Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (17 page)

I had not seen him naked for so long and unbroken an interval in five years. As I was walking now at my ease, there was ample time for me to see him in a hundred different attitudes that brought to the surface the range of the past. In the tower room, in the bathroom, on the beach below the house, I caught mere glimpses of his body. At first I turned from them in sorrow at what was broken in me when I lost him. As the days passed, I should have admitted that the pain was gone, though I clung to it enough to say only that it had changed. I had begun to freeze like a deer when I came upon him in the nude, if he stepped out of the shower and shook his wet head like a dog or if he stretched at the closet door in the morning, deciding among his shirts, while I lay in bed behind him. I took in the simple beauty of him at those times. There was something abstract about it, like the running figure in the film that I saw from Madeleine’s window. I insisted, as if I might have to prove it in Farley's court, that my feelings were not
sexual.
This new pain had to do with brief and perfect beauty. I swore to myself that I was aching as I would ache about a rose poised in its midmost hour. This was a high-flown pain, and I was as faithful to it as Keats.

Naked myself now, and on a fragrant carpet of pine, I didn't any longer know what I had to prove. The pain was not there, and with it had gone the double-crossed reasoning that said pain made me real. I would be so glad, I thought, if this wall went on forever. My neck throbbed from looking up at David, but it had the sweet simplicity of localized pain. A week earlier, I would have supposed we had earned this moment without rules or borders by living through the day we had just lived through. But I thought it took away from the newness and the merriment of a naked forest walk to see it as a reward. If we were survivors, it was not today we were surviving. You would have had to come up with a myth or a fairy tale to compare David to as he led me along. He was not, in this brief journey, compelled to mirror any action from the other life we had left behind. Nothing in the tower and nothing in the past had any force here.

He stopped and looked down at me, his legs wide apart as he stood on two stones. He was grinning, I thought, because he seemed to understand how lewd he must look from where I was standing. "Well," he said happily, "we're here."

"Where?" I wanted to know, and said so, since it seemed to me there
was no
"here." We had been where we were from the moment we ran out of the sea. He shook his head at me gently. He could see now, I think, that it was he and not the landscape who had caught my eye and given it a lighted path out of the cave I lived in.

"You know what you look like?" he asked ironically, and because I didn't, he told me. "From up here, you look like you've been struck dumb by a vision. If I put a rag around your loins, you could pass for a saint waiting for the sky to open."

"You always said I was a mystic."

"Mystics aren't hunky like you," he said, and he reached out and pulled in the branch of a maple tree that grew at his height. He snapped off a leaf and put the stem in his mouth. "Aren't they all skin and bones? They have big Adam's apples and red eyes."

"I don't know. I think they look like you and me, except when they're being mystical."

"Do they get turned on when they get turned on?"

Without thinking, I reached for my genitals. My cock had swelled and lifted until it thrust out at a right angle from me, but I didn't know it until I gripped it around and felt a leap of delight. I was surprised, because I usually knew what it was doing. I usually
told
it what to do.

"I don't think so," I said. "I think they leave the body far behind."

"Well, I don't want to be a mystic until I'm old, then. They see the forest all right, but they lose track of the trees. Let's not be mystics." He had been chewing the leaf stem all the while, and now he took it in his hand and dropped it. It floated down, and I caught it with one hand while the other now cupped my balls.

"Rick,
look!"
he said, as if he couldn't seem to get my attention. I felt the feather touch of the leaf and looked up, and he was pointing off to my right. I turned, thinking I would see an animal or a seabird, some cousin of the deer who had long ago eluded me at Sea Island. There was water a stone’s throw away. I could see now that we had arrived at the angle from which the two ridges sprang toward the sea. This high up in the woods, the hill just seemed to unfold, to open on a hinge like a box or a book. The pool in the crook of the two ridges was faced by steep, sheer walls of rock that went straight up and down and looked as if cut by a jeweler. The pool was twenty feet across. I walked over to it, out of the sun, and I could feel David walking above me. At the edge, I saw that its banks were all solid rock. I couldn't place the natural force, what sort of tempest or ice age had scooped it so perfectly out of bedrock.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It's a quarry," David said. "They hauled granite here, but then they hit a spring, and it filled up, so they went somewhere else."

"How do you know?"

"I figured it out."

It was deep, and it looked cold. I stared down at myself in the water and then saw David reflected from the top of the wall, higher than he had been, perhaps twelve feet. When he jumped, I saw him suspended for an instant like a dancer in the blue surface of the pool. He knifed in, feet first, and I felt the explosion of it in the water that broke on me. Darts of cold hit me on the legs and belly, and my muscles clenched. Then there was just time to see the pool's surface flashing in a million pieces before he shot up in the center and again took over the scene. He swam in a couple of strokes to the edge where I was standing, then heaved himself out and came to his feet in front of me. He hugged his shoulders, smiling through chattering teeth. I put my arms around him and shivered at the coolness of him.

"You know what?" he asked, his voice as clear as a boy's in the aftermath of his leap.

"What?"

"You're all covered with salt, and I'm all clean."

I kissed his cold and dripping hair. As I ran my tongue along the side of his neck and across his cheek, I licked the water from him. His open mouth met mine, and the heat of it smacked like whiskey. I held him around the shoulders and didn't move, as if too much motion would awaken us and dissolve us like a dream. But David's hands whirled between us. He stroked the hair on my chest with his open palms and then squeezed my nipples between his fingers until they throbbed. We were both already hard. He took our two cocks in his right hand and kneaded them. With his other hand, he massaged the small of my back, at last trailing one finger lightly along the crack of my ass.

