فصل پانزدهم

FIFTEEN

She met him at the door, and his jaw dropped. She was wearing the net bra he liked, a pair of semi-transparent panties, and nothing else.

‘You look delicious,’ he said. ‘Where are the kids?’

‘Missy Dandridge took them. We’re on our own until eight-thirty … which gives us two and a half hours. Let’s not waste it.’ She pressed against him. He could smell faint, lovely scent – was it attar of roses? His arms went around her; first around her waist, and then his hands found her buttocks as her tongue danced lightly over his lips and then into his mouth, licking and darting.

At last their kiss broke and he asked her a bit hoarsely: ‘Are you for dinner?’ ‘Dessert,’ she said, and then began to rotate her lower body slowly and sensuously against his groin and abdomen. ‘But I promise you you don’t have to eat anything you don’t like.’ He reached for her but she slipped out of his arms and took his hand. ‘Upstairs first,’ she said.

She drew him an extremely warm bath, then undressed him slowly and shooed him into the water. She donned the slightly rough sponge-glove that usually hung unused on the shower-head, soaped his body gently, then rinsed it. He could feel the day – this horrible first day – slipping slowly off him. She had gotten quite wet, and her panties clung like a second skin.

Louis started to get out of the tub, and she pushed him back gently.

‘What—’

Now the sponge-glove gripped him gently – gently but with almost unbearable friction, moving slowly up and down.

‘Rachel—’ Sweat had broken all over him, and not just from the heat of the bath.

‘Shush.’

It seemed to go on almost eternally – he would near climax and the hand in the sponge-glove would slow, almost stop. Then it didn’t stop but squeezed, loosened, squeezed again, until he came so strongly that he felt his eardrums bulge.

‘My God,’ he said shakily when he could speak again. ‘Where did you learn that?’ ‘Girl Scouts,’ she said primly.

She had made a stroganoff which had been simmering during the bathtub episode, and Louis, who would have sworn at four o’clock that he would next want to eat sometime around Halloween, ate two helpings.

After, she led him upstairs again.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘let’s see what you can do for me.’

All things considered, Louis thought he rose to the occasion quite well.

Afterward, Rachel dressed in her old blue pajamas. Louis pulled on a flannel shirt and nearly shapeless corduroy pants – what Rachel called his grubs – and went after the kids.

Missy Dandridge wanted to know about the accident, and Louis sketched it in for her, giving her less than she would probably read in the Bangor Daily News the following day. He didn’t like doing it – it made him feel like the most rancid sort of gossip – but Missy would accept no money for sitting, and he was grateful to her for the evening he and Rachel had shared.

Gage was fast asleep before Louis had gotten the mile between Missy’s house and their own, and Ellie was yawning and glassy-eyed. He put Gage into fresh diapers, poured him into his sleeper-suit, and popped him into his crib. Then he read Ellie a story-book. As usual, she clamored for Where the Wild Things Are, being a veteran wild thing herself. Louis convinced her to settle for The Cat in the Hat. She was asleep five minutes after he carried her up and Rachel tucked her in.

When he came downstairs again, Rachel was sitting in the living room with a glass of milk. A Dorothy Sayers mystery was open on one long thigh.

‘Louis, are you really all right?’

‘Honey, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘And thanks. For everything.’ ‘We aim to please,’ she said with a curving, slight smile. ‘Are you going over to Jud’s for a beer?’ He shook his head. ‘Not tonight. I’m totally bushed.’

‘I hope I had something to do with that.’

‘I think you did.’

‘Then grab yourself a glass of milk, doctor, and let’s go to bed.’ He thought perhaps he would lie awake, as he often had when he was interning and days that were particularly hairy would play over and over in his mind. But he slid smoothly toward sleep, as if on a slightly inclined, frictionless board. He had read somewhere that it takes the average human being just seven minutes to turn off all the switches and uncouple from the day. Seven minutes for conscious and subconscious to revolve, like the trick wall in an amusement park haunted house. Something a little eerie in that.

He was almost there when he heard Rachel say, as if from a great distance: ‘—day after tomorrow.’ ‘Ummmmmm?’

‘Jolander. The vet. He’s taking Church the day after tomorrow.’ ‘Oh.’ Church. Treasure your cojones while you got ‘em, Church, old boy, he thought, and then he slipped away from everything, down a hole, sleeping deeply and without dreams.