The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [20]
“Why is France so painful?” She drummed her fingernails against her glass, not bothering to hide her curiosity.
“My childhood ended very suddenly, and very dramatically. When I left the village I grew up in, it changed. Because of me. I went back and everything was different. Strange. And I lost both my parents by the time I was twenty-five. It’s not home anymore.”
“No brothers or sisters?”
Max shook his head. “My grandmother still lived there until she passed away five years ago.” He crossed himself in an absent way.
“That sounds very sad,” Fallon said.
He tweaked one corner of his mouth like a shrug. “There are many stories in the world sadder than mine. I’m fortunate, you know, that I have made enough money to live this way.”
Fallon stared, taking him in. It was true—he was a free man. She couldn’t think of another person she’d met who wasn’t beholden to a bank or a spouse or a career path, to some stressful notion of how their life was expected to unfurl. She most certainly couldn’t think of anyone who could freely take or leave hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Max went on, echoing her thoughts. “Many people are much sadder, because they spend their lives making money for other people, doing things they hate. In places they hate, with husbands and wives they hate. I’m lucky. I get paid to do something that to me is as essential a part of living as eating or sleeping.”
Or screwing, Fallon added to herself, the addendum seeming inherent from the way he stared at her. As if to punctuate the close of this topic, Max took their empty glasses and bowls to the sink. In the wake of the relative intimacy of the conversation, Fallon suddenly dreaded taking her clothes off again.
“Should I keep doing what I was doing before?” she stalled, picking nonexistent lint off a sleeve.
He shook his head. “I think we should go outside. I want to study you by the ocean. I think that is more your habitat, yes?”
“Are you going to make me get naked in public? There’s a lot of boats out there.”
He laughed, the sadness seeming to leave him. “Of course not. I’m difficult, not cruel, you know.”
She nodded, deciding this was probably true.
Max breathed in the smells of the pines and the sea as he and Fallon waded side by side through the overgrown grass of his back lawn, descending the wooden steps that wound down to the strip of coarse sand beyond the rocks. He’d brought a pad and a pair of charcoal pencils but set them aside on a driftwood log. He held his palm out to indicate Fallon should sit down on the beach. He joined her, already thinking this was a very good idea, feeling grateful the sand flies were gone for the season. Feeling grateful in general.
“What am I doing?” Fallon asked, pulling strands of wind-whipped hair from her mouth.
“Whatever you like.” He crossed his arms over his knees expectantly, increasingly curious to see how this woman dealt with his demands.
“Right.” She unlaced her shoes and stripped off her socks, rolling up her pant legs and digging her toes into the sand.
Max followed suit beside her. “Tell me about your childhood,” he said, staring across the inlet to the opposite shore then off into the endless Atlantic.
“I’d rather not. I don’t know you that well.”
“Well, tell me about something else, then. Tell me what you would be doing if you did not have to be here with me.”
“I’m here by choice,” she corrected him carefully. “And right now? It’s Saturday. I guess I’d probably be making a casserole or something for dinner, listening to PJ Harvey in my kitchen. Returning phone calls, waiting to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer.” She smiled, seeming to miss such things.
Max studied her eyes in the white light of the overcast sky, so clear they unsettled him. “And what would you be doing for these three months that I’m keeping you away from your kitchen and your laundry?”
She shrugged. “Work, mostly. Probably a couple trips into the city with friends. Not a