“You don’t have to.”
“I probably should.”
“You don’t need to,” she said, her face averted, looking at the streetlights on the drawbridge.
Then, against all his instincts, all the warnings that told him not to take advantage, not to be a surrogate, he closed his arms around her, his biceps swelling into the girth of pressurized firehoses. He could smell the freshness of her clothes, the powder she had sprinkled on her shoulders, a touch of perfume behind her ears. He ran his big hand across the firmness of her back, the taper of her muscles along her hips.
“You’re stand-up,” he said.
“Not really,” she said.
“You feel great, Barbara. Wow, do you feel great,” he said, rubbing his cheek against her hair, petting her back, closing his eyes as he breathed in the fragrance and heat on her neck.
“So do you. But, Clete . . .” she said uncomfortably.
“What is it?” he asked, looking with alarm at her face.
“You’re standing on my foot.”
From her bedroom window he could look out across the veranda and see the tops of the banana trees below, the old gray convent across the bayou, and the moss in the oaks that grew above the convent’s roof. He saw a milk truck drive by, one like his father had driven, and he tried to think of an explanation for the presence of a milk truck on a quiet, lamp-shadowed street at this time of night. For some reason he saw images out of his childhood: a razor strop, a thick-bodied child walking to school, bent down in the wind, a peanut butter sandwich and an apple in a paper bag for lunch. Clete blew out his breath and shook the image out of his head and tried to remember the number of drinks he’d had that evening, almost as a form of reassurance.
He felt awkward undressing in front of Barbara, conscious of his weight, the gold hair on his back and shoulders. She lay down on the far side of the bed and waited for him, her hair like points of fire on the pillow.
“Is something wrong, Clete?” she asked.
“No, not at all,” he lied.
He lay down beside her and kissed her mouth, then touched her breasts and stomach and felt his sex harden against her thigh. But all his movements seemed heavy-handed, clumsy, his knees constantly hitting her, making her flinch.
“I jog and lift weights. I’ve cut down my beer intake to eleven or twelve cans a day. But I keep tubbing up,” he said.
“I think you’re a sweet man,” she said.
He knew it should have been a compliment. In fact, he was convinced she was sincere. But he knew there were other words that women used in certain moments, words that were intimate, naked in their expression of vulnerability and love and surrender, words they used rarely in an entire lifetime and that marked a contract with a man that no wedding ceremony ever provided. But these were not the words he heard.
“I think you’re a fine woman who’s had a bad night. I think maybe the wrong guy shouldn’t take advantage of the situation,” he said.
She brushed at his hair with her hand, in almost a maternal way, then mounted him and cupped his sex in her palm and placed it inside her. There was a spray of strawberry freckles on her shoulders and arms and the tops of her breasts. He put her nipples in his mouth and ran his hands down her hips and over her rump, and then turned her sideways in the bed and reentered her, this time on top, and he saw her mouth open and her eyes close and felt her fingers dig tightly into his back.
When she came, her face grew small and pale, then he felt a long, sustained shudder commence inside her womb and a tightening in her thighs and a cry burst from her throat that was strangely more like need and unsatiated desire than it was satisfaction. But he could not sort out his thoughts from the nature of his own desire and the incredible loveliness of her face, the smallness of her mouth that in the dark looked like a purple flower, the caress and grace of her thighs, and the heat of her womb, the orgasm that broke inside him and rushed out of his body in a way he had never experienced before, like a burst of white light that had nothing to do with the self or the fear and hunger and sometimes rage that characterized his life.
He sat up on the side of the bed and kissed her hands and her forehead and traced her features with his fingers. Her arms lay by her sides n
ow, the sheet pulled to her navel, her head turned toward him in a melancholy fashion.
“You doin’ all right?” he said.
“You were fine, Clete.”
But the answer did not fit the question he had asked, and he searched her eyes and found no explanation for the strange sense of disquiet he felt.
“Dave and I were always the odd pieces at NOPD. He got fired and I had to run for a plane to Guatemala. Both of us learned too late not to fight with the bastards,” he said. She covered his hand with hers. But her eyes were focused beyond him, over his shoulder, and she was not listening to his words now.
“Clete, a shadow just went across the screen,” she said.
He pulled on his pants and walked shirtless and barefoot out on the veranda. He smelled cigarette smoke, then heard footsteps leave the stairs down below and head across a grassy area toward a side street that led to the drawbridge. But the person was not running, as though he had no fear of apprehension or sense of shame at being discovered in a voyeuristic act.
The lamps above the side street were haloed with humidity. He heard an automobile or truck engine fire up, then fade between the buildings as the driver turned into the Friday-night traffic crossing the drawbridge. A burning cigarette glowed in the grass next to the sidewalk. Clete picked it up gingerly with the balls of his fingers and looked at it. It was unfiltered, still wet on the unlit end with the smoker’s saliva. He tossed it in a sewer grate, then wiped his fingers on his pants.