Circle of Three (27 page)

“How long can they live?”

“Twenty-eight, thirty. That’s if you treat ’em like goddesses.” He picked up his cup, set it down when he remembered it was empty.

“Want some more coffee? I’ll get it.”

He crossed his arms, looked at me curiously. “What’s behind this urge to take care of me today?”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to hover.” I stood up, a little hurt. I wanted him to say, “No, I like it,” or something, but he just looked at me. “What time do you have to start milking?” I asked.

“Four. Same as every day.”

The clock said 2:20. How did you make a move on a man you’d said
no
to so many times, he’d quit asking?
No
had become our theme song; over the years we’d learned to dance to it with a certain amount of grace. How could I tell Jess now, out of the blue, that I wanted a new song?

I couldn’t, of course. You had to lead up to something like that slowly; you dropped girlish hints; you flirted. You changed the temperature gradually, so nobody’s system went into shock.

“What if you had an emergency right now,” I said. “So you couldn’t do your phone calls or your business. Would anything terrible happen?”

“No. Why?”

“I don’t know, I just thought—maybe you needed to relax.” My God, I sounded like a call girl. This was completely wrong; I pushed the whole idea out of my head and changed tacks. “Sometime when you’re not busy, would you like to go out to dinner? With me?”

What was he thinking? The outline of him seemed to get sharper, better defined, more distinct from the desk and the wall behind him, like a bas relief. He steepled his fingers in front of his face, hiding his mouth and nose. “Yes.”

“Good. Then sometime we should do that.”

I was on my feet, I had delivered my exit line. But instead of leaving I said, “Do you miss being married? Not—I don’t mean do you miss Bonnie, but do you miss having someone? To be with?”

“Yes.”

“I always wondered what broke you up.”

“You know what broke us up.”

“I do? No, I don’t.”

“Carrie, what’s going on?”

“Hmm?”

“Why did you bring me lunch? Coffee. Why did you show me your legs?”

I blushed. I considered getting huffy—
I have no idea what you’re talking about—
but I said, “I don’t know what’s going on,” truthfully. I was full of wanting him, I was bursting out of my skin with it, and I had no idea how to tell him.

“Are you…lonely? Is that what this is about?” He said it
kindly
.

“‘Is that what this is about?’” I repeated, laughing. Now I
was
insulted. “Does the widow need a little consoling, you mean? The answer’s no.” I moved away. “I’m not lonely, not at all. But thanks for asking. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember when I’ve been less lonely. I really don’t need a thing.”

I stopped at the door to the hall, keeping my back to him. “Oh God, I’m just so bad at this.”

“What?”

“No practice, that’s the problem.”

“Bad at what?” He sounded baffled. But hopeful.

“Telling you I’m ready,” I said, turning around. “But I’m not lonely, honestly, not anymore—I don’t know why. I don’t need you, I just want you. There—you said to say it in words.” But now I’d panicked myself. I was afraid he’d touch me, afraid he wouldn’t.

He did neither.

“
Did you just look at your watch?”

He laughed, a glad, real sound. “Sorry.” Still laughing, he came and put his arms around me. Kissed me. Held me, pressed me against the wall, put his hands on me. Happy ending.

Was it like high school, the dark, electric-smelling utility room? Maybe; because I thought of it, I made the association. And there was a familiarity in the feel of him that I wasn’t prepared for, I thought everything would be new, strange. Molecularly speaking, doesn’t the human body change completely every—so many years? I didn’t expect our bodies to recognize each other. “It’s the same, isn’t it?” I said between long, deepening kisses, but he said, “No, it’s completely different.” So I don’t know.

A little later, I caught him sneaking another glance at his watch, behind my shoulder. “Look, if I’m keeping you from something…”

“I have to make a call. Two seconds.”

He left me to call and ask if a Mr. Turnbull could come to the farm tomorrow afternoon instead of today, same time. He must’ve said yes, because Jess thanked him profusely.

“Who was that?”

“A.I. tech.”

