressed my body against his, feeling the water take it away, pressing it back. There were subterranean currents, though from where I could not tell. The slight resistance was profoundly sensual.

“Have you ever done it in champagne?” I said against his chest.

“I’m good, but I’m not that good,” he said ruefully. “Ask me again sometime when I’m not neck deep in ice water.”

“You may be sure that I will.”

We swam until the cold began to make our arms and legs rubbery, and then we crawled out and lay on the sun-heated rocks, breathing in the silence and the smell of the woods, feeling the sun’s red weight on our eyelids. We lay there until the water’s chill dried to silky coolness and that turned to heat and then to the slight stickiness of sweat.

“Lunchtime,” he said finally, and we got up and stretched and looked at each other.

“Better put our clothes on,” he said. “People still drive down this road occasionally, as far as the lodge, just to see where it goes. Unless you want to shock the Kleinfelder family of Ottumwa, Iowa, out of their leisure suits.”

“Nah, I’m for your eyes only. The Kleinfelders will never know what they missed.”

Back at the tower the sun smote the earth where the trees had been thinned out, and I heard for the first time that old master sound of summer, the lazy hum of cicadas in the encircling forest. I closed my eyes and for an instant was home beside the river. Then I opened them and shook my head. That was for later. That was for another lifetime, or a past one.

We ate lunch on the shabby veranda, under the canvas awning T.C. had rigged up. He brought bread and Brie and some leftover grapes back when he returned from checking the answering machine, and a couple of bottles of cold white wine.

“I can count on the fingers of one hand the days that have been too hot to stay up there, but this is one of them,” he said. “Today we spend right here.”

Curtis had staked out a cool spot under the water spigot where the earth was splotched with dampness, and thumped his tail in welcome, but did not indulge in any unnecessary welcoming frolicking. He went back to panting his doggy grin. T.C. pointed, and I saw Forrest’s shifty jet eyes glittering from a terra-cotta pot with a lush crop of thyme in it. T.C. held out his arm and snapped his fingers, but Forrest preferred the damp earth and the sheltering thyme, and only twinkled his snout slightly.

“Did you know that in New Guinea they eat your cousins, you dirty rat?” T.C. told Forrest. “God-awful big things called Capas, or something. You’re lucky there are no New Guineans around. You’re already seasoned with thyme.”

“Do I have to keep these clothes on?” I said. “I miss the sight of your naked magnificence, and I’m hot as if it were August in Atlanta.”

“Shuck right out,” he said. “Just let me set up the screen here. If the Kleinfelders come by, it’ll give us time to get dressed. I go around without clothes a lot in hot weather, and once a park ranger caught me naked as a jaybird, lying down here reading The Prince of Tides .”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. He asked me how it was going and I said pretty good, and he drove on down the road. Don’t ever try to wear The Prince of Tides as a loincloth, though.”

He unfolded a tattered burlap screen that leaned against the tower base and set it up around the sofa and chairs and upended cable spool that served as a coffee table. I was out of my clothes in an instant, tossing them into one of the rump-sprung chairs. He sat back on his heels, smiling at me.

“Come here,” he said, holding out his arms, and I walked over and into them. His face came just to my waist. He buried it in the space between my ribs, and took a deep breath and let it out again.

“You smell like clean water and woods dirt,” he said, and I could feel his mouth against my skin when he spoke. He kissed my stomach, and my navel, and moved his lips down and down, and I felt my legs go boneless once more, and warmth bloom in the pit of my stomach.

“Care for a nooner?” I murmured.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, and got up and pulled me with him onto the deep old couch. Slow: Once again it was all slow, all delicacy and tasting and teasing, all slow-spreading like spilled honey. Then the plunging dark. When I had found my way back, T.C. was laughing and Curtis was whining and barking and nosing at us with a cold, frantic black muzzle.