Slow Hand (28 page)

When she set out for her cabin, it was almost eleven, a late night for the good sisters. She flashed her light only when she needed it. Unlike Anne, who was night-blind, she saw well in the dark and didn’t like to obscure the stars. She walked alone (having taken time to remove her witch’s garb), fifty feet behind Anne and Teresa, engaged in some intense exchange that ended with a brief embrace when they reached Anne’s rooms. A strange sight, Karen thought, two witches embracing in the dark, a small pool of light at their feet. She watched them. Teresa pulled away first and continued at a measured pace down toward her own cabin. The path to Karen’s place diverged to the right from the road, about thirty feet before
Anne’s. As she turned off, the remaining witch walked toward her. She wasn’t crying—Anne almost never cried—but the veins stood out at her temples and her eyelids were red-rimmed, signs, Karen knew from many years’ experience, of trouble.

“Turn off that flashlight,” Karen said, in an effort to ignore what brewed. “Witches are supposed to be able to see in the dark.” Anne looked down at her black clothes as though she had forgotten them and pressed the button. The two women stood there for a moment, in silence, under a moon that was not quite full and partly obscured by a small cloud. “I can’t see your face,” Anne said. “Can we talk inside?” She fumbled for a match to light the propane lamp in her entryway and let the lamp provide the light for the bedroom as well. Dim but sufficient. Karen sat cross-legged, as was her wont, on the bed and waited without speaking for Anne to initiate the inevitable ritual of sitting backward astride her desk chair as though she were going to plunge into conversation, then, before saying anything at all, turning back to the desk, opening the top drawer, taking out a cigarette, getting up and searching for matches, which were never in the porcelain ashtray where Karen would have kept them, were never, in fact, in any predictable place. She ended up going back to the box in the entryway. After she lit the cigarette, she abandoned the chair and joined Karen on the bed, an action that would within a minute or two, Karen knew, necessitate getting up for the ashtray, now out of reach. Karen liked knowing the moves ahead of time, liked knowing, for example, that there would be only one cigarette, to get them started, and that, once started, Anne would get right to the point.

“I’m a sex fiend.”

Karen laughed. “You look like some sort of fiend in that outfit, but sex fiend wouldn’t be my first guess.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, Karen.”

“Yes, you are, or you wouldn’t have said that.”

“I was trying to express, in a pithy but admittedly exaggerated way, a serious problem. I mean, when I assess the situation
rationally, I decide I’m just a normal woman with a normal sex drive. But here, among the saints, I feel like a nymphomaniac.”

“Translation: Teresa doesn’t want sex with you as often as you want sex with Teresa.”

“Your translation,” Anne said, “like most translations, is literally accurate but misses the subtle nuances.”

“Like?”

“Like the fact that Teresa likes sex but doesn’t seem to need it, like the fact that you liked sex once upon a time but seem to have transcended it, like the fact that Donna and Sharon and Louise and Jan and Kathleen and Beatrice do without it on a regular basis and never complain and never seem to fill the common space with erotic tension and never seem about to explode. What’s wrong with me?”

Karen decided to be fair. “Maybe the question is what’s wrong with the rest of us.”

“I tell myself that sometimes,” Anne said, “but it won’t wash. You are all fine. You are affectionate and more or less sane and intelligent and fun and well, fine—not twisted by frustration, not anguished by erotic energy, not driven by the need to channel your sex drives into creative endeavors.”

“You are affectionate and sane and intelligent and fun and fine, too, Anne, maybe even more so than the rest of us. Besides Beatrice.”

“Then why do I feel like this? I love Teresa, I want her, I want her desperately, I want her to want me. She says yes, okay, fine, anytime, thanks, but she never
wants
me, and so mostly I’ve just stopped asking, and we haven’t slept together in weeks.”

“I’m sorry.” Karen did feel sorry, rather to her surprise.

“Why should you be? You haven’t slept with anyone for twenty years, and you never moan and groan about it.”

“Never to you. I could hardly moan and groan about it to you, friend, when your answer would be—and it would be a fair answer—you’re the one who walked away.’”

“To whom, then?”

“Oh, to Beatrice.”

“I bet you did it once, Karen, maybe fifteen years ago. Am I right?”

