Three Women at the Water's Edge Read online

  “It’s getting cold,” Dale replied.

  “Well, it’s late October. We’ll have some more warm days, but summer is definitely over.”

  Then they rode in silence. By the time they reached Dale’s apartment she was nearly in tears of desperation. Should she invite him up? It was after eleven; they both had to teach the next day. Should she invite him to dinner? Should she—what? What could she possibly do? The bold casual woman who had lived inside her skin for two years in France had deserted her now. She would truly die before she would say now, as she had said so often in the past two years to so many men: “Would you like to kiss me?” Or even, “Would you like to go to bed with me?” Now she remembered how smug she had been in Europe, how safe and invulnerable she had been, how cowardly: and all along she had thought of herself as a bold woman with daring sexual habits and strong sexual needs. In Europe she had been in love with no one, and so she had been vulnerable to no one. The men she had slept with had not touched her. They did not hurt her; they could not have hurt her. If they had turned down her proposal—and no one ever did, but if they had—she would have only shrugged. And when they made love to her, they had not touched her; she realized that now. And now here she was, nearly ill with despair because the evening was over and she did not know how to carry on from there, what to say, what to do. They were both adults, for heaven’s sake; surely she could say to him, “Wouldn’t you like to kiss me?” Or even, “Would you like to spend the night with me?” And he would not be appalled. But she was afraid he would refuse her. His face, when she glanced over at him, was stern and set. Was he already thinking of the next day, of a test he had to give? Suddenly she hated him. Why wasn’t he bristling out toward her as she was toward him? Didn’t he find her attractive?

  When they stopped in front of Dale’s apartment, she said, “Would you like to come up for some coffee?” It hurt her throat to speak.

  “I’d better not,” Hank said. “I’ve got some grading to do tonight. As a matter of fact, I’ve got some chores to do, too. I’ll walk you to the door,” he said.

  He got out of the truck, and Dale sat there blindly, hot with desire and pain, while Hank performed the courtly act of coming around the front of the truck to open her door and help her out; another thing the men she had known in Europe seldom did. He took her hand as she jumped down from the truck, but then he let go of it immediately. They walked in silence toward the large colonial house. The lights were on in the front room; Carol was either still up or had left them on for her. And there they were then, standing down by Dale’s front door in the dark.

  “It was a very good dinner,” Dale said. “Thank you again. I—I’d like to invite you to dinner at my apartment sometime. I—there are some things I can cook fairly well.”

  “That would be nice,” Hank said. He was staring down at her so seriously that for a moment Dale thought that he might be feeling the same panic she felt. But then he said, “I had a nice evening. Let’s do it again sometime.”

  And she said “Yes,” and he smiled and walked off, back to the truck.

  Dale went inside the house and shut the big old door and stood blankly staring at the stairs she had to climb to her second-floor apartment. She did not want to climb them, she did not want to go one step farther from her contact with him. But she heard the truck pull away and go off down the road, and then the night was empty of sounds. She went blindly storming up the stairs then, and by the time she was inside her apartment she was sobbing with frustration.

  Carol was sitting in an overstuffed chair, wearing a quilted peach-colored robe, reading. “Did you have a nice time?” she asked.

  “Jesus Christ!” Dale sobbed. “He didn’t even kiss me good night! He didn’t even touch me!”

  “Oh, dear,” Carol said, coming over to Dale and putting her arms around her. “Don’t let it upset you so, Dale. Hank Kennedy is the quiet type. You’re the first woman I’ve heard of him dating since he moved up here.”

  “He’s probably gay,” Dale said. “That would be just my luck.”

  Carol laughed. “He’s not gay. There are plenty of girls around here who knew him when he came up in the summer with his family who could attest to that. Calm down, for heaven’s sake. You’ve got to teach tomorrow. Would you like me to make you some warm milk?”

  “Warm milk?” Dale burst out laughing. “Warm milk? The last person who offered to fix me warm milk was my mother. Oh, Carol, you’re sweet, but I’m afraid I’ve gone past the warm milk stage, even if I am acting like a moony adolescent. No, I’ll have a stiff scotch and go to bed.”