Artificial insemination technician. “And his name is Turnbull?” Everything was so funny. We laughed our way up the stairs and into Jess’s room, and I was so relieved when it wasn’t his old bedroom, the one I used to do my homework in. Glad too when it wasn’t his parents’ big, gloomy room, still cluttered with dark, old-fashioned furniture. Jess’s room was the old sleeping porch at the back of the house; he’d enclosed it and added wide, ceiling-high windows. I could see a silver ribbon of the Leap through tree leaves at the bottom of the long, grassy flood plain.

“This room isn’t ugly,” I said, feigning surprise, glancing around at the plain oak dressers, the sturdy bed—unmade; manly navy sheets in a tangle—both bedside tables covered with magazines and books. “What went wrong?”

“Hmm. Guess I thought your mother would never come up here.”

We took off each other’s clothes like brand-new lovers, smiling and reverent, practically glowing from gladness. Underneath the excitement, it felt like coming home. I don’t know why I wasn’t more self-conscious, why I wasn’t paralyzed with nerves. The familiarity again, I think. Not a sense that this had happened before; more a feeling that it should have. I did mind that my naked body was twelve years older than the last time Jess had seen it. But he didn’t. He told me I was beautiful, so fervently that I believed him. How it was to be with him came back to me quickly, and the best was the way he could make me feel that nothing I did was wrong or clumsy or tentative or silly. With Jess I was lovely, I was a pretty fish gliding through water, all certainty and grace.

He was what I knew he would be, passionate and tender, undisguised. Lost. “I promise not to leave in the middle this time,” I whispered to him—in the middle. Questionable timing for a joke, but if we were both remembering our last time together, I thought, we might as well speak of it. Dig it up and disarm it.

It took him a moment to react at all; I could actually see his eyes clear, shift from absent to present, and I remembered that that absorption, that mindless departure into the nothing of sensation was one of the things that had frightened me away from him so long ago. I was a girl then, I couldn’t lose myself the way Jess could—that was a goal to spend your life chasing. At least I wasn’t afraid of it anymore.

“I wouldn’t let you this time,” he said, poised above me, his hair backlit, a coppery halo. “That’s been the problem, me letting you go.” He didn’t smile; he wasn’t joking. Could that be true, could it really be that simple—the “problem”? I wanted to talk to him almost as much as I wanted to make love to him. And then I wanted to paint him.

In patches of nostalgia, I remembered what it was like to lie in bed with a man, the thrill of someone else’s ceiling, a different scent on the pillow, another slant of light from unfamiliar windows. My mind drifted to old lovers—not to Stephen, but men I knew before I knew him. No one in particular; just the sensation of newness, excitement, what it was like to be naked for the first time with a naked man, the lawless, liberating feel of skin on skin, the sense of boundless physical possibility.

It was like that with Jess, and then it was more. Everything between us multiplied, compounded, like mirrors reflecting us in the present, and then an infinite number of diminishing images of our past. We had now, and we had everything that had happened before between us. The most extraordinary combination. Exactly the same and completely different—we were both right.

Afterward, I lay with my head on his chest, listening to his heart beat, feeling his hand in my hair. Our heavy, word-less silence felt right for a time, the only appropriate response to what had just happened. But I was impatient. I wanted answers to all the tantalizing whys—why did he love me, why did he like sleeping with me, why did he pick me and no one else. And how could he want me again after the last time, after
all
the other times I’d disappointed him?

“If it only rains every twelve years, you don’t curse it when it finally comes,” he said. “You curse the drought.”

An analogy.
My farmer, my cow herder, my dairyman made a metaphor about
me
. I sank in deeper, seeded in love, planted. “But why did you ever even
like
me?” I was recalling the eighteen-year-old virgin, the overachiever, mama’s girl.

He said the nicest things—that I was brave, I had a loving heart, I was kind to him, I liked him even though I didn’t understand him. “Caution” ruled me in the end—that was the word he used,
caution
—but by then it was too late, he said, he already loved me.

“It’s not wrong to want to please everybody, Carrie. It doesn’t work, but it doesn’t make you a bad person.”

No, just a weak one. But the last thing I wanted to talk to Jess about right now was my mother.

“I always knew you loved me,” I said. “It was a secret I tried to hide from myself, but I couldn’t, I kept it with me all through the years. I can’t imagine my life now without it. Such a gift.”

