“I missed you all morning,” he said. “I feel like a kid. I don’t like this going to a job.”
“I missed you, too.” She put her cheek against his. “But it’s only a little while, and then we can have a nice dinner.”
“Come with me now. I’ve got forty-five minutes left. We can get something quick at Pei Wei or someplace like that.”
“I’ve got paint all over me,” she said. “You just came here for a kiss.”
“I wish it was more than that.”
“Soon,” she said. “My darling.”
They went on through the weekend. In the evening they watched the news and ate dinner with Iris, who insisted on doing the cooking. She made brisket one night, and lamb chops the next. And on Monday she and Natasha brought home a container of pulled pork and ribs from Corky’s. They all had a little too much to drink, and Faulk put his arm around his wife-to-be and told her he loved her. Resting her head on his shoulder, she had to ward off the sense that everything was a kind of forgery. She resorted to carefully constructed, tenaciously resolute thoughts of being in the new house, all the things she would do to make it her place, make that poor little place her own. That was how it seemed to her when she looked at it on its small street, with the big tree looming over it. When she was in those warm rooms, painting the trim and putting up wallpaper and waxing the floors, or when she was trying to get the watercolor of the sad lady so it showed the depth of what was in that face, she was happily almost clear of mind. There were few bad images, few intimations of jarring memory.
3
They rented a U-Haul trailer and moved into the house the following Saturday. It took most of the morning, Faulk moving the furniture and setting the bed up and organizing the books in the new shelves he had built. His back ached. He was pleasurably weary, and he made jokes about feeling like a college kid moving into a dorm. But he was proud of the bookcases, and very meticulous about setting the titles in alphabetical order. The day was hot and muggy, and even in the air-conditioning his white shirt was soaked. She would come past him and stop to kiss his cheek, and it was their little house, he said, their home with its big picture window and fresh wood- and paint-smelling rooms, and its leaky kitchen sink. Iris put dishes away while the other two arranged the furniture and hung pictures.
She surprised them by taking the kitchen faucet apart at the base and rubbing soap into the threads of the pipe, stopping the leak. “Old trick,” she said.
She made a lunch of boiled eggs and English muffins, and they sat in the little dining area off the kitchen while she talked about moving from Collierville into the city, to this neighborhood, and walking past this house so many times with Natasha before Natasha went off to Europe. Faulk had bought a half bottle of champagne to make mimosas, but nobody else wanted a mimosa, so he put the bottle in the refrigerator, which was mostly empty.
He spent the early afternoon hooking up the television and the computer while the women went shopping for groceries. When he had done everything he could to make the place comfortable, he sat out in the shade of the rose arbor and tried to read, waiting for them to come back. Birds sang in the branches of the river oak, and a breeze had come up; but it was finally too warm and buggy to stay out there, and he went back inside. He felt hopeful, walking through the rooms of the little house and looking at things.
That night, after they drove Iris home, they made love in the dimness, in the quiet, new-paint-smelling bedroom. He lay on his back while she straddled him and moved slowly, looking down at him. “My love,” he said.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Yes.” Resting her elbows on either side of his head, she let her hair come around his face. She kissed him and then nuzzled at his neck. For a long space she simply stayed that way, with him inside her. She felt relaxed, and easy, and wanted it to go on. After a soft few moments, she lifted herself very slightly, and then let down.
“Oh, that’s so lovely,” he said. “Yes. Do that.”
It was as things had once been between them. She moved her hips, her face in the pillow at his ear, and she wept soundlessly for the relief of it.
He gave a slow thrust upward and she murmured, “Oh.” And he began to thrust quickly, his hands tight on her shoulders.
“Wait,” she said. “Oh. Wait.”
He held very still, and she felt herself fall through, moving quickly now, and kissing his forehead, his cheeks.
“It’s us,” he said. “Oh, babe. It’s us.”
A little later, they lay still. She straightened, and gazed down at him. “So good.”
“Beautiful,” he said.
“We have our house and our place,” she murmured.
“Are you crying?”
“I’m happy,” she told him.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, me, too.”
“I don’t ever want to leave this room. Let’s stay here forever.”
“Oh, baby, I want that.”
“We can make it our own little crypt.”
“But I’ll want to walk through the rooms and savor everything, too. Our house. Ours. We’re in our house.”
“We are. Let’s brick up the doors and windows.”
They lay side by side, looking at the slightly shifting light on the ceiling from the passage of a car in the street. They went to sleep like this, and they slept deeply. She dreamed they were on an island somewhere, not Jamaica. It was like the idea of an island, sunny and with the smell of the ocean and, oddly, cooking meat. The odor of the meat became too thick, and the rest of the dream was of looking for a place on the beautiful island where you couldn’t smell it. She woke feeling physically spent and struggled to go back to sleep, concentrating as best she could on the perfection of the night before. But its very exquisiteness seemed now unreachable in its contrast to what she had been suffering. She got out of the bed and put on a robe, and sat shivering in the predawn at the window. After a few moments, she made coffee and went back and watched the sun come up. The panic had returned, the freeze at her abdomen. It was worse now, utterly and only itself, unalloyed, connected to no thought or idea, a separate thing coiled under the flow of her thoughts and wired to all the nerves of her body. She sat very still as if trying to hide, watching color come to the sky, a fair sunrise, full of gentle shades of gold, and how it shone through the membranous leaves, some of them even beginning to turn.
He had busy dreams, too fleeting to take hold or reach even the level of consciousness nightmares have, or good dreams. It was nonbeing for a space, and when he woke he saw that she had already left the bed. He rose and went in to her and saw her sitting on the couch in the light from the picture window. She was staring out at the backyard, holding a cup of coffee.
“Morning,” he said.
She spilled the coffee.
“I’m sorry.” He moved to the kitchen to get a paper towel. “Who did you think it would be? It’s just us. At home in our house. Remember?”
“I didn’t know you were up,” she said, laughing too loud. He saw tears in her eyes.
Drinking the coffee had warmed her from the inside as the sunlight warmed her skin, the sun rising over the treetops beyond the end of the yard and shining on her through the glass. She stood and wrapped her arms around him, feeling the solidness of him, the bone and sinew, and breathing the sleep odor of him.
“Tears of happiness,” he said. “I hope.”
“Oh, yes, my love.”
They cleaned up what she had spilled and then had another cup each, and then he had to go to work. She stood with him in the doorway and embraced him.
“Iris coming here today?” he asked.