Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“It’s all right,” she heard herself say.

He unbuttoned the top of her dress and bit her shoulder. “Can we go in your bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not expecting anyone?”

“No. I want to be with you. I want to help you leave behind all those bad memories from the war.”

“You’re sure this is what you want?”

“Yes, it is. It’s the way it’s meant to be, or it wouldn’t be happening,” she said.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve done this,” he said. “But it was different. It was selfish. That’s not the way I feel about you.”

She took him by the arm and led him into the bedroom. “Get undressed. It’ll be all right. Don’t worry anymore.”

He hesitated, and she realized he was looking at a framed photograph of her and Hershel on the dresser. “You don’t have to feel guilty,” she said. “Anything that happens here is my responsibility, not yours. You don’t know the whole history.”

“History of what?”

“It doesn’t matter at this point,” she said.

She turned off the light and pulled back the bedcovers and threw all the pillows except one on the floor. She hung her dress over a chair and removed her underthings with her back to him, then turned around. His face softened, like warm wax changing shape. She pushed him down on the mattress and spread her knees, straddled his thighs, and placed his hands on her breasts. Next door she could hear someone bouncing up and down on a diving board, then springing and flattening on the water. “I just want to ask one thing of you,” she said.

“Anything,” he replied.

“Don’t talk bad about me later. Like men do when they brag to others. Don’t ever do that to me.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I want you to hold me and kiss me when it’s over. I want to see you in other situations also.”

“Whatever you want, Linda Gail.”

She made a cradle of herself and leaned down and kissed him and put her tongue in his mouth.

“You’re the most wonderful woman I’ve ever been with,” he said.

She reached down and placed him inside her. She shifted her weight back and forth and crunched her stomach and rotated herself until she saw his eyes go out of focus. She had never felt such power in her life. It was like the first time she walked into the waves at Santa Monica, the water sliding above her thighs, the foam wetting the tops of her breasts, the gulls wheeling overhead as though in tribute to her, the suntanned boys on Muscle Beach setting down their iron weights to gaze upon her. Now, when she came with him, she went weak all over, her neck stretched back, a ragged sound bursting from her throat. Then she came again and again, something she had never done, as though an entire race were being conceived inside her, as though at that exact moment she was silhouetted against a molten sun descending into the ocean, the palm trees stiffening into black cutouts against a flaming sky, her nails digging into his arms on a beach where there was not another human being.

Later, they lay side by side, their bodies damp with perspiration. As he fell asleep, she stroked his forehead with the tips of her fingers and idly stared at the ceiling. Then she kissed his shoulder, enjoying the warmth of his skin and the hint of salt on it. A great and restful fatigue seemed to settle upon her and quiet all the turmoil and anger that lived inside her. Just before she nodded off, she thought she heard wind blowing in a seashell and waves sliding back from a precipitous shoal gnarled with crustaceans. Out in the swells, she saw herself mounted on a porpoise that would take her to a coral kingdom beneath the sea. It wasn’t simply a dream. She had earned her place in the Pantheon. Today was just the beginning.

Chapter

> 18

OUR DRIVEWAY WAS unpaved. Maybe that seems a silly observation to make in regard to the place where we lived in the Heights in the year 1947. But it was one detail of many I noticed on that late afternoon when I parked my car next to our screened porch and wondered how I should confront Rosita with the movie reel that sat in a tin box on the seat to me. The grass was a pale green, the chrysanthemums blooming in the flowerbeds, the driveway little more than a pattern of white rocks, like an ancient road protruding from the dirt, the lawn scattered with pecans in their husks.

There was another detail about our neighborhood that I had not given great weight to, and that was the absence of fences between the houses. It was an era of trust, of a boy on a bicycle sailing the evening paper up on the porch, radios in a window blaring with the overture from William Tell at six-thirty Monday through Friday evening all over the land. I didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want to hurt my wife. I didn’t want to discover she was someone other than the truthful person I thought she was.

She was making sandwiches in the kitchen, trimming off bread crusts on a chopping board. She glanced at me and at the can in my right hand, then resumed slicing. “Where have you been?”

“Somebody dropped a movie reel in my car. I took it to a photo shop owned by a friend and watched it.”

“Your friend didn’t have a telephone?”

“I asked my friend to leave the room while I watched it.”