Michael felt a rush of humiliation for himself, for Kristin, whom he loved.
"Or maybe she doesn't know, eh? This good and faithful one. When Mr. Norman Rockwell comes in the evening to paint you, ask him to show her where it is."
"I don't like it," he said, "when you demean people I love. I don't mind your putting me down. I know I'm an idiot."
"Ah, ah," said Lara, "I've been a bad person. I've insulted virtue, eh, which I wouldn't know if it hit me in the ass. So," she said, "punish me."
He saw that she was holding a strap like a dog's collar in her hand. She had taken it from under the pillow or somewhere about the bed.
"Go ahead. Punish me."
It was an odd little instrument, the strap. It had no buckle and apparently no holes to insert a metal tongue. Lara handed him the thing and threw her head back on the bed so that her throat was rampant, her forehead bent back. She showed him the whites of her eyes and stretched her limbs out toward the four corners of the bed, turning her arms upside down at the elbow.
"I've been bad, eh. I've insulted your little half-a-virgin of a wife." She put the strap around her own throat. "Go ahead, all-American boy, punish me."
He looked at the beautifully muscled structure of her throat, its strength, its perfect skin, and twisted the strap around it.
She looked him in the eye and cursed him in a French of which he understood not a word, and he twisted the strap until she had to stop. Then he held it tight against her throat a few moments longer. Her eyes widened. All the while she held her four limbs drawn stiff toward the edges of the bed.
There were red welts in the beautiful columns of her throat when he tossed the strap aside. She touched them with her fingers.
"Like it?" she asked.
He liked it. This time he had no trouble with her clitoris and they licked each other as if they were trying to dry off, thirsty, like dogs.
They lay in silence a long time after.
"Oh, God, baby," she said.
It had got dark outside. It was dark in the room, except for the light of the fire she had made.
"Oh, God, baby is right," Michael said.
"It's late. You're late."
"Fuck late."
She sat up and slapped his shoulder.
"Oh no! Don't be a child on me now."
"No? I can't be a child on you?"
"No. Uh-uh. You go and wash and go home to dinner and Mr. Rockwell." She moved across the bed and sat beside him and took his face in her hands and kissed him. "Or I'll have to send you away and you'll never come back and that will be that. Get me?" She nudged him hard in the ribs. "Get me, pal. Eh?"
"That hurts."
"Ooh," she cooed in mock solicitude, "poor bébé. Tough shit."
He went into her bathroom, preparing for his shower. Could he have lived without what had just happened? Done without her? The answer was yes, he could have done without her fine. He might so easily, now in retrospect, have been a person of principle and never let it happen. Too late now. He stood under the force of the water. Washing, washing, washing all day long. Baptized into pleasure, he thought. Free again.
She drove him back to campus to pick up his car. All the drive home, he pictured Kristin's suspicion and anger at his being late. It was nearly eight, too late for supper with the others, too late to help Paul with his homework.
When he had parked the car, the first thing he saw was Paul's vaguely worried face at the kitchen window. It had started to snow. When he went inside to the lingering savor of the night's meal, he realized how fiercely hungry he was.
"I put a few slices of lamb in the lower section of the oven," Kristin said when she walked in. "They'll be pretty dried out."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I got involved in the Phyllis Strom committee." The academic career of Phyllis Strom had its thorny aspect as an alibi.
"Really?" Kristin asked. "How's life on the Phyllis Strom committee?"
"Never a dull moment," Michael told her.
4
IN THE snow-sealed silence of his carrel, Michael read the reflections of one Keith Michneicki on Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Keith was a twenty-year-old from the apple orchards of the lake country. He was a hockey star, also a perceptive, thoughtful reader.
Maybe alone in the class, Keith had recognized the vitalism on which Red Badge turned, the priesthood of the life force, the riddle of blood and sacrifice. Like any good, clean-living American boy, he had pretended not to know what he was looking at, and faked it sloppily.
"Henry realizes," Keith had written, "that we have within us the wherewithal to cope with each of life's challenges."
There was no excuse for it, even if down on the lake, in apple-knocker country, enough people still believed that this was the kind of lesson boys went off to college to learn.
"Read the book!" he wrote on Michneicki's paper. "Is it propaganda? Truth or illusion?"
Then he put the papers aside and turned to his computer. Encouraged by Norm Cevic, he had been spending a great deal of time trying to track his new friend Lara on the Internet.
He found her ex-husband first, a Frenchman named Laurent Corvus, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Geneva, assistant in Africa to the late Desmond Jenkins, a left-wing European expert on colonialism. He had begun as a secondary school teacher and then worked for the Red Cross and for the UNRRA in the Middle East. His listing was posted by a site dedicated to foreign affairs and security matters. He had occupied a few vice chancellorships and assistant directorates at some African universities. It was hard to imagine what would bring him to Fort Salines.
Lara herself, under her maiden name of Purcell, appeared on a few other sites. She was a graduate of Swiss schools and had an advanced degree from the Sorbonne. Her area of study was the Caribbean and the former colonial world in general. She had worked with her husband and also as an assistant to Desmond Jenkins.
Marie-Claire Purcell grew up in St. Trinity, a poor island on the elbow of the Windwards; her listing contained a pocket history of the place. St. Trinity was a British sugar island that supported an exotic culture of exile. In 1804, at the end of the Haitian wars of independence, hundreds of French slave owners had arrived from Cap Haitien with their property and slaves. Vodoun and various forms of the French language persisted there.
The site listed her publications: a short history of St. Trinity, a study of French colonial settlement in West Africa and the Caribbean. It went on to advertise a hotel, apparently owned by her family in All Saints Bay, in the south of the island. And it listed a number of books by her brother, John-Paul Purcell, an authority on Caribbean religious practices. He had written and published a great deal. Lara herself sat on the board of some corporations doing business in the tropical Americas. She seemed also to connect with an entity called AbouyeCarib.com.
This site, however, was guarded by a square patch appearing in the middle of Michael's screen demanding a password. The patch was intricately designed and vaguely forbidding. He had come late and resistant to the world of the Internet, only a little less phobic about it than his wife. His one feat of electronic athleticism had consisted of decrypting the password on his son's computer, which was Falo, the dog's name backward, in defiance of dyslexia.
His plan had been to meet Cevic for lunch so they could go over whatever he had printed from the Web. There was not very much. Crossing the welter of slush and freeze between his office and the door of the deli restaurant in town, he instead decided to keep the handful of documents to himself.