“Turn over,” she said, softly. Then he felt her hand at the small of his back, just to the right of where his spine ended, at the very epicenter of his pain.
“How did you know?” he mumbled, half into the soft mattress. “How did you know exactly where?”
There was a hint of a laugh. “I just knew,” she said. “Undo your pants.”
He managed to lift enough to get the buckle and zipper loose, then helped her peel away the jeans and undershorts.
She pushed upward on his polo shirt. “This, too.”
He tossed it aside and sank again into the feather mattress. The sunlight had warmed the room, and the air felt good on his naked skin. He felt her climb onto the bed next to him.
She placed both her hands on his back again and held them there, as if feeling for something. She took them away and put them back again in a slightly different position. Then again.
He had nearly drifted off, but now he became fully alert. Her hands were growing warm. Not simply the warmth of skin against skin, but a heat he had never felt before from another human being. It grew until he thought he would be burned. Then she withdrew her hands. When she replaced them, they were cooler, and she began to gently massage the place at the center of the pain. He felt a deep relaxation coming, of muscles he had not known were there.
“Have you ever done this before?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Did you mother tell you what to do?”
“No. She just said I’d know.”
Howell moved his body gingerly in a way that would have, a few minutes before, caused him agony. Nothing happened.
“Not yet,” she said. “Don’t move yet. Let me do the moving.” She began to move her fingers up his back, feeling her way, seeming to pull at his spine. She placed the heel of one hand at the base of his skull and the other in the small of his back and pushed in opposite directions. She began massaging his neck and shoulders, then stopped, got up for a moment and returned. She began again, this time using oil, which she warmed in her hands. She moved slowly down each side of his back, rubbing away tenseness, then to his buttocks, pressing hard with the heels of her hands into the large muscles. At one moment, her hand brushed across his anus and made his breath quicken, then she moved down to his legs and eventually, his feet. She stopped and sat quietly for a moment. He lay still, breathing deeply. “That’s all I can do for your back right now,” she said. She seemed to be breathing rapidly. “Lie still for a few minutes and rest. Then get dressed and come downstairs. I want to check on Mama.” She left.
He lay on the feather bed and tried to recapture what had just happened, but it flew from him. Finally, knowing that she would not come back, he got up and dressed. It was not until he was halfway down the stairs that he realized that he was moving without pain or restriction for the first time in days. There was some soreness in his back, as if he had just played some strenuous game, but no pain. He felt light and easy on his feet. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Leonie came out of her mother’s bedroom. They walked out on the porch together.
“I’d like to thank her,” he said.
“She’s asleep. You can see her another time.”
“I hardly know how to thank you. I’ve no pain at all in my back. I can tap-dance again.”
She laughed. “I’m glad to hear it. Mama says I’ll have to do it again, to make it permanent.”
“Well, you won’t get an argument out of me. I could come back whenever you like, or…” He hesitated. “Will you come to the cabin?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Tomorrow night?” He was already thinking of what to say to Scottie. Work, maybe. He would say he could only work at night.
“Not at night. Only in the daytime, when I can get away.” She laughed again. “Anyhow, you’re busy at night.”
“I can get free.”
“Only in the daytime.”
“All right.”
Driving back to the cabin, he thought about the Kelly family, why they were the way they were. He pushed the thought away. That was all over. The old man, Patrick, was dead, and there was nothing wrong with Leonie. He wanted her. Elizabeth came into his mind for a moment, but he pushed her away.
12
Howell was setting the dinner table when Scotty arrived. She stepped inside the door and stopped in her tracks.
“You sonofabitch,” she cried, “you’ve been faking all along.”
“No, no, I…”
She advanced toward him across the room. “You just wanted to be nursed and have your back rubbed, didn’t you?”
“No, listen, I’m healed! Really, I am!” He did an awkward, mock soft-shoe.
She watched him in amazement. “You really went to Mama Kelly, right? You did it!”
“I did, indeed.” It didn’t seem necessary for him to tell her that he had been ministered to by daughter, not mama.
“And it worked? It really worked?”
Howell put down the plates he had been holding, bent over, and touched his toes.
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
“Probably. But before that, you’ll be served my famous spaghetti.”
“Famous for what? Ptomaine?”
