The Beginners (21 page)

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Authors: Rebecca Wolff

BOOK: The Beginners
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“Certain slants of light,” Raquel interjected, then fell pensive, with a look on her mobile face of frustrated comprehension. This was a look she often wore when she wanted to explain something, as she so often did. A look like a combination of dawn breaking and clouds rolling in.
“Yes, you see,” she began again, “that’s the thing. That’s the thing about talking, about three people talking in a room with the firelight, with music, with air. It happens, doesn’t it? The two of you can’t help being there and you can’t help hearing me.” I noted that Raquel had figured Theo and me as
the two of us,
together, and thrilled to see us paired, thus, even if only in her perception. For though I never wished to displease her, or even to disobey her, now that she had spoken it there was the possibility of a new triangulation. “No matter what I don’t or do get out of my mouth you are
all there,
your own selves, experiencing the whole thing, the event, the vibe, the atmosphere. There’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“Except kill us.” Theo said it softly. (If Theo seems a shadowy figure it is probably due to the quality of his attention. He looks at you when you speak to him as though you are an educational program on public television that he feels obliged to watch.)
“Yes, well,” Raquel rejoined, a few beats later, “I’m afraid that Ginger’s parents might object to that sort of final solution. Not to mention Ginger’s own right to life . . .”
“Ginger can take care of herself. Can’t you, Ginger?” He cast me a look that seemed partially to include me in the joke and partially to instruct me to keep my mouth shut. As though I needed any instruction. “I think she takes more after me than she does you, Raquel. I don’t think Ginger can be stopped from getting what she wants, in the end, whatever it may be. If she wants to live, she will live.”
 
 
THE THREE OF US approached the mill through the chill September twilight like thieves at the door of a bank: casually, unconcernedly, as though we had every right to be there. As though we might be customers, or the ghosts of customers, coming to buy batting to stuff a quilt, or to place an order for a length of fine cloth.
This forced entry was Theo’s idea, an alternate plan to historical adventure. He proposed it, as we sat around the house that afternoon, and from the ease with which he did so I got the sense that he was no stranger to abrupt outbursts of criminal behavior. It might, in fact, be the first alternative when his usual recreations—reading, cooking, sleeping—had been exhausted.
And he proved to be good at it. He plotted a simple scheme, and when night began to fall we followed him into it like seals sliding off a rock into the ocean, one after another. We walked through town together discreetly, without hurry. No one was on the streets, it being dinnertime, and I pointed out a few landmarks quietly: the lit-up window of Pritt’s Printing, where my parents still toiled; the dark library where I had spent some of my happiest hours.
 
 
THE MILL OCCUPIES a central position in my town’s imagination, if not in its economy. A concrete bridge carries you safely over the dry bed of the Shift River. There, on your right, is a red brick rectangle of great structural integrity, long and massive from the side view, from across the riverbed, all the little windows in their rows.
It had been a woolen mill. It was really two separate structures: a black sign with gold lettering hung on the face of the front building, above the big red double door’s archway, proclaiming “Wick Knitted Fabrics.” This would have been where prospective customers entered. The small, short, rectangular building stood directly at the roadside, providing its own advertisement. Business transactions must have occurred in the offices on the second floor of this frontal lobe, offices that were graced with larger windows facing out over the road. The long rear building stood tall, with pointed roof, in back, an uncle sternly peering over the shoulder of a foolhardy nephew. On its side were wide black iron double doors, like those of a prison, which must have been where the streams of laborers would enter in the morning, and exit in the evening, dull of brain and limb, dullness the dull fruit of their dull action. On top of all this was a kind of cupola, rising high and white above the flat roof; a small, gazebo-like structure, perhaps an observation tower, though what there may have been to observe we cannot know. Approaching consumers? Mischievous children? Malicious herds of deer? Many times Cherry and I had discussed our plans to find a way inside and up into this point of highest perspective, from which we guessed we could probably see a long way in every direction. But we never did try.
The iron doors that had always looked so invulnerable to Cherry and me seemed to fairly welcome Theo in, after a few blows with an ax at the rusted mechanism that contained both the lock and the handle. The shouts of the ax against the hasp of the lock rang out in the dusk and I shrank against the brick wall, but I heard no answering cries or indications of notice. Without any hesitation Theo slipped inside, Raquel behind him, and I followed them, as had become my habit.
 
