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  She never touched his prick. It was too sacred, too potent. They pretended it wasn’t there, even when their bodies straightened at the angle permitted by the front seat and its heater-crowded foot space and he held her buttocks through her rumpled skirt and pressed himself rhythmically against her, all the time their mouths kissing, until he came, came in his underpants, where the dried jism made a brittle stain he later picked off with his fingernail, hoping his mother wouldn’t notice it when she did the wash. In the house they had now she did the wash in a dim cobwebby space under the cellar stairs, on a newer machine than the tub-shaped one that had seized his hand in the Willow basement; this machine had a lid that closed, and a spin-dry phase in its cycle instead of a wringer.

  His sense of sexual etiquette was primitive, gleaned from the way men and women acted in the movies up to their huge close-up kiss at the end, and from enigmatic dialogue in a few books, like For Whom the Bell Tolls and Forever Amber and A Rage to Live and The Amboy Dukes, that he had looked into, and from a pornographic poem that Marty Naftzinger’s younger brother, Jerry, a runty curly-haired kid in Owen’s class, could recite, if you paid him a dime. But it was developed enough to ask, after one such climax against her compliant body, “What can we do for you?”

  This embarrassed her. Elsie liked to pretend that what had just happened hadn’t happened at all. “How do you mean?”

  This made him shy in turn. “I mean—just holding still for me isn’t enough, is it?”

  She said, “We can’t do more, Owen. There might be consequences you don’t want.” She never touched his prick and never said “I love you,” knowing it would put him to the discomfort of saying the same thing back, when he wasn’t ready. Otherwise she could have explained, I love you, I like exciting you, it excites me, isn’t that enough for now?

  Yet there was more, both knew it, and as his senior year ran out they groped to find it without committing sins so dark and final their lives would be forever deformed. Elsie was less afraid of this than he; he refused to test how far she would let him “go.” It had become their way in the car for him to bend over and kiss the silky warm inner sides of her thighs and then press his mouth as far up as he could into the warmth, her warmth, its aroma at times like the tang his mother gave off on a summer day and at others of the musky mash bins in the back of her father’s store. At first she resisted, pushing at his shoulders, and then came to expect it. In those days even teen-age girls wore girdles: the crotch of her underpants was guarded by edges of stiff elastic, and though she shyly edged her hips forward in the car seat his lips could not quite reach the damp cotton. Not that he knew enough to make her come with his mouth, or how girls came at all. The pleasure was his, in being this close to a secret, in having her yield it up to him, even her fragrance, which was strong enough at times to exert a counterforce, a wish to pull his face away. But he loved it there between her legs, and how hot and sticky his cheeks grew against her thighs, and the graceless awkwardness this maneuver asked of her, still wearing her knee socks and loafers.

  The summer before he went off to MIT, their experiments took on a desperate edge. She knew he was slipping away; the baton had not been passed after all. Owen had got a summer job on a surveying crew, tending the target marks and chopping brush out of the sight lines. Elsie had been sent to a Lutheran camp in Ohio, where she was a counsellor, for six weeks. He would get rides with the crew to far corners of the county and have to be fetched from Alton when he could not hitch a ride south; he would come home exhausted and dirty, and tried not to think that college in a foreign region was swooping down upon him and would carry him away—for good, he both hoped and feared. His grandparents were ailing and his parents were no longer the young couple on Mifflin Avenue into whose bed he would climb when a dream scared him.

  After Elsie returned from Ohio, it seemed almost too much work to take a bath in the farmhouse’s one tub and go out again, into the dark. He and she needed the dark now. With the freedoms they had granted each other they needed such privacy that even a distant streetlight or the remotest chance of a Willow cop with a flashlight and barking voice could not be borne. Where could they go, with their maturing needs and fears of eventual desertion? His summer had not been so distracted that he had missed the implication, in her letters from camp, that she had found companionship with the boy counsellors, or the gossip, when in August she had returned, that while he was cutting brush in future housing developments she was to be seen at the township public pool, lounging in a two-piece bathing suit on a towel on the grass, with another boy, a boy her age, in her class, who would be there with her after September.

