Now she was willing to accept that such things had been done, at least some of the time, simply for the carnal joy of it, and that she had been jealous of others' freedom to do something in full public view that she herself would never have done. Sarah had been more instrumental than anyone in changing her mind, just by being Sarah. She got like this whenever and wherever the mood struck; in private or not, it never mattered.
They had met after Adrienne had been in Tempe for half a year, and had sat next to each other at an evening guest lecture at the university. Nothing short of broken legs would have kept Adrienne away. The speaker was once a student and protégé of Erich Fromm. Adrienne adored Fromm, whose theoretical stances on social psychology, along with the more mythically oriented stances of Carl Jung, had driven stakes into the heart of much of what she found lacking or simplistic in Freud. Jung and Fromm comprised the two mighty pillars on which she had built her own outlook.
Adrienne had arrived as early as she could and sat third row center in the lecture hall. Two seats over sat a woman who doodled in a notebook and, minutes later, kicked off both shoes and propped her dirty bare feet upon the back of the seat before her. Adrienne could not decide if she was rude or just ill-bred.
And what wide, strong feet they were, too. Adrienne couldn't help but stare, fascinated by the sturdy bone structure, the power in the high arch, the light tracery of veins, then the sudden thought of every place they must have carried this woman throughout her life. She was possessed of an abrupt desire to touch them, stroke them. The woman caught her staring, and Adrienne tried to look away, but too little, too late.
"At my day job," said the dark-haired woman, leaning in, very deadpan, "I tread on grapes."
"Oh." Adrienne was brought up horribly short, never before at such a loss for words. Shouldn't she say something, at least? "I shrink heads."
She'd blurted it out before she realized it, and red could not even begin to describe the color blooming across her cheeks.
The woman smiled, wide and delighted; Adrienne next caught herself staring at her full lower lip, as moist and ripe as some enticing fruit.
"A genuine modern primitive," the woman said, reaching out to shake Adrienne's hand. "I never would have guessed."
The lecture ended as, if not a total loss for Adrienne, then near enough, an hour and forty minutes of concentration shattered. The amplified voice wafted past her like a breeze she was only fitfully aware of, while instead consumed by every aspect of the woman she was to later know as Sarah Lynn McGuire. The sound of her breathing, the etching of her pen across page after page of notebook paper. No movement, from a shift in her chair to a sweeping of hair from her eyes, was too minute to escape notice. Adrienne felt progressively warmer throughout this exercise in torture, bathed in an imagined cloud of pheromones, while the object of a desire she'd not even realized she had was less than three tantalizing feet away.
Now this was going to take some introspection.
She had long acknowledged herself to be bisexual, if latent these days. It had been years since she'd had any kind of sexual relationship with another woman, and even those had been fleeting, sandwiched between lengthier affairs with boyfriends. First had come a handful of tentative high school encounters, more confusing than anything, wherein offbeat flirtation had led to hesitant kisses and experimental touches in the cars or bedrooms of friends, after which she would retreat to the solitude of her own room in the middle class fortress of her parents' home, and sit without moving, aware of the fearful throb between her legs, as insistent as an accusation. It never quite felt wrong enough to frighten her away from a next time.
With college came greater assurance, and the consummation of what had previously been mere sex-play. She possessed her own life there, as did the women she occasionally met who wanted to be more than friends, and they had all the time needed to explore. It was no longer experimentation, this she recognized right away. The light touch of a nipple beneath her fingertips, the grinding undulation of a gently swelling belly against her own, the musky taste of petaled labia and budlike clitoris upon her tongue … she took to these as naturally as she had taken to men and their rougher, more singularly directed passions. Neither seemed to possess a clear advantage over the other. She was either neatly divided into halves, or, conversely, unified into a perfect whole. Omnisexual? It had an intriguing connotation.
Still, there had been no one of like gender in her life since graduate school, and she had come to think of her lack of sexual differentiation in lovers as a phase she'd outgrown. In eighteen months of preliminaries and seven years of marriage, Neal had never even realized she was bi. Although after his philandering and their divorce, she'd thought of sending him a card — Guess what, I like pussy too — but it seemed a childish and spiteful thing to do.
Not to mention no longer applicable.
Or so she had believed, apparently erroneously. Her reinvention of self in Tempe had apparently brought the past. Adrienne credited the desert, naturally. Those winds and infrequent rains, no telling what buried treasures might wink anew in the dawning sun after a night's erosion.
What greater proof did she need? For there she was, trapped in a lecture hall with her sweat and her hunger and a stranger. Going on thirty-two years old and her heart pounding as if fifteen, while she had no way of knowing if the woman seated within her reach shared even a remotely similar orientation.
Fortunately, Sarah had taken pity on her, had made the first overture. Perhaps she smelled the frightful conflict that must have exuded from Adrienne's every pore and left her terrified to initiate further talk — but not too paralyzed to accept Sarah's invitation to go to The Coffee Plantation for lattes.
And within a week Adrienne had reaffirmed for herself that which archaeologists have always known: buried treasures are far more beautiful and valued the second lifetime in which they see the sun.
*
The apple slices were gone and Sarah had drunk the wine from the bowl by the time the sun was down, nothing but a defiant rose-red rime thinned across the horizon. The party was coasting, mellow, and Adrienne wondered if they would ever get around to singing "Happy Birthday" to Jayne.
"Remember the code blue I told you about, from a couple of weeks ago?" Adrienne asked.
"How could I forget a wandering desert madman?" Sarah ran a finger in the bowl and licked the traces of wine from the tip. "Such a classic, and it had to be you. You had to remind me, didn't you?"
Adrienne frowned. "You wouldn't have been feeling privileged if you'd seen him brought in. It would've almost made you sick. He'd beaten his hands to splinters, don't forget."
"Sorry." Sarah's face of contrition. "It was just so vivid, you know?"
"I know, I know. There is something about it, isn't there? But there's something about him…" Adrienne sighed and waved her hand in frustration. "On one level I'm completely baffled by this guy. He doesn't act quite as he should."
She was breaching all manner of ethical considerations in discussing Clay Palmer. Still, there wasn't a doctor or nurse she knew who adhered to expectations of patient confidentiality to the letter of the unwritten law. They all blabbed when they got home, and rationalized it by citing their discretion: What's a little sacrifice of confidentiality between bedmates?
"He sounded pretty distraught to me," Sarah said. "How's he supposed to act?"
"Anybody who's that problematic with aggression is going to resist counseling to some degree, if not exhibit outright hostility. I've never treated anybody like that who was very cooperative. Never."