An Emergence of Green (19 page)

As she lay in her bed his angry presence seemed to radiate through the walls of the house. But he had every right to be angry, she reflected…and she would make it up to him tomorrow, somehow.

She turned her thoughts from him, but her mind retreated again, from analysis of what had happened today, from its meaning. There was one distilled fact—that she longed to be in Val’s arms now, against her softness.

Images of Val’s body, memories of her surrender to that powerful nudity coursed through her. Her body aching with want, she rolled over onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow.

Carolyn drove to her house by rote, her hands gripping the steering wheel, a thickness in her throat she could scarcely swallow past. The day’s work seemed in the remote past; she had performed her job automatically, her mind skimming over its surface. As she turned onto her block she felt momentarily dizzy from the surge of adrenalin. Would Val be there, would she be in the backyard swimming as she always was?

She glimpsed Val, in cutoffs and a white T-shirt, sitting at the top of the three small brick steps that led to her front door.

She parked carefully, using the electronic door opener to close the garage behind her. Faintly, shakily, she walked out onto the driveway and to her front door.

Unrestricted by a bra, Val’s breasts strained against the thin fabric of the T-shirt, flattened slightly by the cloth barrier, the taut nipples starkly outlined. Carolyn reached to her, to take the opulence in her hands. Val stopped her, taking Carolyn’s hands in hers. She removed the set of keys from the side of Carolyn’s shoulder bag, examined them, unerringly chose the house key.

Carolyn dropped her purse onto the small table in the entryway and walked through the cool house knowing Val was following. In the guest room she turned and again reached for what she wanted, tugging the T-shirt up to clasp the bare breasts in her hands, then burying her face in them, opening her mouth to take the soft warm flesh into her, her tongue avid on a swollen nipple. She felt Val’s hands at the zipper of her dress, felt clothing being loosened, falling from her, felt Val’s hands slide inside her pantyhose to pull them over her hips. She stepped from Val, stripping the pantyhose off as she tugged at Val’s cutoffs.

She was shocked by the heat of Val’s body. The strength of Val’s arms forced the breath from her. She arched into the heated softness and pulled Val’s mouth to hers and wrapped her arms around the thickest part of her back, craving that heated flesh in all the hollows of her body; and as Val lowered her to the bed, she raised her legs to lock them around her.

Val’s tongue thrust in and out of her mouth, the bed rocked and creaked. She answered the gradual but ever-increasing tempo of Val’s body with her own urgent rhythm, writhing under Val with the brilliance of her own sensations, the fierce throbbing between her legs. In shuddering intensity Val pressed herself fully into her, and Carolyn’s body absorbed the quivering height of her coming.

They lay fused together. Then Val lifted her body away.

As cool air struck her nudity Carolyn felt exposed beyond nakedness, rigid with want, aching between her legs, her nipples so taut that the first touch of Val’s mouth on her breasts was unbearable and she pulled Val’s mouth away. Val lay down between her legs, her palms sliding up Carolyn’s thighs.

Her eyes squeezed shut in her need, she did not understand what would happen to her until Val’s mouth came to her. Instantly remembering Paul’s revulsion, she froze.

There was a smothered, choking sound from Val, and her hands released Carolyn’s thighs to grip the bedspread. Carolyn felt her mouth as a roughness, a hungry searching. Val’s hands came to her again, to press Carolyn’s thighs tightly up against her warm face. There was the sound again from Val’s throat and then Val’s mouth softened, stilled, opened.

She was melting from each stroke, she was in the very heart of pleasure, each stroke on the jeweled center of her was perfect and she spread her legs fully; she would die if the strokes stopped. The strokes moved, just slightly, and frenzied in her diminished pleasure she seized Val’s hair, her two hands holding Val’s head viselike as the strokes quickened and created new and greater ecstasy. On the very edge of orgasm she hovered exquisitely, knowing that in the next instant she would come, the next instant, the next instant—and then she did come, from the roots of her hair, from everywhere, consumed with her coming.

She settled slowly onto the bed, her body light and so utterly empty she thought she would float.

Val’s disembodied voice vibrated above her, speaking the first words between them: “God, you love that—you absolutely love it.”

Carolyn spoke with difficulty, her mind a thickening gray swirl of cotton. “I don’t…want you ever…to do that again.”

She awakened at four-thirty. The bedspread had been pulled up around her; her dress had been hung in the closet, her other clothing lay folded neatly on a chair. She sat up to read a note propped on the dresser: I’LL BE AT THE BEACH HOUSE ALL DAY TOMORROW.
I won’t, she thought, I can’t let this happen again.

She had an hour before she had to begin preparations for dinner. She lay back, and then rolled over, tears leaking from her eyes into the pillow as she remembered, the euphoria of her body dissipating in the heat of reawakened desire.

Paul watched Carolyn stare at the TV screen as if she were newly converted to the ritual of Monday Night Football. “So they had to call off the presidential election,” he said.

Her response was an absent nod.

“Goddammit, Carolyn.” She looked up at him in alarm. “You haven’t heard one thing I said since I got home.”

She shook the ice cubes in the drink she had not touched, placed it on the coaster, and rubbed her eyes.

“Bad enough you don’t sleep with me, you don’t even listen when I talk.” Her sigh pushed his anger higher. “You say you need time—how
much
time?”

“I don’t know…till it’s right again.” The green eyes looking into his were wide and grave. “How can you want me when I feel like this?”

“I always want you.” He added pointedly, “If you committed murder I’d forgive you. And want you.”

“That’s crazy. You can’t mean that.”

He considered his statement only briefly. “I do mean it. Whatever you did, I’d love you and want you.”

