Slide - Kyle Beachy [107]
Here again he took my hand and shook it like this meant something to us both, then left to cross the field. I turned and moved back toward the log, where Opal sat with her hands in her lap. Hair pulled behind ears. I sat next to her and listened to her hum some tune and then stop. Cicadas and crickets all around us singing or rubbing legs or whatever it was they did to find mates.
“I want to say something.”
“What kind of mother. I know. Because I broke one of the biggest rules there is. But I don't stop loving him just because I'm not there. And he's with his dad, and do you know his dad loves him too? He does. And he is a good man overall. Just because I don't love him doesn't make him a bad man. They go to baseball games together.”
“How long will you stay here.”
“I don't know how long.”
“Set a time. Stay that long, then go back.”
“Why are you here? Really?”
What profound appeal there was to being seen through. Her thumb went into my waistline and I could feel the shift. There were creases in her face and I liked them very much. Her entire face, origin of Ian's. Same beauty. Here on our log I thought of the other fallen tree and Stuart's return to the pool house, his trip for cake mix and his new love Marianne and my old new love Audrey and where I was, developmentally when I met her. I moved my hand to the small of her back, damp with sweat. The sun had left us. Still the workers kept going in what I wanted to call the gloaming but wished I didn't.
“You can come back with me,” she said.
“That's my line.”
“Unless you want to stay here. Or unless you want to leave.”
What was out there, anyway? Emaciated catalysts like fatherly pride, suspicious urges to please your mother. Here there was the job, the task, the work of callused hands. I could recover my calluses. There was only lifting, and carrying, and building. Wanting and working. I watched a man crest the hill carrying at his waist a stone the size of an overweight cat. This simplified little society, removed from the distant exasperations of the twentieth century. They had outsprawled sprawl itself.
“I'll show you my room,” she said.
“I'm to believe that this is something you desire. Want in the strict common sense of the word.”
“Come on.”
We walked quickly across the grass and back among the grapevines. By now, the evening sky had bled off its light and Opal's lamp framed us in a yellowish bubble, anchored by the steady hiss of gas. Around us were other lights, flickering their way up the hill, shadowing pairs of contented workers. I followed her through the vineyard until the main building appeared up ahead. She led me up the hill, across the patio, and into the building, pushing with a small palm against a portion of wall that was actually a door.
Inside was the kind of warm soundlessness that fills ears like a wet finger. A long hallway with many doors we passed along the way. Lighting was mounted on walls. We met people as we walked, similarly dressed cultists who flashed meaningful smiles in passing.
“This way.”
We turned a series of corners, descended a short staircase. The building was much larger than it appeared outside. I had the sensation of going deeper, always turning down a dimly lit hallway that would lead farther inward. Disorientation like liberty The air was damp and odorless and still as a stalled car. At the bottom of another staircase was a door, which we stepped toward. She stopped short, turned, and gestured with an open palm.
“We're here,” she said.
six
windowless room lit yellow by propane lamp in the corner. Twin mattress on the floor, no furniture, no nothing. Seen from above, shape of two people could be one. Tangled. The young man and the older woman on the bed.
She and I on the bed.
You wake and think, Wait just a goddamn second. These are not living quarters. There are no dressers. No closet. This is the sex room.
It was time for reevaluation.