Thief of Dreams (15 page)

She had a marvelous lunch, preferring, at last, to eat by herself. She felt a little too inspired and energetic to eat with any of the salesladies. She didn't wish to listen to their everyday conversations about the expense of children's braces or whether to buy drapes for the dining room or paper the hall, or any of the ordinary, passionless discussions she had once envied precisely because they were so dull and safe, and therefore, seemed the hallmarks of full lives and happy marriages. Anyway, God only knew what she might have blurted in the state she was in, feeling, as she did, full of wonderful secrets and power.

And after work, at dinner with Leslie, it seemed to her she got a glimpse of the way life really ought to be. There was no animosity between them. None. For the first time in a long while, food tasted the way it should, and now and again she found herself giggling.

“Do you remember the time Lonnie Crocket put the garter snake in Mrs. Dunbar's purse?” Leslie asked and laughed.

She did remember very well. Lonnie and Leslie had been in the tenth grade when she was in the twelfth; and, during lunch, Lonnie had managed to sneak a pretty big garter snake in Mrs. Dunbar's purse, wisely figuring someone in the twelfth grade would be blamed. It had been in the spring, and Mrs. Dunbar was troubled with hay fever, and every so often she would yank a handkerchief from her purse, give her nose a blow and a wipe, and go on with the lesson. The strange thing was that, when she came out with the twenty-inch garter snake, there seemed to be a moment when even the most basic, primordial instinct failed and she had no idea what it was. Who would expect to find such a thing in one's purse after all? Even Dolly Clarke, who sat in the front row, screamed before Mrs. Dunbar, although not as long or as piercingly as when Mrs. Dunbar's puzzlement became, in the next heartbeat, profound and hysterical recognition. The poor, good woman left a puddle between her desk and the blackboard and a fetid cloud that seemed to hang at the front of the classroom for the rest of the afternoon, while first a substitute from one of the other grades and finally the principal came in to harangue and threaten them.

All through dinner the two of them remembered pranks and high school love affairs and hay rides and church picnics, and it was all so easy and comfortable that they lingered over every course. Although finally, they found they were talking less and spending more time giving each other long, fond, open appraisals over raised coffee cups and idle forks until Madeline dropped her eyes and said, “You know, I really would like to see your house … to see where you live … just so I can imagine you in it.”

Maybe he was too pleased to reply. She didn't know. Maybe he couldn't think of anything appropriate to say, but she sensed as much as saw him nod. Quite suddenly they both turned shy and took more time over their coffee than was necessary.

The house stood halfway up the mountain above Cedar Hill on a twisted residential street, so that the grand living room and dining room and the master bedroom looked down on the lighted streets of Cedar Hill with what seemed a benign but distinctly proprietary air. The house was made of stone; had wide, pegged, oak floors, stained a rich, warm color; and two full baths, which seemed wonderfully extravagant. It also had three large bedrooms, the most beautiful kitchen she'd ever seen, and a study with glassed-in bookshelves on either side of a huge granite fireplace and hearth. Everything was in excellent taste and neat—he had a cleaning lady twice a week—but somehow sterile too and without the warmth a woman's constant presence and touch might have given it. Leslie's wife had died while the house was being built, and she'd never lived in it.

“She got to fuss some at the builders, though, while it was going up,” Leslie said.

“Ahhh,” Madeline said, truly and profoundly saddened, even as she was pleased that she might become the first, and not the second, mistress of this dwelling.

In the living room once more, she could see a wan reflection of herself in the dark windows surrounded by the faint image of Leslie's furniture and appointments, all shot through with the lights of the town below. She wished to look as though she belonged, but she wasn't so sure she did, nor did her reflection quite please her the way it had earlier in the day when she'd caught glimpses of herself in the fitting mirrors. She looked ghostly with the lights of Cedar Hill shining through her. In any case, she suspected Leslie knew as well as she did that she hadn't come merely to look at his house, and suddenly that knowledge seemed to charge the atmosphere around her with uncertainty and make her palms misty. She thought of Edward, but she made herself turn toward Leslie and put her arms about his neck. “Oh Leslie,” she said, realizing she had almost, out of the instinctual weight of years, spoken another name. “Oh Leslie, I love you,” she insisted and kissed him. She held him as close as she possibly could, and after many long moments, when his lips almost left hers, she still didn't release him. So they stood kissing for a long time until he began to pet her and she could feel him rising, and she began to shiver and tremble, head to toe. At last he pulled back and led her away.

