It struck Wallingford as typical of himself that here was an essential element of his fate, which he'd unwittingly set in motion but over which he had no control; whether Mary Shanahan was pregnant or not was entirely an accident of conception.
Before leaving the main cabin--when he had used the bathroom, and after he'd brushed his teeth--he had taken a condom from his shaving kit. He'd held it in his hand all the way to the boathouse. Now, as he put Otto down on the bed that served as a changing table in the bedroom, Mrs. Clausen saw that the fist of Wallingford's one hand was closed around something.
"What have you got in your hand?" she asked.
He opened the palm of his hand and showed her the condom. Doris was bending over Otto junior, changing him. "You better go back and get another one. You're going to need at least two," she said.
He took a flashlight and braved the mosquitoes again; he returned to his bedroom above the boathouse with a second condom and a cold beer.
Wallingford lit the gas lamp in his room. While this is an easy job for two-handed people, Patrick found it challenging. He struck the wooden match on the box, then held the lit match in his teeth while he turned on the gas. When he took the match from his mouth and touched the flame to the lamp, it made a popping sound and flared brightly. He turned down the propane, but the light in the bedroom dimmed only a little. It was not very romantic, he thought, as he took off his clothes and got into bed naked.
Wallingford pulled just the top sheet over him, up to his waist; he lay on his stomach, propped on his elbows, with the two pillows hugged to his chest. He looked out the window at the moonlight on the lake--the moon was huge. In only two or three more nights, it would be an official full moon, but it looked full now.
He'd left the unopened bottle of beer on the dresser top; he hoped they might share the beer later. The two condoms, in their foil wrappers, were under the pillows.
Between the racket the loons were making and a squabble that broke out among some ducks near shore, Patrick didn't hear Doris come into his room, but when she lay down on top of him, with her bare breasts against his back, he knew she was naked.
"My bathing suit feels so cold," she whispered in his ear. "I'm going to take it off. Don't you want to take yours off, too?"
Her voice was so much like the woman's voice in the blue-capsule dream that Wallingford had some difficulty answering her. By the time he managed to say "yes," she'd already rolled him over onto his back and pulled the sheet down.
"You better give me one of those things," she said.
He was reaching behind his head and under the pillows with his only hand, but Mrs. Clausen was quicker. She found one of the condoms and tore open the wrapper in her teeth. "Let me do it. I want to put it on you," she told him. "I've never done this." She seemed a lit
tle puzzled by the appearance of the condom, but she didn't hesitate to put it on him; unfortunately, she tried putting it on inside out.
"It's rolled a certain way," Wallingford said.
Doris laughed at her mistake. She not only put the condom on the right way; she was in too much of a hurry for Patrick to talk to her. Mrs. Clausen may never have put a condom on anyone before, but Wallingford was familiar with the way that she straddled him. (Only this time he was lying on his back, not sitting up straight in a chair in Dr. Zajac's office.)
"Let me say something to you about being faithful to me," Doris was saying, as she moved up and down with her hands on Patrick's shoulders. "If you've got a problem with monogamy, you better say so right now--you better stop me."
Wallingford said nothing, nor did he do anything to stop her.
"Please don't make anyone else pregnant," Mrs. Clausen said, even more seriously. She bore down on him with all her weight; he lifted his hips to meet her.
"Okay," he told her.
In the harsh light of the gas lamp, their moving shadows were cast against the wall where the darker rectangle had earlier caught Wallingford's attention--that empty place where Otto senior's beer poster had been. It was as if their coupling were a ghost portrait, their future together still undecided.
When they finished making love, they drank the beer, draining the bottle in a matter of seconds. Then they went naked for a night swim, with Wallingford taking just one towel for the two of them and Mrs. Clausen carrying the flashlight. They walked single-file to the end of the boathouse dock, but this time Doris asked Patrick to climb down the ladder into the lake ahead of her. He'd no sooner entered the water than she told him to swim back to her, under the narrow dock.
"Just follow the flashlight," she instructed him. She shined the light through the planks in the dock, illuminating one of the support posts that disappeared into the dark water. The post was bigger around than Wallingford's thigh. Several inches above the waterline, just under the planks of the dock and alongside a horizontal two-by-four, something gold caught Patrick's eye. He swam closer until he was looking straight up at it. He had to keep treading water to see it.
A tenpenny nail had been driven into the post; two gold wedding bands were looped on the nail, which had been hammered over, into a bent position, with its head driven into the post. Patrick realized that Mrs. Clausen would have needed to tread water while she pounded in the nail, and then attached the rings, and then bent the nail over with her hammer. It hadn't been an easy job, even for a good swimmer who was fairly strong and two-handed.
"Are they still there? Do you see them?" Doris asked.
"Yes," he answered.
She once again positioned the flashlight so that the beam was cast out over the lake. He swam out from under the dock, into the beam of light, where he found her waiting for him; she was floating on her back with her breasts above the surface.
Mrs. Clausen didn't say anything. Wallingford remained silent with her. He speculated that, one winter, the ice could be especially thick; it might grind against the boathouse dock and the rings might be lost. Or a winter storm could sweep the boathouse away. Whatever, the wedding rings were where they belonged--that was what Mrs. Clausen had wanted to show him.
Across the lake, the newly arrived Peeping Tom had the lights on in his cabin. His radio was playing; he was listening to a baseball game, but Patrick couldn't tell which teams were playing.
They swam back to the boathouse, with both the flashlight on the dock and the gas lamps shining from the two bedroom windows to guide them. This time Wallingford remembered to pee in the lake so that later he wouldn't have to go in the woods, with the mosquitoes.