Karen laughed. “I think it was more like ten years ago, but yes, you’re right. But …”

“But you still have desires. You just breathe them into your roses, sing them into vespers, paint them into flowers, send sweet loving messages with them to us all, and maybe you even masturbate once in a while. Don’t worry. I’m not asking. Damn it, Karen. I like my work, too, and I love vespers, and I feel close to my sisters, and I masturbate. But I want
sex,
with another living, breathing, panting human being. Who doesn’t even have to be Teresa. Who could be Sojourner, who could be Jan, who could be that journalist who came—what was her name, Marta?—who could be you. Sometimes I even think about sex with Beatrice. I’m promiscuous as well as desperate.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Karen? I live surrounded by women I love and I
want
them, and I don’t understand why they don’t all want each other.”

Karen took a deep breath. She didn’t know where to start. She lacked Anne’s eloquence and perhaps her passion, but she, Karen, had things to say to this woman who mistook control for calm, who discarded effort, who, like the fisherman’s wife, wanted castle for cottage and even then wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to start five minutes back and say that if Teresa said yes, it was enough, take it, love her. It was greedy to want more than Teresa’s yes. She wanted to say that Donna, good, kind, dependable Donna, preferred animals to humans and had who knows what kind of secret desires or secret holiness wrapped up in her silent ways. She wanted to say that Louise was single and celibate when she arrived at the monastery, in her thirties. What, if any repressions had brought her to them virginal were as incomprehensible to her, Karen, as to Anne. She wanted to say that Sharon hadn’t been there very long but was, Karen strongly suspected, going to have a lot of trouble with this very desire and that Jan, Karen knew for a fact, though she wasn’t at liberty to say so, had as much trouble with it as Anne; that Jan had actually, for over a year, had an enormous crush on
Anne, which she worked with touching diligence and ingenuousness to overcome. She wanted to say that Kathleen and Beatrice had desire beaten out of them at Mt. Carmel and that Beatrice sometimes seemed to beat back desire still. Once, at least, Karen thought she had seen it, alive and, yes, desperate, in Beatrice’s eyes—which were, at the time, looking at Anne.

She wanted to say that she, Karen, had times of calm and times of chaos, that she
did,
when chaos came, breathe desire into her roses and into her drawings, that she did love herself with it and torture herself over it, that Beatrice had, in a most passionate and un-Beatricelike way, said once that she must never do it violence because without it this life was nothing. She wanted to say that sometimes (maybe because she had tried not to do it violence) she, Karen, wanted her, Anne, desperately and passionately, not often, but sometimes. Like, Anne, like tonight when we were dancing, when you and Teresa broke away from the circle and I said to myself, damn them, damn them. I said that, Anne, because I wanted you, I wanted to throw myself at you and rip off that witch’s shirt and—right there on the common room floor—suck your nipples through my teeth until they bled. That’s what I wanted, Anne (how do you like that?), that’s what I
want.

She wanted to say these things, and she did say them. She said them all except for the part about Jan, which she knew but couldn’t say, and the part about Beatrice, which she didn’t know and couldn’t say and was afraid of. She said them until the tears were running down her cheeks and until Anne unbuttoned first the witch’s shirt and then the witch’s skirt and took off the bra and pants underneath and came at Karen naked, her nipples erect, and said in her huskiest voice, “Suck them, Karen, until they bleed.”

While Karen sucked, Anne stripped her, not gently, carefully, as she had so many years before (when that her tall, thin body even breathed must have seemed to Anne a tenuous miracle), but quickly, roughly. Karen helped with her jeans, let go of Anne long enough to light a candle to replace the dimming propane lamp. “I want to
see
you,” she said. She looked hard at Anne’s body, different from the memories but no less compelling.
She ran her hands down Anne’s hips, felt Anne’s hands grabbing her butt, pushed Anne to the bed. They struggled there, not for anything but the struggle itself, and Karen came out on top. She slid herself down until her mouth was again around Anne’s breast, and she drew the nipples again through her teeth, in and out, in and out. At the same time she thrust three fingers inside of her and rubbed the ball of her hand firmly against Anne’s pubic bone. Anne spread her legs far apart and danced wildly into Karen’s hand, whispering, hoarsely, harshly, “Harder, harder,” then moaning so loudly that young Karen would have let go at first sound of it, but this Karen didn’t, couldn’t. She only sucked and pushed and pulled harder until Anne came, almost shouting. She tasted blood.

