Sister Wolf (12 page)

How much kissing any couple does standing up is a matter of stamina. If they discover that their mouths fit, that their teeth have nerve endings, and that they like quick tongues, their knees will take longer to buckle, but they will fall of their own weight, eventually, on the floor or the bed. If they are wearing light summer clothes and no underwear, the clownish business of undressing is accomplished faster. The man’s socks give the only trouble, since removing socks, when he is lying on his back, requires two hands and a sudden forward arching of his body.

The night the wolves brought Gabriel to Marit, they had gone to bed in the dark; the only memory they had of each other’s body was lodged in their fingers and on their skins. They could see each other now, the pale one and the dark one, against the background of royal-blue fabric patterned with peacock feathers. They touched what they saw, reviving memories and laying in new ones: Marit’s breasts, round and full, but placed high; the line of down that led from Gabriel’s navel to his pubic curls. In pubic patches, the spectrum runs from modest to riotous: hers was discreet and close-fitting; his was woolen. They did not break their pace with a long spell of musing and looking. Marit and Gabriel had the same metabolism; they wanted it fast, not slow. They wanted peaks, not erotic bypaths, no stopping and starting, no ice cubes, no garters, no honey and pepper on the lingam, no foreign inserts that play the chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth. They paused once, on their knees, to look at themselves in the mirror, whose antique silver backing had worn and reflected them chastely.

Of the act itself, there is never any memory, no more than there is of being stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, or of the pain of tonsils being cauterized. Some of the stage business is remembered later, and some of the sound cues: Gabriel covered Marit; she did not have to guide him in; they both made a lot of noise; the door to the bathroom was open and a tap was dripping. If Marit had been more experienced, she would have known enough to be grateful to Gabriel for not starting up to soap and rinse his penis. They had not pulled back the covers; there would be crusty white spots on the peacock feathers.

Gabriel collapsed on his back like a sprinter after a race. He did not open his eyes, even to look at her, until he woke up later when the room was nearly dark. Marit curled in as close as she could, on her side, with her head on his shoulder. She was not at peace, but she would not move, or disturb him. She did not know how to nap or doze, so she was consigned to keeping the vigil. Their skins were stuck together. Her arm, which was lying below his belly, had the beginning of a cramp in the wrist. She flexed her hand slowly, but he flinched and murmured. She scanned his face; he seemed to be frowning. He had that look, which she remembered from their first encounter, of a soldier in effigy, alien and complete and locked away, making a lie of their perfect connection. There was no clock in the room, and she could not calculate the time. His features were drawn and sharpened with fatigue; he might sleep for an hour, or through the night. She felt a surge of guilt for her greed, which had drained the spirit from him. How was she going to lie without moving for even an hour, with one arm bent under her like a broken wing? Her other arm, resting on the hair that grew above his penis, had started to itch.

A breeze had blown up outside, as it does in the foothills, to chase away the heat of summer afternoons. Their sweat had cooled, and Marit was chilly except where their bodies were touching. There was a lap robe draped over the foot of the chaise longue, if only she could get it. Why was she clinging like a limpet to a reef, alive with discomfort, cut off from grace by the stony form of a sleeping man? She was not the same girl; she had turned into a craven mendicant. The world had stopped until he woke up. When he did wake up, they would have to begin from zero. Shared ecstasy gave her no rights and no expectations; it had wiped out the past and created a void around them. That was not exact: she thought she knew what to expect. He would open his eyes, as dazed as a victim of concussion, search the room for some sign of his location, and stare at her as if she were a stranger. He had said the magic I Love You. He had said it more than once, along with other binding endearments. But his words and caresses were single and separate; they did not build a personal history.

