"Sexist goose. Turn it around. 'I have a theory, Richard, that handsome men don't much care for sex.' "
"Nonsense! What are you getting at?"
"Listen: 'I'm defended like a fortress against handsome men, I'm cold to them, I keep them at arm's-length, don't
let them be a part of my life, and somehow it doesn't seem as if they enjoy sex as much as I want them to. . . .' "
"No wonder," I said, and in a flying shatter of broken conjecture knew what she was saying. "No wonder! If you weren't so cold to them, wookness, if you'd open up a little, let them know how you feel, what you think-none of us really handsome men wants to be treated as a sex-machine, after all! Now, if a woman shows us a little human warmth, there's a different story!"
She moved her body very close to mine. "Class?" she said. "What's the moral of this story? Richard?"
"Where intimacy is not, is not the finest sex," I said. "Is that the moral, teacher?"
"What a wise philosopher you are becoming!"
"And if one learned that, if one found someone whom one loved and admired and respected and for whom one had spent one's life looking, might one find the warmest bed of all? And even if the one that one found was a very beautiful woman, would one find that she might care a very great deal for sex with one, and might enjoy sweet carnality as much as one might, oneself?"
"Fully as much as one might, oneself," she laughed. "Could be, more!"
"Teacher!" I said. "No!"
"If you could be a woman, you might be surprised."
We newlyweds touched and talked through a night that made crumbling walls, collapsing empires, clashing with government and plunging into bankruptcy-that made those insignificant. One night of many, lifting from the past, arching through the present, shimmering into the future.
What matters most in every lifetime we choose? I thought. Can it be so simple as intimacy with one we love?
Except for the hours when we had been furious with each other in the desert, or collapsing in fatigue over the computers, there hummed a soft gh'mmering aura of sex over everything we did. The brief flash of an eye, a quick smile, a touch in passing, those were welcome events between us every day long.
One reason I had sought out beginnings, years before, was that I hated endings, hated the vanishment of the subtle electrics of sex. To my delight, with this one woman, voltages didn't fade. Gradually my wife became more beautiful, became ever more lovely to see and touch.
"It's all subjective, isn't it?" I said, lost in curves and golden light.
"Yes it is," she said, knowing what I thought. There was no technique to our telepathy, it just happened, often, that we knew each other's mind.
"Somebody else could look at us and say we hadn't changed," she said, "that we're still the same. But there is something about you that gets more and more attractive, to me!"
Exactly, I thought. If we weren't changing, to each other, we would get bored!
"Have we ended our beginning?" I said. "Or does it go on like this always?"
"Remember in your book, what the seagull said? Could be that's where you are: Now you're ready to fly up and begin to know the meaning of kindness and of love."
"He didn't say that. It was said to him."
She smiled. "Now it's being said to you."
forty-three
THE BANKRUPTCY court allowed us to stay in our little house as caretakers for a time, while we looked for a place to rent. Someplace farther north, someplace cheap. Then it was time to leave the Little Applegate Valley.
We walked inside, outside, saying goodbye together. Goodbye desk and timber-sale protest. Goodbye bed under skylight, where we watched the stars before we slept. Goodbye fireplace of stones we had carried one by one. Goodbye warm little house. Goodbye gardens that Leslie had imagined into flowered reality, that she had mixed and dug and planted and protected. Goodbye forests and animals we loved, and fought to save. Goodbye, we said.
When it came time to leave, she buried her face in my chest, her courage dissolved in tears.
"Our garden!" she sobbed. "I love our garden! And I love our little house and our wildplants and our deer-family and
the sun coming up over the forest. . . ." She cried as though she would never stop.