  “My father owns a hundred acres of woods not that far from Brechstown,” she told Owen, after an hour of directionless cruising one evening. “There’s an old road in. Nobody ever comes there.”

  “Sounds perfect,” he said, but did it? He let her direct him, turn by turn, on narrow roads he had never driven before. He was frightened at the road entrance, with its No Trespassing sign and rusting remains of barbed-wire fence; there was a sandstone boulder that with his summer muscles he rolled five feet to the side so they could get by. They were in the fragile old black Chevrolet that his father, mocking his own poverty, called “the flivver.” As branches raked the creeping car’s sides, Owen felt guilt, yet less than if it had been her father’s Chrysler, which was kept so shipshape and Simonized. A litter of cans and wrappers in the headlights revealed that others had been here before, also pushing aside the boulder in their strength of desire. The road was rough; the old car rocked. Suppose they broke an axle or got a flat tire? The scandal, the disgrace would stain his charmed life forever.

  “Isn’t this far enough?” he asked. He felt a trap closing behind him.

  “It goes in for a long way but gets worse,” Elsie admitted. He turned off the ignition and the headlights. Such darkness! It pounced upon them with an audible crackle; it locked around the windows as if the car had plunged into a black river. As Owen’s eyes adjusted, he saw a star or two high in the windshield, in the spaces between the great still trees overhead. Occasional headlights on the dirt road a half-mile away twinkled. Their own headlights must have been equally visible. Elsie’s face was a mere glimmer in the cave of velour, rubber, shaped steel, and shatterproof glass. His lips found hers, and they were full and moist, but the old melting, one mouth into another, met impediments, things he couldn’t put out of his mind. Suppose the Chevy didn’t start when they wanted to go? Suppose he couldn’t back it out on this overgrown road, the bushes a solid mass behind them and he without the machete he used on the surveying crew? He felt life, a silent vegetable life, enclosing them, on this her father’s land, this man present in every leaf and reaching branch. Owen was still young enough to invest the darkness with spying presences; they distracted him when he should have been purely bent on the treasure at hand, in the deepest privacy he and Elsie would ever know.

  It was August; she wore shorts and no girdle. As their embrace gained ardor and flexibility her crotch came into his hand as if rising to it. She lifted her hips on the car seat so he could slide her shorts down; through his clumsiness her white underpants came off with them and Elsie did not try to grab them back. She seemed to stretch, elongating her belly. Even in this darkness he saw wet gleams upon her eyeballs like faraway fireflies and the pallor of her long belly descending to a small soft shadow. Frightened of that shadow, he turned his attention to her breasts; with a touch more practiced than with her underpants, he unhooked her bra and tugged up her short-sleeved jersey. She crossed her arms and pulled the jersey the rest of the way, up over her head, with the bra. Her hair, cut shorter this summer so she could be in and out of the lake at the Lutheran camp, bounced, releasing a scent of shampoo. The bony smooth roundness of her shoulders gave him the shock of her nakedness; he hid his face in the side of her neck, saying, “Oh God. I can’t stand this.”

  Her cheek tensed, smiling. “Now you, Owen,” she breathed into his ear. �
��Your shirt.”

  Quickly, not wanting to let go of her for a second, he pulled it off, wishing he had bathed more carefully at home, for the smell of his armpits joined that of her shampoo and her skin in the close air of the car. He could see more and more, as if light were leaking from the patches of sky in the gaps between the trees, shedding glimmers into the woods, where faint noises were reviving and becoming less faint. He kissed her breasts, trying to be delicate, trying not to bite as the nipples grew hard, while she pressed into his ear a voice that seemed made up, enlarged and rehearsed, like something in the movies: “Owen, I used to take off my clothes in my room and walk around looking at myself in the mirror, wishing you could see me.”

  “You’re beautiful—amazing,” he told her, meaning it, but, as if her voice had swabbed out his ears, he now heard other things, whispers and stirrings around them, on the other side of the glass and metal. From somewhere not too distant there was a hoot, an owl or possibly a signal from a murderous, demented gang that lived here in caves and came out at night. Suppose the car doesn’t start? he thought again. It often didn’t, in rainstorms, or on cold mornings, his father frantic, flooding the engine in his panic, so the wearying starter turned it over uncatching, cooga cooga. “Did you hear something?” Owen asked Elsie.

