The Moon Pinnace Read online

  “Thinking what?”

  “When I went to the bathroom to get dressed this stuff that came from you was running down my leg.”

  He winced, a shiver of avoidance, his former madness in his vision—strings of milk on the pale plane of her thigh. “Oh, ” he said.

  “You asked,” she said. “And I was thinking I don’t want to go to baccalaureate or the prom with Robert Beggs or give my stupid valedictory address.”

  “You probably will, though. Won’t you?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s not your fault. I let you.”

  From behind her he looked down at her head, at those strands of straight, combed-out brown hair she thought drab. Her skull was round and small, held up by a narrow white column of bone and muscle, vein, gland, tendon, nerve—everything common and complex. It was this female organism, so ordinary and real and so full of instinct and worry about its existence, that he had invaded. Vaginal, uterine, ovarian—voodoo to a believer, words of almost repellent power. It seemed long ago that she was only a friend, and now she sat here in her dark mood thinking as a fuse might tick.

  “It was both our faults, then,” he said carefully. “I don’t think I would have stopped even if you’d asked me to.”

  “I didn’t want you to stop.”

  “It’s dangerous, though. I didn’t use anything.”

  “Did you have something to use?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t use it, so I’ll get pregnant?”

  “It’s possible, but I think the odds are against it.”

  “Oh.”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “I guess so. I just don’t know very much about it.”

  That she’d let herself get into such a position, with so little knowledge, amazed him. Women amazed him—a whole half of the race so responsible in some ways and so mortally reckless in others. He put his hands on her head and face. Her jaws seemed tender as birds’ bones. He felt the skeleton of her face, teeth beneath lips beneath his fingers, cheekbones, soft eye hollows. She turned her head as if to look up at him and he put his hands beneath her arms and lifted her up, his arms around her from behind so that they both looked out over the lake. She was exactly right for him, such a neat package, a charm, perfection.

  “I know you’ll never marry me,” she said.

  “Don’t say that. I don’t know that.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  They went up to the cabin, thinking that they were going to gather up their things and go home, but they stood watching the embering fire for a while as if each were trying to think of some summary thing to say, and their silence became mysterious and full of weight, more important than anything they could think of to say.

  “Well,” he said. “Well…” and kissed her lips. She was so passive he knew he could do whatever he wanted with her. This increased his dread of the future, but not enough. He began to take off her clothes and she, more efficiently, finished doing it. She said nothing, so he said nothing, just took his own clothes off, wondering if his erection, that gross opinion he couldn’t hide, might be bad for her to see. He was embarrassed for it, wanting the moment to be more meaningful. Her body was very simple when it was naked, like a girl sculpted in white marble, from another century. Her narrow dark eyes looked at him. “I love you,” she said. Her words were like manacles clicking onto his wrists and ankles.

  He was going to do it again without using anything—a madman—but she reminded him, then watched, an interested witness to his “precaution,” saying in the most reasonable and companionable voice that she’d heard them referred to as “safes.” This let him pose as a man of experience, but also released in him, suddenly, a comradely tenderness that surprised him; he’d thought he was too horny and impatient to be tender—if tenderness was the glow of value and vulnerability that surrounded her. This didn’t keep him from doing all he could to truly seduce her. He must make her so passionately ecstatic with him that she couldn’t live without him; that was the object of his careful performance, his gentle restraint, his gigolo self-consciousness. But the more his seduction of her seemed too deliberate to him, the more she cried her love for him, and their separation was all on his side, a despicable triumph. Then he was surprised by what seemed to be a wind blowing through his nerves, and he was blown away, “dismasted,” he thought, by the coming together of every quality of her that he used.

  They were very cool and grave as they closed up the cabin and dismantled the sailing rig from the canoe. She was again thinking private thoughts, and he was shivery and apprehensive under the loom of the future. He kept thinking of her delicate little white panties, which she had no doubt bought in Trotevale’s department store with her own earned money. Today she had taken them off for him, and they were part of his life now, girlish and slippery and secret.

  That evening he called her, but the Perkins’s telephone was in the dining room, where everybody could hear whatever she said, so she couldn’t say much.

  “How are you?” he said. He had to know if she was worried or confused.

  “All right.”

  “Can I see you tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got to be in school.”

  “After supper?”

  “All right.”

  The next day his check for $110 came from the Veterans Administration. He took it to the Leah Savings Bank, bought ten ten-dollar American Express traveler’s checks, then stopped at the bookstore and bought a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Fifth Edition. At home he wrote on the flyleaf, “For Dory on her Commencement. All the best, John.” He thought long about writing, “Love, John,” but finally came to the conclusion that “Love” wasn’t quite right for a dictionary, love being the slipperiest word in the language. “Tender and passionate affection for one of the opposite sex” didn’t quite make it. Then he looked up the word “patronize,” and in the margin next to it wrote, “Even if it is pronounced ā as in ale, I apologize, J.” He wasn’t exactly satisfied with his wit, or with his gift, and didn’t have any idea how she’d react. In a way this gift was like a threat: Dory, improve thyself. Something like that: the imperative of his princely vanity.

