She was listening to the music, dancing slightly, swinging her hips, lean, not skinny, but slim. There was something wiry in the way she moved, and it thrilled him. She began to dance go-go style, smiling at him in a coy way at first, and then twisting her arms over her head and closing her eyes. He looked around and lit a cigarette. Then he motioned to a split-rail fence and told her to sit down on it. “Sit on the fence,” he said. “I want to see you sit on that fence.”
She gave him a look and called him a control freak and then smiled and went over and sat down. The yard behind her, with the Queen Anne’s lace and weeds and the house in the backdrop, seemed elemental and part of a package: Wendy sitting on a fence. That’s how it seemed to work. They’d said, You’ll find yourself weirding out about the way you see things, and you’ll be aware not only of your enfolded material, the sensation of it in your head but also the blind spot you have, the blank area.
He admitted that he was feeling turned on, seeing her sit there.
“As a Psych Corps member I have an obligation to remind you of the Credo,” she said. She got up and took his hand and led him back to the towpath.
“Fuck the Credo.”
He walked to the edge of the canal and looked down into the water. All of the creosote and tar had washed into it, along with whatever the mills had added, and it moved sluggishly along the weeds. It was easy, looking at it, to imagine that in a million years the fossils of small mammals and fuckups like himself would be chiseled from the ossified mass of gunk.
He placed his palms together and extended his elbows, a diving gesture.
“Once you’re in that you never get out,” she said. There was an edge around her words, a fear he hadn’t heard before.
“You don’t think I’d do it?”
“I hope you wouldn’t do it,” she said.
“I’d do it, but life is looking up and I’m trying to live the Psych Corps Credo.”
“I love a man who recites the Credo in his sleep,” she said, kissing him.
“You sounded, for just a second, like a hippie.”
“I’ve never been enfolded, so I can’t sound like pre-enfoldment,” she said.
“You can take the hippie out of the man, via enfolding, but you can’t take the wayward out, or the deeper tendencies.”
“Don’t quote me that shit. Not now.”
* * *
Later they drove to the beach and laid out their towels and smoked, looking out at Lake Huron, pollution levels down slightly but still a queer gloss over the surface, a fresh glaze of rainwater over the tension and a few sad birds in the resin, unable to pull free, yanking their wings. On the transistor radio (Nothing like transistor on sand, Singleton thought) a reporter was explaining that Kennedy was on one of his so-called wave-by swings, this time in South Bend, weighing his popularity and the love of the public against the evil elements out there, doing his PT 109 thing, except in a limo instead of a boat.
“You can ask me more about Klein if you want,” Singleton said. “You can say something like, What’s Klein doing? Something along those lines.”
“You could stop directing me to ask you certain questions,” she said. She leaned back and put her face to the sun. “What’s Klein doing, something along those lines?” she said, hunching over to form a windbreak, rolling another joint with her long fingers, pressing the papers expertly.
“He puffs his chest out,” Singleton said. “Fingers his medals and pretends he’s in charge. It’s starting to make me sick, to tell you the truth. All I’m hearing now is repeated information, modulation this, formations that.”
She shrugged, sighed, looked away down the beach. “I think he’s doing the right thing, going about his life as if it wasn’t threatened, upholding democracy and the like,” she said.
“Who, Klein?”
“I’m talking about Kennedy,” she said.
“I’m not going to get into a Kennedy drive-and-wave debate with you, baby, not when I’m this stoned. But you and I both know he’s got a death wish that has a lot to do with his back condition. All that pain is an inducement to push the envelope. Take it from someone who knows. I like to imagine I was bivouacked out of Nam, looking down at the canopy, saying, ‘I’m flying, man, I’m flying and this is cool, groovy, groovy.’ That kind of thing.”
He took another deep toke and then a short one and held it, holding, holding.
He passed the joint and watched as she nimbly took a hit, letting the smoke trickle.
“I lost my train of thought,” she said.
“I never had a train. Who wants a train when you can have this shit?”
They lay in the sand for a while and he looked at her through the glare, over the top of his arm, and tried to imagine the kind of letters they would’ve written back and forth, from the war on his side to the States on her side. Her letters would’ve been chatty, full of nursing stories, patients who were demanding in one way or another, doctors with their know-it-all attitudes, full of authority, the long, lonely night shifts at the desk, sorting files, the small minutiae of everyday life; his would be filled with urgency, written in a crabby longhand, giving faint details and avoiding the truth as much as possible.
* * *
When a storm began brewing to the west, a dark line over the parking lot, they ran to the car and drove a few miles down to the next beach, concrete car bumpers and spaces delineated by faded yellow lines, reminders of a better era when crowds had picnicked and barbecued and made use of the grills and the quaint stone hut and the fact that the state of Michigan had the funds to keep the water pump working. A sense of common destiny that had been lost in the last few years. They parked in a far corner and watched long curtains of rain steaming when they hit the hot asphalt. The sky darkened while lightning stabbed at the lake, sending up spumes of fire. Even before they started kissing it seemed like a sure thing that they’d have visionary sex, that a memory would surface — two souls sealed in a car by the lake — and then they were kissing, and she was sliding down, unbuckling his belt, he felt her lips on his belly and there was a flash, a quick image along with the lightning Klein with a pipe between his teeth, closing his lips and making the fish-suck and then opening them again he lifted his hips and shifted his weight against the seat, her fingers worked the waistband, two seconds of quivering, empty air until her mouth — a faint brush of breath — was close enough to feel. He slid into the open space of it, her tongue rolling softly. So this is, her tongue seemed to say, this is how it’s going to be. She kept at it while another flash of lightning pulsed against his closed eyelids, leaving a purple blot, thunder shook the car and the blot disappeared, Wendy on the fence, with the Queen Anne’s lace moving gently in the air, the smell of her herbal shampoo and the faint patchouli of her skin, he felt her mouth and he filled it, filled and filled and slipped out as she lifted herself above him, taking his palms and putting them flat on her hips, a sensation of guidance the tip nothing but the tip the tip just the tip of his cock a last flicker of fire and then he came, Rake’s face in black and white, a photograph on a file folder, mug-shot grimness and eyes furious, the paradox of being remote and captured at the same time.