Swimming in the Volcano (15 page)

“You've got to be tired.”

Her eyes slowly reopened. “I'm all right.”

“Why don't you go in and go to bed.”

“Not yet.” Her head started to bob but she made sure it didn't, straightening her spine. The skin of her face had slackened, allowing the promise of future jowls and a loose chin. Her eyes were rimmed with the price of traversing oceans, the jump of time zones. And, too, her constant sniffing made it obvious she had been helping herself along the way to the drug in the diaphragm case. “Mitch, why did you send me all those letters? They made it impossible to forget you.” She set her breakfast plate down from her lap. “Okay, I suppose that's why you sent them.”

“Well then.”

“Well then!
You have to say more than that.”

“There's no more to say than that.”

He tried to recall what it was he had written to her over the past years. Second-page news, miniature visions, adolescent restlessness and chitchat, oblique hints of lust, queries about beaus, peculiar events witnessed, the illness of his father (she had liked him for the plodding bureaucratic thoroughness with which he kept up his wooded property, which is just about the only place she ever saw him),
incidental juvenile musings on loss and pain, all the funks like Fifties tearjerk tunes, rigidly objective abstracts on the absurdly powerful astonishment of heartbreak. Consistently some wit or clever attempts to pitch at her, keep it fresh in her mind what a smart guy he was, always good for a chuckle, yet why he did this he really couldn't say. Not to play coy with himself, but each time he wrote her he believed had its own isolation and purity, not linked to any greater motive than could be assigned to ham radio operators—which Mitchell knew was no more true than the idea of birds migrating arbitrarily but he would not, certainly not now, confronted with the deed, admit it.

“If there's so much to say,” he dared her, “you say it. Nobody twisted your arm and made you write back.”

She was pleased that the moment had come, after these dodges and dead-ends, for her to address the apocrypha of their relationship. She smiled eagerly and stubbed her cigarette, which had stayed in her mouth even though it had burned down to the filter. She lit another, craving everything all at once, and told Mitchell what he never knew—what the letters had meant to her.

“At first it was like being tailed by one of those guys who gets a fix on you, you know, takes an interest after seeing you once in a restaurant or pumping gas into your car, and you become his obsession. You begin to notice him everywhere you go, and you realize you're not having any luck in getting rid of him, you can't shake him loose. You feel as if you've been adopted by a pervert, some nimrod, and there doesn't seem to be much you can do about it. I wanted to shriek, every time I went to the mailbox and there was a Charlottesville postmark. I wanted to scream, Why don't you shut up? Why don't you go away? Stop harassing me. But Daddy kept forwarding your letters as I tramped west, and like a dope I kept opening them.”

She laughed lightly, holding up a finger when she saw he was going to interrupt. “Let me finish what I was saying about the letters, before you start stewing again. Unlike the way things are going at the moment, you refused to be silent. That was your secret weapon, that's what you were doing, wasn't it? It amazed me, to tell you the truth, that you could be so stubborn. It was so nonchalant, so cavalier, your defiance, so gentlemanly, and I didn't expect it. It dawned on me I really meant something to you, you know. It rattled me that you could still care, considering what I put you through. I mean, that was terrible, Mitch. And I didn't think your caring was very healthy.”

“If caring wasn't a form of sickness, your father and every other shrink would be out of a job.”

“Look,” she went on, becoming more animated. An ash from the cigarette had landed on her breast and she brushed it off, leaving a gray smudge above her left nipple. Mitchell aimed his attention there as if it were a problem to be solved. “Look, I thought your game was to haunt me, to keep reminding me how fucked up I was. But you never tried to nail me into a coffin of guilt—or if you did, honey, you were sure shrewd about it, you know. None of your letters were like you're being now ... so how could I not respond. I mean, am I supposed to be from another planet or what. Why sack everything, why go for the total wipeout? That's how whores are treated, trash, and as mixed up as I was, that's what I thought I had coming. You know? But there you were offering me something beautiful and I admit it, I was confused by that. Who wouldn't be? It took me a while, but I had to write back, send you a card like on your birthday or Christmas. Most of it was pretty superficial, I know, and I know how crazy it sounds now, but I started to believe that we had never split up, that an accident had separated us but that it was only a question of time ... do you know what I mean?”

