Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 26

Seal

There Jacques was. Coming towards her. Yes, it was him. She stopped dead in her tracks, her heart all a-flutter. The clichés of cheap romance novels were proving themselves real, although her bodily sensations weren’t solely cardiac. Other, less poetic systems were coming in to play, the outer manifestation of which was a pleasant dampness between her legs. The sea stank, fetid and amniotic.

He looked around before embracing her. “I hope I didn’t make your mother suspicious.”

“She can be as suspicious as she likes. My husband—well, he sends her a cheque every month. If she cooks my goose, she cooks her own. I suppose that isn’t a particularly elegant way of putting it—”

He was smiling fondly at her, and she saw that he was taken by her simplicity, that those letters she had written him, in which she had endeavored to offer him a well-turned phrase, an original observation, had enchanted him when she was most straightforward.

They bent their heads together, each forming a wind break for the other, as they followed the crude path down to the strand. They stopped at a tidal pool and watched a sea anemone, with its hundred of tentacles waving in the water, both phallic and fragile. When Marcel had been inside of her, his penis must have looked like those translucent fronds, only later filling with tissue and blood. A minnow darted by and the tentacles, as skillful as the fingers of a blind man, pulled it into the stout center of the organism.

What were these translucent bits of protoplasm floating past? Tadpoles, polliwogs, a just-born guppy or jellyfish?

They came to an outcropping of rock forming a half-cave. Without any preliminaries, Jacques took a blanket from his rucksack, spread it on the sand, seated himself, and unbuttoned his flies. He yanked up her skirt, pulled off her drawers, tucking them in the rucksack so they wouldn’t blow away, lowered her roughly onto him, facing away.

The world beyond them disappeared. Even her breasts, their limbs, their mouths, their smells were inconsequential. There was only his sex, her sex, the bare and frank conjunction of their movement. The God she’d worshipped all her life, the God of good and evil, of sin and virtue, was killed as they made love, murdered by his ancient mothers and fathers. The stout gods and goddesses of the barbarians reigned again, squatting around campfires, gnawing on the gristle of roasted bone, picking their teeth, farting—gods who did not know the meaning of the word shame.

And then the world came back.

The wind.

The fog.

The two of them.

The plash and funk of the ocean.

A sound, something between a honk and a bark, slowly distinguished itself from the rumble of the ocean, the cries of the gulls, the flap of the wind against their clothing.

“We aren’t the only lovers on the beach today,” Jacques whispered. Steadying herself with one hand against his hip, she turned.

A few feet beyond them, two monk seals were coupling lackadaisically on the strand. Their bodies, so graceful in water, were slug-like on land. The cow moaned as the bull flopped on top of her.

“Slowly, slowly,” Jacques’ whispered, as she pulled herself off of him. She sat on his lap, his arms wrapped around her, sheltering her. She whispered, “They can’t smell us?”

He shrugged, mouthed the words, “The wind—the wrong direction—”

The seals both bellowed, roars of pleasure, cries of pain echoing off the rocks and waves.