Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (56 page)

At first, they danced awkwardly,
Domino keeping a discreet distance, but as she grew more accustomed to the
novelty of the situation and as the music in her ears and the wine in her blood
took over, she relaxed into his light embrace. “Can you believe?” she asked. “I
haven’t danced since my junior prom in Philadelphia.”

“Well, then,” he said, dipping her
gingerly, then pausing as “Stranger in Paradise” faded out and “If I Loved You”
from
Carousel
came on, “consider this your present. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you. Thank you very, very
much.” Her appreciation struck him as touchingly genuine. “When is
your
birthday?”

“It was back in July.”

“And you didn’t celebrate?”

“Lost track of the calendar and
forgot all about it—until sometime in the middle of the night. Then I got up
and went out in the desert and tried to count the stars. Astronomers claim the
human eye can see no more than five thousand stars at any one time, but I swear
I counted nineteen thousand. Not including asteroids and major planets. Of
course, I may have counted some black holes by mistake. But it was a splendid
celebration.”

Domino squeezed his hand and folded
against him, moving in his arms like a pendulum moving in a grandfather clock.
“I should like to have done that for my birthday: counting stars.” She sighed
close to his ear. “Better than vespers, maybe.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, they’re still
up there. Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri, the Big Dipper, Orion, neutron
stars, pulsars, novas, supernovas, red giants, white dwarfs, purple
people-eaters, the whole twinkly-assed crew. We could. . . .” He motioned
toward the door.

“No,” she whispered. “Not tonight. I
must go soon.” Her voice brightened without rising. “But tomorrow night? We
could, if you want, count stars tomorrow night.”

“Sure. I’m free. I’ll meet you around
ten. At the gate.”

“No. It’ll be cold and windy out
there in the open. We’ll meet in the tower. You know? At the top of—what do you
call it? The ladder.”

“As long as it isn’t the corporate
ladder, I’ll be happy to climb it.”

They, in their dancing, had kicked
over all but one of the candles. The dining hall was so faintly illuminated
they could no longer ascertain if Bob and ZuZu were still in the room, yet
Domino’s eyes seemed luminous, even though partially closed. If it was the wine
that was responsible, either on her part or his own, he would ever be wine’s
loyal friend. He swore it.

“My grandmother,” he said, “confessed
to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a
man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a
person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of
Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a
bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and
temporary disguise.”

“Sounds not quite a proper method to
me. Are
you
drunk, Switters?”

“Certainly not. But it’s a state that
might be beneficially attained were I to gain access to that last bottle back
in the kitchen. In the interest of knowledge, of course. We could see if I pass
Maestra’s test.”

“You’ve rearranged enough furniture
for one night.” She smiled, glancing at the combined tabletops over which
they’d been (at times, precariously) skimming. The ballad from
Carousel
had ended and a lively, up-tempo tune from
South Pacific
was intruding
on the mood. She pulled away from him. “See you at the tower. Bring your
calculator.” She was going, and he was prepared to let her go, but, abruptly,
before either of them could step aside, each of their faces moved forward, as
if attracted by a sudden mutual activation of atomic dipoles or else shoved
together by formless relatives of the Asmodeus. And they kissed. They surprised
themselves utterly by kissing.

It wasn’t a lengthy kiss, as kisses
go, yet neither was it a friendly peck. (As the Egyptians knew full well,
Platonism never stood a chance in this world.) It was a kiss of moderate
duration, devoid of all but the sweetest hint of tongue, yet a kiss fraught
with pressure, irrigated with mouth moisture, and animated by some force that
transcended the mere contracting and relaxing of oral musculature. It possessed
a muscular rhythm, however, as well as a kinetic inquisitiveness, and a
systemwide excitation was somehow synergistically precipitated by the crude,
unsanitary, and yet glorious co-mingling of lip meats.

How could anything as commonplace—and
in their pink, fatty, babyish way,
dumb
—as human lips produce such
mysterious pleasure? Accompanied by tiny noises like carp feeding or rubber
stretching or fallen kumquats returning to the branch? Fusing one pair of lips
to another must be akin to attaching an ordinary prefix such as
re
or
a
or
ex
to an ordinary (and rather harsh) verb such as
ward
or
rouse
or
cite
. Looking at it from another angle, their kiss was like a paper
airplane landing on the moon.

When at last they began to pull
apart, a thread of spittle as slender and silky as a spider’s wire connected
them for another second or two, as if they were continents linked by a single
transoceanic cable. Then, with an inaudible pop, they were disconnected,
staring at each other from opposite shores.

“
À demain
,” she said, a little
breathless but not rattled in the least. “Tomorrow night.”

“The stars.”

“Count them.”

“Every damn one of them.”

“Okay.”

The following night, and every night
thereafter for seven months, they lay on a Bedouin carpet in the roofless tower
and looked up at the cat-black sky. Not many stars got counted. On the other
hand, lest one jump to conclusions, not many carnal apples got bobbed, either—at
least not in the sense of conventional sexual intercourse. What transpired
nightly in the room at the top of the tower was at once more uneventful and
more extraordinary than routine copulation and sidereal enumeration. And, no,
that wasn’t a typographical error back there: it persisted for seven months.

The first night that they met in
the tower and lay on the rug (Switters never dared to test that floor with his
feet), admiring a moon that looked as if it had been oiled by a Kurdish
rifleman and pointing at the satellites that skittered from sky-edge to
sky-edge like waterbugs crossing a cow creek, Domino confessed, with a minimum
of embarrassment and no shame at all, that she had “a big crash” on him.
Switters, ever the language man, was on the verge of correcting her English
when it occurred to him that being infatuated with the likes of himself was,
indeed, probably more akin to a “crash” than a “crush.”

