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Page 18.

And I am so wet for you.

He bit his lip, put his arm around her back, and drove along as life must be driven, one stoplight at a time, staying with the flow.

She stroked his chest with feather-light fingertips. “I will never forget you and you will never forget me. I love you, Jon Harney, Charles Egeny, free spirit. You will always remember me, because that is our fate. Neither of us can help who we are or where we are or what we are.”

Fucking Bill. If you were a man, you’d be here in this car, driving this beautiful angel, telling her how much you love her. It would be you in tears over her, not me.

“I love you very much,” he said.

She did not answer, except for a faint squeal buried in his chest. He looked down to see the gold of her hair, to smell warm salt water as if they were floating in a summer sea. The heat of her tears soaked his chest as her head rocked on him with quiet sobbing. She didn’t mean for him to hear, but he heard her anyway, keening like a lost child, over and over again, that broken wailing sound. Her hand lay curled helplessly on his thigh, upturned away from him, grasping for the impossible or just for mercy.

A while later, feeling empty and in love and in the moment and strangely composed (as in the eye of a storm), he turned the corner into Sleeping Giant Park. On the right were the white buildings, sharp spire and manicured acreage of Quinnipiac College. On their left reared the trees and slopes of the Sleeping Giant Mountain, which you could see for miles around, looking truly (if you squinted slightly) like some gigantic Indian, hooked nose and all, arms folded on his chest, dozing away through the ages sunken deep into a bed of tree crowns.

I’ve only known her a few weeks; I may never see her again. She’s a fox, she’s available, she’s hungry—a rare combination these days. Summer is here and the beaches are loaded with bikinis.

The park was full of people. Merile sat glued to him, with one arm over his shoulder, and her other hand on his thigh. Her body pressed against his at every possible spot. This short time was theirs and she was his. Nothing else mattered.

“Looks awfully crowded,” she said, peering past the back of his head at the picnic area filled with cars and people in Bermudas. The cool, dark woodsy air was filled with char smoke and the sounds of barking dogs and squalling children.

Driving on, he said, “Too bad. There is a nice pond near there with a waterfall.”

“Probably crowded to the waterline,” she said.

“Maybe we should drive a little further,” he said.

“Feel free,” she intimated.

For some time the car crawled on a winding and tree-crowned road.

“How’s this?” he said, pulling into a secluded nook between great shady trees.

They stood outside the car and stared uphill into wilderness. His hand sought hers, and her fingers eagerly entwined with his.

He speculated, craning his neck. “Wonder what’s on top of that hill?”

She pretended a pout of protest, lifting the hem of her dress. “I didn’t think we’d be mountain climbing today.”

He shrugged and stared at the back of the car, where the cooler and picnic basket were stored and ready.

“Leave the cooler here.” Hungry for something else, she nudged him. “Come on, we’ll find privacy up there someplace.” She started up the pathless hillside. He followed her. The climb immediately drew perspiration. The grade quickly grew steep, and she clambered with tennis court agility up over the huge mossy boulders, around mushroom-infested tree trunks, hand-over-hand up fields of sprawling exposed roots, sweating through short bright leafy fronds, careful not to let any twigs whip back and hit him.

He followed, at times scrambling on his hands and knees, but unmindful of the bruises and an occasional mosquito bite. He had eyes only for her long legs, her pertly rounded behind, her churning muscular thighs and the bunching of her underpants between struggling buttocks and legs.

Their circuitous route took them upward several hundred feet, mostly on reddish sandy stone, and whipped by punishing saplings. The Pontiac disappeared from view behind and beneath them. For a few moments they saw only tree crowns. The only human sound was that of an airplane distantly circling for a landing at Tweed-New Haven airport on Long Island Sound. In the bright sunshine, they broke through tangled underbrush and waist-high reeds. “There are houses,” she pointed accusingly into the distance, and he winced at the sight of gray and white rooftops slumbering under the trees.

We wanted to be alone, he thought, wishing he could give her that, but even such a simple wish was beyond his reach. I could never provide for her.

