“Corin?” she asked him suddenly.
“Yes, love?”
“How old are you?”
“What? You know that!”
“But I don’t! I just realized… I don’t know how old you are. You seem so much older than me-not in appearance, I mean! Well, partly in appearance, but also in… in other ways,” she floundered. Corin smiled.
“I’ll be twenty-seven next birthday,” he said. “There now-are you appalled that you’ve married such an old-timer?”
“Twenty-seven is not so very old! I shall be nineteen in just a couple of months. But… you seem to have lived here for a lifetime already. You’re as settled here as if you’d been here fifty years!”
“Well, I first came out here with my father, on a business trip-prospecting for new beef suppliers. My father traded in meat, did I tell you that? He sold to all the best restaurants in New York, and for a time I was destined to go into the business with him. But I knew as soon as I got out here that we were at the wrong end of that chain of supply, and I never left. I was just sixteen when I decided to stay on out here and learn about raising the beeves instead of just buying their dead flesh.”
“Sixteen!” Caroline echoed. “Weren’t you scared, to leave your family like that?” she asked. Corin thought for a moment, then shook his head.
“I’ve never been much afraid of anything. Until I asked you to dance,” he said. Caroline blushed happily, straightening her skirts.
“It really is hot, isn’t it? Even here in the shade,” she commented.
“You want to know the best way to cool down?”
“What is it?”
“Swimming!” Corin declared, springing to his feet and pulling his shirt up over his head.
“Swimming! What do you mean?” Caroline laughed.
“I’ll show you!” he said, sliding off his boots, kicking his pants to one side and charging into the pool, as naked as Adam, with a wild whooping and splashing. Caroline stood up and watched in utter amazement. “Come in, sweetheart! It’s the best feeling!” he called.
“Are you crazy?” she cried. “I can not swim here!”
“Why ever not?” he asked, swimming the length of the small pool with broad strokes of his arms.
“Well… well, it’s…” she waved an incredulous arm. “It’s muddy! And it’s out in the open-anybody could see! And I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Sure you do! It’s right there under your dress,” Corin grinned. “And who’s to see? There’s nobody around for miles-it’s just you and me. Come on! You’ll love it!”
Caroline walked uncertainly to the edge of the bank, unlaced her boots and hesitated. Sunlight danced prettily on the water’s surface and tiny fish were lazing in the warm shallows. The sun beat down on her, scorching the top of her head and making her clothes feel tight and stifling. She bent down, pulled off her boots and stockings and put them carefully on the bank, then, gathering her skirt to her knees, she stepped in until the water lapped her ankles. The relief of cold water on her clammy skin was her undoing.
“Oh, my goodness,” she breathed.
“Now, how much better does that feel?” Corin called to her, coming over to where she stood. The white of his buttocks gleamed, distorted, beneath the surface, and Caroline laughed.
“You look just like a frog in a bucket!” she told him.
“Oh, really?” he asked, flicking a spray of water up at her. With a squeal she retreated. “Come on, come in and swim! I dare you!”
Caroline looked over her shoulder, as if an audience might have appeared, ready to gasp in dismay at her wantonness, then she undid her dress and stays and draped them over a willow branch. She kept her chemise on, the bare skin of her shoulders crawling, feeling utterly conspicuous, then went back to the edge of the pool with her arms wrapped protectively around her. There she paused, mesmerized by the feel of the mud as it squeezed up between her toes. She had never felt anything like it, and hitched up her petticoat to look down, flexing her feet and smiling. When she looked up to remark upon it, she found Corin watching her with a rapt expression.
“What is it?” she asked, alarmed.
“You. Just look at you… You’re so brave. And so beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said simply. Water had splayed his hair across his forehead, making him younger, boyish.
Caroline had only intended to paddle, but the touch of the water and the thrill of Corin’s words made her bold, and she waded in up to her waist, the water swirling the translucent folds of her chemise around her legs. With a nervous laugh she lay back and let the water buoy her up. It felt chilly as it fingered through her hair.
“Come here and kiss me,” Corin demanded.
“With regret, sir, I am far too busy swimming,” Caroline replied grandly, paddling away with an ungainly stroke. With a start, she realized she hadn’t swam since childhood, at her family’s summer house.
“I shall have a kiss, even if I must chase you down for it,” Corin told her. Laughing and kicking her legs Caroline tried to escape; but she did not try very hard.
The sun was setting as they came over the last rise and saw the lights of the ranch house glimmering below them. Caroline’s skin felt hot and raw where the sun had singed it, and her dress felt odd without the chemise underneath, which was laid out drying on the back of the buggy. She licked her lips, tasted the mineral tang of the creek water. They both carried the smell of it on their skin, in their hair. They had made love on the riverbank, and the languor of it lingered in her muscles, leaving her heavy and warm. Suddenly, she did not want to arrive back at the house. She wanted the day to last for ever; she and Corin in a shady place on a hot day, making love over and over again, without another thought or care in the world. As if reading her mind, Corin reined the horse to a halt, surveying his home for a moment before turning to her.
“Are you ready to go back?” he asked.
“No!” Caroline said fiercely. “I… I wish every day could be like today. It was so perfect.”
“It truly was, sweetheart,” Corin agreed, taking her hand and raising it to his lips.
“Promise me we’ll go back there. I won’t go one inch closer to the house until you promise me.”
“We have to go back to the house! Night’s coming… but I do promise you we’ll go there again. We can go back whenever we want to-we will go back, and we’ll have many more days like today. I swear it,” he said.
Caroline looked at the outline of him in the indigo twilight, caught the gleam of his eye, the faint shape of a smile. She put her hand out and touched his face. “I love you,” she told him simply.
With a shake of the reins the horse began a lazy descent toward the wooden house below, and with each step it took, Caroline felt a sense of vague foreboding growing inside her. She turned her eyes to the dark ground ahead and was suddenly afraid, in spite of Corin’s pledge, that no day to come would be as sweet as that which had just passed.
Chapter 3
mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight
I have been trying to remember good things about Henry. Perhaps we owe him that, because we got to grow up, live lives, fall in love, fall out again. He liked to tell stupid jokes, and I loved to hear them. Beth was always kind, and took me with her, and helped me, but she was rather serious, even as a child. Once I laughed so hard at Henry’s jokes that I nearly wet myself-the fear of it abruptly stopped the giggles, sent me scrambling for the toilet with one fist corked between my legs. What do you call a dinosaur with only one eye? Do-you-think-he-saw-us. What do you call a deer with no eyes? No idea. Why do elephants paint the soles of their feet yellow? So they can hide upside down in custard. What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot. What’s small, brown and wrinkly and travels at two hundred miles an hour? An electric currant. He could keep it up for hours, and I pushed my fingers into my cheeks where they ached.