Up Island (48 page)

For what seemed a very long time we simply lay there. I could feel our hearts beating together through the heavy clothes, and feel his warm breath. His eyes were very close, and wide open, and dark. Unreadable eyes. His mouth was soft and slightly open, like a child’s nearing sleep. I felt my laughter slow and die, and his did, too.

He pulled my head down to his, then, and kissed UP ISLAND / 415

me. It was a very long kiss, complex and searching, seeking hard, and seeming to find what it sought in my own mouth.

I felt myself slacken into the kiss, going more deeply into it, more deeply into his arms. It felt strange, to be held by arms that were not Tee’s, to be kissed by a mouth that did not taste of Tee’s. But not that strange. Soon it no longer felt strange at all. The kiss went on and on.

In a little while I felt the hard, muffled surging of him against me, and laughed in pure delight.

“Hello,” I whispered into his mouth. “What’s this?”

He pulled his head away and looked up at me. His face in the moon and snow light was beautiful. He was grinning.

“Good God. I can’t believe it,” he said, beginning to laugh.

“Do you think it’s possible for a one-legged man to fuck in a snowbank?”

As it turned out, it was.

I
STAYED AT DENNIS’S ALL THAT night and for much of the next day. I slept and slept. It was the sort of sleep you think you remember from childhood or adolescence but really don’t: silent, sweet, voluptuous, bottomless. It seemed a separate element to me: I would dive and glide and turn and roll in it as a seal might, in beneficent water; I would sink deep and soar up to the very sunlit surface of it, stretch and dive down again. I was conscious of no need at all to surface except satiety. When I had had enough, far past noon the next day, I woke up.

Sunlight was pouring into the bedroom, but it did not fall where I was accustomed to seeing it, and for a moment I simply lay, slack-limbed and rested in all my parts, looking at the pale rays with dust motes dancing in them, falling on a quilt and a rug and an armchair I did not know. I started to smile out of sheer well-being, and then I remembered where I was, and why, and sat up with my breath huffing out of my throat.

“Oh, God,” I whispered to myself, eyes squeezed shut. “I made love to Dennis Ponder in a snowdrift and spent the entire night in his bed. Oh, shit! What does this mean? I don’t know what this means!”

416

UP ISLAND / 417

And then I looked at my watch and vaulted out of bed as if catapulted, tangling myself in the bedclothes and falling to my knees on the rug. I scrambled up again, searching for my clothes. It was nearly two-thirty in the afternoon, and nobody but Dennis knew where I was. My father would be frantic, the old ladies would be cold and hungry and possibly worse.

I found my clothes, still damp from last night’s snow, on the floor beyond the chair and skinned into them, grimacing slightly at the unaccustomed but not unpleasant soreness in parts of me where no soreness had been for a very long time.

I glanced in Dennis’s filmy old bureau mirror and saw a madwoman with tousled hair and a flushed face, raked my fingers through my hair, and ran into the living room bare-foot, looking for my shoes.

Dennis Ponder had not been in the bedroom, but he was in the living room. He stood with his back to the room, looking out the window at the sun striking light off the snow, holding a cup of coffee. He wore a black turtleneck and chinos and a work boot, and he balanced on the back of the sofa as he stared out. Lazarus lay beside him, and he turned and thumped his tail at me when I came in the room, but Dennis did not turn. I stood stock-still, feeling my face beginning to flame, unable to think of a single thing to say to him. So far as morning-after etiquette went, I had had need of it only once, long ago, and in that instance I had married the partner.

I had no casual postcoital talk.

I cleared my throat to speak, and he said, “If you want to forget it ever happened, we’ll say no more about it. If, on the other hand, you enjoyed it as much as you said you did, let’s go back in there and do it again. It’s your call.”

418 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I…oh, Lord, Dennis, I have to go! My father doesn’t know where I am…”

“He knows. I called him last night after you’d gone to sleep,” he said. He still did not turn his face to me.

“But Bella and Luz…”

“I went,” he said.

“You what?”

“I didn’t want to wake you, so I went over there and built up a fire and heated up some soup. Don’t make a big deal out of it, Molly. You were half dead and it’s past time I stopped letting you carry the whole load. The truck’s got the oldest automatic transmission in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but it has one. The county’s gotten to the road and somebody’s plowed out the driveway. It was no problem.”