Daughters of Magyars do not lie shivering in the service of commoners. Marit pulled away from him and scrambled off the bed, bouncing the mattress and making the bedposts vibrate. She shot a rueful look over her shoulder, but he had not moved. He was dead, for her purposes; he belonged entirely to himself. Her white flannels and blue linen shirt were heaped at her feet—boyish rumpled clothes that usually gave her Dutch courage. His khaki trousers, with a belt through the waist, were piled under hers. Another menial instinct took hold of her. She held up the pants by the cuffs, bringing the creases together so that she could fold them over the chair and hang out the wrinkles. As she folded them, his wallet fell out of the back pocket, with a plonk, on the floor. There are very few girls, newly in love and muddled by it, who would put a billfold full of secrets back in its place, and not stand rooted with alarm like a soldier who knows that he is holding a live grenade. Marit hunkered down out of eyeshot from the bed, bare and trembling, but no longer from the cold.

It was a cheap, battered wallet, coming unsewn, filled with plastic windows. Some still-benign part of her brain remembered a drawerful of Vlado’s accessories, among which was an elegant passport-size case of Italian leather. She would give it to Gabriel; she would like to give him beautiful things. There were cards in the windows, nothing to account for her sped-up heartbeat—Social Security, Walker Niles Memorial Library, draft status, blood type, driver’s license. Other items were stuffed behind the cards that showed through the plastic. She squeezed apart one of the windows and pulled out a piece of ruled paper, which was written on in a crabbed, miniature script. The paper had been folded many times, and she leaned close to read it:
hooded merganser, scaup, rough-legged hawk, brown creeper, pine siskin, dark-eyed junco.
… It was his life-list of birds, with numbers beside the names for the month, day, and year in which he had sighted the species.

She smiled to herself and decided to open the other windows, in the interest of thoroughness, like a chore to be got out of the way. In the center of the second window was a stiff piece of paper, which stuck. She pulled it out carefully. It was a photograph, in profile, of a girl. Squeezing open the next window, her fingers fumbled. There was something inside. The same girl, full-face and smiling. A girl like an illustration from the fairy books, the kind of girl who turns into trees, wears a train of dewdrops, is borne across the waves on a cockleshell. On the back of the photographs, written in the same tiny script as the life-list, she read “Francesca, Vinalhaven, 1955.”

Marit sat down on the floor, crossed her legs, and arched her back. She could hear her heart thudding in half time in her temples. There was no other sound, inside or outside the room, no crickets or tree frogs, no breeze through the leaves, no owl or animal cries, or cars on the road. She was as still as the world around her, calm and suspended, like the landscape when a tornado is in the neighborhood. She felt no pain as she had at the fair. Gabriel’s student seemed like a figment of a rival; the fairy creature in the snapshot was a fact of his secret life. Marit felt poised and excited, as if she had always known that this girl existed, or someone like her. Her eyesight was as clear as her brain, and she scanned the darkening room like a hunting cat.

Gabriel was sitting up. He held out his arms to her.

“I had a bad dream,” he said. “You went away.”

She saw how frail and unguarded he looked. He had slept his hair into cowlicks. The wallet was still in her hands. There was no way to hide it.

“You weren’t dreaming,” she answered. “I got out of bed because I was cold and got right into trouble.”

He reached over to the bedside table and turned on the lamp. She held up the wallet.

“It fell out of your pants,” she said, “but I didn’t have to open it.”

“Open it, baby, open it. I’m yours, it’s yours, what’s the problem?”

Marit hung her head. “Perhaps you should have told me.”

“Told you what? How much time have we had for talking?”

She could not look him in the face. She was losing bravado like an airplane losing altitude.

“The pictures.” She paused for a second, waiting for the sword to fall. “Snapshots,” she said, bearing down hard on both parts of the word. It was taking Gabriel a long time to react. It had already taken him six or seven seconds. When she was swimming underwater, she could only hold her breath for a count of ten.

Now he was down on the floor in front of her, so nimble and goatlike that she had not heard him climb off the bed. He leaned over to kiss her shoulder, just above her breast. She reached out and cupped his soft penis, forgetting that she had no rights, that her head was on the block for committing Pandora’s crime. He took the wallet away from her and opened it. She had not filed the full-face snapshot, which floated down on the rug.

“My poor Francesca.” He shook his head. “We were going to be married. I killed her.”