I wanted to know about his wife, but I wouldn’t ask. In fact, I wanted to hear about
all
the women in his life, and I wanted him to place me among them. I would’ve liked a chart, frankly, a detailed graph of the hierarchy of all Jess’s women, with me at the tip-top. Not because I was that needy and insecure—I just felt like celebrating. Doing a dance on top of the pyramid.

“Remember when you told me I needed to do the ark animals? And I didn’t believe you. You said, ‘You
need
this,’ and I just laughed. How could you have known that, Jess? Because it’s true,” I felt comfortable telling him, “I did need it, and it
saved
me. All I had before was Ruth to be alive for. The same way…” The same way my mother only had me to be alive for. God help her.

“People are like sheepdogs,” he said, but his straight face crumpled when I raised up on my elbow to gape at him. “It’s true. A sheepdog isn’t happy unless he’s herding. That’s his
one and only job, that’s his work. You weren’t doing your job, but now you are and you feel better. That’s why you’re here with me right now.”

“But what is my job? Making giraffes?”

“Making something. Maybe it doesn’t matter what.”

“Yeah. No,” I realized, “it does matter. It can’t be just for me—it has to be more than stenciling wallpaper or refinishing the furniture.” Hooking rugs. Shudder. “But I don’t know what, and when this is over I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You’ll find out.”

“What happened to me? I lost my artist’s eye, I forgot how to see. Once—I did a self-portrait out of all the numbers that defined me, my Social Security number, telephone, address, my birth date. For nothing, just for myself. I used to do collages, I did contour drawings, conceptual art, I did rubbings of textures, like—sidewalks and tree bark, bricks. I tried to paint an emotion. I made
connections
between things, I could see sculptures in tree limbs, I could see Renaissance Madonnas in fruit, I could
see
. But then I lost it, I went to sleep. I never thought I’d get it back.”

“Your sheep.”

“My herd. I got my work back.” I moved over him, began to kiss him passionately. “I’m not saying I’m any good—that’s a different subject.” I wanted him, but I couldn’t stop talking. “But I know what I’m supposed to do now. In general, not specifically. Jess, Jess. You are so…mmm. Do you have other girlfriends? Do you like my hair short? You’ve never said.”

Well, we’d talk later. Those were reminders; I stuck them in like stick-on notes before Jess shut me up by kissing me back. We made love again, slowly, and so sweetly it made me cry. And it worked this time, and it didn’t remind me of anything.

Then it was time to go. “Four o’clock, you have to milk cows.” This was going to be a challenging affair, I could see. A daytime affair. “At least it’s spring,” I said, watching him dress. God, he was good to look at. “Warm. I’m looking forward
to a lot of outdoor trysts. Rolls in the hay.” I tried a lewd wink, not difficult considering I was flat on my back where he’d left me, naked and uncovered.

“I like your hair,” he said, pulling his T-shirt over his head. He looked different to me, more substantial or something. His whole body was real now, not a rumor.

“You never mentioned it. So naturally I assumed you hated it.”

“I didn’t know what I was allowed to say. I couldn’t tell what the new rules were.”

“You didn’t used to have any rules.”

“I changed.” He smiled.

“Is that my fault? Do you blame me?”

“I used to. Now I try not to blame anyone for anything about myself.”

A model I should try to follow more often. “Anyway,” I said, privately defensive, “I don’t think you’ve changed that much. It’s more that you’ve adapted. Really. You’re not your house, Jess.”

“It doesn’t matter. Everybody changes.”

But he was sadder, quieter, he’d grown more discreet. I knew some who would say he had room for a little discretion, that curbing his impulsive ways was just part of growing up. I didn’t agree with them, now or twenty years ago. Jess had changed because of me—that wasn’t ego, it was the truth. But I couldn’t despair, even if part of him was lost, because under it all, older, wiser, sadder, gentler, stronger, he really was still Jess. Still mine.

“I might fall asleep,” I said, stretching, showing off. What a long time it had been since I’d felt any sexual power at all. You didn’t know what you’d missed until you got it back.

“Not for long.” His socks had holes in the heels. He pulled on his work boots and tied the laces in knots instead of bows because they were both broken. He needed taking care of! This just got better and better.