Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [17]
Later on (but not much), Lusa and Cole had slept together in her apartment on Euclid Street. Cole made love like a farmer, which is not to say he was coarse. On the contrary, he had a fine intelligence for the physical that drove him toward her earthy scents, seeking out with his furred mouth her soft, damp places, turning her like fresh earth toward the glory of new growth. Her body, which she’d always considered too short and hourglass-curved to be taken seriously, became something new in the embrace of a man who judged breeding animals with his hands. He gave her to know what she’d never before understood: she was voluptuous.
She told him about the scent cues animals use to find and identify their mates. Pheromones. That delighted him. “So it’s all about sex. All you people in that laboratory, all the livelong day. And getting paid for it.”
“Guilty,” she confessed. “I study moth love.”
He was interested in moth love. More interested still when she explained to him that even humans seem to rely on certain pheromonal cues, though most have little inclination to know the details. Cole would, she thought. Cole, the man who buried his face in every fold of her skin to inhale her scent. He could only love sex more if he had antennae the shape of feathers, like a moth, for combing the air around her, and elaborately branched coremata he could evert from his abdomen for the purpose of calling back to her with his own scent.
He’d asked, “When you fall in love with somebody for no apparent reason you can think of, then, is that what’s going on? The pheromones?”
“Maybe,” she’d answered. “Probably.”
He’d rolled onto his back then and locked his fingers behind his head, providing her with an opportunity to study him from close range. He was astonishingly large. His shoulders, his hands, the plane of his broad, flat stomach and chest—all of him made her feel tiny and delicate. Here was a happy giant, naked in her bed.
“Tell me this, then,” he said. “How come a woman will do everything humanly possible to cover up what she really smells like?”
“I have no idea.” Lusa had wondered this before, of course. Even shaving armpits defeats the purpose. The whole point of pubic hair is to increase the surface area for scent molecules, and she told him so.
“Damn if this isn’t another thing entirely, sleeping with a lady scientist,” he’d declared, smiling at her with a face she’d already begun to think about missing. Damn if he wasn’t another thing entirely. And soon he would be gone, the happy, earnest enormity of him, his closely trimmed beard that marked lines on his jaw and up the center of his chin to his wonderful mouth. His beard made her think of the nectar guides on the throats of flowers that show bees the path to the sweet place where nectar resides.
Her Euclid apartment had seemed to suit him so well that he delayed his departure for two days after the seminar’s end. They hardly left her bed, in fact, and she had to call her lab to claim sudden illness. She was on the verge of asking him—not out of guile, but just for curiosity—whether he habitually slept with women he’d just met, when he proposed marriage. Lusa was speechless. For the next year he courted her with an intensity that caused her to ovulate during his visits. She began taking real care, lest a pregnancy too close to their wedding provide his relatives with the goods on Lusa they seemed to want. Her mother’s language had an expression for people like Cole’s sisters: “Born with ten fingers so they can count to nine.”
Cole had finished his breakfast now and glanced up at Lusa as he lit a cigarette. He seemed startled to find her staring at him. “What?” he asked.
“I was just remembering how much we used to like each other.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Herb will be up later this morning to borrow the pressure sprayer. Don’t be surprised to see him digging in the storeroom.”
She glared. This was typical Cole, to answer an appeal to his emotional core by appearing not to have one. “I don’t want Herb in our storeroom,” she replied flatly.