  He picked her up after supper and they rode to the cabin. She seemed a little devil-may-care, as if she were a tragic heroine, and wanted to try the gin, which they did, straight over ice cubes because there was nothing to mix it with. It was hard to swallow that way but they each managed a couple of jiggers and felt it, watching the back of the sunset over the lake. She got a sort of twisted smile on her face and began to wrestle with him. She was very strong, for a girl, until she grew still, the wrestling having lost its increment of aggression. Then they “made love“—his quotes—and came back to Leah after dark, following the wavering yellow cone of his headlight. “Faster, faster!” she called into his ear. In front of her house he turned off his lights and engine and said, “I’ve got a graduation present for you.”

  She was still being the reckless lost woman, but even so she surprised him when she said, “Maybe you’ve already given me one.”

  He laughed, because it was the response her tone required, but he had a grave chill, a sympathy pain in the skin of his crotch.

  He got the dictionary out of his saddlebag and she accepted it for what it was, all of what it was, and thanked him.

  “You said you only had a pocket-sized one,” he said.

  “I appreciate it. I do,” she said. She kissed him on the lips and went into her house.

  She went to the prom and to baccalaureate, but skipped class day and spent it with him at Cascomhaven. When he was not with her he had twinges of yearning for the open road, single adventure, quest, space, Zugunruhe, but decided to stay until she had to go to work at Cascom Manor. Every day they went to Cascomhaven, wet through on one day it rained, and they had to dry their clothes on a clotheshorse in front of the fire. It seemed to him they’d been togethe
r for a whole season, as if he were living in a humid swamp of debilitating lust, in which time was inoperative and he was in thrall to a hydraulic sweetness whose power waxed and waned, then surged again with just as much power as before. Friends of his had come back to town but he never saw them, only her. He’d given up any other activity normal to a man and spent all his hours, it seemed, in the arms of this moist, naked girl who gave him everything. That he could put a name to the power invested in him didn’t make it less mysterious. The word itself was mysterious. “I love you,” she said, but never asked for the word in return.

  She was often so quiet he hesitated to talk to her at all, as if by her silence she meant that now she was his, why should he bother to talk?

  Once, after she moaned in what he thought was rapture, she grew still and her face was suddenly wet. Her lips turned sticky, as if they were dissolving. “Are you crying?” he asked, but she wouldn’t answer.

  “Talk to me,” he said. “Come on, Dory. Say something.”

  “There’s nothing to say.” The constricted words were those of a child in the paralysis of injustice or self-pity, and he remembered that ache in the throat very well.

  “There must be something. You’re crying.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  He looked down at her child-face, her dark eyes, her lips now unhappy, and suffered a great hollow fear of loss. “I’ll come back and marry you,” he said, “and we’ll live happily ever after.”

  “Why say that? You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I do what I say.”

  “No, you won’t. So stop being flippant. I love you and I’ll do anything you want, so you don’t have to lie.”

  Another time, in another mood, he asked her about the prom and Robert Beggs, implying light scorn and no jealousy toward that callow youth, that petit bourgeois whose father owned a grocery store. How could a high-schooler, a non-veteran, compete with the likes of John Hearne?

  Actually he had acted like a spy and watched from among the sumacs and steeplejack on the riverbank across the street from her house. Curious, he’d told himself, to see this high school swain, cellophane-boxed gardenia corsage in hand, call for his date for the junior prom. Sweet virginal date that he, he, John Hearne (pulling on his villainous black waxed mustache wings, Ha, ha!) had seduced and deflowered. But when the prom couple appeared at her door and made their way to Robert’s father’s Plymouth, he could see only her, in a light blue formal dress of silk and gauze that looked insubstantial and, in a little-girl-dressing-up way, ill-fitting and tacky. Her mouth was too wide and natural to have been covered with stark red paint, her dark eyes too close together for cosmetic indignities that didn’t work anyway. He wanted to take her away and remove all that stuff. He was embarrassed for her, protective, weak with pity.

  “Robert’s a nice boy,” she said. “He gave me a charm bracelet. He wants me to marry him.”

  He thought they had a kindred scorn for Robert Beggs. “And I gave you a book full of mere words. Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Going to marry him?”

  She hit him hard on the cheek with her fist. He had to hold her still for a long time before he could trust her not to try it again. It was possible for him to understand that his question, seen in a different way than he’d meant it, without the collusion it had implied between the two of them against Robert Beggs, was insensitive and even cruel. But she would laugh at such things, sometimes. He could make her laugh out loud, even when she was in a mood like this, but she would hold her resentment, and even after laughing would still be angry. He couldn’t understand how she did this. She would seem to be with him in jape and irony but her anger was still there, like fire underground. Then it would be gone altogether, and he was never sure when or why.

  They went sailing once more, on a day when the wind, instead of increasing, died away in the late afternoon, leaving them becalmed on a wide reach of the lake. The light was odd, the sky filmed over with clouds that looked like fish scales, and they rode an invisible surface. When they looked down into it they saw a colorless progression into dark. He let the sail go and paddled leisurely toward the cabin, a mile away.