  She had left her loafers on the gritty floor of the car and had risen up, bare now even to her feet, to kneel on the seat beside him, stroking his face as he tongued her breasts; even in his state of growing terror he marvelled, holding her tight, at the give of a girl’s waist, at the semi-liquid space below the ribs and then, behind, the downy hard plate at the base of the spine and the glassy globes of her buttocks, smooth into the cleavage, all of it unified like the silvery body of a fish, all so simple and true, the simple truth of her, alive in his arms. He heard the distant hoot again. Something rustled near the car tires. She felt his mouth losing interest in her nipple, and began to listen with him. Behind the skin between her breasts her heart was beating. “I don’t think so,” Elsie answered him, her voice losing its movie-screen largeness and becoming small, with a childish quaver.

  For reassurance she added, “He says nobody ever comes here except in hunting season.” But she too must have seen the cans and wrappers in the headlights, evidence of others. He: her father, the owner, all around them, hating Owen, what he was doing to his daughter, striving in every twig and trunk to eject the two of them. They listened and heard a noise so faint it could have just been saliva rattling in their held breath. Owen’s hands began to move again, gathering her tender taut nakedness closer to him, his fingertips finding a touch of fuzz in the cleavage behind. He wondered how to get his head down to kiss that soft shadow he had glimpsed; it had seemed shyer, gauzier than what he had seen in dirty photographs and drawings, the few he had seen. His prick was aching behind his fly, and her hand dropped and, the first time ever, began fumbling at his belt buckle to release it, its imperious pressure, its closeted sour smell.

  But he had spooked her, he had spooked them both, and the desire that dominated him, bare-chested though he was, was the desire to escape, to see if the car could start and he could back it up that narrow road without hitting a tree or deep hole. Her father’s land, and her nakedness in it like a shout: Owen was vulnerable, criminal even—trespassing, and she a minor. He must restore her intact to society. The rustling he had imagined near the tires became a sudden thrashing, a distinct lunge of the unknown.

  “Elsie,” he whispered.

  “What?” Perhaps expecting some avowal, some earthy plea.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  She hesitated. He heard her heart beat, her breath whistle. “It’s up to you,” she decided in the mannerly voice that she had used with his mother. Then, catching his mood, she whispered, “Yes, let’s.”

  Often afterwards he would remember details of this hour (her shorts and underpants in one sweep; her gleaming eye-whites; his sense of her slithering into the space above his head like a silken kite, like an angel crammed into an upper corner of a Sienese Nativity) and regret his lack of the boldness that would have let him linger with her gift of herself, and taste it, and let her continue undoing his pants. But his nerves had poisoned their privacy. Naked or not, she was a person, and now a frightened one. His retreat was cowardly but he felt brave and cool, successfully managing the maneuver. He started the engine—thank God, it started, drowning out all those other sounds—and backed down the overgrown road by the wan glow of the back-up lights while branches scraped metal and Elsie scrambled into her clothes. He would have backed up right onto the paved road, not bothering to roll back the boulder, but she said in a voice whose calmness sounded stern, “Owen. We should put it back the way we found it.”

  Her father’s precious land. This had been her show, he realized. He got out angrily and in the glare of his own headlights heaved the rock back into place, for the next trespassers. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said when the Chevy was safely running down the highway, to the village, Brechstown, where she lived. “I chickened out.”

  Elsie said, after lighting a cigarette (rare for her, but girls in Willow smoked, and he had taught her), “You’re more citified than I am. Woods don’t frighten me. My father and uncle hunt in the fall. There are no bears or anything, not even bobcats any more. I felt safe.”

  “You should have told me that while we were in there.”

  “I tried to distract you, to keep you interested.”

  “You did, you were stunning. I loved it. You.”

  She was silent, putting his jerky speech together.

  He told her, “It’s just as well. We might have fucked.”

  Not a word they used, with others or between themselves: it was a kind of offering. But she held her silence. It occurred to him, his face heating in a blush, that he hadn’t been prepared even physically, with one of these rubber things he had seen years ago up by the abandoned Dairy Queen. Don’t touch it!