  And again it seemed that she did not sleep all night. For a long while she lay in bed, remembering the evening, listening for the phone to ring. Perhaps he would call her to say that he wanted to see her right away, he would come back and pick her up now, or that he wanted to see her the next evening. But the phone did not ring. Dale had to content herself with trying to remember the outlines of his hands, the exact green of his eyes, and the few intimate things he had mentioned about his life.

  He did not call her the next day. He did not call her for a week. Dale was frantic, then alternately manic and listless. She thought of calling him, of asking him for dinner, but somehow could not do it. She began to think she would never see him again. She kept away from the beach; she worked industriously on her lesson plans, planning far into the year, making intricate, detailed charts and sheets.

  And finally, eight days after their dinner together, he called. There was a movie on in Portland the next evening. He would pick her up at six.

  The next evening was a Saturday; there was no school the next day, no reason to return to the apartment early. For their dinner together, Dale had worn her loosest of shirts, wanting to appear casual and altogether uninterested in sex; she did not want to appear to be coming on too strong. Now, for the movie, she wore her tightest sweater. She did not care how she appeared; she was interested only in a reaction. She wore a sweater, tight jeans; she wore lipstick and eye shadow and perfume. Then, at the last moment, afraid of seeming too obvious, she desperately put her long thick hair into two braids, hoping that would make her look innocent, would counteract everything else.

  At the movie they did not touch, except briefly, when he helped her with her coat. After the movie, Dale invited him to her apartment for coffee and dessert. She did not tell him that Carol was spending the weekend at her parents’ home twenty miles away. It was wonderful hearing Hank’s heavy male step as he came up the stairs to the apartment behind Dale. It was wonderful having him stand so near, so real, as she unlocked the apartment door.

  Inside the apartment she put on music, made the coffee, served the cake. Hank sat on a chair in the kitchen, watching her. He talked about one of his problem students and the administration of his school. The boy wanted to wear a red cap all the time in school; the administration considered this deviant behavior but could not find any specific restrictions in their books against constantly wearing a cap. Dale sat sipping her coffee, not even pretending to eat her cake, listening to Hank talk about the boy. She had hoped that this second time with him she would feel less lustful; but she desired him even more. His skin. It was so firm, so smooth. She wondered if he had hair on his chest, on his back. His thighs. She could not keep from looking at his thighs, so substantial in the blue denim. His hands. They were rough hands for a teacher, but she supposed that was because he had animals, ran a farm. His hands were clean, his nails were blunt and square and even; but his hands seemed rough, and she wanted to feel their abrasiveness against her skin. She could not respond intelligently to what he was saying. She could not keep interested in his words. Perhaps she seemed bored; he set his coffee cup down on the table and rose.

  “I should be going,” he said.

  Dale rose, too. She thought she would cry. She could not help herself, she finally said the words she had said so often before, but this time she said them almost inaudibly, and to her helpless horror, her eyes filled w
ith tears as she spoke: “Don’t you want to kiss me?”

  Hank stood there a moment, on one side of the kitchen table, looking at her so seriously Dale thought she would faint. Then he said, “My God,” and crossed around to where Dale stood. He took her into his arms. She was stunned to feel that he was shaking. “My God,” he said again. “Dale.” And he bent his face to hers. He kissed her then, intently, firmly. He held her against him, his left hand on her head as he kissed her mouth, her eyes, her neck; his right hand resolutely pressing her body against his. And she understood why he had been so reluctant to kiss her; his feeling about her was not frivolous; he wanted her, too. And once he had begun making love to her there was no halfway point where they could stop.

