I Know How to Sail
The house was hot and stuffy from being shut up for the past few days and smelled of cloves. We went around opening the windows, letting the air pour through. A woman from Ethiopia, panicked by a glitch in her paperwork, had been staying here the past week with her two children, looking after the house. She left on Thursday, free and clear, going on to her sister in Chicago before Ross got back—it would’ve been improper for a female to be in a house alone with an unrelated male, and she had grown increasingly afraid of the neighbors’ stares. The house basked in the late summer heat in a cleaner state than normal. One of the living room windows was stuck fast, and I called for Ross to come and help me open it. I stood in front of it, struggling with the sash to no purpose as he came over, but didn’t move when Ross came up behind me. When it was obvious I wasn’t going to get out of his way, he asked, “Do you want me to try and open it with you attached?” Chagrined, I moved aside, and it was then we saw that the wallpaper under the sill had been scribbled over with red crayon. What would the Nagles say about that! Ah well, it was too hot, the late day air too balmy, to think about it now.
Ross read the note Mrs. Mosissa had left and quickly looked through the mail piled on the dining room table. He was tired. He took the envelope holding the extra house key and threw it in the drawer of the desk in the living room, walked out into the kitchen to get a beer out of the fridge, then went back and sank down on the living room couch to watch the end of the first game. The house was empty and quiet for a change, just the two of us. After watching the bottom half of the fifth, I went into the kitchen to putter about. I could hear the humidity droning through the late afternoon light, punctuated by the periodic crack of ball against bat. An array of vegetables in varying states of ripeness had been spread out on the kitchen counter—mostly zucchini—a token of thanks from the Wilsons down the street because the residents here occasionally mowed their tiny patch of lawn. The area teenagers were already cruising in their cars, punching a hole in the languor; booming bass notes announcing their arrival long before they sped past the house and annoying the neighborhood long after their departure. I fought an impulse to run out and lob the disintegrating vegetables after the offending vehicles.
I picked one of the tomatoes, but half of it stayed on the counter. “These tomatoes Tom and Mary gave you are too ripe,” I called out over my shoulder to Ross. “They’re gross.” No response. “I’m gonna throw them out.” Again, no reply. He must have fallen asleep.
* * *
Ross wasn’t asleep; he was acutely aware of the girl rattling around in the kitchen. Why did he ask her here, he asked himself. He was too tired to go through the routine one more time. But he hadn’t wanted to come back to the empty house without her. He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head the whole time he was away; she had popped up in his thoughts just as if she was some phantom sidekick, leaning over his shoulder, laughing, commenting in his ear on everything he did. He didn’t want to lose that connection, he wanted to make it real, but he was afraid to test it.
He hadn’t had much luck holding on to love. He seemed to inevitably disappoint the women he sought out simply by being himself. Staring at the TV screen a deep loneliness settled over him. Things never got any better; love or affection—it always ended mangled up. And it wasn’t all his fault, he was sure of that. Women regarded him as a prop—he had all the right credentials for that—an escort to flaunt, an automatic teller machine; they always wanted him to be something he wasn’t. A stand-in for the surfeit of superficial sex. They were uncomfortable with his true passions.
All the talk back in school about not ending up like your old man—slaving away to make a buck, the big house, the big car—he took that seriously; everyone else treated it like a throwaway fad, gone the way of long hair and flannel shirts. He believed it. His work mattered; it was tough, ball-breaking work, littered with failures and very few successes. But those successes, he knew, were the finest thing he would ever do. His friends had moved on to private practice; most of the reporters he worked with in the beginning had burned out and had become flacks. Donna had, more than once, told him point-blank to grow up. He was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with him. Was he just fooling himself? Doing this to get back at Dad? No, he thought grimly, it’s still better to try and stop . . . what?
He was broke. All his relationships ended up broke. He was worn out and the thrill of the chase was gone. God knows he had screwed enough women in the past trying to make it work, though not as many as people seemed to want to think. He smiled ruefully to himself—Amy could not figure out how to swallow that unappetizing fact, though he suspicioned that their purported beauty rather than their number was what annoyed her the most.
His expression softened at the thought of her . . . was she the exception? He was afraid to believe it, afraid to let this particular sweetness go sour, but he couldn’t shake the hope that she just might well be. The girl got to him; she pleased him, she humored him, she understood where he was coming from with an unsettling acuity, she was working her way under his shell. She had once been ensconced in the high-flying material world and had seemingly extracted herself without regret. Brave, but vulnerable and uncertain, and he wanted to protect her. She wanted something from him, too—true, but it wasn’t what the others wanted, she apparently wanted . . . what?
Suddenly she was there next to him; she had flopped down on the coach, provocatively close to him, almost in his lap; he could smell her perfume—some flowery thing—could feel the warmth emanating from her body. She breathed into his ear, “I said, those tomatoes Tom and Mary gave you are too ripe.” Although conscious of her in every nerve, he couldn’t seem to unlock himself from his thoughts and look at her, and she mistook his silence as irritation at her disrupting his watching of the game. In defense, she took a swig of his beer and quickly popped up and trotted back to the kitchen. He made a grab at her, but missed.