 
THIS WAS NO CASTLE. It was an oblong, dark, dirty room with a high ceiling, empty but for a few long, rough tables that appeared to be bolted to the brick walls. A staircase to the second floor crept up one wall and disappeared into a small square hole. I had always assumed that the mill would still be occupied by machinery, dusty, hulking relics of early industrial labor, but of course it must have all been sold off a hundred years ago. Theo pulled the door shut behind us and moved into the room, to stand by a window on the other side. I followed him, curious to see what the laborers had seen as they sat, or stood, or bent to their tasks.
Raquel hung back, and I felt her hesitation on the back of my head like an invasive set of eyes, a vision not my own. She spoke in a loud whisper. “What industriousness, what tireless production. What
product
, after all, could have been attempted here? If each innumerable window represents innumerable handy workers, then what an incalculable amount of work was going on inside these walls!
“Okay, this place gives me the creeps,” Raquel continued, and I turned to watch her as she moved slowly backward, her hands reaching out behind her, in the general direction of the door. “I’m sorry, my darlings, but it’s too real. So much history in one place, I can feel it in the air like particles I don’t want to inhale. But you two knock yourselves out. I’ll wait for you at home.” Still facing us she bumped up, hard, against the heavy door; it budged and she backed through, pushing it firmly shut from the other side. Theo stayed silent at the window, and I stood frozen in my place between him and the door. He crossed the room, in which my eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom even as it deepened, and stopped at another window. It seemed a cue: I went and stood beside him and together we watched Raquel recede. The air between our bodies filled with a kind of vibratory compulsion: I needed to move nearer, or farther. I struggled to stay still.
With hindsight, one sees that there were several cues, or prompts, or leads that we followed. A setup. I can still feel the heaviness that settled on me; it was odd to be on the inside, to watch her through the begrimed glass of the small window as she grew like an afternoon’s long shadow away up the riverbank, slung her leg over the guardrail, and was gone. It was even odder to be now so alone with Theo. This had never happened. Still, the unexpected feeling of bereftness, and the uncomfortable sense that in some way I must now take the place of the absent woman, was familiar, reminded me of those rare dinners at home with my father when my mother had gone out to a town meeting or to visit a friend. I was so used, by now, to being three; three provided me with the proper balance. I was neither fulcrum nor lever but ballast, the one who could be unloaded, dispensed with if lightness was called for. In this new pairing I would surely be missed. I had some responsibility.
But still, even as the path lay cleared ahead of us, remember that I was quite young, and believe that I was unsure. I wondered, I really wondered, if I should follow Raquel, and leave Theo alone here inside the mill to explore. That would have been the natural choice—to remain by Raquel’s side. But she hadn’t seemed to want it. In fact it seemed as though she had wanted to leave Theo alone with me. Maybe she wanted us to get to know each other better, or, more likely, to have a chance to talk about her. Or maybe she had to be taken at her word: she had simply wanted to not be inside. And I did, I did want to be inside, even if what I saw there was tantamount to yet another end of my childhood. The empty mill, no castle; the mill itself strangely uninflected, devoid of atmosphere. For unlike Raquel, I found the mill’s air to be altogether quiet, still, free of debris, psychic or otherwise. I found that I felt quite at ease there, in the empty room, as though all the years of my imaginings had made it ready for me, made it welcome me, much in the way it welcomed Theo.
“Come sit here,” Theo said. He’d pulled his jacket off and laid it on the table next to where we stood, in the violet light coming through the window. My eyes were unaccustomed to dwelling so long on him: usually I trained them on Raquel so as not to call attention to myself. His attention. What would I do with it if I had it? Now his form in the dimness was like a blot of light, a silvery, uninflected shape that I couldn’t wholly define. I levered myself up onto the table. We would talk now; I could tell him about the castle, and he would understand, as I had not tried to make anyone else understand, not even myself, what the still fresh, still recent loss of Cherry meant to me: two becoming one, a final collapse. And then he might tell me what Raquel meant to him, so that I could know better how to place myself in relation to the two of them. Should I come nearer? Go farther? Should I leave them more to themselves or did they resent the time I spent away from them? Should I quit my job and simply stay with them, always? We could all three leave this town together, and find a new town, and I could be known there as their daughter. For some reason I felt sure that if we spoke now, in the privacy of the castle, with Raquel absent, I would be able to talk to him as I had never talked to any man before. Certainly not to my father, with whom I spoke only in well-rehearsed lines. Not to Jack, who had departed before I could learn to speak.
But Theo did not talk to me, nor did he sit next to me. Instead he placed his hands on my body, on my sides. With his hands on me I was unable to hear my thoughts, to feel myself in time. What happened seemed to happen
already,
and I ran to catch up with the apprehension of it. So I did not feel glad or afraid when he dragged me around to face him squarely and pulled my knees apart. I felt rather that I had to watch carefully, to ascertain correctly, to keep actions moving forward in time. He stood between my knees, locking his hips to the edge of the table, and I was obliged to look into his eyes, which were remorseless, though I only saw them for a moment. He showed me instead the top of his head, light brown waves in disarray. He fixed his eyes on my neck, my collarbone, and I felt his fingers at the bottom of my sweater, then up inside my shirt, and brushing over my shoulders, my breasts, pulling at my nipples.
 
