“Oh,” she said in a small voice when it was over.
She murmured again sweetly but sounded disappointed, though she continued to nuzzle him. She held him tightly for a long while, then sighed and removed his blindfold.
“What did you see?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Good. Now get some of Tom’s clothes and run along,” she said. “This can be our secret.”
He stared at her. Though she was damp-faced, with tangled hair and a redness on her cheeks, looking chafed, she was still in her white bra and pink panties, and she lay like someone who had just woken from an afternoon nap. She smiled at him.
“The first time I saw you I thought: This kid loves secrets. I’m going to give him one to keep, all to himself. And if he’s good at keeping it, I’m going to give him some more secrets.”
Ava put her pen down and leaned back and stretched. She said, “Didn’t Tom ever find out?”
“He wasn’t interested. Anyway, he had an older friend. That man Kenny, with the boat.”
“But his mother was taking a risk.”
“His mother, I see now, was a beautiful sensual woman, starved for attention. Long before that day she dressed up for us. She put on fancy dresses at mealtimes in that plain summer cabin. Even now I don’t know the names for those clothes.”
Ava said, “Your adolescence coincided with the age when women dressed carefully, the last gasp of extravagant fashion. White gloves. Pillbox hats. Veils. Girdles. Garter belts. Angora sweaters. Dresses with pleats. Women took pains to look…”
“Lovely?”
“I was going to say edible.”
“Maybe that’s why nakedness doesn’t interest me.”
“Maybe you’re a woman’s dream. We’re so insecure about our bodies.
“I was so flattered that Tom’s mother wanted me.”
Ava was staring at him, and now she looked flustered and responsible, like Tom’s mother.
“What else did she want?”
Instead of answering that question, Slade said, “A life isn’t only about what you accomplished. It’s also about what you desired. What you dreamed. What was in your head. All those secrets.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“Because I realize that now”—all this time he had been sipping from a wineglass brimming with the muddy liquid of his dissolved drug—“I want to remember it all.”
Ava said, “There was more?”
“Much more.”
6
THE INTRIGUE between himself and Tom’s mother, Mrs. Bronster (he was too shy to speak her first name, which was Lily), was so inconvenient, so filled with secrecy, uncertainty and misunderstanding, so many agonies of waiting, fears of interruptions and being found out, such a misery of insecurities and whispers and obstructions, of hardly any privacy, Tom quacking, “Where have you been?” and Nita nagging, and just the feeble pretense that he was a houseguest and she was his whining friend’s kindly mother — so much nuisance and dissatisfaction, such confusion and thwarted pleasure — that he knew it could not possibly be love. He was thirteen years old. Only now, reliving it with Ava for his narrative, seeing it through the blaze of his drug, did Slade understand that all this pain and joy was the absolute proof that it was love.
Slade blinded himself to remember, blinded himself to write, blinded himself for desire; he was transfixed by the drug’s blindness most of the time. The days at the lakeshore cabin had haunted and informed his life as a lover.
“Because everything I need to know is in my own head,” he was saying on one of his dictating days after that, sitting to stare at Ava with blind eyes.
“She wanted me every day,” Slade said. “And I wanted her just as much. I loved the routine that became a delicious ritual. I longed for her to blindfold me. It excited me to hear her heels on the floorboards of the cabin coming toward me after she finished locking the doors.”
Then she would be next to him, and he could hear her sighing, smell her perfume, feel her body brush against him, the rub of the older looser skin of her arm or her belly.
“Don’t move,” she would say. “Keep your arms to your sides.”
He stood like a small soldier, obedient and blindfolded in the middle of the wooden floor, its rough-cut timbers still so new they held the tang of the saw blade. Even blinded he knew that Tom’s mother was standing in her shorts and bra, and could see her long legs rising into her loose shorts. Damp wisps of hair framed her face, which was bright with the blush from the day’s heat. With gentle attentive hands she undressed him, helped him to put on the panties, reminding him that they were her best ones, expensive ones, and how lucky he was, as she brushed her fingers across the loose silk.
His mouth was gummed shut in panic and pleasure, for there were just the two of them in the house, and he knew that he was part of something illicit — his very desire was a proof of it. In the pistol imagery he associated with desire, he sensed the hammer was cocked on his libido in those hot afternoons with Tom’s mother.
“I have to change,” she said. “I have to get ready. You can help me. It’ll keep you out of trouble, won’t it?”
He could tell from her voice that she was bending over. He heard her shoes drop, and then the plop of her shorts, and the tearing sound of her panties skidding down her long legs, and the soft lisp and release of her bra; how her voice changed and strained as she reached behind her to unhook it.
“I need a shower,” she said, and he heard her bare feet on the planks as she walked past him to the shower stall. He listened to the water coursing over her body. She was back in the room moments later, drying herself with a towel, gasping a little from the exertion, and he could hear the towel chafing her skin.
“Help me,” she said, and put the damp towel into his hands.
His head rang as he pressed the towel on her smoothness, feeling her curves give, a new sensation to him, soft flesh. And all the odors — her perfumed soap, the sawn planks, the fragrance of the bedroom, the humid afternoon air still holding the lunchtime aromas of hot dogs and mustard — mingled with the distant yelling of children.
“Do you like doing that to me?”
Unable to think of a reply, he concentrated within the darkness of his blindfold and dabbed gently with the towel, loving the heat of her skin.
“Because you’re so good at it you must have done it before.”
“No,” Slade whispered, wiping blindly at the woman’s body.
“You’re a fast learner,” she said. “Can you see me?”
Slade made a solemn sound of denial in his nose that was more negative than the word “no.”
“And don’t peek. Peeking’s against the rules.”
Her voice was receding slightly. She had moved away from him and he stood still, holding the damp towel and listening hard. From the sounds, the same on every occasion, he took her to be kneeling and bending, sliding drawers, clattering coat hangers, and he gathered that she was looking in the dresser and in the closet, choosing clothes.
“Come here.”
He went gladly, to please her, to please himself, but he stumbled, twisting the towel, as though for balance.
“Careful,” Tom’s mother said. “Over here.”
The same game every time, one he loved. She was moving, there was laughter in her voice, and he could hear the throb of her desire in that laugh.
“You can’t find me.”
She spoke in such a teasing way that he laughed, too, and was aroused. He relaxed and in this mood of pleasure seemed to see Tom’s mother as a big warm upright glow, giving off heat from across the room. He went forward with his arms extended, following the wisps of her fragrance, the creak of a floorboard, discovering that every perfume had its own heat.