“Dennis…my God…”

He turned then, and I could see that his eyes were rimmed with red and his nose was pink. There was no doubt that he had been crying. I felt shock and hope and dread collide in my chest.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“No. Not now. Maybe in a little while. The thing is there’s nowhere you have to rush off to, so let’s have some lunch and a glass of wine and see where things go. Last night was…more than I thought I was going to have again in my life.”

I felt the flush on my cheeks flood down over my chest. I saw my shoes beside the door and went and got them and sat down on the sofa, busying myself with them. My whole body felt on fire. Every place he had touched me last night seemed limned with light and flame.

“I…” I began, and choked, and cleared my throat. “I enjoyed it, too,” I said, stupidly and primly.

UP ISLAND / 419

He laughed.

“Can you look at me? Okay, that’s better. Now. Tell me what’s on your mind. Did my magnificent hairless body turn you on? Did my one-legged state repulse you? Did the earth move? Should I have lit two cigarettes and handed you one?

What?”

“I…you know, Dennis, I’ve never done that with anybody but my husband before. This wasn’t anything like that, and thank God for it, but I don’t quite know yet how to act. Did I like it? You must know I did. But I don’t know, I just don’t know…if I can jump right in bed and do it again. I mean…I hardly…”

“You hardly know me?”

He laughed again but there was not so much warmth in it this time.

I nodded. That really had been what I meant and even in my addled state I realized how utterly ridiculous a notion it was. I might never know Dennis Ponder any better than I did now.

“I guess I mean maybe we should talk about what sort of relationship we’re going to have,” I said miserably. I could not seem to make myself sound any way but absurd.

“What relationship?” he said. “What relationship could we have but the one we do?”

“I sort of thought we needed to let things develop, see what common interests we have, get to know one another in…other ways, too. We already have a lot in common…”

“Molly…”

He sighed, and came and sat down beside me on the sofa.

“Listen. We made love. We screwed, to put it another way.

It doesn’t mean we’re engaged. It doesn’t
420 / Anne Rivers Siddons

mean I won’t respect you tomorrow. You don’t want any other kind of relationship, I can promise you. What would be in it for you?”

“I don’t just screw, Dennis.”

“I know you don’t. I didn’t think of it as just screwing. It was…something else entirely for me. But I’m not exactly a prime candidate for a long-term relationship, to use a New Age term I loathe only slightly more than ‘special.’ ”

“You mean you think you’re dying?”

“I mean I don’t know. But I know I’m not dying this afternoon, and all I’m proposing to you is a suitable occupation for the rest of this afternoon.”

“Dennis, I just don’t know if that’s enough,” I said softly.

“It’s all I have,” he said.

We sat looking at each other, seeing no quarter in each other’s eyes. And then he said, “I won’t hassle you about this. If you feel like it, you let me know. The offer stands.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

“What do you want me to do, just tap on your shoulder in the middle of some afternoon and say, ‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’ ”

“That, or ‘Let’s fuck,’ ” he said mildly, and I laughed again.

The awkwardness went out of the air. I felt absurdly good, young and lighthearted and sensuous and admired. I could remember that feeling from the very earliest days of Tee’s and my courtship, that delicate, flirtatious, breath-held time when all things seemed wonderful and possible but there was no hurry about anything. The sense of delectation was high.

I wish I had had a lot more of that feeling before I had what came next. I wanted, suddenly, to tell it to UP ISLAND / 421

Teddy: Don’t rush into anything, take that long, delicious, teasing time that’s your due before you settle on someone. I wished I could have told it to Caroline, too. I wondered if Dennis Ponder had ever had it. Somehow, I did not think so. It presupposed too much self-delight, too much sheer playfulness. I thought Bella might well have murdered any capacity he had had for those things.

