The cedar deck was still dripping and the patio furniture was sodden, but I didn’t care. I threw a bath towel over an Adirondack chair and settled in. The sky had begun to clear. A crescent moon rode over the forest, and the air was cool and smelled of the pine woods and the sea.
I was thinking about Damian when the door creaked and he stepped out to join me.
“Sleep,” he said. “Highly overrated.” He looked into the distance, and the moon cast his shadow, pale as smoke, across the deck. “I keep thinking about home. You know what I mean?”
Lisa and Loretta and their big welcoming house. Yes. “We could use their advice.”
Like most of us in the tranche, I had sought their advice more than once. I was thinking of the time (four years ago now) when Damian and Amanda had first gotten together. The dynamics of jealousy were different in a Tau community, but I was as capable of jealousy as any other human being. I had been avoiding both Amanda and Damian for days—I had even thought about leaving the tranche—and it was Lisa who had called me on it. She had summoned me into the kitchen to sample her tiramisu (“I used Madeira instead of Marsala”), but that was just bait. She sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me a big-eyed stare. “Adam,” she said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were sulking.”
“I don’t know what you mean. The tiramisu is great.”
“And you lie so very badly. But I guess it isn’t easy, knowing Amanda is with another man?”
“I’m dealing with it.”
“But not very well. You know she loves you, yes?”
“She says so.”
“And she means it. You know she means it?”
“I guess so.” That was disingenuous and childish. Of course she loved me. We were Taus. I recognized her love in the worried glances she had lately been giving me. I heard it in her voice when she tried to explain the relationship that had developed between her and Damian. And I resented her for it. It denied me the comfort of an uncomplicated anger.
“Then you need to stop behaving the way you’re behaving. Your relationship to Amanda has a certain nature. You two have always conducted yourself according to that knowledge. Her need for autonomy was built into her love for you. What’s the use of wanting her to be what she is not?”
“No use. I know that. I’m just…”
“Hurt,” Lisa supplied.
Yes, painful as it was to admit it. Hurt, yes. Childishly hurt. Hurt like a five-year-old whose ice cream cone just plopped onto the sidewalk. Hurt by this awareness of myself as a petulant infant. “I’m not sure I want to talk about it.”
“Of course you don’t want to talk about it.” Lisa reached across the table and put her hand on mine. Her hand was parchment-skinned, all bones and veins. It felt wonderful. “Who would? But here we are. You know, of course, that Damian is also concerned about you.”
That was even more difficult to accept. The thing was, I admired Damian Levay. Which hardly made me unique; everyone admired Damian. He was passionate about the Tau community and its welfare—not just our tranche, but the sodality, the entire Affinity. He was smart, wealthy, generous, and ten years my senior. I could hardly blame Amanda for falling in love with him. I was half in love with him myself.
“It is Amanda’s misfortune,” Lisa said, “that she’s attracted to hopelessly heterosexual men. More than once I have seen conflicts like this resolved by a jovial three-way fuck. But I think in this case that’s not an option.”
Trevor had made the same suggestion more bluntly. (“So get over yourself and go to bed with him. Are you completely blind to his hotness?”) But Lisa was right; it wouldn’t have worked. I wasn’t especially proud of my heterosexuality—in our tranche it sometimes seemed like a kind of selective sexual impotence, for which I deserved sympathy and compassion—but I was stuck with it. Born that way, as the old song has it.
“If you continue to cultivate your own unhappiness,” Lisa said, “you and Amanda will end up as—what? Not enemies. We aren’t that sort of people. But just friends. Do you want that?”
“No,” I said.
“Then you have to start living up to your own expectations. And—oh, do you feel that?”
“What?”
“The wind from the window!” The gingham curtains lofted as she spoke. “Rain on the way. You can smell it.” She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “I do love that smell. Smells like thunder!” As if on cue, there was a distant rumble. “I’m nearly seventy-five years old, Adam, and I still love a summer storm. Is that wrong?”
“Of course not.”
“I sense a kindred soul. You love a storm, too, don’t you?”
I admitted I did.
“But we’re not rivals, are we? Because there’s storm enough for both of us.”
“Ah. The parable of the storm.”
“I’m sorry, was it too obvious?”
“Maybe just obvious enough. You are wise, oh ancient of days. Maybe Amanda’s the one who should be jealous.”
Lisa performed a credible blush. “I love you too, dear. Especially now that you’ve stopped pouting. You’ve finished your tiramisu, so I propose a bottle of wine and chairs in the arboretum. We can watch the lightning together. How does that sound?”
It sounded fine.
That had been four years ago. Since then, Damian and Amanda and I had arrived at a modus vivendi. Amanda would not tolerate us competing for her attention, so we didn’t. And as for my feelings about Damian …
“Lord,” he said, hands on the railing of the cedar deck, staring into the moonlit corridors of the forest, “take this cup from my lips. I’m pretty sure Lisa and Laura would make a better decision than any of us.”
He was a Tau and I loved him as a Tau. But he was as imperfect as the rest of us. Left to his own devices, he would never wear anything but sweat pants and t-shirts. He believed he was a good cook; he was mistaken. He had a laugh that sounded as if someone had stepped on the tail of a small dog. He couldn’t assemble Ikea furniture or operate simple appliances without a friendly intervention. Amanda had once said she loved Damian for his confidence, even when it was misplaced, and she loved me for my doubts, even when they were foolish. In a sense, we were the two sides of Amanda’s own personality. Damian worked on behalf of Tau in a way that echoed the work ethic Amanda had inherited from her family: do what needs doing, and do it selflessly, efficiently, and promptly. I was the other side of that equation, impractical and occasionally impulsive, sometimes usefully creative. Amanda’s personal philosophy veered between Aristotle and Epicurus. No wonder she needed two men in her life.
It was also true that these thoughts were easier to entertain now that she was sleeping in my bed again.
Mist from the drenched forest had begun to condense into a ground fog. The high moon dimmed. I was about to stand up when Damian said, “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“In the woods. About your nine o’clock.”
I tried to look where he was looking. The trees were still dripping. In the silence I could hear the creak and sway of their branches. I might have glimpsed a moving light in the deep of the woods. But it was gone before I could say a word. “Maybe it’s one of the security guys.”
Damian stepped away from the railing. “We need to ask Gordo,” he said. “And we need to go inside. Right now.”
CHAPTER 10
I went into our bedroom to wake Amanda.
She was asleep on her back, head turned to one side. She wore her hair longer than she used to, but it was still short, a dark halo against the cotton pillowcase. She sighed when I sat on the bed. I called her name.
She opened her eyes and frowned at me. “Adam? What is it?”
“Sorry, but Gordo wants us all in the main room where he can keep an eye on us. Might be some motion outside the house.”
“Oh.” She sat up and fished her blouse off the floor where she had dropped it. “Something moving around, you mean? Like a deer? A bear?”