Howell clutched his chest. “You wound me, madam. Before the evening’s over, you’ll apologize.”
An hour and a half later, she drained her wine glass and put it down. “I apologize,” she said, contritely.
“Told you so.”
“I didn’t get ptomaine, just ordinary indigestion.”
“There’s nothing ordinary about the indigestion you get from my spaghetti. It matches anything you might get in any of the greasy spoons you have to eat in when you’re a reporter. It’s a Pulitzer indigestion.”
“Say, now that you bring it up, what happens when you get the Pulitzer Prize?”
“They give you a thousand dollars, and you become a legend in your time.”
“No, no, I mean, what happens on the day. How do they tell you you’ve won it?”
Howell leaned back and took a sip of his wine. “I think somebody knows something a little early,” he said. “I got a call from my editor at the Times asking me to come to New York; he didn’t say for what. The news came over the AP wire that afternoon. There were five bells on the teletype, and the thing started to print: ‘The Board of Trustees of Columbia University today announced the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism.” They didn’t keep me in suspense. “The Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting was awarded to John Howell of the New York Times. Then all the others were announced. There was a little impromptu party in the executive editor’s office, and then he took a bunch of us to ”21“ for the best dinner I ever had.”
“Wow,” Scotty said, softly. “I want it to happen to me just like that.”
“Hang in there, kid; you never know.”
“Do you ever miss the Times?” she asked. “Would you go back?”
“Sometimes,” he said. God, how he missed it. “I think it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever go back. They say you can leave the Times once for another love, so to speak, but not twice. I’ve only left once, of course, but somehow, I don’t think they liked it very much.” That was an understatement, he thought. They had offered him the best thing going, and he had turned it down. They didn’t like being turned down.
“Listen,” she said, “is your back really cured?”
“You bet.”
“You can screw, and everything?”
“And everything.”
“Don’t tell me, show me,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table.
As she headed past him toward the bedroom, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him. With his teeth he pulled the front of her T-shirt out of her jeans and pushed his tongue into her navel.
Scotty made a little noise and peeled the T-shirt over her head, exposing the beautifully shaped breasts which had always appealed so much to Howell. He bit the nipples, which leapt out at him. She unzipped her jeans, pushed them down, kicked them off and surprised him by climbing so that her knees were resting on the arms of his chair. He pushed his face into the mound of hair and opened her with his tongue. Scotty was now biting off tiny yells. She was pulling his head into her, and for a moment, Howell thought he would suffocate, but he couldn’t stop. Within less than a minute she was coming noisily, shouting her delight.
Howell scooped her up in his arms and swept her toward the bed. Then he was out of his own clothes and into her, moving with slow, shallow strokes. He pulled her legs up over his shoulders and, very slowly, slid more and more of himself into her until, finally, she was panting and laughing.
His arousal had started with Leonie, that afternoon, and now he had an outlet for it. Both women were in his mind as he brought Scotty to orgasm again, then again. Finally, he came with her, shouting with her, rocking the bed until he thought it would collapse. He rolled over, and she lay on top of him, their sweat mingling.
“Johnny,” she said, “I’ve done my share of fucking, but never in my whole life was it like that.”
“Me, either,” he said, weakly. “Listen, Scotty, I want to be straight with you…”
“Yeah?”
“Look, I’m just coming out of a marriage that didn’t work, and it was my fault, all of it. I feel as if I’m in bed with you on false pretenses.”
“Listen, sport, there was nothing false about what we just did.”
“Yeah, well, I feel that way, too, but I just don’t want you to expect too much of me.”
Scotty turned on her side and put her head on his shoulder. “Johnny, I’ve been stuck up here with nobody, and I mean nobody even to spend an evening with, let alone make love to. I like you, really I do; I think we’ve become friends. But that’s enough for me; is it enough for you? Are you looking for somebody to be in love with you?”
“Oh, no,” Howell said, with sincerity. “I don’t think I could handle that right now.”
“You like me? Are we friends? Do you feel close?”
“Yes, I do. I really do.”
“Well, then, as long as we seem to have slid into this wonderful patch of screwing, why don’t we just ride it out, so to speak, and see how it goes?”
He kissed her on the top of the head. “I think that’s a marvelous idea,” he said. Then, drained and shattered, he fell soundly asleep.