Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [47]
WHEN Libby returned the following week, the lake was socked in with fog. The air was was cool, even cold, but the weatherman said to expect temperatures in the high eighties by noon. She set up two poles, wrote in her journal, and caught one fish, which somehow slipped off her stringer. She dozed in the warming air, a slow bake.
Someone called her name and Lewis pulled out of the fog like creation itself. Her first reaction was, How dare he? Her second, pleased surprise. Or maybe the two thoughts were simultaneous: How dare he cause her pleased surprise?
“This is the second week I’ve come looking for you.” Lewis squatted by her chair. He threw back his head and gulped air. “This is a cool thing to do. I normally hate man-made lakes, but there is something to be said for large bodies of water. You’re right—it is like going to church, only better.” He touched the cane pole. “And murdering fish is the sacrament. Hey, want to go to Miserable Yolanda’s for breakfast?”
“Can you go there?” she said.
“Why not?”
“Isn’t it a bar?”
“What, you think I’m going to drink?”
“No, no …” she stammered stupidly. Alcoholism etiquette, she sensed, was a minefield for the uninitiated.
He punched her arm lightly. “I’ll be safe with you. You won’t let me partake, even if I want to, right?”
His dark eyes danced with what? Derision?
“Sorry,” she said to him. “It’s none of my business.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
When they got to town, he was too hot and wanted to change out of his sweater. “It’ll just take a sec,” he said. “You want to see my room?”
She wasn’t crazy about ducking into the Mills with a man in clear sight of Victor Ibañez’s window, yet she’d always wondered about the fine white clapboard building with wide porches under tall, graceful deodar pines.
The lobby, though dingy, was clean, with scarred, stunted cacti in pots, an atmospheric plein-air painting of red rocks and cypress trees, and rugs so worn that their patterns were mere tracery. Lewis’s room, at the top of creaky wooden stairs, was tinier, if possible, than her trailer’s spare bedroom. He barely had space for a bed and a bureau. Thumbtacked to the wall was a T-shirt silkscreened with a caricature of Wallace Stevens. A postcard of a blue jar was tacked upside-down above the T-shirt’s neck. “It’s a joke,” Lewis said. “Wallace Stevens wrote a famous poem about a blue jar.”
The only poem of Stevens’s that Libby had read, which a pianist friend had recommended, was about somebody at the clavier. The vocabulary had cowed her, and she lacked the training, or possibly the patience, to decode the work. Lewis shuffled a stack of library books, suddenly determined to read this blue-jar poem to her.
Libby sat down on the bed since there was no place else to sit, unless she wanted to roost on a big clump of laundry in the room’s only chair. Through a small window, she looked out on the bone-white limbs of a eucalyptus tree. Lewis began to read. She didn’t understand this poem, either. Lewis’s room smelled of old varnish and dust. The tap in the bathroom sink dripped. Her hands were chapped and speckled with fish blood. Her hair snarled from wind. The room was hot. Lewis was reading another poem now, with more dizzying words. “The Idea of Order at Key West.” At least she didn’t have to think of anything to say. Then, he put the book down on the foot of the bed—she assumed he was going to rummage in the laundry chair for a shirt—but without a word, he placed his hands on her shoulders and then slid them down her arms. He came in close; it was a stare-down, an ophthalmic assault. Her mind sped. He couldn’t kiss her when she was all fishy like this, and bundled up in shirts. But he did. He was relentless, even, nudging her down on the bed, kissing her neck and jaw, licking his way back to her lips. In no time he was undressing her, a series of insistent tugs. She didn’t mind. In fact she liked this focused, no-nonsense approach. This