When he had at last had all he wanted, Rodney’s breathing had become labored. He was dewed in hot sweat. His bladder, too, was full, but his feeling of satiety there in the kitchen was so delicate and golden that he did not feel like shifting an inch to find a toilet. So he lowered his zipper and relished the sound of fluid hitting terracotta tiles, which mingled with the keen scent of his own urine in a most ideal way.
He had only just shut the refrigerator door when a white motion in the window caught his eye. Who was it but Katherine Nevis, the darling prisoner of the house? She plodded across the rear courtyard, on flat, large girl’s feet, heading for the little inlet. She shed her robe, and Rodney was unhappy to see that even at that private hour of the evening, she still bothered to wear a bathing suit. She dove, and the water accepted her with the merest ripple. For many minutes, Rodney watched her sporting and glorying in the pool, diving and breaching, white, dolphinlike exposures of her skin bright against the dark red tide. When he could put it off no longer, Rodney stepped through the sliding door and went to her.
“Howdy!” he called, very jolly. She whirled in the water, only her head exposed. Rodney walked to the edge of the pool. “Hi there!” he said. She said nothing, but sank a little, gathering the water to her with sweeping arms, taking it into her mouth, pushing it gently over her chin, breathing it, nearly. She said nothing. Rodney put his fists on his hips and grinned at the surveillant moon. “Hell of a spotlight. Good to swim by, huh?”
Her eyes were dark but not fearful. “How’d you get in here?” the girl said wetly.
“Oh, I had some business with your dad,” he said.
“My dad,” she repeated, her face a suspicious little fist.
“Maybe I’ll get in there with you,” Rodney said, raising his shirt.
“Do what you like,” the girl said. “I’m going inside.” He put a hand out. She took it and pulled herself into the night air. He picked up her robe. Draping it on her, he caught her sourdough aroma, unmasked by the sulfur smell of the sea. His heart was going, his temples on the bulge.
“Stay,” he said. “Come on, the moon’s making a serious effort here. It’s a real once-in-a-month kind of moon.”
She smiled, then stopped. She reached into the pocket of her robe and retrieved a cigarette. “Okay. By the way, if I yelled even a little bit, my mom would come out here. She’s got serious radar. She listens to everything and never sleeps. Seriously, how’d you get through the gate?”
Rodney stretched his smile past his dogteeth. A red gas was coming into his eyes. “She’s one great lady, your mom.” He put a hand on the girl’s hip. She pushed against it only slightly, then sat with her cigarette on a tin-and-rubber chaise longue to light it. He sat beside her and took the cigarette, holding it downwind so as to smell her more purely. He made some mouth sounds in her ear. She closed her eyes. “Gets dull out here, I bet,” he said.
“Medium,” she said. She took back the ocher short of her roll-your-own. He put his hand on her knee, nearly nauseated with an urge. The girl frowned at his fingers. “Be cool, hardcore,” she said.
“Why don’t you…how about let’s…how about…”
“Use your words,” she said.
He put his hand on the back of her head and tried to pull her to his grasping lips. She broke the clasp. “What makes you think I want to kiss your mouth?”
“Come on,” he groaned, nearly weeping. “Goddamn, you’re beautiful.”
“Shit,” the girl said.
“You are a beautiful woman,” said Rodney.
“My legs are giant,” she said. “I’ve got a crappy face.”
“Come here,” he said. He lipped some brine from her jaw.
“Don’t,” she said, panting some. “You don’t love me yet.”
Rodney murmured that he did love Katherine Nevis very much. He kissed her, and she didn’t let him. He kissed her again and she did. Then he was on her and for a time the patio was silent save the sound of their breath and the crying of the chaise’s rubber slats.
He’d gotten her bikini bottoms down around her knees when the girl went stiff. “Quit,” she whispered harshly. He pretended not to hear her. “Shit, goddammit, stop!” She gave him a hard shove, and then Rodney saw the problem. Arn Nevis was over by the house, hunched and peering from the blue darkness of the eave. Nevis was perfectly still, his chin raised slightly, mouth parted in expectancy. His look changed when he realized he’d been spotted. From what Rodney could tell, it wasn’t outrage on the old man’s features, just mild sadness that things had stopped before they’d gotten good.
—
Three mornings later, Rodney Booth looked out his bedroom window to see a speeding ambulance dragging a curtain of dust all the way up Naiad Lane to the Nevis home. He watched some personnel in white tote a gurney through the gate. Then Rodney went downstairs and poured himself some cereal and turned the television on.
Later that afternoon, as Rodney was leaving for the wharf with his fishing pole and creel, Cora called to him. She’d just gotten off the phone with Phyllis Nevis, who’d shared the sad news that her husband was in the hospital, comatose with a ruptured aneurysm, not expected to recover. Rodney agreed that this was terrible. Then he shouldered his pole and set out for the wharf.
The day after the ambulance bore Arn Nevis away, Rodney began to suffer vague qualmings of the conscience relating to the Nevis family. He had trouble pinpointing the source of the unease. It was not sympathy for Nevis himself. There was nothing lamentable about an old man heading toward death in his sleep. And his only regret about his tender grapplings with the sick man’s daughter was that they hadn’t concluded properly. Really, the closest Rodney could come to what was bothering him was some discomfort over his behavior with Phyllis Nevis’s ham. He pictured mealtime in her house, the near widow serving her grieving children the fridge’s only bounty, a joint of meat, already hard used by unknown teeth. The vision made him tetchy and irritated with himself. He felt the guilt gather in his temples and coalesce into a bothersome headache.
That afternoon, Rodney harvested and shucked a pint or so of oysters. He packed in ice three pounds of fresh-caught croaker filets. He showered, shaved, daubed his throat and the line of hair on his stomach with lemon verbena eau de cologne. In the fridge he found a reasonably good bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and he set off up Naiad Lane.
Phyllis Nevis came to the gate and welcomed him in. “I brought you something,” Rodney said. “It isn’t much.”
She looked into the bag with real interest. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s very, very kind.”
“And the wine is cold,” said Rodney. “Bet you could use a glass.”
“I could,” said Phyllis quietly.
Together they walked inside. Rodney put the fish in the refrigerator. He opened the bottle and poured two large glasses. Phyllis went upstairs and then returned with her baby, Nathan. She sat on the sofa, waiting for Rodney, giving the infant his lunch.