Marit shifted her position. There was a note of piety in his voice that made her restless. He clasped his hands in his lap and lifted up his eyes, like old paintings of St. Peter Martyr with the axe through his skull.

“I blew up at her,” Gabriel recited, “about a piece of nonsense. She ran out of the house in front of a truck. She is buried at Matlock. I go there to see her. For a while I used to go there twice a week.”

Marit reached for her shirt, in case it could give her some protection. She pulled it on.

“I have a black temper,” Gabriel challenged her. “My temper killed her.”

Marit stood up and backed away to the window, pulling her shirttails together to cover her groin.

“Now she’s your life’s work.” Marit faced him with her chin up. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

Gabriel frowned. He did not unclasp his hands.

“It gives your life a shape,” said Marit, “mourning and repenting.”

He drew his knees in close to his chest and dug his clasped knuckles into his forehead.

“I want to be rid of her,” he said. “She clings to me. She wants to take me with her.”

“You adore it.” Marit showed her teeth. “You’re a living shrine.”

Gabriel lay back on the floor, one arm covering his face. When he spoke he sounded sad and far away.

“How hard your voice is.”

Marit took criticism badly, especially when it was justified. It is truer to say that she took any comment on her actions, however apt, and heard it as criticism. When she was stung, she raised the ante and fought like an animal. In another century she would have whipped her critic for lèse majesté. The process was circular: in the end it was herself she was punishing, hating herself more than she hated her critic, so that there was no way out but weeping and groveling and prostration.

“I see. I’ve nicked your plaster saint. I’ve tracked mud into the shrine.” She could not stop. Her nostrils began to prickle, an early warning of tears.

He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at her with calm, mild eyes. His nakedness was noble and candid, and gave him the advantage over her.

“I told you something that I am ashamed of. I wanted your help. Instead you are jealous of a dead girl.”

“I’m jealous, all right.” Marit was all precarious swagger. “I’d like to uproot her and scatter her.”

“Jealousy is a demeaning emotion. It is a waste of energy for a spirit like yours.”

Marit felt a knot forming under her rib cage. She had gone too far. His lofty tone was a sign that he had hardened his heart against her. A wave of grief or sickness made her dizzy. She slid to the floor and tried to meet his eyes. He was smoothing the young girl’s photograph between his palms, as if Marit’s touch had wrinkled and bent the paper.

Marit had never asked for pardon since her childhood, and her lips would not pronounce the simple formula. She said his name and waited for an answer. She spoke again, “Please, Gabriel”; and once more, “Please …”

He looked at her with courteous disinterest, like a doctor who has squeezed an ailing patient into a schedule that was already overcrowded.

“Please talk to me. I have to hear. What was she like?” Marit pressed her back against the wall to brace herself for what he might disclose.

“She was gentle and frail.” He studied the picture. He spoke like someone who is thinking aloud. “She forgot to eat. I had to feed her. I cut the pieces of food very small, or she couldn’t swallow. I gave her drinks made with eggs and she sipped them from a spoon.”

“Was she ill?” Marit kept her voice steady by biting her lip.

“She was ill as a child. I think she had rheumatic fever. She missed a year of school, but she read so much that they put her two grades ahead.”

“A prodigy,” said Marit, whose lower lip was taking a beating. Gabriel stared into the middle distance. He had not heard her.

“She was so small. It was caused by the fever. Her hands were tiny. She had boneless little feet. I came home with a colleague one night and he saw her boots drying outside the door. ‘I didn’t know you had children,’ he said. That was one of our jokes.”

It did not sound funny to Marit, who was trying to take her punishment like a man. She did not question the fitness of her ordeal. If Hell had ten circles, instead of only nine, the tenth would be reserved for the jealous, who must listen, until the trump sounded, to the voice of their lovers extolling the merits of a rival.

Gabriel turned to Marit, but his eyes were fixed and dull. If she left the room, he would have gone on talking, in a voice that was as flat as his gaze, a voice more suited to confessing sins than to singing praises.

“She had no one else to take care of her. Her father was old, the age of a grandfather. Her mother was dead. She was a late-life child. Late-life children are usually gifted, like Francesca.”