“Come on, this way,” he said. He made for a dense growth of pine to their right. They plunged through tall grass, suddenly downward into the cool darkness under the sweeping pine boughs. The underbrush was sparser here away from the sunshine. They clambered downhill around huge tumbled boulders left by the last great ice age, for the North American glaciers had stopped growing precisely here and then melted, up to two miles deep and full of boulders and other debris. The ice had melted, receding toward the north, leaving its load of boulders behind. Early Puritan mythology claimed the boulders had been thrown at each other by good and fallen angels during a war in heaven. The area had place names like Sodom, Gomorrha, and Satan’s Corner.

“Oh look!” Merile gasped, as if staring at a miracle.

They stood between high walls of pine and gray, split rock, looking over an expanse about thirty feet in diameter and oval shaped. A shallow pond of still and moss-green water lay with mirror surface on a depression worn by eons on the rock shelf. Water from high rocks, fed from the highest land, trickled in a steady waist-thick stream down into the edges of the pool. The smooth stone around the pool was covered with old leaves and blooming moss in thick patches.

“I wonder if anyone knows about this place?” she said.

He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“Maybe it is a mirage,” she ventured.

“More likely it’s a well-kept secret of the people living near here. Look.” He pointed to a cache of empty beer cans tucked under a rock ledge. The cans were filled with tobacco-brown rainwater and had been there for some time.

“We should have brought our picnic along,” she said.

“Do you think I’m going to climb down to get it?” he said watching her sit down, take off her shoe, and shake twigs and dirt out.

She squinted in the half-light between the pines and the tall stones. “I wonder if anyone will blunder up here.”

“We’ll hear them coming for a mile.” He walked in fascination around the rock pool. Water dribbled loudly down into the edge of the wide pond. Green surface scum pushed away by dropping water maintained a thick pressing circle around the waterfall.

“It trickles away through a split in the rocks at this other end,” he told her, watching the overflow gurgle away. His voice must have carried with a faint echo, because he was surprised at the loudness of her voice, “I wonder where all that water comes from.”

He pointed uphill. “All those beer-drinkers peeing up there…”

“Ve-ery fun-nee!”

He nestled down on his side and elbow beside her. “This could be our little hideaway.”

“Until the owners of those beer cans return,” she said, finished tying her shoelaces and sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees.

“Merile?”

“Ummh?”

“What you said back there. About us, I mean. It’s true.”

“I know,” she said, glancing at him briefly, then continuing her study of the tree tops and sky.

He looked in the same direction, squinting in the sunlight and chewing on a grass blade. “I’m not trying to use you.”

She shook her head. “I know that.” She paused. “What dopes you men are, with your fifteen-pound egos inside three-ounce brains.”

“What do you mean?”

She grinned and rubbed her hand along his neck. “I didn’t mean anything nasty. It’s just…well, did it ever occur to you I might be using you?”

He shrugged. “It occurred to me in one way or another.” The panic from before threatened inside again.

She lay down on her side and elbow facing him. “Silly, we’re both using each other. So what? People always use each other. It’s not always malicious. People need each other.”

He looked out over the still pond. “Why do I feel this desire for you? It’s like fire. You know what scares me? That I may not be able to control it.”

“That scares me too sometimes. Not being able to walk away smiling.”

“You at least seem to be able to laugh and cry at the same time.”

“Not an easy trick for me,” she said, undoing her bracelet. “This is from a ritzy store in Manhattan,” she said, throwing it. Green slime absorbed it without a splash as it sank, a golden, twirling treasure in clear water underneath.

“Why did you do that?”

She crawled close on her elbows and wrapped her hands around his shoulders. “Something of us together has to stay someplace deep inside.”

He took her hands, squeezing them between his, and she gently reclined on the mossy stone under him. “I don’t understand. Every pore of your skin makes me dizzy. Why is it when I don’t have any right to you that I feel I could squeeze you close and never let you go?”

She smiled, her blue eyes sparking in the mossy half-light. The laugh welling up from her diaphragm was a husky, mature one. “Do you think I don’t feel the same way? But would you let me own you?”

He made a wry face. Inside, though, he thought, You already own me, Merile. My woman. My girl. My love. My sweet pussy. My eternity.