The ballgame receded into the background. What was that all about? Did she realize how often her small gestures turned him on? How she could drive him to erotic distraction and leave him stranded there? Was this all for him, or was she just honing her skills in case something better came along? That old cynicism again. No, he could see that she wanted him; he could see it in her face so often turned up to his. Those eyes, somehow it was all right . . . that soft, sweet mouth. He imagined kissing her, making her drop all her apprehensions, sinking into his arms. He imagined her doing all sorts of things . . . He could feel the longing welling up in him, an achingly overdue overload. The need to make this connection blotted out every indecisive thought. Damn, he wanted her. He wanted her on his own terms and he wanted her completely.
He turned off the set, walked slowly into the kitchen, and leaned against the door frame.
“Hey,” he said, softly.
* * *
I didn’t hear him at first because I had turned on the radio.
“Hey . . .”
I was a little miffed at my earlier reception, so I didn’t turn around, though there was a low seductive pitch to his voice.
“Come here.”
I turned at this command; Ross was waiting, his eyes intense. I inadvertently threw the dish towel on the floor rather than back on the counter. Never breaking his gaze, I went over and stood very close in front of him. We looked at each other, each able to hear the desire silently avowed by the other. Ross put his hands on my face, spreading them out across my temples and cheeks, sinking his fingers into my hair. He seemed unable to move or speak. Another song came across the air.
My turn. “Dance with me,” I murmured.
So we moved together, eyes closed, slowly, increasingly swaying further back and forth, secure in our movements and in each other’s arms, falling into hypnotic rather than frantic abandon. Swaying side to side in unison to the rhythm, we spoke our desire in this manner, a dance more loaded with erotic sensation than anything else I’d known. Once again Ross put his hands on my face, sliding them back and gripping the hair at the nape of my neck, gently pulling down, forcing my face upward toward his. Finally, he kissed me, sliding his arms down around me, pulling me closer.
He lifted me in his arms to carry me upstairs, but misjudged the width of the doorway, and the romantic carrying up to heaven was stopped abruptly by his slamming my ankles into the door jamb. Pain and surprise caused me to jerk so violently that he lost his balance and we half sat down, half tumbled through the doorway onto the dining room floor, catching the cord and pulling the phone off the hook in the process.
“Jesus . . .,” I moaned, rubbing my ankle. Ross reached up back behind his head and felt blindly for the phone’s handset on the table, somehow managing to put it back on its cradle, silencing the dial tone. This struck both of us as hilarious and we giggled like a couple of idiots, sprawled out on the floor. The mesmerizing spell was broken, but the metamorphosis had taken place: Ross took my foot in his hand and kissed the reddening bruise. It was a warm intimate gesture, something I’d never seen come so easily for him, yet it was completely natural.
“Sorry,” he smiled.
Hot and still, one could feel the inhalations and exhalations of the house itself, creaking, shifting, warm air wafting in, ebbing out. Cars were no longer on the rampage, and the distant rumble of the surf emerged in the ensuing silence. The sun was lower in the sky. A fine film of sweat covered Ross’ forehead, a trickle winding down past his temple. I wiped it away with my fingers, running them down his cheek. He staggered to his feet, pulling me up.
“Ross . . .”
“No, no . . . we can talk later, all night if you like."
“You go up, I have to grab my purse,” I said with a significant look.
He swung me around to face him, our noses almost touching. “I’m not charging for this,” he said in all seriousness. Sometimes, I just wanted to smack him.
Upstairs, I stuck my head out of the bathroom, leaning on the door, blithely announcing, “I’ll be right back.” Ross was sitting on the bed pulling off his shoes. He looked up at me and slightly shook his head, a gesture both mocking and covering up the urgency. Closing the door again, I did feel that I’d been given the raw end of the deal. I was worried about taking too long, never having done this before under pressure, worried about destroying the mood. I splashed cold water over my face and patted it dry. I peeled off the rest of my clothes and bent over and ruffled up my hair, flinging my head back up like the sexpot I wanted to be at that moment. A little rusty in my moves, not brazen or confident enough to bounce out of the bathroom completely naked, I came out with Ross’ bath towel wrapped around me.
The bedroom was bronzed with a beautiful sunset glow, sea breezes from the open windows blowing the curtains softly over the bed, a vessel bound for open water. Ross was sitting on the side of the bed, half-stripped, hair tousled, hands clasped, arms resting lightly on his thighs. I stood still for a moment, still on the shore, and took the whole sight in. The look in his eyes, focused into me, made it worth being a sailor, if only for this trip.
“Drop the towel,” he said.
I did.
Image: Bound for open water. Source: ‘Sailing off Gloucester,’ by Winslow Homer, 1880. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.