Mitchell rubbed the back of his neck, scowling. He knew what she meant, and it put him in no mood for clearing up their relationship as neatly as she was doing it. A sugar finch landed on the feeder that dangled from the eave, just a calabash shell with sugar water in it, and he watched it, not knowing why it could contribute to his rage.

“Don't make it all sound so goddamn noble,” he said. “It's been five years. I've had other girlfriends. I write letters to plenty of women. They write back. They fly in infrequently though.” The things he wanted and the things he didn't want—Johnnie had them all in a tangle. Lately Mitchell had been wanting a girlfriend and he kept finding candidates too, when he was drunk, and discarding them when he was sober. Here in front of him was the only woman he had known whom he couldn't evict from his thoughts, an early Christmas for his loneliness, and he was maneuvering to make her cry and do what she said he was too much a gentleman for in his letters, an objective he apparently had no qualms about face to face.

Johnnie blanched. “I didn't think about other women, I guess,” she said. “You always left that part out.”

“Did you think you had crippled me?” Mitchell was grinding his teeth, fuming, provoked by her dispensation of honest secrets. “Give me a fucking break, okay. Why should it all mean anything now?”

“It doesn't,” she moaned, and wrapped her hands in the cloth of
her skirt. Her face reddened, on the verge of tears. “Please don't be a son of a bitch, Mitchell. My life has not been easy. You have a right to do what you're doing, but please don't go after me so hard.”

“Lord Almighty. How subtle you've become.”

“Fuck you,” Johnnie said in anguish. “You have to be able to afford to be subtle first. I have to pay my way as I go.”

“So go ahead—confess, confess,” he shrugged. “Catharsis”—a pop of dyslexia went off behind his eyes—“th-the cathartic ecstasy. Make us both wretched ... more wretched.” He was becoming demented. “So, tell me, how's the you-know-what business these days.”

“Aren't you smart?” she said furiously. “Of course it's drugs, you prick. Drugs, sex, rock and roll—all the naughty stuff, all the decadence, I'm behind it all. I'm the queen bee of the generation.” Mitchell started to tell her that he knew all along but she stamped her foot so he wouldn't go on. “Man, would you just fucking
listen. Please
.” Her expression was as willful and wild as he had ever seen it. She couldn't moderate her voice. Mitchell listened to its quivering and thought, breakdown time. “When we lived together—it wasn't very long ago but the world was such a different place then. And I didn't know anything. I had nothing to compare you to.”

“You once compared me to a jackass.”

“Oh, you are a jackass, you. Just
listen
to me, Mitchell.” Her rueful laugh frightened him. “The men I've known these past five years, they've been beasts, monsters. I didn't deserve them, I really didn't, but there they were, worshiping themselves and making me feel like shit underfoot. Through it all, you jackass, you were in the mother-fucking mailbox—”

“Old jack-in-the-box.”

“Damn it, will you please let me finish. There you were, a phenomenon, a precious phantom. Finally, I suppose I romanticized you—how could I not. You persuaded me to have a second try. Wait—” Anticipating him, she stiff-armed the air, then dropped her hand across the crate onto his. A sheaf of hair fell across her eyes and she tossed it back in frustration. “Don't say it. I know you weren't trying to encourage me.”

Mitchell couldn't comprehend why she was working so hard to sell her story. The door was open. Here she was. Why press the case? “You can stay as long as you need to,” he said wearily. “Okay? No more interrogation. I'll leave you alone.”

She withdrew her hand and brought both of them to cover her face, her fingers fanned from cheek to cheek, barring her inchoate eyes, their light now more brown than green, and sad. “You wanted
to see me again, didn't you?” she murmured. “Despite all this, you wanted me back, or have I really messed up?”

“That's a very interesting question,” Mitchell said.

“Interesting!”
Her head flew back and she pushed out of her sitting position, maddened to the point of assault, clamping her hands on his ears as if she were about to twist him around until his neck snapped. “You sit there like an Indian and tell me I've raised an interesting supposition. You spook in the mailbox. You cocksucker.” She dropped all her weight against him and they tumbled off the crate, Johnnie atop him, squatting on his stomach. “Don't you dare say that, you nasty martyr. You Saint Mitchell.”

