He grinned and looked at Jo Anne. Then I saw it. The flash in the corner of the eye, the deferred longing, the predator that would have to wait for another day. “I have to be going,” he said. “But we’re on for tomorrow, right?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Atta girl,” he said. He looked at me. “Can I give you a lift?”
“I can walk,” I replied.
“You enjoy sloshing around in stormy weather, splashing through the mud puddles, that sort of thing?”
“Actually, that’s why I do farmwork. I don’t like to be crowded.”
“Sending out warning signals, are we?”
“Does your faculty do student home calls on the weekend?” I said.
“I live not far from here. I dropped by to see how Jo Anne’s work is coming along. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Stop this,” Jo Anne said.
“Let him talk,” Devos said. “I have the feeling Aaron is a complex man. Perhaps writing a book on the migrants? Taping folk songs, the John and Alan Lomax routine?”
“Not me,” I said. “I have a Gibson guitar and play it badly.”
“Oh, humble man.”
I could feel a pressure band tightening along the left side of my head. Behind my eyelids, I saw Devos undressing Jo Anne, putting his lips on her breasts, sliding his hand down her stomach. These were the kinds of bizarre images I saw inside my head with regularity; they made me wonder if I was perverse or impaired. The room was swaying. I looked out the window. “Are those the neighbor’s pigs?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Devos said.
“I know everything there is to know about pigs,” I said. “Hamps, Yorks, Hamp-Yorks, York-Hamps, Poland China, Chester Whites, Red Wattles. Let’s take a walk out to the pen. You might want to paint them. It’s probably cheaper than hiring nude models. Or do you use your students for that?”
“Leave,” Jo Anne said to him.
Devos got off the stool and picked up an Australian army campaign hat that rested crown down on the counter. He fitted it on his brow and tightened the chinstrap. “Our friend here is an all-right fellow,” he said to her. “He’s had a rough go of it, and I can’t blame him for his feelings. Give me a ring later, and we’ll talk about your new work. It’s marvelous.”
My stomach was roiling. But the problem wasn’t his. I had allowed him to be magnanimous at my expense. He opened the door, then turned and gave her a thumbs-up, the rain blowing a nimbus around his head, wetting his skin, the warmth in his eyes and the sensuousness in his mouth undisguised. I felt like a voyeur.
* * *
JO ANNE WATCHED Devos drive away in his Mustang, then slapped a legal pad on the counter and began writing with such intensity and anger that the lead in her pencil broke.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“What does it look like?” She started writing again. “Darrel Vickers led the attack on you. His father’s name is Rueben. He’s worse than the son. They’re both buckets of shit.”
“I’m sorry I offended your friend, or whatever he is.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Meaning I should toggle along?”
Her face was heated, and she curled her nails into the heels of her hands like someone who wasn’t used to getting angry. “Don’t go near the Vickers family. You’ll lose.”
“You’re really a painter?”
My words seemed to break on her face. She was wearing tennis shoes without socks and a denim shirt that hung over a frilly white dress printed with wash-faded pink roses. There was a mole by the side of her mouth and freckles on the backs of her hands.
“I lied to your friend about writing a book,” I said. “I wrote a novel that has been rejected all over New York.”