 
IT IS CONFUSING to be cold while being made love to. He tugged my sneakers off, then my jeans, then my underwear, and I could feel the deep, hard chill of the table against my buttocks even through the padded lining of his workman’s jacket. He drew his fingers along the goose-bumped flesh at the insides of my thighs. It was as though I had fallen into water, dark water, and all perception was sharpened by the medium in which I was suspended. He knelt between my legs, and then I felt his tongue, warm on the tender parts. He stiffened it, and moved it over me like a finger. I’m not sure if I made a sound. If I did, he silenced it with his hand over my mouth, his long arm reaching up to clamp it. Then he put his hands over my breasts; then he sucked at them, his mouth slick. I could smell myself on his breath, on my skin. He arose from his knees and stood, then unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them down. His penis stood out from his body through a flap in his underwear, like the mast of a sailboat on end in the water. It seemed to pulse slightly.
 
 
I THOUGHT I KNEW what to do. I slid off the table and to my knees, the grit of a hundred years grinding into them. I grasped him, warm in the cold, in my fist, put my other hand on his buttock, which was cool and smooth, put my tongue to the end of it as I had seen illustrated so clearly, then didn’t know what to do after that. Every description I had read simply said
suck,
but I could not fit the whole thing in my mouth and still draw enough breath to suck. I began instead to lick it, like an ice cream cone melting in my hot fist. I was surprised at how smooth it was, featureless and without flavor.
“You’re sweet,” he whispered, and put his hand on my chin, another on my shoulder, drawing himself from my mouth.
Sweet,
I thought, and felt like a child. And thought that would be the end of it, probably, now that he understood my inexperience. None of my reading or imagining had prepared me for the overwhelming effusion, the tactile imposition, of proximate contact with his bare skin. I will confess that it crossed my mind that I would rather be asleep. I thought I might shut my eyes for a minute and rest, away from sight.
But then I was lifted up, and my eyes flew open like a doll’s, and I was put swiftly on my back on the hard table, his hands under my arms, more like a baby than a child, and then he leaned over me, pressing his torso down onto mine, holding my hands over my head in his hands. The weight of him was tremendous, and through his bulky sweater I thought I felt him shiver, or shake, a tremor passing through him that passed into me, and I tried to meet his eyes, to make another point of contact, but he bent his head to bite my shoulder through my shirt, and I spread my knees. When I felt him pushing to get inside, I spread still wider, my knees bent, as I had seen it done, and he took his hands from mine and placed them on my calves, leveraging. I put one hand on each of my knees and pulled them toward my face. Now he put his hand over my mouth, again, and pumped, short thrusts. I was aware of his calculation. Then he put his fingers into my mouth, and I kept them there, again as I had seen it done, until he pulled me off the table, turned me around, and bent me over, my cheek resting on his jacket, and came in to me again from this anterior position, and, reaching around, used his finger to touch me where anticipation was concentrated like pain. I remembered, from my first visit to the Motherwells, with Cherry, that this was the trick he used on Raquel, and to my surprise the impact of the split-second image of them together in this way, entire, from out of nowhere caused my insides to twist suddenly open and then shut and then open again, wider, like the hidden eye of a camera. “Oh,” I cried, and my cry reverberated in the room, and in its wake Theo increased his speed and force until I felt him tense, his body arched away from mine and quivering like a bow. He didn’t make a sound, but I could almost hear his heart thudding; then I could feel it clearly when he slumped forward again and rested his head on the back of my neck, his chest on my back. We stayed there like that for a moment, during which I became acutely aware of the chill, as the slickness at the inside of my thighs quickly cooled. After a minute I felt him flop out of me, deflated, and then more of his semen was released from me and dribbled down.

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