After that, they began meeting whenever they could, when her stepfather was out riding with Adolph or when he’d sent Jimmie into the fields on one pretext or another and she sneaked away to meet him there. At first, they explored each other through their clothes, fumbling and inexact, stroking and squeezing and feeling what each had to offer, and then she wanted to see him — see what it was, the male organ — and she made him strip naked before her. It was in February, three weeks after she’d arrived, and conditions were hardly ideal. The ground was wet, the day steely and brisk, with a low cloud cover and a wind that sang through the chaparral. They’d found a protected place, deep in one of the ravines, where the rocks hemmed them in and the bushes that had escaped the sheep had begun to flower and sweeten the air. “I want you to remove your clothes,” she said, “all your clothes.”
He dropped his jacket on the ground, making a sort of bed of it, and he pulled his shirt up over his head, eager, grinning at her, his eyes focused and daring. Off came his boots, then his trousers, so that he was standing there in his union suit and stocking feet. “Everything? Even my socks?”
“Go on,” she said, and her eyes were fixed on his. “No malingering. What are you waiting for?”
He reached behind him for the buttons, his arms elbowing out, then pulled the garment down to his waist so that she saw the black tangled hair at his nipples and his navel — a sort of Christ’s cross of it there — and then he was bent over, stripping the fabric from his groin and legs as if it were a second skin. When he rose back up to stand before her in a confusion of limbs and a torso bleached white as flour where the sun had never touched it, there it was, the male organ, standing out rigidly from the dark nest of his groin as if it were an arrow that had been shot into him and stuck there, wooden and hard. But it wasn’t hard. Or it was, but it was soft too. She took it in her hands, chafed it, squeezed, rubbed, slid her fingers beneath it, at the root, thinking of Ida. This was what Ida had taken inside her, this quivering veiny blood-engorged thing that was like an animal itself — that had been how the baby came to grow there, and even then, even with Jimmie standing before her and moving to her touch with his mouth hanging slack and his eyes pressed shut, she refused to admit or even consider who had been the second party involved, though she knew,she knew.
But Jimmie, Jimmie was her plaything. He was no ram, he was only Jimmie — Jimmie with a whole new set of needs and weaknesses — and she’d been fooling herself to think their relationship had changed. He did whatever she said. Did it gladly, beseechingly, abjectly, no humiliation he wouldn’t endure for her sake. As the weeks fell away she became expert in manipulating him till the white fluid came spurting out of him and very gradually she allowed him favors too, though she would expose only one part of herself at a time and never removed her dress or underthings no matter how furiously he stroked or how deeply he kissed her or how much he begged. She was curious. Of course she was. And he satisfied her curiosity — and more: the touch of him made her blood race, though she wouldn’t admit it, not even to herself — but this wasn’t a pact and it wasn’t reciprocal and she was the mistress, always, and he was the slave.
Mrs. Caliban
At the end of July, on a fine high clear day that brought the mainland so close it was as if the channel were a tranquil little pond you could swim across in fifteen minutes, she found herself on Charlie Curner’s schooner once again. Her stepfather was taking her to Santa Barbara for three days. On business. She was to stay at a boardinghouse for women presided over by someone called Mrs. Amelia Cawthorne and she was not to leave the house for any reason except under her stepfather’s or Mrs. Cawthorne’s supervision. That was the promise she’d made, and what choice did she have? — it was either promise and go or refuse and be left behind. I want your solemn oath, he’d said, and she’d given it, gladly, humbly, with shining eyes and a smile of fawning gratitude. She’d all but curtsied — and would have, would have done anything — except that it might have aroused his suspicions, and she didn’t want that. The fact was that in the past three months her stepfather had been twice to the mainland without her — he’d taken Jimmie the second time, as if to rub salt in her wounds, and she’d been left alone with Adolph and the sheep and a misery so deep and all-abiding she couldn’t get out of bed the whole time and if Adolph complained to her stepfather because he’d missed his three square meals a day she never knew of it. Or cared. So she made a promise, swore it to his face, On my soul, on the Bible, as God is my witness, a promise she had every intention of breaking the moment she was clear.
Mrs. Cawthorne was a large woman, a matron sunk in fat whose husband, a boatwright, had been lost at sea in one of his own creations twenty years past. She had pinched narrow eyes — squinting, always squinting — and a way of claiming all the space in any room she happened to be occupying. The other boarders — there were three — were spinsters in various stages of decrepitude. Her stepfather paid in advance and informed the landlady that he’d be back in the morning to fetch his daughter and take her with him on the rounds of his errands. In the meanwhile — and here he’d given her a significant look before turning back to Mrs. Cawthorne, who stood there in the center of the parlor working one swollen hand in the grip of the other — she was exhausted from the journey and would no doubt want to go up to her room directly after dinner. The landlady had squinted at her, giving her a long look of appraisal. One of the spinsters, ancient, with claws for hands, who’d been napping in an overstuffed armchair by the fire, came awake with a snort and glanced up sharply. Her stepfather said, “Isn’t that right, Edith?” Stupefied — he wasn’t even going to let her look in the shop windows or take her to dinner or his hotel or anyplace at all? — she just nodded dumbly.
In the night she awoke in the dark to a whole symphony of strange noises, of water shifting through the pipes and the house creaking and groaning as the hours chipped away at it, the barking of the neighbor’s dog, a soft hiss from beyond the windows as if a giant were sweeping the streets with a broom made from an upended tree. Her stepfather had given her a single dollar in spending money, as if to say, Let’s see how far you can get on that, but what he didn’t know about, what no one knew about, not even Ida, who’d handed her the envelope, was the bracelet her mother had left her. She had it with her now, wrapped in tissue paper and secreted in her purse. For a long moment she lay listening to the sounds of the house, then she rose from the bed and dressed in the dark.