  —

  His chest and his flat belly were hairy; his back was not. His skin had an olive cast, and his body was marked by different stripes of tan: his arms and neck were still the darkest from working on the farm; the area around his crotch and buttocks was paler than the rest, indicating the shape of his swimming trunks. His thighs were long and lean and as hard as iron, and covered with wonderful thick black hair like fur. Dale rubbed her face in his thighs, murmuring. The first time he entered her she did not come, she could not concentrate, she wanted too much to feel everything at once: his hands, his penis, his legs, his mouth. And he came almost immediately, burrowing his head into her neck as he did. She watched him, she could not help looking at him, watching him, although she supposed it was not fair; when she saw him grimace, when she heard him moan, she felt pierced by an emotion she had never felt before, and she held on to him tightly, as if otherwise he might die. “Too quick,” he said, “I’m sorry,” but she kissed him and would not let him speak, and when he rolled on his back she sat up, naked, to study him. She looked and looked at his body, and ran her hands everywhere. He lay watching her. He touched her breasts, her belly. He undid her braids. Her hair fell about her shoulders. He became hard again, and he pushed her back down on the bed and entered her. He lasted for a long time this time, and this time Dale came to him. She cried aloud when she did, and Hank held on to her firmly and protectively as she helplessly surged through waves of fear, revelation, rapture; and at last was washed aground on the shores of the deepest peace.

  —

  They lay in each other’s arms talking. Dale got up to get them a glass of water, and they sipped it, studying each other’s faces and bodies, and then they curled against each other and slept. They awoke in the night and made love. They slept again. In the morning they made love again, smugly, taking their fond and easeful time at it; then Dale made breakfast, walking around naked, feeling comfortable and satisfied in her body. Finally Hank said he had to go to his farm to feed his animals, and he asked Dale to come with him. He told her he wanted to show her his farm, that he wanted her to spend the day with him there. And Dale understood then that some sort of contract had been made between them, for this man she had fallen in love with did not do anything lightly. She was nearly ill with the richness of what she had found.

  They dressed sensibly and rode out to his farm in the truck; this time she sat close to him as he drove, with her hand on his thigh. He warned her that she would be disappointed in his farm, and at first she was. The house was not much of a house. It was perhaps eighty years old, and had gone uncared for for too long a time. The front porch had warped and broken boards. The outside of the house needed painting badly, and the gutters needed repairing, as did the roof. Behind the house, however, stood two large barns and several smaller outbuildings, and these had clearly been recently repaired and painted red, and they had new green roofs. Inside the house it was, to Dale’s relief, clean, bright, and solid. There were two floors, but Hank lived entirely on the first floor in four large rooms: kitchen, bedroom, study, living room. The living room was actually an extension of the study; the walls were lined with books, and next to the old easy chair that was clearly Hank’s chair was a pile of journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. Hank walked through the house with Dale, pointing out how he had done this and that to bring the house back into shape: he had repaired all the rotted wooden windowsills; stripped the floors of their layers of grimy paint and sanded the original pine and filled the cracks and covered it all with a shield of polyurethane; put up storm windows; put a wood burning stove in the kitchen and one in the study; given all the walls a coat of eggshell white. The bedroom, he added, would be the dining room if and when he ever finished work on the upstairs, if and when he would ever need a dining room. As it was he took all his meals in the kitchen. The kitchen was large and bright and clean; Hank had put in new linoleum, but left the large old slate sink. He had a refrigerator and a gas stove, but admitted that from time to time he cooked on the wood stove and had even tried baking bread. Dale walked around the house, loving it, hungry to explore every crack and plane of it, because it was owned by Hank. The furniture was old but good, castoffs from Hank’s family. The house was comfortable enough, but lacked the grace that wallpaper or curtains or plants would have added. It was a comfortable, unpretentious place, with high ceilings and large long windows and beautiful wooden floors. Dale slowly ran her hand along the arm of the chair Hank usually sat in. She wanted to be that chair, to embrace him, provide him comfort and support, feel his bones and flesh sinking into her.