“Get off.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Not until you confess what's in that heart of yours.” She cocked her head and pretended to listen carefully.

“That,” he said, imperturbable, “is the sound of the little fish of charity, swimming in circles, happy to be of service. They only come once a year and you want to show them a bad time.” He moved his hips to budge her off but she strained against him, a counterthrust that shocked with erotic energy. I don't want you to touch me this much, this quick, he thought out of self-preservation, the round dull blades of her pelvis digging into his groin, their bodies poised for a large lapse into sexual fluency, the language of that distant intimate world where they had grown up together, a small alphabet with a boggling capacity for meaning. Maybe we could dance first, something, anything to work up properly to this level of mock copulation about to turn real. It was merciless, this itch, and Mitchell was beginning to see that the largest share of Johnnie he had held on to as his own, his mnemonics of her, his mantra and his movie of this woman, was a spellbinding sequence of carnal images and sweaty vignettes, an index of lovemaking that dominated the archives of his memory of her. The notion crossed his mind that, healthy or aberrant, fair or unjust, in her long absence he had distilled Johnnie into a private stock of pornography. Reduced and reproduced through countless daydreams and night visions, transmuted into a benevolent succubus, she had lived with him twice the time as in the original version, and this newest Johnnie of the batch, mounted above him, was a source of pure upheaval.

She resumed her tricky polemic, her pitch. “Something kept shining on, Mitchell, bright as the north star,” she said, an alluring whisper, her voice dropping lower and lower, “and I followed it here.”

Mitchell felt too furtive and pathetic and would not respond. The heat from Johnnie's legs and bottom sank like radioactivity into his flesh, cunning isotopes. He squirmed under her. She rocked perfectly in sync with his movement so he stopped.

“Johnnie—” he started to say, but she placed a finger on his lips. Bold, worn out, plumes of hair-thin crosshatchings framed the expression of her eyes where one emotion collided with another and paid the toll of contradiction, like shoals thrown up where two currents opposed each other. Deception, passion, their separate reversals—Mitchell could see exactly where they met, barely visible still but given a few years they would advertise an overt brand of duplicity.

“What we had should never have ended. I invite you to gloat,” she said to him, yet she seemed the one to be gloating. “If you want a true confession, there it is.”

“What did we have?” The question seemed justified.

She hovered over him, inches away and bending closer by fractions, her smile enlarging from seductiveness to a wide leer, her makeup breaking down into crystallized particles, a granulation meshed by pores swelling in the tropical heat, the relentlessness of travel; layers of her skin dissolving before his harsh scrutiny; the leathery chap of her lips; a yellowness to the teeth farther back in her mouth, scored and packed with amalgamate. Mitchell blinked and the grotesque focus relaxed, softening her features.

“Do you want me back, Mitchell? Just say it, one way or the other.”

“Hey, forget that question.” He propped himself up on his elbows and Johnnie, gripping his biceps, pushed into him.

“I believe you, Mitchell,” she whispered urgently.

Through an injured nose Mitchell inhaled whiffs of her hair, her soap and protein. Nothing registered was recognizable as belonging exclusively to Johnnie, and nothing she had said made sense except as subterfuge, because all she was was a runaway, and she had run away from so many people and things that she had begun to repeat herself, lost in her own momentum, a child resurrecting old toys. Her pubis was like a mallet struck against his own, urging him to acquiesce, and her breath pumped into his ear, a narcotic. Mitchell visualized a hormonal flow chart that resembled a metropolitan subway system, all lines headed for the downtown station. The picture went black and he rolled out from under her.

“You too fahst, gy-url.”

Johnnie stayed flat on her back, staggered, her legs and arms
spread-eagled as though she had fallen from the sky, coaxing her breathing back from its galloping pace. She lifted her head, chagrined but still not thoroughly daunted, her look telling him she understood—whether true or not—what had happened. “Shit,” she said, and let her skull thump back on the floor.