Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [18]
"We could go walking?" he suggested.
"I’m not," she said helplessly, turning toward him and gesturing weakly, "much of a one for walking."
"Please," he said, astonishing himself with his courage. "We could sit and talk, if you like."
She gave him a dry, shy look which he interpreted as a form of assent.
Ahead of him, turning over like the pages of a heavy book, he saw the difficulty of all he would have to learn, of courtship, of marriage itself and its initiations, of a new way of speaking. The thought of so much effort brought him close to discouragement, yet he felt driven to carry on, to learn what he needed to know and to test his strength. Within a month he had exacted a promise from her. She would become his wife. They would move to the village of Tyndall thirty miles away where he had been offered a job in the new quarry. He announced his intentions to his mother and father—who were stunned into silence—and a wedding day was set.
People smiled to see them together, this timid, boy-bodied, besotted young man leaning attentively toward the immense woman, taking her wide, heavy hand on his lap and stroking it delicately. It was observed that he was an inch or two shorter than she.
Standing at the doorway of the Home, saying goodnight, he placed his fingers on her broad cheek, tracing the outline of her curved pink untroubled skin.
From the beginning he knew that Mercy Stone’s ardor was of a quality inferior to his own, of a different order altogether, and this seemed to him to be natural, rightful. The potency and fragrance of erotic love that overwhelmed him so suddenly in his twenty-sixth year was answered by Mercy with mild bewilderment. She was not cold toward him, not in the least, but returned his first shy eager embraces with a sighing acquiescence. About their future life together she seemed incurious, almost indifferent, though the fact that they would be let a modest company house did stir a response—her own home to order and arrange and run as she pleased. She would like that, she told Cuyler shyly. It was something she had not expected ever to have. She was, you might say, a woman who recognized the value of half a loaf.
When, in 1903, he married Mercy Stone, my father knew nothing of women, the hills and valleys of their bodies or the bent of their minds, and he had no idea at all how to organize a household, where to begin, what might be expected. Certainly he could not look to his laconic parents for an example, though they did rouse themselves to the extent of attending the simple marriage ceremony and presenting a wedding gift, the adamantine clock which chimed the hour, never failing to remind him of his luck in throwing off his old comfortless arrangements for a new set of pleasures, all the bleak rooms of his life freshly ordered and radiant.
He was changed. The tidal motion of sexual longing filled him to the brim, so that the very substance of his body seemed altered.
He felt that he carried in his head some ancient subtle strand of memory, a luminous image of proof and possibility, the coast and continent of achieved happiness. He had no learning, knew little of history or of literature, had never been told that men in medieval times were put to bed with a disease called lovesickness, which was nothing more than a metaphysical assault too strange and powerful to be absorbed by simple flesh.
All day, at work in the quarry, breathing in clouds of mineral dust, my father thinks of his Mercy, the creases and secrets of her body, her fleshy globes and clefts, her hair, her scent, her way of turning toward him, offering herself—first bashfully, then finding a freer ease of movement. She sighs as their bodies join—this is true, he cannot deny it—but he loves even her sigh, its exhaustion and surrender. Lying together in their shallow bed, she is embarrassed