In his bedroom, divested of her clothes, she was shocked to realize that she felt less shy than she'd ever felt around her husband. Not once in her previous life could she remember being naked without feeling the cooling touch of shame and the need to cover up. Nor had she ever allowed herself to admire a naked man, except in the most surreptitious little peeks and glances. It was as if Leslie were the first naked man she had truly ever seen. He was slender and handsome, she thought, although he didn't look especially strong. Still, although his arms and legs were thin, they were well proportioned, and his chest and belly were thick with springy hair as silver as the hair on his head—odd, since the hair on his arms and legs and around his genitals was still mostly black. He was really quite remarkable, his nipples like dark badges among all that hair, and the curve of his penis and the orbs of his testicles, almost beautiful, almost endearing.

Oh but he was gentle and tender, his mouth upon her mouth, her eyes, her breasts and nipples. And his hands, how could they be so wise and gentle and tantalizingly slow, and where had he learned all this, and when? Had he been some nasty little boy hiding out in the barn with those pretty little dark-eyed cousins of his? How many women had he known before his wife? Since? But she had grown delirious for him to caress each new part of her. There was no spot he might wish to touch and woo that she would not gladly surrender. She would do anything he asked, she knew she would, because she was totally dotty. She knew she was. She had never in her life been so thrilled. And when, at last, he entered her, for the space of a heartbeat she lost consciousness. Gentle and wonderful he was, and on and on he went. On and on and on. But when she certainly would have reached climax, haunting the most remote boundary of thought, was Edward. She would not admit him, but she couldn't banish the effort it took to keep him at bay, and so the moment escaped her. For some time then, the sensations, which had been so delicious, turned raw and almost painful, and the whole situation seemed ludicrous. But Leslie would not stop, and finally, as though from the wrong side, as though the whole matter had been turned wrong side out, she reached orgasm, somehow as horrid as it was wonderful.

JAMES TALLY

When the trouble started, James was crossing the playground toward the sycamore tree where Lester was already eating his baked sweet potato, a sweet potato being the only thing Lester had had in his lunch bag all week, except when they were small and he'd had two of them; and when James thought about it later, he figured it had all happened because he'd been so deep in his own thoughts. He was about fifty feet from Lester when he heard, or maybe just felt, a presence close by; and in the next second a jarring blow to his shoulder made him stagger.

“Whaddaya say pissant?” Earl said. “Gettin any gravel for yer goose?”

His arm felt half-paralyzed, and he had a crick in his neck from the impact of Earl's bony knuckles against the point of his shoulder, but he kept walking, not even looking around, as though he'd merely stumbled or been shoved by a sudden gust of wind, although Lester and the sycamore were blurred from the moisture that pain had dashed across his eyes.

“Hey,” Earl insisted, “answer me, boy! You gettin any poontang? Any frogjaw?” And he grasped James's shoulder to turn him around.

Whatever the reason, when he was forced to look into Earl's proud, cruel face, he said, “Get away from me,” in a voice he didn't even recognize, and when Earl opened his mouth to speak, the heels of James's hands shot out all by themselves, hit Earl in the chest, and knocked him backwards.

“Why you little shit!” Earl said and did exactly the same thing to James, only James's feet left the ground and he landed on his back with the base of his skull slamming into the hard-packed earth of the ballfield with such force that he seemed to go blind and maybe a little crazy too, since he was up and swinging wildly before he knew it. He hit Earl once on the forehead, once in the neck, and once in the ribs before Earl's fist hammered into his eye and knocked him down again. It was such a hard, bone-against-bone blow that it didn't even hurt, exactly; instead it provided a numbing burst of color, and he hardly felt himself hitting the ground. But this time, just as he had scrambled up to his hands and knees, Earl landed on him, got an arm twisted behind his back, grabbed the hair of his head, and slammed his face into the earth, which bloodied his nose and got his mouth full of dirt. In a rage of frustration and anger, he thrashed and struggled, but Earl cursed him and rode him, forcing his face into the ground by the hair of his head.