  She told him the dream she’d had about Canadian soldiers, and his reaction to it was as irrational as a dream itself. He saw how she had been moved by the sadness of their journey into limbo, never to see their farms again, but he didn’t like the dream and felt that she was in danger. He was also, irrationally, pricked by jealousy. There were too many of those young soldiers; their power of emotion over Dory was too great He didn’t trust them as she did.

  “I don’t like it, ” he said, and she was surprised.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t trust them.”

  “But they were all dead!”

  “I guess I don’t like your feeling so sorry for them.”

  She seemed about to smile, but didn’t quite. “I remember when you left for the Army. I was afraid for you.”

  “You must have been thirteen.”

  “I told you I fell in love with you when I was eight or nine, so I’d been in love with you for maybe five years by then. I had my first period when you were home on furlough and I thought I was sort of catching up with you.”

  “You caught up, all right.”

  “I never thought much about being a virgin, but now it feels strange not to be.”

  “Do you feel any different, really?”

  “I feel more real, like before I was mostly all one piece inside. Sort of rudimentary.”

  He thought he might be getting used to her candidness, as if she were giving him an education in the facts of life, or at least showing him how to accept them as matter-of-fact. Her curiosity had seemed a little unnatural at first. She touched and examined him, and herself, open-eyed, without any shame or shyness, expressing only wonder that it all “felt so good.”

  But beneath all of their talk, often muting their voices, were the ominous processes that might be happening in her body. Dory, as if she’d read his thoughts, put her hands under her bathing suit on her breasts.

  “Do they feel sensitive?” he asked. They had discussed this before, in restricted voices, as if in the presence of a beast they might wake.

  “It’s because you’re looking at me, I think,” she said.

  When they’d spoken of the possibility she’d said calmly, with a certainty, or maturity, more real than he thought his life to have as yet, that if she had a child, she’d have a child. What about abortion, or adoption, he’d asked, those solutions being modern and rational and acceptable to him. Abortion was illegal, she’d answered, the property of criminals and fly-by-nights, septic and dangerous. And to give a child away would be a betrayal; no person was interchangeable with another. He could say what he liked, but he knew by now that words could not change her. Her attitude seemed insane, and perhaps all he had was words.

  But then she would grow quiet and sad in a way that hurt him because he imagined her to be in despair. She “loved” him, a power always accepted, after some initial wonderment, as a right.

  This day they came silently gliding back to Cascomhaven, took a chilly swim and were again naked in front of a growing fire when he was overcome by the problem of her and turned a little brutal, strange to himself. He had her get down on her hands and knees and without a word, as if she deserved to have no opinions or feelings, took her from the rear—inu-rashii, or dog fashion, the Japanese called it. He observed the rise in her flesh caused by his entering her, her tea-colored anus, her position on knees and elbows perfectly subservient. If you can’t understand it, he thought, gloating, fuck it. He came and was immediately dissatisfied, his orgasm tainted by selfishness and cruelty. What had made him come so soon was the act of humiliating her.

  She turned around on the rug and looked at his eyes, which he didn’t want her to see. He removed the condom and placed it in the fire, where it bubbled, swelled and made sooty smoke.

  “It
’s all right,” she said.

  “What’s all right?” he answered, lying.

  “I don’t mind your doing that.”

  He was cold with self-dislike, and looked away.

  She said, “You can do whatever you want. I’ll do anything you want.” He didn’t answer, and his anger began to slip toward her. She couldn’t see this through his paralysis of expression. “What’s the matter, John?” she asked. She was on her knees, facing him, and her body seemed to grow smoother and simpler, as though her breasts were accidental ceramic bumps, her neck the white neck of a ewer. It wasn’t anger, it was a reduction, or an attempted one—attempted by a part of him he didn’t care to know. She came toward him, on her knees, hesitantly, and offered herself to him. It was as if he broke strings to accept her.

  Later she cried silently and apologized, saying she was just in a mood. He witnessed his own response, which this time was tender. She was valuable everywhere, everywhere beautiful. Of course he was ready again and it was that itch speaking. If he didn’t use a condom he might make her pregnant and that would solve all this embarrassment and indecision. He’d marry her and get it over with. He was about to enter her but stopped, lifted her hips and kissed the wet maze of her vagina. He’d never done that and it startled her; he could feel the start in her thighs. His face was all wet with her, his tongue among clefts and edges. She liked what he did, and said “oh, oh.” She was so valuable, so present. He lifted her higher, to prove his regard, and kissed her budlike anus. Did that prove anything? Painful air surrounded his erection and he quenched it in her with no dull condom between them. She knew, and her eyes opened in surprise, but she said nothing.

  They were both insane. Someone should stay sane, but that was a faint lost shout. When he came into her it felt as if bolts, nuts and washers hurtled out of him along with his spinal matter and the marrow of his bones. She still squeezed him as hard as she could and her own shuddering ended in a purr.

  In the ensuing calm the subject of his recklessness surrounded them.