Bella…

“Dennis, your mother…how is she? Physically, I mean. It must have been an enormous shock for her, not to mention old Luz. Do I need to see about them? Or…do you want to go again? I don’t intend to pry, but I have to know how to play this now.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to tell you much about my mother, Molly,” he said. “I went, she was surprised, she cried, she carried on, she prayed, she got to coughing and gasping. I gave her a shot of Scotch and calmed her down and stayed until they’d eaten and were about to drop off to sleep, and then I came home. You probably ought to check on them in a little while, but I think they’re fine. She’s too old and sick to make much of a fuss, and Luz is too out of it. Luz didn’t turn a hair, by the way; she just looked up and said, ‘You may be tall, but I know you’re Denny. Where’s your other leg?’ And I told her I left it in Seattle, and she just nodded. Luz is exactly the same as she was when I left, except wrinkled. But my mother…my God, she’s grotesque, isn’t she? And a real wreck physically. Well, I guess neither one of us is much of a prize. And that’s it. That’s all I know about it right now. If there’s any more, maybe I’ll tell you about it.

Or maybe not.”

“All right,” I said faintly, and as it happened, that
422 / Anne Rivers Siddons

was all I ever did learn about that first meeting of Dennis Ponder with the terrible, sad old woman who had thought she could only have one love.

But after that, he went frequently to the farmhouse on the Chilmark moor. He went a couple of times in the mornings so I could do other errands, but mainly he went in the evenings, because that was when Bella was strongest and most alert, and when Luz was most focused, and when his own carefully husbanded energy burned highest. Once or twice he went alone in the truck, but usually I drove him so I could have the use of it, and picked him up again when I was done with whatever I had to do. We did not specifically agree on it, but gradually he took over the late-afternoon reading.

“It’s not that we don’t like the way you read,” Luz told me sweetly on one of the first days Dennis read, “but this is our Denny, and when he reads about kings it’s nice because he’s descended from one, just like we are. It’s the same king, you know, King Dinis. It’s like hearing about family.”

And Bella nodded, her black eyes flaming with joy.

I did not look at Dennis when she said that. From the very beginning, we all pretended that there was nothing in the least unusual about the fact that Dennis Ponder, son of this house and this huge old woman, sat reading to her in the dusk of a place from which he had been banished more than forty years before. I don’t think to Luzia there was anything extraordinary about it; in the tapestry of her shadowy mind it was little Denny, to whom she had read only a heartbeat ago, who sat with her in the lamplight now. But it must have been an unimaginable effort for Bella to conceal UP ISLAND / 423

her radiant pride. Yet she merely sat quietly, looking interested and appreciative, like a lady to whom a well-bred youngster is tendering a special, small social favor. I don’t know how she managed it. Her florid mind must have been roiling with the sort of baroque maternal passion she had not been able to indulge for many decades. I wondered if Dennis had laid down any ground rules about how they would all behave, and decided not. Whatever there was in his heart for his mother and Luzia Ferreira now, I knew it could not be simple love, not in any ordinary filial sense of the word. Perhaps the pretense that all was as usual was necessary for him to go into that house at all. Perhaps Bella’s facade of mere pleasantry was in the nature of a child’s pretending not to see a wild little animal so as not to frighten it away. It was an infinitely delicate and careful balancing act that the three of them conceived. I would not have asked about it for words. Bella never told me how she felt, and Dennis did not until much later.

On the first evening that I dropped him off to read to the old women, I said, “The books they like to hear are on the table by Luz’s bed. We’re in the middle of
Penrod and Sam,
but Luz is going to beg for
The Once and Future King.
It’s Bella’s turn to choose. Don’t let them start fighting about it; it makes Bella sick, and it takes forever to calm Luz down.”

“I brought my own book,” he said. “They’ll get it or nothing.”

“What? The Marquis de Sade?” I teased.

“
Mother Courage,”
he said dryly. But he did not show me the book.

When I came back, in the clear green light that you get on the twilight moors of Chilmark every now
424 / Anne Rivers Siddons

and then in the earliest spring, the house was quiet, and I let myself into the living room softly so as not to disturb the old women if they had fallen asleep. But they had not; they sat in their familiar little tableau, Bella sprawled back in the big recliner that by now bore the indelible shape of her great buttocks, Luz snuggled into her tattered linens. Dennis sat opposite them in a spavined old morris chair, his leg outstretched on a hassock. The fire whispered, and Palestrina trickled from Dennis’s cassette recorder. A single old milk-glass lamp shone down on the book he was reading from, and in its light I saw that Luz wore a smile more of the air than the earth, and the nacreous tracks of tears traced Bella’s blank moon of a face.