An Emergence of Green (20 page)

By nine o’clock she was certain Carolyn would not appear, but still she strained to hear the sounds of a car over the pounding and hissing of the surf. It was too dark with cloud and mist to paint, and she had not expected to paint; the thought of what she had anticipated for this day sent a searing over the surfaces of her skin. Carolyn still might show; it was remotely possible…If not, perhaps it would be bright enough later to work.

Despondently, she worked on a finished canvas—the light lay well enough across it for varnishing—applying a thin coat to one small square at a time. She propped the canvas against a wall facing a window. The plants were watered, she’d dusted, done all the things she had intended to do Sunday. Her restless glance lingered on the painting of Carolyn; she had brought it with her to finish drying here where they had made love. Pulling a sketch pad from the travel case Carolyn had given her, she sat near the window apathetically sketching sets of waves.

She had miscalculated, misinterpreted yesterday—what could be more obvious? Just as she herself had reacted to Alix, Carolyn apparently considered this new venture into lovemaking a perilous foreign border she did not intend to cross again. The words Carolyn had whispered yesterday before she had fallen asleep, so puzzling after her passion, were now clear and meaningful.

Val turned the page, began a new set of waves, her pencil marks thick on the page. Probably the chance was gone to explore this new aspect of herself—this capacity to initiate and create pleasure in a woman she desired, a woman she had learned over the past months to treasure. And to possess Carolyn again was to learn more of those mysteries of her that Paul Blake knew. What she had discovered yesterday gave her a measure of equality with Paul Blake; the ecstasy Carolyn had felt was a weapon Paul Blake could truly fear. Now that weapon literally had vanished from her hands.

Was that a car outside? Wishful thinking, she decided as a wave obliterated all sound with its thunderous arrival. Adding a rock to her sketch and smoothing its edges, she continued her reverie, smiling at the image of Carolyn asleep yesterday and her enchanting quality of innocence. Each time, even at the uninhibited height of passion, she seemed freshly overwhelmed, as if experiencing all her sensations for the first time. And she fell asleep with the suddenness of a child…

The house reverberated with the chime of the doorbell. Val dropped her sketch pad.

Framed in the doorway Carolyn looked young and vulnerable in her white wool jacket and pants. She stared at Val. “It took me a while to—to…”

Val cupped Carolyn’s face in her hands. “Are you all right? Your color seems high.”

Carolyn’s eyes closed; she bit her lips as if fighting back tears. Val pulled her close, her lips brushing Carolyn’s ear. “What’s wrong?”

“I…just want you.” Carolyn’s arms tightened around her; her body molded itself to Val’s.

In churning excitement at Carolyn’s desire, exulting in her sense of control, Val led her to the sofa. For a long time she kissed her, holding Carolyn’s body close into hers, savoring the ardent response. Kissing her with slow deep strokes, she unbuttoned Carolyn’s pants and slid a hand down into soft wet hair and began an equally slow stroking. Her hips undulant, Carolyn gasped into Val’s shoulder.

She knelt beside Carolyn, slid clothing down unhurriedly, touching her cheek to the pale hair, brushing her lips through it. She slid her palms over Carolyn’s stomach and under her hips, clasping and lifting them, kissing high inside her thighs, intoxicated by the heady sexual scent and the exquisite flesh quivering under her tongue.

Carolyn’s hands, rigid and imperious, gripped her hair; she fastened Val’s mouth to her.

The sounds of the room were muffled by the soft trembling thighs that cushioned her face and the heavy thudding of her own heartbeats. Carolyn’s thighs opened, and the sounds were more distinct but oddly distorted: As from a great distance she heard a wave break; the ticktock of the clock was sharp as pistol shots. Carolyn’s breathing seemed like sobbing, and her legs spread apart, one leg high up on the sofa back, the other brushing objects across the surface of the coffee table. A second wave broke, a third, and as the fourth broke Carolyn’s body was arched stillness. The transfixed hands relaxed and took Val’s mouth away.