He reminded her, as she had once
reminded him, that the very first time he laid eyes on her he’d blurted out
that he loved her. He now had, he said, nothing to add to that declaration nor
nothing to subtract. In all likelihood, he had been, as charged, out of his
cotton-picking mind back then, and whether or not that condition had improved
he was in no position to say. However—
however
—whatever he felt for her
(and he could only describe the emotion as being as satisfyingly poignant as it
was pesteringly agreeable), or she felt for him, it had been established—had it
not?—that he was not her type, since he was a dollar short when it came to
maturity and a day late when it came to peace.

“I may have been wrong about that,”
she conceded. “You are a complicated man, but
happily
complicated. You
have found a way to be at home with the world’s confusion, a way to embrace the
chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It’s all part of
the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have
reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than . . . ummph.”

Although shutting her up was probably
not his sole or even primary motive, he kissed her before she could define him
further. He kissed her hard—and soft and long and deep and dreamily and
urgently, and she kissed him back. In a sense, Domino’s kisses were rather like
Suzy’s, which is to say, they were both eager and shy, adventurous and
uncertain, yet there was a strength in them (or immediately behind them), a
solidity that made him feel that this simple, oddish act of osculation, was
somehow supported by and connected to each and every one of what Bobby Case’s
ol’ Chinese boys called “The Ten Thousand Things.” Indeed, there was a sense in
which a kiss was a thing as well as an act, and Domino’s kiss, inexperienced in
terms of execution but seasoned in terms of foundation, might be compared to
new spring growth on a venerable tree, or (despite Switters’s disrespect for
pethood) a puppy with a pedigree. Moreover, being a thing in and of itself, her
kiss, while undeniably a concretized expression of an emotional state, was not
necessarily a mere prelude to other activity, the leading edge of a larger
biological urge. He liked that about it: the self-contained, concentrated
isness
or
kissness
of it, though he would have been the last to maintain that
it failed to encourage larger biological urges.

As a matter of fact, he worked her
chador off her shoulders, unhooked her bra, and bared her breasts. She didn’t
object, though the breasts themselves, livid and alert, seemed almost to blink
in astonishment at their exposure. He kissed them, licked and sucked them,
rolled them in his palms, and squeezed their nipples between thumb and
forefinger as if testing berries for ripeness or turning the knobs of a
particularly delicate scientific instrument—and, actually, when he gently
twisted the rosebud dials, it pumped up the volume of her breathing to a
virtually orgasmic level. When he advanced his explorations and adorations to
the lower half of her body, however, he was rebuffed. And, in truth, he didn’t
mind. He had his hands full—and his mouth full, too—and he was content with
that largess.

After a while, they paused to see if
the stars were still there. Domino fingered her own nipples, perhaps to
calculate the difference between his touch and hers; or, just as likely, to
facilitate a conversational segue. “Have you noticed,” she inquired, “that the
grapes are becoming full on the vine?” She wondered if he might be persuaded to
stick around for the harvest and for the winemaking that would follow. She
thought it only fair, she said, that he help replenish their pantry since he
had done so much to reduce it. Of course, she knew how anxious he was to get
down to Peru, no doubt with good reason. . . .

He interrupted to reveal that he’d
always wanted to participate in a grape-stomping, longed to jump up and down on
tubs of the fruit until his feet, including the spaces between his toes, were
as purple as eggplants or 2-balls, and that he could never fully trust a person
who didn’t find the prospect of squashing grapes in their bare feet
irresistible; but, alas, he feared that stomping grapes on stilts would be
neither very enjoyable nor very effective.

“Silly,” she said. “We are not old
shoeless peasants. We use a press.” Then, as if there was some doubt that he
fully understood the meaning of the word
press
, as applied to separating
articles from their juices, she unzipped his fly and reached into his pants.
When she touched active flesh, she drew back, startled, as though, reaching for
a rope, she’d grabbed a snake by mistake. Switters appreciated this, in that it
mitigated her boldness and reestablished her innocence, but he also appreciated
it when, more cautiously this time, she returned her fingers to the surrogate
grape-bunch and gradually tightened her grip. They kissed. Domino squeezed. She
squeezed rhythmically (instinctively?), relaxing and then increasing tension.
And it wasn’t long before the winepress demonstration produced graphic results.
Needless to say, nobody thought to bottle the Château de Switters Beaujolais
Nouveau, but few would have disagreed that it was a vintage pressing.

They spent the night in each other’s
arms, sleeping only intermittently due to the novelty, the shock, of their
romantic union. And sometime before the sun reclaimed their patch of Syrian
sky, he agreed to stay on at the oasis until the end of October. They both knew
full well that neither her request that he stay nor his consent to do so had
anything especially to do with the actual harvesting of grapes.

The supply truck came, bringing
gasoline, flour, soap, cooking oil, sugar, toothpaste, and salt. It also
brought magazines and mail. Included in the mail was a statement from the
Damascus bank with which the Pachomians did business, and the bottom line was
not encouraging. So few contributions had been deposited in their account
(widows in Chicago and Madrid each sent them a hundred dollars, Sol Glissant
appeared to have forgotten them altogether) that Domino instructed the driver
to reduce their usual petrol order by half next trip and to deliver no
toothpaste or cooking oil at all. They’d clean their teeth with salt and
attempt to make their own oil from the walnuts that would be ripening soon. She
also canceled magazines and papers: they could get their news from the
Internet. She did order, on behalf of Switters and paid for with his deutsche
marks, a five-pack of cigars, a ten-pack of razor blades, and a six-pack of
beer. The driver, who had no idea that there was a man residing at the convent,
gave her a funny look.