Ava, lying between them on the bed, arched her back and licked her lips.
Then Ava wanted them both in her vagina at the same time. It was a difficult, contorted manoeuvre, and Ferris was convinced that it was painful for her. A few days afterward, he phoned and asked her point-blank.
“It was pleasant,” she said, her voice cool. “Should we be talking about this on the phone?”
“It didn’t look like it was pleasant,” he said. “It looked painful. And it felt painful.”
“It hurt you?” she answered, her tone still cool.
“No, damn it. It hurt you. I hurt you.”
“Ferris, sweetie,” she said as if instructing a child. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between pleasure and pain. In any case, if I’d wanted you to stop, I would have said so.”
“You would have.”
“Yes. Don’t you understand that?”
He told her he did.
Ferris realizes that he’s staring at Ava, remembering being in those strange and stranger embraces with her, helplessly recalling her scent and taste and the myriad erotic postures in which he’s seen her exquisite body. He knows more about her, been more intimate with her than any woman he’s been with. At the same time, he knows nothing about her, nothing comfortably human. Doesn’t intimacy leave indelible traces? Where are they, here?
“Don’t, Ferris,” Ava says. “I don’t want to be looked at like that. Not by you, or Vince, or anyone else.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He is sorry. “That certainly isn’t why I’m here.”
“So why are you here, exactly?”
Tough question. Mentally he goes over the list: curiosity about the events of the last ten years, an old friend’s and lover’s distant concern, some personal curiosity about how a beautiful woman has aged. All acceptable motives. But there’s a surprise item on the list, and it isn’t acceptable: Ferris isn’t sure he wouldn’t tumble into the sack with them right now if they proposed it.
He frowns, tries to rid himself of the thought. “Tell me what happened with the child you adopted.”
Ava looks at the floor, and Vince sinks back in his chair with a sigh.
“There’s not much to tell,” he says. “She had learning disabilities, you knew that. She didn’t improve, and by the time she was fifteen, we had a major behaviour problem on our hands. All sorts of incidents, one thing after another. Eventually she was caught breaking into the house of one of our neighbours, and she got sent to a juvenile home. We sprung her, but after that, it was worse. She’d be here for a few days, and then she’d disappear for weeks on end. Then she stopped coming. We don’t even know where she is, now. In jail, I think.”
“I’m sorry,” Ferris says. “What about Bobby?”
“What about him?” Vince replies. “He’s around. He has his own place in town, works, goes to school part-time. He just outgrew the island, that’s all. This isn’t much of a place for young people.”
“Are you two happy?”
Ava answers. “Sometimes. Yes.” There’s a long hesitation. “We’ve been in therapy for three years. That’s helped a lot.”
“What for?” Ferris asks, without thinking.
“It got out of hand,” Vince answers for her. “There was nothing in our lives but sex. It was an addiction.”
Their distance makes it feel more like there’s a continent between them and him rather than a few feet. The distance was there when he arrived, but now it is tangible. And it is growing, solidifying.
“We didn’t understand that, not really. Nobody does, anymore. We thought the pleasure we wanted, or whatever it is life is about, was somewhere else, something else, someone else. That’s what you were all about, what that whole thing was about. It felt like a big mountain we were climbing, but we were only climbing out of ourselves. We discovered that what matters is the village at the base of the mountain. Now we get up in the morning and work on things. One day at a time.”
Ferris can feel disappointment straining against his discretion. Vince has just given him a cliche-ridden Alcoholics Anonymous speech. It’s evidently a sincere one, and the small smile on Ava’s face as he speaks confirms her agreement.
“But you know, Ferris,” Vince says after an awkward silence Ferris doesn’t break, “we’re okay, now. It started to come around when we realized that life isn’t supposed to be easy. None of what we did was a total waste of time. We had to go through it and come out on the other side. I think that’s what you’re doing, too, in your own way. It’s too bad you have to do it alone.”
Ferris shrugs. Maybe, just maybe, it is that simple. The way they lived, the dangers must have kept growing, while the payoffs got smaller, or at least harder to find. Eventually, the accumulated discretions and indiscretions must have toppled over on them in some terrible way. Maybe in the real world, maybe just in their minds. But maybe they just got tired of the complications, and stopped. So maybe the unfinished business he came here to settle isn’t unfinished, and there are no revelations forthcoming.
Well, not quite. Ever since he got on the ferry this morning, he’s been wrestling, somewhere in his subconscious, with the puzzle of how Vince and he performed simultaneous anal and vaginal intercourse with Ava. He’s certain it took place, because he can distinctly remember the sensation of his and Vince’s penises touching through the thin membrane between them. What’s bothering him – what’s been bothering him for a long time – is the configuration.
It was part of an obscure fidelity Ferris kept, and he’d been subtle enough with it that he was certain that neither Vince nor Ava were aware of it. But throughout everything they did, Ferris had not once entered Ava unless they were face to face. Now, suddenly, he realizes the configuration he wants isn’t physically possible. He’s been deluding himself. Vince had been on his back, she kneeling forward on his chest, and Ferris was squatting behind her. In the crudest possible sense, Ferris had fucked her up the ass, impersonally, like a dog would. And for ten years, he’d been blocking the memory of it.
“What’s wrong, Ferris?” he hears Ava asking. His consternation must have shown in his face. “Were you expecting more?”
Ferris looks at the ceiling. “No,” he says. “I just thought of something. It’s obscure stuff. Nothing to do with you.”
He wants to tell Ava he’s sorry, but what he’s sorry about is so oblique there’s no way he can make her understand – even if she wanted to. It’s the truth, but sex delivers an almost infinite number of truths, all equal. It’s also true that he didn’t return after that because he was frightened to. Beyond unrestricted pleasure he’d glimpsed its opposites: violence and pain. And in Ferris’s mind, they had crossed the boundary.
Or maybe that’s what I’m seeing and saying, and Ferris is nothing but a sexual cuckoo that vacated the nest when it got too hot inside. I’d like Ferris to see it, but what’s the point of inflicting my erotic insights on him – or on Vince and Ava? I could do all sorts of comforting things here. I could make Ferris grovel for forgiveness, join their chapter of Sexaholics Anonymous – or form his own. I could force him to admit that he’d started a primary relationship soon after he left, and when that failed, another, ad nauseam. Or less comforting, I could make him confess a secret he’s kept even from himself: that sex was never so good as it was with them, not before, nor after.
But there’s nothing discreet for him to say, nothing he needs to know or say about this. By a different route, he’s come to the same conclusions they have. It’s time to go.
“I should catch the next ferry back,” Ferris says. “But you’re right. Life isn’t supposed to be easy: I just wish I’d known that twenty years ago.”
Ava smiles. It’s a real one this time, and as Ferris gets up to leave, she reaches over and grasps his hand. “So do we,” she says. “But we didn’t.”