Val dabbed at the wetness of her face with an edge of her sweatshirt, regretting the quickness of Carolyn’s climax. Carolyn’s eyes were closed; Val knew from her erratic breathing she had not fallen asleep. She took the blanket from the foot of the sofa and covered her legs.

Moving purposefully, she gathered up Carolyn’s clothing. She packed up the traveling case, elated that she would have no further use for it this day. She glanced only briefly at the fireplace. The floor might be all right for Carolyn’s young body but she was not yet ready for another afternoon there. She removed the blanket from Carolyn’s legs. She said softly, “Let’s go upstairs.”

She pulled the spread off the bed and finished undressing Carolyn. With Carolyn silently watching, she stripped off her own clothing.

“Are you going to do that to me again?” Carolyn’s tone was plaintive as Val came to her.

“Do you want me to?” She stopped any reply with her kiss, then picked her up in her arms to lay her on the bed.

A long leisurely time later Val murmured, “Tell me now.”

“Yes,” Carolyn uttered.

Afterward, as Val took her into her arms, Carolyn mumbled, “It’s like dying…Never, I’ve never felt…” With her usual abruptness she fell asleep.

He doesn’t do that to her. He never has. No one ever has. She was amazed. All the man does is fuck her.

Gently she released Carolyn, and went into the bathroom to towel her face, to stare at her visage in the mirror. She went downstairs and returned with her sketch pad.

Carolyn’s body lay in an arc, one leg drawn up over the other, an arm flung up over her head. Thinking Carolyn might shift, she quickly sketched the attitude of her body, then lingered over the lines and curves, warm in her desire, yearning for the woman on the bed and in her sketches to awaken. Finally, Carolyn stirred, and Val put aside the sketch pad.

This time her mouth on Carolyn was a long, slow searching, with different pressures, exploring every crevice, her tongue stroking all the swollen folds of flesh before she took the tiny hardness between her lips.

You don’t have this.
She remembered Paul Blake grabbing his crotch, spitting the words at her.
You want one.

Carolyn gasped and her head thrashed back and forth on the bed as the tip of Val’s tongue vibrated.

I don’t need one
, she hurled back at Paul Blake.

In uninterrupted joy, again and again, unrelenting, she lay between Carolyn’s legs, her hands on the quivering thighs to feel them spreading fully open to her, projecting taunts at the image of Paul Blake:
She’s never felt you like she feels me now.

To Carolyn’s question, asked twice, she answered, “I don’t need to.”

And she did not. Carolyn’s orgasms were like coming herself, and she could not feel the sensations enough. And late that afternoon when Carolyn’s response had all but ceased and she uttered that she couldn’t anymore, still she came again with a protracted shuddering that left her tearful in Val’s arms. And Val understood that if she made Carolyn come a hundred times it would not extinguish her own fire.

Carolyn had been silent as they dressed, remote, unresponsive to Val’s questions. When Val took her into her arms, Carolyn turned her cheek to Val’s lips.

Val looked at her in sudden knowledge and an apprehension that became deepening fear. Instead of making tender love with the precious woman she passionately desired, she had been in bed attacking the man she hated.

“Carrie,” she breathed in terror, in cold sobriety, like a drunk awakening to realize the damage of the riotous night before.

“I’m so very tired,” Carolyn whispered. “I’ve never been so tired.”

Carolyn walked into her house and went straight to bed. When Paul came home she called out weakly from the guest room, “Could you get your own dinner? I think I’ve got the flu.”

He sat on the bed, felt her forehead, brushed at the tears that leaked from the corners of her eyes. Exhausted, shamed, she would not look at him. She felt ravished by Val’s passion, humiliated and diminished by her raw need. In a depression so black and deep she did not care if she lived or died, she fell asleep.

At nine o’clock Paul awakened her. An arm supporting her, he fed her soup as if she were a child. She fell asleep again.