I brought my own hands up to cradle his head. Our tongues came apart as I drew his head back and looked into his face. Spit glistened around his mouth, and his eyes were shut. The thought flashed once in my mind that I would love to go over and over with him the approach to this moment. In the tower. He would tell me everything he thought and wanted from the instant the gardener came inside him. The head of my cock tingled in David's grasp at the mere idea. But I knew I was, as David kept trying to tell me,
here.
I could have come in seconds, just as we stood by the water, but I figured we had a way to go yet.

"What do you want to do?"

"Lie down," he said.

"And do what?"

"You mean, which of the acts of darkness do we perform? I don't care. I want you to stop thinking about it. We don't have to
do
a fucking
thing."

He took my hand and brought me to the ground with him. We stretched in the pine needles, side by side, and he studied my face. It was a stepping backward from the brink, I suppose, to hold off both the fiercer pleasure of coming and the declarations that welled up in my throat like tears. Our hands grazed one another's skin more slowly. We drew back from the center, and yet the pressure in my groin did not diminish. It gathered to a greater spasm as we groped like sleepers with our hands and held each other's open eyes like hypnotists. What do you see, I used to wonder long ago when David stared at me. I didn't think to ask now. I saw the same thing he did.

When we finally moved, it was as if we both assented silently to the same desire. He turned me over onto my back. He leaned over and took the tip of my cock between his lips, his tongue vibrating against the opening. I began to roll my hips to the rhythm of it as he straddled me and braced himself on his hands and knees. He rocked back and forth as he sucked. His genitals brushed across my face, and before I took him in my mouth, I let my tongue play loosely against him, lapping at his balls and burying my face in the swirl of hair on his thighs and in his groin. We fed like animals, furiously. We gauged each other, closer and closer to bursting, working for the shared instant. He was riding deep into my throat when he began to come, and at the same time he seemed to swallow me entirely. I spilled over in a great rush that about broke me in half, while my mouth filled with jet after jet of David's heat. The stream ran out of me, and then, wed to a perfect cycle, it streamed in again.

He collapsed on top of me, and the grip of his legs loosened at my head. But we both held each other in our mouths, breathing through the nose until we were soft. Then he drew back his mouth and let my limp cock fall back between my legs. He folded his arms across my abdomen, laying his head on them as if he were going to take a nap. I stared up at the sky through David's thighs. Now how do we get out of it, I thought. I didn't think it all that anxiously, and part of me thought it gleefully. By this point in the past, after all, I would have had my daily dose of post-coital
tristesse
—"PCT," David came to call it, since he had occasion to observe it so often. Instead I was getting giddy, and I wasn't sorry to be pinned down on the tiny earth. I might have floated off otherwise. Get out of it, Rick, I dared myself.

"Are you having a mystical experience?" David asked from my waist.

"No. I have not left the body far behind."

"How are you?"

"Thirsty," I said. "I just took in a lot of seawater."

He lifted off me and leaned in a crouch over the edge of the pool. He scooped up water and splashed his face, then bent way over and drank at the surface. Though he was only an arm's length away from me, he was still as beautiful as the boy who lived in the film shot from the upstairs window. That said something about beauty, if not about me. As he swung around, I saw that his cheeks were bulging with a gulp of water. He held his face above mine. I opened my mouth. The water drizzled down all over my lips and teeth, and I held my tongue out to catch what I could.

"Yum yum."

"Don't mention it," he said, and he didn't move. His face was still only inches from mine.

"David, what did Madeleine whisper to you?"

"She said you'd be horny once you'd signed your name." He smiled and kissed me lightly on the lips. "She said I'd better be ready."

T
HERE
IS
A TIME
in midsummer when every day seems more what you mean by summer, when to wake up to the sun is a relief because it proves it is not just in your head. This hasn't anything to do with the light, which has after all peaked weeks before. But different people reckon their summers by different certainties. Mrs. Carroll was such a broken-hearted type, for instance, that she said it was all downhill after June twenty-first. She said the winter had not unlocked her bones before the longest day was past, and so there was a sting that the year never lost. For me it all comes true in the middle of July. It is not possible for it to be too hot for my taste, and when the humidity pressure-cooks the city, I like it even more. The people I don't understand in New England are the ones who complain about winter and summer both, about the cold and the heat. I don't understand what they want.

But I think the weather is all right in Boston. I like July best of all, but I don't need it all year long. David says he does. He is all right from the Fourth of July until Labor Day, and thus he thought he would have been a happy Carroll child at the turn of the century, in and out of the water all day while his nanny sat guard in her puffed uniform next to a pile of white linen towels. The sea upset him the rest of the time, chill with winter coming or winter going. He and Mrs. Carroll had pinpointed it about their differences one night over claret and Gitanes. David told me all this about the weather as if I had never heard him talk about it before, when in fact I remembered whole days in Boston when he talked about nothing else. He used to brood and piss until we had a fight.

"Do we have to talk about the weather?" I asked him now. "I know the winter brings you down, but why don't you just enjoy today?"

I was a regular little Pollyanna. We were lying side by side, covered with oil, on the high roof terrace where Phidias had first argued out the plan with Madeleine. The oil was called Tahiti Gold, and Aldo, who had bought it on a South Seas trip last winter, swore by it. He said it would turn us the color of chocolate in no time.