With that, she hurried off into the darkness, leaving George to contemplate the error of his ways, to puzzle over her apology, and to listen to the wind intoning its ceaseless consonant-less sentence, like a mantra invoking an idiot god.
Judging by the way their conversation ended, George did not expect a happy result; but the upshot of the encounter was that Sylvia began coming to him every few nights, and they would make love and discuss practical considerations, most having to do with Peony. They were, he reflected, becoming if not a traditional family, then a functional one. He suspected that Sylvia’s heart was not in the relationship, but her pretence pleased him, nourishing a longstanding fantasy and sustaining him against the two oppressive, unvarying presences that ruled over the plain: the heat and the dragon. At times he was unable to distinguish between them – the dragon patrolling overhead seemed emblematic of the terrible heat, and the heat seemed the enfeebling by-product of the dragon’s mystery and menace. Without Sylvia’s affections and his paternal regard for Peony, he might have succumbed to depression. The days played out with unrelenting sameness: too-bright mornings and oven-like noons giving way to skies with low gray clouds sliding past, their bellies dark with rain that never fell, and a damp closeness turning the air to soup – it was as if they were living in the humid mouth of a vast creature too large to apprehend, one of which they had only unpleasant and unreliable intimations. Of course the dragon was the most salient threat, the one for which there was neither explanation nor remedy. Though he had denigrated Edgar and Snelling for their lack of interest in the question, George soon realized that any attempted analysis relating to the dragon’s purposes would be pure speculation. The most sensible explanation he came up with was that the dragon was using the plain as storehouse for its food supply, but this raised other questions, notably why would Griaule bother to choose its human treats by so indirect a procedure (assuming the others had been transported to the plain by touching or rubbing immature dragon scales). He inquired of Peony again, asking what she knew of Griaule’s designs, but she spoke in generalities, repeating her original statement that he wanted them to witness something, adding to this that they were ‘the lucky ones.’ When he pressed her, she grew tearful and mumbled something about ‘fire.’
George had not entirely accepted that the dragon of the moment was Griaule, or that, as this would imply, Griaule was still alive, and he found Peony’s failure to resolve the question unbearably frustrating. He tried every means of coercion at his disposal, but nothing caused her to elaborate on the subject and he decided that the only thing to do was to table the matter. To occupy his mind, he began teaching Peony about the natural world, lessons she did not appear capable of absorbing. As they wandered the plain in their never-ending search for food, he would point out the various trees and bushes and repeat their names, and he explained processes like the sunrise and rain, often over-explaining them, a tactic that may have annoyed Sylvia but to which Peony raised no objection.
One day while they were exploring the thickets to the west of the stream, they happened upon a kumquat tree that had escaped the attention of the birds, its boughs laden with dusky orange fruit. George sat beneath it and fashioned a makeshift basket out of banana leaves, while Peony nibbled at the fruit, gnawing away the flesh from around the big brown pits. After she had consumed over a dozen kumquats he told her that if she didn’t stop she might experience stomach trouble. She plucked another kumquat. He repeated his warning to no effect and finally snapped at her, forbidding her to eat more – she dropped the kumquat and refused to look at him. He patted her on the arm, feeling like a bully, and lectured her in detail on the consequences of eating too much fruit.
As the sun approached its zenith, George located a patch of shade large enough to shelter them and stretched out for a nap with Peony beside him. He emerged from an erotic dream to find that Peony had unbuttoned the remnants of his trousers and was fondling him. At first he thought it part of the dream, but then he pushed her away. She made a pleading sound and tried once more to fondle him – he shouted at her to quit and she covered her head with her hands, as if to shield herself from a blow.
‘You mustn’t do that,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to do that anymore. No one will hurt you if you don’t.’
She met his eyes without the least sign of comprehension; a tear cut a track though a spot of grime on her cheek.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at the people who taught you this was how you should please them.’
She gazed at him blankly, her face empty as a fresh-washed bowl embossed with an exotic pattern. She drew a wavy line in the dirt with a fingertip and looked at him again.
‘Do you understand?’ he said. ‘You never have to do this anymore. Not with anyone.’
A worry line creased her brow. ‘I want to make people happy.’
‘Where this is concerned, touching people, allowing them to touch you . . . the important thing is to please yourself.’
She made a clumsy pawing gesture and lowered her eyes; she saw the kumquat she had let fall and reached for it, then pulled back her hand.
‘From now on,’ he said, ‘if you have the urge to make anyone happy that way, if anyone asks you to make them happy, you come to me and ask what to do. Or ask Sylvia. Will you do that?’
She nodded and reached for the kumquat. He started again to reproach her, but decided that she had enough to think about.
It was not until after he handed her off to Sylvia that he began to speculate about his hesitation in pushing Peony away, thinking his reflexes may have been slowed not by sleep as much as by perversity; and it was not until that evening that he began to wonder about that first night after he had rescued Peony, when Sylvia had come to him . . . if it had been Sylvia. Her touch seemed in memory less practiced, less confident, akin to Peony’s in that regard. And surely Sylvia would have spoken to him – it was not like her to be so shy. The longer he thought about it, the greater his certitude that Peony had expressed gratitude the only way she knew. The idea repelled him yet he could not stop dwelling on it. As he went over the events of that night, a measure of prurience crept into his thoughts, repelling him further. He hewed to the notion that this was how the obsessive mind worked, seeking ever to betray itself, subverting every clean impulse by assigning it a base motive; yet as the days wore on he insisted upon punishing himself for his crimes. Even when occupied by the basics of survival, part of him was always focused upon Peony, upon what he had or hadn’t done.
The matter should have been easy to resolve, but when Sylvia next visited him, George had feared that anything she said about that night would support his self-imposed verdict. Better, he decided, to maintain a modicum of doubt concerning his moral turpitude than to have none. He was unable to perform with Sylvia, excusing his failure by claiming to have stomach trouble, and as they lay listening to the wind flowing across the plain, watching clouds skimming a half-moon that set their edges on silvery fire, he allowed this intimacy to change his mind and blurted out what had happened between him and Peony the day before, and asked Sylvia if she had come to him the night following the rescue, because he feared now that it had not been her.
She was silent for a beat and then turned to face him. ‘Is that what’s got you in a twist? Of course it was me!’ She gave him a playful punch. ‘I’m insulted you didn’t recognize me!’