  He did the chores while he showed her the barns. He had had the farm only a year, and clearly his work had all gone into the barns. They were clean and well maintained. In one smaller outbuilding Hank had chickens: seventeen of them, five of them banties. In a bigger barn he had his green John Deere tractor and his tools; his workroom was clearly one of his delights: hammers, nails, wrenches, saws, bolts, ropes, chains, barrels, cans, lanterns, wire, wire cutters—everything was in a correct place. In the third barn were the cows and Hank’s horse. He seemed very pleased that Dale knew the cows were Herefords, beef cattle; and that the horse was a quarterhorse gelding. The large red-and-white cows were all milling around together in one large stall of the barn. There were eight of them, and they mooed at Hank and purposely bumped into him with their large rumps as they filed out the open door into the corral and then on out into the pasture. He slapped them lovingly in return. Dale could see how he felt about them; could see why he would not want to expose himself and his animals to an unsympathetic eye. He led the horse out into the field and stood scratching him, talking to him, giving him bits of corn, but finally the horse grew tired of the affection and tossed his head and trotted away. It was a cold brisk morning, but a sunny one. Dale and Hank walked around the pasture, and the edges of their boots grew dark from the heavy dew.

  Hank owned only forty acres, but he had first option on an adjoining one hundred and fifty acres, which to his relief the owner was not yet ready to sell. He had made no profits from the farm yet; it absorbed every bit of his salary from teaching, and all of the money that his grandfather had willed him was in the equity. He discovered that it even cost more to feed the hens than it would have to buy eggs at a grocery store; but he liked the chickens, he liked the fresh eggs. He told Dale he would scramble her some for lunch. The pasture was wide and long and at one end was a large stand of trees. Not enough trees to be called a woods, but large enough and old enough so that Hank could get most of his firewood from it. That was another thing, he confessed, that pleased him greatly: felling an old tree, cutting it into the right lengths, stacking it in the trailer and pulling it in behind the tractor, then stacking it outside the house on the back porch, within easy reach of the kitchen. The wood stand was pleasantly varied: he got hard maple, birch, elm, oak, from it. And a man he knew down the road let him take all the applewood he wanted out of the orchard, provided the tree was dead or dying. The old farmer didn’t have a fireplace or a stove and didn’t need the wood, and he liked the orchard cleaned up. And Hank liked the smell of applewood in the winter; it sweetened the house.

  The fences around Hank’s property were barbed wire and in perfect condition. Not a strand s
agged or was loose from the posts. They walked back through the barns, which were fragrant with the bales of new hay that Hank had been piling in for the winter. Dale sat on a bale and watched Hank clean the cows’ stall, pitching the manure into a large stall in an opposite corner and putting fresh straw down. She felt enormous pleasure at the way his hands were sturdy and competent on the pitchfork, in the way his arm and back muscles flexed as he worked. She wanted to take a bite out of him.

  For about an hour Hank worked. Dale sat with her elbows dug into her knees and her chin dug into her hands, watching. She felt quiet and content there in the barn with Hank, surrounded by the strong barn walls whose beams crossed and joined each other in intricate notched patterns, providing beauty, providing strength.

  “You like it here, don’t you?” Hank said, when he had finished.

  “Of course,” Dale said, “why do you seem so surprised?”

  Hank shrugged. “Well, sometimes women don’t like manure, or they worry about mice and things.”

  “Oh, no,” Dale said, “that didn’t even occur to me. I really do like it here.” Then she had to hide her face, for she felt so proud of herself, so smug, to have pleased him with her ease.

  Later he scrambled eggs for her in his kitchen, and lit the wood stove. It gave off an agreeable radiant warmth. He served her hot coffee and eggs and toast with honey from a beekeeper down the road, and they talked.

  “My parents think I’m crazy,” Hank said, and did not laugh. “They think this place is a waste of money, and that my entire life is now a waste of time. They wanted me to be a lawyer instead of a history teacher. And they wanted me to follow in my father’s and brother’s footsteps. A nice town house, a nice marriage, silver wedding presents, a respectable and useful life which everyone would know was respectable and useful because it would be reported in the proper sections of the proper papers. They were truly horrified when I told them that I was going to move here, take the academy job, and try to run a farm. God. Poor mother. First the divorce, and then this. I don’t think—”