COITUS
THIS TAKES place on a Wednesday afternoon on the tenth of July on a cooler than usual day of a long dry hot summer along the Eastern Seaboard during coitus between Bob Sampson and Ellen Davison-Simms, who are lying together in light that seems to billow with the rise and fall of the curtains, which during those first moments (before entry) have risen and fallen several times, giving form to a front of Canadian air, cool and dry, bringing relief to two long weeks of record heat. The house in which our two lovers find themselves — as they say — is full of light, bursting with it, clean and white and not so large or small but grand in a way, attaching itself as it does to the larger estate it was once a part of; it’s the so-called guest house, but it is larger than the houses farther up the hill, away from the river, and now with the hedges grown up, the drooping roses on rotting trellises, it stands on its own. The entry part is over — he’s in her — and the rise and fall of the breeze against his body — he’s on top — makes his buttocks feel chalky, like rock, firm and hard, eternal, holding some coolness the earth requires, yet there is that line of his suntan that gives him the feeling — at least a vague sensation — of being a man of two sides, one warm and the other cold, hidden by Speedos and boxer shorts and tennis gear. But that’s another story because by the second or third thrust (is it a thrust or a wave, a movement confined by certain latitudes?) the curtains lift again, billow, fold, his head turns slightly to see them, eyes almost closed, as white folds of light and space and air; curtains that his wife made for the old house, their first together, laying the long sheets of cotton in the living room to be cut down to size — facing back towards Ellen, chin touching chin a moment, hummmm easing up from her throat, the nip of her throat, he feels, vibrating — from off, off, the soft moaning of a boat horn, a tug, drawing a barge up the river to the limestone quarries in Haverstraw, two warnings of some sort, he hears them …
… brings to mind for no good reason Tom’s death — his brother in upper Michigan spilling a canoe along the Two Hearted; a bad paddling river, lots of deadfall that spring, water ice-cold, the cold black branches holding him under — it was at this great cost that Bob Sampson purchased the depth of his eyes; Ellen saw that, it gave his eyes a great attractive quality. They had met in that traditional bump-together way you see in bad movies, or even some good ones, where fate has actually transpired to physically nudge two souls together — or so you’re supposed to think, at least, knowing damn well it’s mostly luck and nothing else, what else would explain the quality of Bob’s eyes having cost so much? You never get that in movies, the cost of great beauty; Ellen knew it when she saw it, met his eyes, in line; who wouldn’t know it? Bob has great eyes. There is that deep pooling quality; they stay on you just long enough and then move away; he doesn’t stare, but he takes some time with each glance, or at least he had, standing there, turning to order a double cappuccino with extra cinnamon — a man who likes cinnamon, she thought; she was wearing her lime-green skirt, pleated, tight against the sides of her thighs; she owned a clothing store and knew everybody in town but for one reason or another she hadn’t met Bob, who was moving his business into his home, or setting up a home office, whatever they called it; she later recalled his wife; she knew her by first name, Cindy, a tall willowy woman who came in often and preferred long and black and somewhat draping dresses … we’ll leave her out; the arch of himself into Ellen, that boat, the boat horn, her nub, the nub of her chin — pink and white light, cool, but nonetheless a thin moustache of sweat forming just above the line of his upper lip;
there is a reluctant sadness in the way he holds back from the next movement, what would you call it? It wasn’t that he was thinking this but maybe the thought was forming anyhow — that it was a fending off of death, this pausing to keep yourself from coming, to hold off the spillage without letting on that that was what this pause was about, her hand webbing the back of his hair, which was layer-cut black, small specks of gray — maybe he didn’t even know that, wouldn’t allow the pretense of some kind of control into this moment; he wiped the sweat with his tongue.
what’s the matter
nothing
you’re sure
yeah
just resting
yeah
the horn again farther up the river more near Haverstraw, or just a train-coming-in-across-the-river sound playing those desperate tricks — what was it, a mile over there, two maybe? — the water glassy cool and slicked with silver; eyes open; Ellen, six years younger, still taut around the jaw but not clear-skinned, her own eyes hickory brown and small and close to his, maybe too close because he began the waves again to get her away, to move her back to get her to shut those eyes white and pink, that white-pink behind-the-eyelid thing; again the wind, going to the sides now, a nudge of his knee against her inner leg, the whole thing tipping … this groaning inward sound both made once, twice, the white lifting and the house, trying to remove, to rid, to get rid of something. (There was this time last winter when, on the way back from the city, in heavy snow, going up the Saw Mill, he saw deer grazing along the roadside — no it wasn’t what he saw that mattered, it was the monotony of the trip that did it; he was driving so slowly with the great windswept walls of snow blurring the headlights that he had to pull over to get his bearings, and then, for the first time in years, for no reason, in the boxed-in silence of the car he thought of Tom, his going down, the canoe tipping, the hard coldness of the water forcing his own breaths short.) What had he seen? His brother going down? No. Nothing of the sort. Just the red canoe wedged up against the tree, the hard black branches over the water and shadowed and down, too, you could see them; he dove down under after a moment to find — nothing — it was just hard darkness; the water current took him down, below it was much harder — then breaking the surface calling Tom Tom Tom, wondering if, maybe, his brother was playing a joke because he did play jokes. (He’d fallen though the ice once, ice fishing, goofing off, chopping the edges of the hole — but that’s another story, just another story.) He couldn’t remember a thing about Tom’s face anyway, really, not any more than he could about Ellen’s face really when he had his eyes closed and was swelling up into her. (The eyes, the lips, they come undone.) They’d stopped a few times to ford and move around the larger branches — too many times, really — and there were blackflies already that early in the day, already swarming; they’d brought face nets just for that, but they left them back at the camp; that was what he did remember, the smell of the fire, the cool hardness of the night, shaving in Lake Superior in the morning where the water was stupid-cold, dead-cold, it blued your ankles before you got in it. The way Tom threw himself headlong into it.