“But I don’t want you to love me like that. It’s as if nothing about me matters. As if your love has nothing to do with anything about me. I don’t want that from anyone.”

“Everything matters about you, that’s just the point,” he said, shaking his head at her vehemence, smiling at her silly logic. Women were such a goddamn pain in the ass. “You’re stuck with how I love you. Believe me, a lot of women—”

There was a buzzing sound in the kitchen and she went off to see about the microwave and their dinner. He sat down in the blue armchair and propped his feet on the ottoman, admiring his slippers deep brown leather, ridiculously expensive—she had given them to him last Christmas.

After dinner he divided his attention between the football game and a competitive report he was formulating for a new product line of featherweight tubing. He raised his voice to ask, “Princess, what are you doing?”

“Just straightening up,” she called from the kitchen, banging a cupboard door in emphasis.

All she did these days was clean and tidy. Or go over to that Amazon bitch’s house. Come to think of it—why hadn’t she gone over there tonight? She always went there on Monday nights, part of her justification being that she’d leave him to his football game.

For a moment he allowed himself to hope; then he realized that if there were a breach with the Amazon, Carolyn would be back sleeping with him again. Probably the Amazon had plans tonight, maybe with her bratty kid. That Amazon bitch, still laughing up her sleeve at him—knowing he hated all this time Carolyn was spending with her and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it.

Eight miserable nights. Nine, now that tonight looked to be no different. She missed it too, goddammit. Look at her—nervous, jumpy, hardly eating any dinner. Bad day at the office, she says.
Bullshit, I say. After eight years I should know. She needs it just like Rita needed it, just like I need it.

“Princess,” he called, “you can come out now, football game’s almost over.”

When would she stop this craziness? The image came to him of the way he lifted Carolyn’s hips off the bed as he slid into her, and he squeezed his eyes shut to drive off the vision, stirring uncomfortably with his partial erection.

She came into the living room and glanced at her watch. “Merv Griffin’s on.” She went toward the guest room.

Her watch—fourteen carat gold, two small diamonds, seven hundred wholesale. Four years ago this Christmas—or was it five? He had been so sure she wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t approve somehow, would make him take it back…but she had fastened it onto her wrist and that had been that. He concentrated on his report again.

She came out of the guest room tying the belt of a white terry cloth robe, face cream glistening on the warm tan of her face. She curled up in her usual corner of the sofa and began to brush her hair.

Why had he ever stopped brushing her hair at night? It had been years…He longed to feel the silk running through his hands again.

His attention was absorbed by a chase scene on the television screen. When the scene faded into a commercial he glanced at her, about to speak, and saw that she lay with her head on the sofa back, gazing at the gray painting.

He glared balefully at it. What was there, what did she see? He could do as well by collecting gray ash and smearing it over canvas. He returned his attention to his report.

When next he looked at her she was asleep, her head tucked into the corner of the sofa, arms hugging her body. He waited until the program ended, and then through the ten o’clock news, wanting to keep her with him even asleep. He went to her, knelt before her.

“Princess,” he whispered, aching with love and desire, kissing her forehead.

She awakened reluctantly. Her eyes heavy-lidded, she gathered her robe around her. Almost as an afterthought she kissed him on the cheek—he grieved that it was unshaven—and then she got up; he watched her walk slowly, yawning, into the guest room.

She awoke at two o’clock. Quietly, she made herself a cup of coffee, and turned on a small lamp in the living room and sat on the sofa, reflecting wryly that unlike Scarlett O’Hara she would prefer never having to think about anything, ever. Surely not about Paul, and surely not about Val.

She curled up in the corner of the sofa and contemplated her painting in the chill of the dim room, sipping her coffee, imagining the sound and smell of rain.

She rinsed her cup and returned to bed. Like oncoming rain, drowsiness descended in a gradual enveloping. Her pillow was soft against her face, like Val’s breasts; she pressed her face into the softness.

The only way to bring normalcy back into her life, she decided, was to do all the things that were routine and normal. Like going to work today and concentrating on her job—and ignoring these images and feelings that were compelling her to go to the beach house instead. She yanked the pillow out from under her head, pressed her face into the firm mattress.

When she rose for work she walked grimly into the shower and turned the cold water tap.

She drove to her office in the gray overcast, considering whether she should call Val and tell her she could not come to the beach house that day. But the wording in the note was not an invitation, just a statement of where Val would be—and her own resolve was not so strong that the sound of Val’s voice…Val would know soon enough that she would not be there.

She honked furiously at a jogger who had stepped off the curb. He cast a frightened glance at her, rapidly backpedaled, and sped around the corner. At work, she concentrated with some success on the computer-generated figures she was assessing for the quarterly employment forecast. The office Muzak, which she had become used to and seldom consciously heard, began a disemboweled version of a song that nagged at her with its familiarity. She put the computer sheets aside to listen, determined to remember. And she did remember: “Every Breath You Take.” She had last heard it on the radio coming back from Santa Barbara with Val, on the way to the beach house…

She bent over her desk, as defenseless as if caught in a sudden deluge, flooded with the memory of Val’s mouth, memory so intimate and detailed and vivid that her legs trembled and opened and spread apart, her knees pressing feverishly into the hard edge of the desk, the throbbing between her legs of unendurable intensity, as if she were again feeling that warm delicate tongue.

“Carolyn?”

She started violently, feeling the color drain from her face. She stared at her boss, amazed and mortified; she had been fumbling with the belt of her pants, and if he had come in only moments later he would have discovered her with her hand inside…

“Carolyn, you’re as white as a sheet. Are you coming down with something?”

A few minutes later she left her office, having agreed that she should go home to fend off what must surely be an onslaught of the flu.