  She at last spoke: “I wouldn’t have let you, Owen. I intend to be a virgin for my husband. It was just, like I said, I wanted you to know me, to see me as I see myself.”

  “You were beautiful. Are beautiful, Elsie.”

  Was she crying? “Thank you, Owen,” she brought out. “You’re a nice person.”

  Too nice, was the implication. Still, he couldn’t blame himself. Her body like that of a slithering cool flexible fish in his arms had been a revelation, but it had been revelation enough for one night.

  Were there other nights, to follow? There might have been, but when he looked back, trying to recall each underlit detail, it didn’t seem so. Their futures came upon them fast. Elsie had another boyfriend for her senior year, and married yet another boy she met at the local Penn State extension. Surprisingly, they left the region, settling in the San Francisco area. If Owen wouldn’t take her away, another would.

  They must have driven around that night, burning up gas, letting their heartbeats slow down, trying to talk into place what they had learned about each other and their own lives, before he drove her home, to Brechstown. It was a village almost in Chester County, an erratically spaced cluster such as Willow must have been before the advent of trolley cars made it a suburb of Alton. Right behind the houses were fields and farm buildings, barns whitewashed white by their Amish owners and silos built of a brown-glazed oversized brick. Mr. Seidel’s feed-and-hardware store, with its loading platform and checkered Purina ads, sat between a gas station and a one-man country barbershop, closed, its striped pole not turning. Elsie waited on store customers on Saturdays, and Owen had more than once shaken her father’s hand in there; Mr. Seidel was a muscular man bordering on fat, and even though he lifted eighty-pound feed sacks into the Mennonite trucks and Amish buggies he wore a shirt and a necktie and a gold tieclip. He would take Owen’s hand with an expert lunge, flashing a mischievous smile beneath a small, squared-off mustache. His house was a quarter-mile away, up a long crunching driveway, an old farmhouse like Owen’s own fami
ly’s but fussily improved. A new addition held a two-car garage below and a family room above, with a TV and built-in loudspeakers and furniture that all matched; the addition was covered in aluminum siding. The original house was built not of sandstone but of limestone, because that was what the earth yielded here, near the Chester County line.

  When he and Elsie kissed good-night, again there was not that melting together, though he took the liberty of stroking a breast as she leaned toward him getting out of the car. Owen felt he had failed but no one could take from him his stolen treasure, how far Elsie had “gone,” leaving him with a kind of home movie his mind could run and rerun in a rickety projector, not just in bed but in inward moments of daylight, flickering bits and pieces of her—her shampoo, her heartbeat like a stranger knocking on the other side of a door, the surprising elastic give and stretch of her waist.

  So Phyllis Goodhue was not his first love interest, though it must be admitted that even for the innocent ’fifties Owen was an innocent. Having been taken too deep into the woods by Elsie, he saw sex as something to be deferred until he had made space for it and didn’t feel squeezed. His freshman year had been squeezed by his efforts not to fail and fall back into the farmland and his disconsolate family. At home, his grandmother, crippled by Parkinson’s disease, stayed more and more upstairs in bed; when he would visit her she would hold out her clawlike blue hands to him and say, “Up. Up.” Grammy had always been active and didn’t want to stop exercising. Owen would gamely pull her up, and then let her down, her head in the wild disorder of its thinned white hair lowering to the pillow, and pull her up again, until he impatiently wearied. Downstairs, his grandfather spent hours sitting at one end of the old caneback sofa reading the Bible. When a car passed on the lonely road outside, he lifted his head as if sniffing, in hopes that it would be the mailman, who never brought him any mail but the Alton morning paper, already out of date, and dues and notices from the Masonic lodge in Willow, of which he had been a member in his prime, a new arrival in town and a significant local investor. Last summer, his daughter had driven him into Willow for the Saturday funeral of his last old friend from those prosperous days; both of them, father and daughter, had come back with tears in their eyes, Owen was startled to see—jewel-like trophies from the world of “for keeps,” where shots rang out and panicked horses ran back into their burning stables and the second law of thermodynamics refused all reversals into a condition of lesser disorder.