I’ve always had great legs, even when I was just a little girl. But I’d been taking dance for quite a while by the time I was thirteen, and my legs were really quite long and shapely...
...knows she can take outrageous liberties with them, probably figures as well that the shorts and the boots are an exaggerated echo of the green nylon running shorts and Nike running shoes she was wearing on the day they met.
“Could you make a martini for me?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says.
“Thank you,” she says. “Vodka? With a twist?”
“Sure.”
He was hoping she’d prefer something simpler, Scotch on the rocks, bourbon and soda, anything but a drink that will require time-consuming preparation, because truly he wants to get this over with before...
Before what?
Well, before the telephone really rings and it’ll be Helen calling from Menemsha.
He doesn’t know what he can possibly say if Helen calls.
Pouring the Absolut, adding a dollop of vermouth, skimming a bit of lemon peel from the big yellow lemon he takes from the refrigerator, the phone hanging on the wall behind the counter, fearful the phone will ring, Oh, hi, Helen, I was just making myself a martini, but the phone doesn’t ring. He carries the drink back into the living room, where Kate has taken off the combat boots and now sits on the couch with her legs tucked under her and one arm draped across the back of the couch. She has also taken off the beret. Her red hair shines under the glow of the ceiling spot that illuminates the abstract painting behind her. He carries the drink to her...
“Aren’t you having something?”
...pours himself a little Scotch over ice, goes to the couch to clink glasses...
“To us,” she says, and smiles up at him.
“Kate,” he says, “we...”
“Mmm,” she says, sipping at the drink.
He sits beside her. The couch is blue. He hopes she hasn’t powdered herself after showering, hopes she won’t leave traces of her powder, her perfume, her scent in this apartment for Helen to discover after Luis casually mentions this little nocturnal visit from a redhead.
“So what is it?” she asks, and turns her head and her eyes to him. He takes a long swallow of Scotch.
“Kate,” he says, “I think you should know I’ll be leaving for the Vineyard as usual this Friday night...”
“Yes?”
“...but this time I’ll be gone the entire month of August.”
“Yes, I know.”
He looks at her.
“You’re a shrink, you’ll be gone all of August, I realize that. We still have the rest of the week. Anyway, why don’t you just marry me? Then you won’t have to go to the Vineyard at all.”
“Kate...”
“Or at the very least, why don’t you go up there on Saturday instead? Or even Sunday. Why do you have to rush up there on Friday? Friday’s only the twenty-eighth. Do your patients know you’ll be leaving so early?”
“Effectively, Friday’s the end of the month.”
“No, the end of the month is next Monday. The end of the month is the thirty-first, that’s when the end of the month is.”
“I know, but...”
“I’m glad you’re not my shrink, David, I have to tell you. Ducking out before the month even ends. By the way, I’ve planned a big surprise for your birthday, so I hope you’re not planning to run up to the Vineyard even earlier than you...”
“No, I won’t be going up till...”
“Good. My place at eight then. We’re dark on Thursday nights, so I won’t have to worry about getting to the theater, will I?”
“Kate, I think we...”
“Wait’ll you see what I got you.”
“I hope you didn’t spe—”
“You’ll love it. Will you have another birthday party when you go up to the Vineyard?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Friday night.”
“Is that why you’re going up so early?”
“I’m not going up early. My patients...”
“Ducking out three days before the month ends,” she says, and turns fully toward him now, swinging around in a dancer’s position or perhaps a yoga position, he doesn’t know which, bringing the soles of her feet together, holding them together with her hands, sitting quite erect, her knees wide, the black shorts rising higher on her thighs so that he can now see the edge of her panties beneath them, white like the ones she was wearing in the park that day long ago, the side-slit in the very short green nylon running shorts exposing a hint of white cotton panties beneath, strengthening the image of youth, white like the ones she was wearing yet longer ago when one day at the beginning of September with russet leaves drifting onto the parking lot she unzipped her cutoffs for him and removed them and lowered her panties and sat on his desk and spread herself wide to him.
“My patients know when I’m leaving,” he says. “We’ve talked about nothing else for the past three weeks.”
But this isn’t quite true.
They’ve talked about other things as well.
And all at once it was dark, and in the dark she could have been anyone, in the dark she was opening her robe and spreading her legs, warm and wet and pulling me into her.
“Kate,” he says, “what I think we should do...”
“What I think we should do is get a bit more comfortable here, don’t you think?” she says, and rises suddenly from whatever odd position it was, dance, yoga, exercise, whatever, rises with arms extended for balance, rises slowly like a swimmer coming up out of icy blue water, stands barefoot on the cushioned blue couch for only a moment, and then springs to the white-carpeted floor with a single catlike leap, yanking shorts and panties down over her knees at once. Delicately, she steps out of them, lifting one long dancer’s leg, and then the other, and then tosses them over her shoulder. Smiling, she takes a step toward him, and then another, dancer’s steps, knee coming up high, toes pointed, foot slowly descending flat to the carpet, slow-motion steps, moving closer and closer, like a cat stalking its prey, but there’s a smile on her face.
“Would you like to fuck me now?” she asks, and falls to her knees in a dancer’s soft collapse. “Say,” she says, and unzips his fly, and whips him free of his trousers and his underwear, gripping him tightly in her fist. She looks up into his face. Her eyes hold his in an innocent green gaze. Her eyebrows are raised. Well? her expression is saying. “Or would you rather stick this big beautiful thing in my mouth?” she asks, and smiles radiantly.
He throws his head back and stares up into the blinding light above the painting, lost in the glare of the light and the insistence of her relentless hand, the light radiating spikes of rapture, losing all resolve within seconds, lost within seconds in her youth, lost beyond recall in her incandescent passion, utterly bewilderingly ecstatically lost.
“Which?” she demands. “Say!”
On Monday morning, he calls Stanley Beckerman to say he’ll go along with the August deception.
Everything in his life has a title now.