I remembered my best friend Scotty and I once saw the strangest thing on a night that wasn’t so very different from this. It was clear, we could see lots of stars, and we lay on our backs on my parents’ patio, in sleeping bags, looking up. We were camping out in the backyard. And then, as we lay there, an odd thing zipped across the little opening of sky above us between the clusters of tall neighborhood trees. It was, or seemed to be, the lighted outline of a rocket, a classically shaped rocket I should say, heading from south to north, there and gone in less than a heartbeat.
We leapt from our sleeping bags and stared, and then began shouting, and kept shouting until my parents shouted at us from their bedroom window to pipe down.
It never made any sense. An illuminated outline of a cartoon-style rocket, zipping by faster than the speed of sound, without a sound, not even in its wake? A lighted outline of a rocket? Not even anything in the middle? It made no sense whatsoever. But even to this day we both still agree that we saw it, saw the same thing.
I went back inside. I was feeling hungry now. I opened the refrigerator, even though I knew there was nothing in there but beer, an aging tomato, and some milk, maybe a couple of eggs. We’d forgotten to go shopping on our wedding day. But I was wrong. There was a wide bowl of cold fried chicken down on the bottom shelf, and a Tupperware container of potato salad next to that. I rejoiced. Olivia must have gone to Kentucky Fried Chicken that morning, thinking ahead. I didn’t know just when she could have gone, but that was the only possible explanation.
Or maybe Curtis and his fiancée had brought it, and in all the anxiety of their visit I just hadn’t noticed.
I sat at the little kitchen table in the dark, and ate three pieces of chicken and two servings of potato salad, and drank another cold beer. It was delicious. I sat there for a while, digesting, feeling good, and finishing the beer. I checked the clock on the wall. Three o’clock in the morning. But I didn’t feel sleepy. I crept into the bedroom and looked in on Olivia. In sleep, her face seemed younger than ever, like a child’s. Just down the hill from the mental hospital, a few more blocks away, was the city park where each of us had spent time when we really were children, with our parents, swimming in the public pool and riding the famous old carousel. It seemed a long time ago, though of course it wasn’t. Now we’d be taking our own child there, soon enough. I crept back to the kitchen, got another beer from the fridge and took it into the living room, sat on the sofa and drank it. The apartment was much cooler now. In fact, it didn’t seem hot at all. All the heat from the day, the blasted fucking insane heat in that attic apartment, was whooshed out and replaced by what seemed a perfect temperature, somewhere in the seventies, a nice cool breeze now gliding through the place. That was a fine development.
I started thinking about Olivia lying in there, so pretty, asleep. I wished she would wake up, come into the living room, and start to love on me a little bit, even though she’d recently called a halt to fooling around. I waited for a few minutes, actually thinking against reason that this might happen, and then I gave up and crept in to have another look at her lying on the bed, asleep.
But she had wakened, atop the rumpled covers, and had removed her sleep-creased clothing, and lay on the bed in a pale beauty, in the scant light through the open window.
“Come on over here,” she said, barely louder than a whisper.
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke before Olivia and lay there in bed beside her for a while.
It was still August, school hadn’t started yet, and I was working full-time at the construction job Curtis had gotten me in June. But I didn’t feel like going in, so I just lay in bed with Olivia. When she woke up and snuggled against me, I said I thought we both should skip out today, and she didn’t give me any argument or worry about it. She just said, “Okay.” She sat up against the pillows and roughed her tangled black hair with both hands, bunched it up on top of her head, and held it there a moment. It brought her nice face out, like an old painting.
“What are you thinking about?” I said.
She seemed a little surprised by the question. Then she smiled in a kind of goofy way and said, “I don’t know. Blueberries, I think.” We had to laugh at that.
I said, “Why don’t we just go on a picnic up at the old pond on my grandparents’ property? It’s nice up there in summer. Maybe I’ll catch a fish.”
“That sounds good.”
“We’ll take that chicken and potato salad along, and a few beers.”
“Okay.”
“It’ll be our honeymoon,” I said, and laughed.
She was still half asleep, lying back against the pillows. I pulled myself up onto an elbow and faced her.
“Did you know we had fried chicken and potato salad in the fridge?” I said.
Olivia opened her eyes and seemed to think about it for a moment.
“I think so,” she said. Then she shrugged and closed her eyes again.
I went into the kitchen. The chicken and potato salad were still in there, minus what I’d eaten the night before. There were several eggs, too, and an unopened package of bacon.
“Wow,” I said. I called out to Olivia that I was going to make us a nice breakfast.
“Okay,” she said. “I could eat. I’m starving.”
I put the bacon into a pan and began to heat it, and waited for the smell of it to make Olivia sick. I listened for the sound of her getting up and running into the bathroom, but it didn’t happen. When I called out that the bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee were done, she came shuffling into the little kitchen in her robe, still sleepy, sat down at the tiny table across from me, and began to eat as if she were indeed the hungriest I’d seen her in a long time.
When we finished, she smiled at me across the table, and I smiled at her, and we went back into the bedroom for another little romp before making the preparations for our picnic.
She was beautiful, hungry, glowing, ecstatic. I’ve never felt more in love in my life. I wanted to swallow her whole, like a loving, cannibalistic god.
WE DROVE UP INTO the country in the VW bus, trundled it down the two-track path to the little lake, hardly bigger than a pond. I parked in a clearing beside the bank, and spread out a blanket on the grass.
We went for a walk in the woods and along the edge of the pasture on the nearby hill. Cattle grazed on the green slope there. A small herd of deer trotted through the trees in the ravine below us. A flicker chattered high up in an old pine, and flew away down the wooded decline, flashing the spot on its tail.
We went back to the lake and Olivia sat on the blanket and read a thick, steamy romance novel while I walked the bank and fished for bass. I was fishing with an artificial worm, one of the long thick purple ones with the big hook. Nothing was happening in the middle, so I walked on down to the narrow end, and cast across to the opposite shallows.
It was a beautiful day, cloudless, cool in the shadows along the bank. The trees filtered light where they stood on the gentle hill across the water, releasing it in stripes and patterned patches onto the leaf- and pine-straw-carpeted ground. Back where I’d walked from, at the other end of the lake, Olivia lay on her side, up on an elbow, and read her novel. She’d worn a light blue sundress, and it lay easily across the barely perceptible mound of her belly. I hadn’t noticed it this morning, for some reason, the dress. I hadn’t known she’d even owned it. Looking at her in it, reading there on the blanket in the shade, made me feel happy.
In a perfect cast I bumped the worm off a stump near the opposite bank and dropped it into the shallows there with a tiny sploosh. A fish hit it, I popped the rod, and it went wild, bent deep. The bass ran, stripping line from the whining reel, toward the bank where Olivia lay. When it paused, I reeled and it jumped, clearing the pond’s surface. It seemed to pause at the top of its leap, and even from that distance I could see its huge eye on one side, looking at me, as if it sensed its trouble came from the other world, the one that was not water, and wanted to see. When it slapped down into the water again Olivia looked up and watched me fight it for a minute, then went back to reading.