“Get off'n him and let him up,” James heard a calm, familiar voice say but Earl pushed his face into the dirt and said, “What's it to you, fester fuck?”

James gathered himself to struggle again, but his arm got twisted so far behind his back, the pain was crippling, although in the next moment, as if by magic, Earl's weight disappeared. For a few seconds James lay where he was, trying to bring his right arm from behind his back. Aching and reluctant, his arm obeyed him, and he sat up and, suddenly very dizzy, spat again and again to rid his mouth of dirt and blood. Earl Carpenter, James was surprised to see, was also sitting on the ballfield a dozen feet away. “Don't bother him no more,” Lester was saying. “You done aggravated him enough.”

A strange, delighted sneer on his handsome face, Earl got up and dusted off the seat of his britches. He shook his head, as though sadly, and grinned. “You gonna get it now,” he told Lester. “I'm gonna stomp a mudhole in yore ass.”

But as Lester and Earl came together, Earl's constant shadows, Tom and Tim Lanich, moved in James's way, and he couldn't see what was happening. “Knock his head off, Earl!” Tom said.

“Kick his ass! Kick his ass!” Tim demanded just as a small boy from a lower grade brushed past James's shoulder and shouted: “There's a fight! Hey, Troy! Hey, Cecil! There's a fight!” And before James could even get up, a dozen people had gathered; and by the time his arms managed to steady him enough so that he could get his feet under him and stand, a whole cluster of people had gathered eagerly around.

His knees didn't feel as if they were going to hold him up, but they did, although they burned with weakness and threatened to buckle. Still, he clutched and fumbled at those in front of him until he came in sight of Lester, who was holding his fists clownishly out before him as though he were John L. Sullivan or some such old-time fighter posing for a picture, except that his lips were so puffed and broken they looked almost wrong side out, and his nose was already streaming blood. James couldn't believe so much damage had been done in so short a time. But it was easy to see that Lester didn't know the first thing about fighting. He pawed the air with his oversized fists in front of an enemy half a head shorter and at least twenty pounds heavier, while Earl, completely unmarked, moved easily out of the way and smirked; until, almost too fast for the eye to follow, he was somehow inside Lester's pawing fists and match-thin arms and had hit him one, two, three times; and Lester became all arms and legs, waving and kicking out for balance. But he didn't fall, and in a moment there he was again, serious, wordless, striking his clownish pose and pawing the air in front of Earl's face.

“Knock his head off, Earl,” one of the Lanich twins shouted, and then other people began to shout, and all of them for Earl. They had to be fooling themselves, hoping that, if they cheered for Earl, he might begin to think of them as friends and be less cruel, or maybe they just couldn't bring themselves to cheer for someone so ridiculous as Lester; James didn't know and couldn't say. But for himself, he felt empty and sick in his stomach, and whether from the sudden passing of his inexplicable anger, or from fear, or for some other mysterious reason, there was no strength in his body, and the crowd jostled him this way and that. “Hey, kick his ass, Earl!” someone shouted, and as though on command, Earl stepped in and punched Lester squarely in the eye.

Lester went reeling backwards, arms flailing, and might have fallen if he hadn't managed to catch Earl's shirtfront, so that the two of them went around and around in a violent dance with Earl yanking Lester about as though Lester had no weight at all and punching him frantically to break free. But their legs only got tangled, and they both went down where they thrashed and rolled and struggled for a long time before Earl managed to escape somehow and stand up, although his shirt was torn and, probably more through Lester's clumsiness than anything, there was a thin trickle of blood crawling out of Earl's nose and a lump under one of his eyes.

Lester got up too, his arms looking as thin as twigs and his big chapped fists slowly churning the air in front of him again.