The Cat's Pajamas

“We could have been happy,” she says.

“It’s nice to think so, isn’t it?”

“I wish you’d change your mind,” she says.

“Too late,” you say.

She sighs.

A wave comes in on the shore.

You are not afraid of being here with Anne. She can do nothing to you. You can handle her. You are confident of that. No, this will be an easy, lazy day, without event. You are alert, ready for any contingency.

You lie in the sun, and it strikes through your bones and loosens you inside and you mold to the contours of the sand. Anne is beside you, and the sun gilds her tipped nose and glitters across the minute pellets of perspiration on her brow. She talks gay talk and light talk and you are fascinated with her; how she can be so beautiful and like a hunk of serpentine thrown across your path, and be so mean and small somewhere hidden inside where you can’t find it?

You lie upon your stomach and the sand is warm. The sun is warm.

“You’re going to burn,” she says at last, laughing.

“I suppose I am,” you say. You feel very clever, very immortal.

“Here, let me put some oil on your back,” she said, unfolding the shiny patent leather Chinese jigsaw of her purse. She holds up a bottle of pure yellow oil. “This’ll get between you and the sun,” she says. “Okay?”

“Okay,” you say. You are feeling very good, very superior.

She bastes you like a pig on a spit. The bottle is suspended over you and it comes down in a twine of liquid, yellow and glittering and cool to the small hollows of your spine. Her hand spreads it and massages it over your back. You lie, purring, eyes closed, watching the little blue and yellow bubbles dance across your shut eyelids as she pours on more of the liquid and laughs as she massages you.

“I feel cooler already,” you say.

She continues to massage you for a minute or more and then she stops and sits beside you quietly. A long time passes and you lie deep, baked in a sand oven, not wanting to move. The sun suddenly is not so hot.

“Are you ticklish?” asks Anne, behind your back.

“No,” you say, your mouth turning up at the corners.

“You have a lovely back,” she says. “I’d love to tickle it.”

“Tickle away,” you say.

“Are you ticklish here?” she asks.

You feel a distant, sleepy movement on your back.

“No,” you say.

“Here?” she says.

You feel nothing. “You aren’t even touching me,” you say.

“I read a book once,” she says. “It said that the sensory portions of the back are so poorly developed that most people couldn’t tell exactly where they were being touched.”

“Nuts,” you say. “Touch me. Go ahead. I’ll tell you.”

You feel three long movements on your back.

“Well?” she asks.

“You tickled me down under one shoulder blade for a distance of five inches. Likewise under the other shoulder blade. And then right down my spine. So there.”