“My goodness, that was a surprise.”
“I’m so sorry, Mary. It’s my fault.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, her hand around my knee. I could feel her letting all of her weight ease back into my chest. “Brainy me did the about-face. Will I be getting two black eyes now?”
“I’m sure you won’t. Does this hurt?” I gently pressed my fingers against the bridge of her nose. She didn’t flinch. The blood was still coming, though in tiny rivulets, and as I had nothing to stanch it with I unbuttoned the cuff of my work shirt and she nodded that I go ahead. We stayed a minute or so that way, her face nestled into my forearm, and had someone come upon us in the narrow path, with the bright blood soaked into my sleeve, they might have thought I was attempting to snuff the life out of her. And the strange thing is that I kept having the thought that I was, or at least imagining the horror of it, for even as every cell of me was reaching toward her with utter tenderness and warmth and the drug of an amorous bloom, it seemed I could just as easily summon the harshest want in my hands, the tightness and pressure that might have no bound. And if some keenly sick man could have committed the act in a flash, for reason of mere possibility or nihilistic whim or curiosity, a man like me would have done so for the avoidance of a future day, whose complications — whether happy or not — might simply overwhelm.
But she tightly embraced me then, turning her face into my neck. She cupped my cheek and she kissed me, deeply, with an instant fervor. Her fingers ran through my hair, along the back of my head. Before this we had held hands and hugged each other after a dinner out or a movie at the village theater, and I’d only politely kissed her good night, despite her clear willingness to linger in the car or before her front door. She would invite me in but I always made the excuse of having to go home to Sunny, which was true enough, though not because I was needed there. In those first weeks with Mary Burns I was still hoping to provide my daughter with a complete family life, and while it was obvious how nearly perfect Mary would be as a mother, how well she could run a house (even mine), I began to wonder if I were up to the tasks of being a worthy partner and husband. I worried whether I knew what to do, like any pubescent boy might be concerned, for honestly it had been quite a long time, long enough that I was as fearful as I was anxious and expectant. But that afternoon, on the impromptu hike, she held me tight and wouldn’t let me go and at some point I began not just to relent but to kiss her back, and with a sudden, spurring ebullience that caught us both off guard.
“You’re such a surprise,” she said, when we finally ceased for a moment. “Come with me.”
She got up and started walking the path again, in the direction we had been hiking.
“Where are you going?”
“Where we were headed.”
“But what’s there?”
“You’ll see. Just come on.”
She was going more quickly than before, almost running, and soon enough we found ourselves in a silly bit of a chase, her slowing down until I could reach and touch her and then rushing forward again, the two of us acting a third or perhaps a tenth of our years. She disappeared around a turn and when I reached the spot, she was no longer ahead of me. I called out and she answered, and when I looked down I saw a small opening within a thicket.
“Come inside,” she said.
“Shouldn’t we go back? The nursery man must be there by now.”
“Please, Franklin. Don’t be a spoilsport.”
I got on my hands and knees and crawled in. It was a small place, open to the sky, a lair that must have been used by deer. Mary Burns sat on the tall, matted grass.
“I think high-school kids sometimes come here at night,” she said. “But don’t worry. I sit here all the time, and no one has ever come by during the afternoon. Today’s a school day, you know.”
Of course I did know. I’d decided, for the first time ever, to close the shop after a half day in order to be with her.
I said, “I’m not worried at all, Mary.”
“Then let’s sit next to each other again, just like before.”
And so we did. And we began to kiss, and eventually our hands were purposefully exploring each other, lingering and caressing and soon enough undoing buttons, clasps. It would have been scandalous in town had someone caught us. But it didn’t seem that we cared. We were only half-clothed in the open-air cloister, and if it hadn’t been so patently unshaded and bright we might have done something right there and then that was quite extreme, and perhaps even wonderful. For I am almost sure she wanted me to make love to her, this by the open, willing character of her body, and then by the strength of her limbs, the way she so tightly wound my legs with hers. It was as if a vast store of energy had been held inside her, bounding about in a terribly long, great waiting, such an abeyance really being the most lovely thing to me, and harrowing as well. For I did desperately want to make love to her; she was so wonderfully pretty lying there beneath me looking up, her silvery-streaked flaxen hair loosened from the headband and splayed against the grass like a fan of shimmering, threaded light. Beautiful, too, I thought, were the many fine creases and lines in her rosy face, the supreme paleness of her lips, and then the fresh smell of her, faintly sour-sweet like unripe plums. I felt awfully young, touching her, and the wanting I had wished never again to know was rushing back to me, a disturbing shiver in my fingers and in my mouth and in my eyes.
I stopped everything then, perhaps too abruptly, for Mary Burns had the impression that she had done something terribly offending or wrong, and I knew I could not convince her otherwise, at least for the moment. We quickly dressed and without speaking hiked back to the cemetery entrance, where the delivery man was waiting with two pairs of evergreen shrubs. He insisted on helping us wheelbarrow them inside, and doing some digging as well, and I was glad that he was there, and even Mary Burns seemed relieved. In fact we never spoke again of what had happened. And though in near time we did sleep together (with a genuinely pleasing, if sober, conviviality), I came to think of that first interlude with a somewhat sorrowful fondness, for I saw that our days together were perhaps sullied from the very beginning and all the way through, right up to the last.
* * *
NOW, MY GRANDSON THOMAS, overfilled with energy and pluck, runs up the short beach holding out his inflatable water wings and dumps them in my lap. He doesn’t need them anymore, he insists, this after a mere week of pool-going. Soon enough he’s practically performing for his newfound friends, as he holds high aloft a bucket of sand and with some ceremony dumps it on his face and neck and chest. I’m a bit alarmed, but the other children laugh at this, and Thomas repeats the action and I realize I’ve seen this from him before, how he often makes a buffoon of himself for others. At the roller rink last week, he spilled wickedly several times, falling flush on his back as he tried to whip around a group of children his age, each wipeout a bit more thunderous than the one before. They snickered, but then seemed more frightened by him than amused; soon after they were ushered off by their mothers. As I was watching from the stands I could only shout my warnings to him, but once they were gone he was perfectly fine as he skated, whipping past my spot with aplomb and cool abandon, his stout little figure apparently unaching, unhurt. Another time, in the toy store, a floor display of boxed firetrucks fell over on him, though I suspected at the time that he had meant to cause it, if not expected them to fall directly on him.
But now I’m deeply worried, having sensed the strangeness in the pattern, his obsessive, self-taunting behavior, and I get up from my folding chair and go over and hold him as I brush the sand from his hair, his thick eyebrows and lashes. He pulls hard away from me.