The next morning when she got out of bed she nearly collapsed from the weakness of her limbs. She realized that she had a fever—that she did, in fact, have the flu. When Paul came in later offering coffee she waved him away, mumbling instructions to call her office.

Throughout the day the phone rang. Either Paul or Val, she supposed, without caring.

Sometime that day there was a knocking on first the front door, then the back. She pushed the pillow against her ears.

Paul came home from work early. “I called a doctor,” he told her. Docilely she accepted the pill he gave her along with some broth, but refused solid food.

Again the phone rang. Paul came in to ask brusquely, “Do you want to talk to anybody?”

“Not even God,” she whispered.

She could hear him in the other room, his voice raised and harsh, “No, she doesn’t. Yes I asked her. I don’t have to tell you anything, you can—” He slammed the phone down. “Dyke bitch,” he snarled.

Time distorted, days and nights passed in a haze of phantasmagoric dreams and occasional awareness of sound: the phone ringing, knocks at the door. She somehow knew that Paul was leaving late for work and coming home early.

Except for liquids, she refused food. In the evenings Paul sat with her and watched the small portable television he had moved into her room. During one of those evenings the vice-presidential debate occurred; she slept through it. Afterward, in response to her sleepy-voiced question, she heard in Paul’s tone his condescending opinion of Geraldine Ferraro’s performance; she did not listen to his words.

On a Thursday, eight days after she had last been with Val, her temperature finally normal, her strength and her appetite for food having returned, she sat outside in warm afternoon sun for more than an hour, contemplating the still surface of the pool, the thin striations of cloud in clear, pale sky.

She supposed she was crazy. Why else had she allowed herself to be pulled into this vortex? Why else was she now repelled by the loving touch of her husband? How else could she explain this passion she felt for another woman, sensations unlike anything she had ever known with anyone, a sexual depth in herself she had never dreamed she possessed?

There was no one in her life she could turn to, whom she could trust with this confidence. Her weekly conversations with her mother were always inconsequential; her mother was helpless and usually tearful in the face of the smallest difficulty.

She thought of her father and smiled in affection as she remembered his ever-present billowing cloud of pipe smoke, a smell delicious to her to this day, evoking images of his huge physical size and strength and energy, his bear hugs and laughter. Like the expected death of a loved one, his defection from her life had not really surprised her. He had always seemed bored and impatient with any problem relating to her. She knew she was a mere diversion in his world—an exciting world, a masculine world of significant activities. With her father, she was beyond receiving or inflicting hurt; she had understood her precarious place in his hierarchy of value.

Why should Paul and Val suffer unhappiness now because of her? Why should either of them care this much? Both had succeeded in professions where comparatively few achieved success. They had more to give each other than she could ever offer either of them. Why did they want her? Why would anyone want her?

If she did not understand her desperate sexual need of Val, did it really matter? Did addicts understand their addiction? The one essential was that they understand and avoid the destructive source of their problems.

Perhaps she and Val could go on, be friends again—just friends. For that she needed distance and time to learn control over this sharp new hunger of her body. The fire of fever and a purging illness which had stripped away seven pounds had not reduced the capacity of her body to betray her. Even now, just the image of Val…

What Paul had done to Val was despicable. But he had sensed danger, had realized that her defiant friendship with Val Hunter threatened the foundations of their marriage, strained the bond of their love. Dyke, he had called Val Hunter. It had never occurred to him to apply the same label to his own wife.

Eight peaceful, contented, conventional years of marriage, with the promise of greater professional success for Paul. How could any alternative be better, more acceptable? Why this confusion, this distress, this rebellion without rational cause? What was wrong with her?

She heard the glass door behind her slide open: Paul had come home. He bent to one knee on the grass beside her and took her hands. “You look so much better, Princess.”

“I am. I think I can go back to work tomorrow.”

“Monday,” he stated firmly, “and don’t argue. Tomorrow’s Friday, what’s one more day? You’ll be at full strength Monday.” He added, “I won’t let you go back tomorrow.”