Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [113]
To celebrate, she and Walton decided to escape the August heat by hiking down Minnehaha Creek to its mouth at the Mississippi River across from Saint Paul. He didn’t have to be at work for another four hours. He had brought his fishing pole and tackle box, and while he cast his line into the water, his dog sat behind him in the shade of a gnarled cottonwood and Jodie walked downriver, looking, but not looking for anything, exactly, just looking without a goal, for which she felt she had a talent. She found a bowling ball in usable condition and one bruised and broken point-and-shoot camera that she left under a bush.
She walked back along the river to Walton, carrying the bowling ball. On her face she had constructed an expression of delight. She was feeling hot and extremely beautiful.
“See what I’ve found?” She hoisted the ball.
“Hey, great,” he said, casting her a smile. “See what I’ve caught?” He held up an imaginary line of invisible fish.
“Good for you,” she said. His eyes were steady on her. He had been gazing at her for the last few days in a prolonged way; she’d been watching him do it. She could feel his presence now in her stomach and her knees. She heard the double blast of a boat horn. Another boat passed, pulling a water-skier with a strangely unhappy look on her face. The clock stopped; the moment paused: when he said he wanted to make love to her, that he almost couldn’t wait, that he had lost his appetite lately just thinking about her and couldn’t sleep, she didn’t quite hear him saying it, she was so happy. She threw the bowling ball out as far as she could into the river. She didn’t notice whether it splashed. She took her time getting into his arms, and when he kissed her, first at the base of her neck and then, lifting her up, all over her exposed skin, she put her hands in his hair. Suddenly she liked kissing in public. She wanted people to see them together. “Walton,” she said, “make love to me. Right here.”
“Let’s go to your place,” he said. “Let’s go there, okay?”
“Happy days,” she said in agreement, putting her fingers down inside his loose beltless jeans.
He was a slow-motion lover. She had made him some iced tea, but instead of drinking from it, he raised the cold glass to her forehead. Einstein had found a corner where she was panting with her eyes closed.
Jodie had taken him by the hand and had led him out to the sleeping porch. You couldn’t have known it from the way he looked in his street clothes, but his body was lean and muscular, and he made love shyly at first and didn’t really become easy and wild over her until he saw how she was responding to him. She was embarrassed by how quickly and how effortlessly he made her come. She put her arms up above her head and just gave in.
Maybe fools made the best lovers. They were devotees of passing pleasures, connoisseurs of them, and this, being the best of the passing pleasures, was the one at which they were most adept. His fire didn’t burn away. He wasn’t ashamed of any impulse he had, so he kept having them. He couldn’t stop bringing himself into her. “Look at me,” she said, as she was about to come again, and he looked at her with a slow grin on his face, pleased with himself and pleased with her. When she looked back at him, she let him see into her soul, all the way down, where she’d never allowed anyone to own her nakedness before.
“So. Happy ever after?”
Walton was asleep after a night’s work, and Jodie had gone down to Clara’s Country Kitchen Café by herself. This morning the fat man with yellow-green eyes was full of mirthless merriment, and he seemed