Without transition, without letting up on the frantic pace, Anne flipped her over and took charge. Suddenly the moans were Karen’s, and she felt with panicked pleasure the finger that had been aimlessly roaming her belly and cunt work its way slowly into her ass and Anne’s thumb on her clitoris. And by the time Anne’s mouth closed over her breast she had wrapped her legs around Anne’s body and was using them to push her hips forward into the firm flesh of Anne’s belly. “What is this,” she said in a loud voice that seemed to be coming from across the room, “Oh God, what is this?” Anne slid her mouth down Karen’s pumping body, and with her tongue traced circles in Karen’s pubic hair while she pressed her thumb inside her. Karen writhed, trying to get herself into Anne’s mouth, but Anne teased on. “Tell me what you want.”

“You know what I want,” Karen managed to say between breaths.

“Say it.”

“Suck me.”

“How?”

“Hard.”

When she woke up at 4:30, Karen lay quietly beside the sleeping witch and wondered if what they had done at midnight was make love or do battle. She felt bruised, her thigh muscles ached. She remembered the way they had held each other
down, pushed and pulled, teased and scratched, bit and shouted and dared. She remembered it as a dream and she the dreamer but not one of the breathless, violent women, teeth bared, rolling over in the bed, spitting blood out of their mouths. She wished it were light so she could see if she had broken the skin on Anne’s breast. Surely not. She tried to say “Damn you” to the body at her side, but she couldn’t. The words that came so easily last night were gone. And when she slid silently out of the bed and into her clothes, she longed for Anne’s fingers on her flesh, not clawing but tracing. She took her shoes to the entryway, and as she bent over to pull them on, she noticed the objects on the table by the door. A glass of water, with a note taped to it: Always drink before running. Two pieces of chocolate on top of another note: Don’t run away altogether. Anne must have written the notes, blind as she was, in the night, while Karen slept; Anne had known she would run, though she hadn’t run for years; Anne, Anne, Anne. She loved her with every sore muscle in her body, with every drop of her blood, with every cell of her brain. She had loved her, not since the day they met, the two young newcomers, wary of the women, of each other, wondering, separately, about this strange step their lives seemed to have taken without them, not since then but since the day Anne appeared at the side of Karen’s bed, though she had never nursed, and stayed through the long and frightening illness that so suddenly claimed her. Though the doctor had answered her questions patiently enough, her diagnosis of Karen’s driving pain paled in explanatory power beside the dark, troubling pieces of her life that worked their way like shards of glass to the surface of her skin. It was Anne who took tweezers to them, held them up to the light for her, safely disposed of them when she was finished. Likewise the doctor’s account of Karen’s recovery bore too little resemblance to her own sense that cells healed under the tips of Anne’s fingers, that every time Anne’s hands rubbed her neck, her shoulders, her sides, they rubbed off death.

Outside Anne’s door, Karen stretched and reached and fell without thinking into her old prerunning routine. It was dark
and it was cold, but Karen thought that in a couple of miles it would begin to get light and she would begin, even sooner, to get warm. And so she ran, trying at first to ward off the cold by singing some of the songs, what she could remember of them, that Anne had sung to her during the weeks of nursing. Quiet, kind weeks. Anne had sung while she stroked Karen’s face, blew cool breath on her hot forehead, traced soft circles on her cheeks. First there were folk songs—it was 1969—lullabies, labor songs, songs from the civil rights movement, songs from some long ago summer camp. “From the hills I gather courage/Visions of the days to be./Strength to lead and strength to follow/All are given unto me.” Karen looked out the window when Anne sang that one. “Nuns,” Anne explained. “It was a camp run by the Sisters of Social Service. They wore gray wool and were into the inspirational stuff.” But she sang it purely, and Karen’s arms got goose bumps. They were so young.

“O gay is the garland and fresh are the roses/I’ve culled from the garden to bind on thy brow.” Karen had liked the roses in that song. Some days she imagined them yellow and warm, other days, when her fever raged, lavender and cool. And then there was the song in a minor key, so slow and mournful. How did it go? “Come all ye fair and tender maidens/Be careful when you court young men/They’re like a star on a summer morning/They’ll come in view, then fade again.”