She read only what she wanted to perceive. “See? It’s that we’re living in fire but we’re ultimately not a threat—a danger, maybe, but not a threat—to each other. There aren’t any strings attached.” She grasped the hairs peering over his shirt top and pulled him close. “I could devour you. I could hold you in the palms of my hands like a butterfly. But eventually I know I’ll have to let you go. Did you ever have a pet like that?”

He rolled back laughing. “You’re sending me back farther than I’d suspected. I’ve loved and lost but…oh God, who knows, maybe once a long time ago I think it was an ant farm, and the neighbor came home weaving drunkenly in his car and ran over it where I’d left it in the driveway. I never looked him in the eye again. I was heartbroken for weeks.”

She nodded seriously. “You are a sensitive type.”

“Aren’t you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Not like you.”

“You have probed my weaknesses?”

She broke into a sunburst smile. “And found them very, very appealing. Oh Jon, can’t you see, I wasn’t looking for an affair, but I’m happy I met you. You’re no Valentino…but then I think usually those men gamble and drink. They are vain, something you’re not. Oh sure, Charles Egeny is the best poet this side of…this side of…Long Wharf, but that’s different. That’s a righteous kind of pride, has to do with paying witness to your talent, I do so respect and honor your talent and you are so sincere…” She finished by sweeping him into a kiss that brought them down together onto the moss.

He pulled up harshly. “Don’t make me feel you think I’m so perfect and sincere.”

Eyes half-closed, she sought him with weak fingertips. He took the fingertips of her left hand in the palm of his hand and squeezed.

“Ouch!” she exclaimed and looked at him terrified. “Let go!”

He released her fingers and threw himself on his back.

She hovered by him, her elegant features pale. “I was just…I wanted to possess you for a moment.”

“Was that it?” He spoke sharply, then closed his eyes and placed his arms behind his head, hating himself for whatever she stirred in him.

Her fingertips played at a patch of moss on a rock, like picking a scab. “I think someday you are going to hate me.”

“Sometimes I think you babble bullyshilly from that nutso colony in Fairfield.”

She stared. So it was class warfare now.

He rose onto one elbow. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t care what those hyenas do or say. As a teenager I remember we used to pass through Westport…whenever they had a block dance for you spoiled brats…they used to throw us out on sight. West Haven kids. Blauugghh!”

“What’s gotten into you?”

“Poetry! That’s what! Can’t you see? I’m not sure Charles Egeny is going to make it out of the slum. He’ll write poetry, yes, and maybe publish a few things in tiny editions without pay, just to see his name in a byline, but ten years from now will he still be picking his nose while you and Mr. Kangaroo Bones are sipping cocktails in some high falootin congress of archeologists?”

She jumped to her feet. “Goddammit, that’s about all I’m going to take! You’re trying to typecast me because you’re an insecure bastard! I haven’t pulled any airs with you! You…you…lawn-mower!” She whirled and ran past the motionless green pond water toward the cleft between pines and cliffs where an overview of gray and white rooftops hid.

He rose to his feet, cursing, and stood looking into the glowing emerald pond. Balling his fists, he grimaced and uttered a bellowing scream that echoed among the rocks. Then he sat down, nervously pulling out tufts of grass from between his legs and throwing them over the water. The first mosquitoes, bumbling, small, and blind, hovered over the surface. The emerald mirror stench rose into his sinuses. He looked over and saw Merile sobbing, overlooking the houses.

“Can I say or do anything?”

She turned. “It doesn’t matter.”

He threw more moss onto the water. “It’s no problem. It doesn’t matter. How long will we know each other anyway?” He snapped his mouth shut, remembering her bracelet.

She walked to him. “Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”

He threw up his arms. “God no. I’m sorry. It was my stupid thinking, that’s all. My emotions. I’m fighting this battle, you see, about losing you. The more I want to hold you, the more I know I’ll lose you.”

She knelt beside him. “Maybe we should just call it quits. We can divvy up the picnic lunch down there and say it was a day.”

He crushed his eyes shut. “No.”

Her hand stole along his ear. In a very soft voice she whispered, “Will you stay a while?”

He reached up and pulled her down so she rolled over him and came to rest with reaching arms on his left. He pelted her with kisses and she sought his lips with her teeth. He reached down and his hand stole under her panties to grasp her round soft buttock. “I’m going to spread your legs and shove inside you.”