‘Do they?’ she asked. ‘What a shame.’
He stopped, looked at her pale, thoughtful face, then gathered her into his arms and hugged her. ‘It doesn’t have to happen,’ he said. ‘They’ve got along fine so far.’
‘But it could happen. It could.’
He considered this, and nodded. ‘Sure, yeah,’ he said at last. ‘Anything could. Come on, let’s eat. What do you say?’
‘I say that sounds like a good idea.’
But she thought she wouldn’t eat much, that she’d been haunted out of her appetite by the vixen’s bright regard. When he began laying out the food, however, she was instantly ravenous. Breakfast had been orange juice and a single slice of dry toast; she’d been as excited (and fearful) as a bride on the morning of her wedding. Now, at the sight of bread and meat, she forgot all about the foxes’ earth north of the beach.
He kept taking food out of the cooler — cold beef sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, chicken salad, potato salad, coleslaw, two cans of Coke, a Thermos of what he said was iced tea, two pieces of pie, a large slab of cake — until it made her think of clowns piling out of the little
car at the circus, and she laughed. It probably wasn’t polite, but she had enough confidence in him now not to feel she had to be merely polite. That was good, because she wasn’t sure she could have helped herself, anyway.
He looked up, holding a salt shaker in his left hand and a pepper shaker in his right. She saw he had carefully put Scotch tape over the holes in case they fell over, and that made her laugh harder than ever. She sat down on the bench running down one side of the picnic table and put her hands over her face and tried to get a grip. She’d almost made it when she peeked through her fingers and saw that amazing stack of sandwiches — half a dozen for two people, each cut on the diagonal and neatly sealed in a Baggie. That set her off again.
‘What?’ he asked, smiling himself. ‘What, Rosie?’
‘Were you expecting friends to drop by?’ she asked, still giggling. ‘A Little League team, maybe? Or a Boy Scout troop?’
His smile widened, but his eyes continued to hold that serious look. It was a complicated expression, one that said he understood both what was funny here and what was not, and in it she finally saw that he really was her own age, or close enough not to matter. ‘I wanted to make sure you’d have something that you liked, that’s all.’
Her giggles were tapering off, but she continued to smile at him. What struck her most was not his sweetness, which made him seem younger, but his openness, which now made him seem somehow older.
‘Bill, I can eat just about anything,’ she said.
‘I’m sure you can,’ he said, sitting down beside her, ‘but that’s not what this is about. I don’t care so much about what you can stand or what you can manage as I do about what you like and want to have. Those are the kinds of things I want to give to you, because I’m crazy about you.’
She looked at him solemnly, the laughter gone, and when he took her hand, she covered it with her other one. She was trying to get what he’d just said straight in her mind and finding it hard going — it was like trying to get a bulky, balky piece of furniture through a narrow doorway, turning it this way and that, trying to find an angle where everything would finally work.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why me?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Fact is, Rosie, I don’t know very much about women. I had a girlfriend when I was a junior in high school, and we probably would have slept together eventually, but she moved away before it could happen. I had a girlfriend when I was a freshman in college, and I did sleep with her. Then, five years ago, I got engaged to a wonderful girl I met in the city zoo, of all places. Her name was Bronwyn O’Hara. Sounds like something out of Margaret Mitchell, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s a lovely name.’
‘She was a lovely girl. She died of a brain aneurysm.’
‘Oh, Bill, I’m so sorry.’
‘Since then, I’ve dated a couple of girls, and I’m not exaggerating — I’ve dated a couple of girls, period, end of story. My parents fight over me. My father says I’m dying on the vine, my mother says “Leave the boy alone, stop scolding.” Only she says it scoldink.’
Rosie smiled.
‘Then you walked into the shop and found that picture. You knew you had to have it from the word go, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s how I felt about you. I just wanted you to know that. Nothing that’s happening here is happening out of kindness, or charity, or duty. None of what’s happening here is happening because poor Rosie has had such a hard, hard life.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘It’s happening because I’m in love with you.’
‘You can’t know that. Not yet.’
‘I know what I know,’ he said, and she found the gentle insistence in his tone a little frightening. ‘Now that’s enough soap opera. Let’s eat.’
They did. When they were done and Rosie’s stomach felt stretched drumhead-tight against the waistband of her pants, they repacked the cooler and Bill strapped it onto the Harley’s carrier again. No one had come; Shoreland was still all theirs. They went back down to the waterside and sat on the big rock again. Rosie was starting to feel very strongly about this rock; it was, she thought, the kind of rock you could come to visit once or twice a year, just to say thanks . . . if things turned out well, that was. And she thought they were, at least so far.
She could not, in fact, think of a day that had been better.
Bill put his arms around her, then placed the fingers of his left hand on her right cheek, turning her face toward him. He began kissing her. Five minutes later she did feel close to fainting, half in a dream and half out, excited in a way she had never conceived of, excited in a way that made sense of all the books and stories and movies she hadn’t really understood before but had taken on faith, the way a blind person will take on faith a sighted person’s statement that a sunset is beautiful. Her cheeks were burning, her breasts felt flushed and tender from his gentle touch through her blouse, and she found herself wishing that she hadn’t worn a bra. The thought made her cheeks flush brighter than ever. Her heart was racing, but that was good. It was all good. Over the line and into wonderful, in fact. She put her hand on him down there, felt how hard he was. It was like touching stone, except stone would not have throbbed beneath her palm like her own heart.
He left her hand where it was for a minute, then raised it gently and kissed the palm. ‘No more now,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ She looked at him candidly, without artifice. Norman was the only man she had known sexually in her entire life, and he was not the sort of man who got hot simply because you touched him there through his pants. Sometimes — increasingly, in the last few years —
he didn’t get hot at all.
‘Because I won’t be able to stop without suffering a most severe case of blue balls.’
She looked at him with such frowning, earnest puzzlement that he burst out laughing.
‘Never mind, Rosie. It’s just that I want everything to be right the first time we make love
— no mosquitoes biting our butts, no rolling in the poison oak, no kids from U.C. showing up at a vital moment. Besides, I promised to have you back by four so you could sell tee-shirts, and I don’t want you to have to race the clock.’
She looked down at her watch and was startled to see it was ten past two. If they had been sitting on the rock and making out for only five or ten minutes, how was that possible? She came to the reluctant but rather marvellous conclusion that it wasn’t. They had been here for half an hour at least, maybe closer to forty-five minutes.
‘Come on,’ he said, sliding off the rock. He grimaced as the soles of his feet splashed into the cold water, and she caught just a glimpse of the bulge in his pants before he turned away.
I did that, she thought, and was astonished at the feelings which came with the thought: pleasure, amusement, even a slight smugness.