“Self-preservation.”
You offer her a cigarette. She is very near you. You nod wonderingly. “I saw you pull the wings off a fly once.”
“It was interesting.”
“Did you dissect bottled kittens in school?”
“With relish.”
“Do you know what dope does to you?”
“I relish that too.”
“How about this?”
You are near enough so it takes only a move to bring your faces together. The lips are as good as they look. They are warm and moving and soft.
She holds you away a bit. “I relish this also,” she says.
You hold her against you, again the lips meet you and you shut your eyes....
“Dammit,” you say, breaking away.
Her fingernail has bitten into your neck.
“I’m sorry, darling. Hurt you?” she asks.
“Everybody wants to get into the act,” you say. You take out your favorite bottle and tap out a couple pills. “God, lady, what a grip. Treat me kindly from now on. I’m tender.”
“I’m sorry, I forgot myself,” she says.
“That’s very flattering. But if this is what happens when I kiss you, I’d be a bloody mess if I went any further. Wait.”
More bandages on your neck. Out again to kiss her.
“Easy does it, baby. We’ll take in the beach and I’ll give you a lecture on the evils of running with Michael Horn.”
“No matter what I say, you’re going ahead with the novel, Rob?”
“Mind’s made up. Where were we? Oh, yeah.”
Again the lips.
You park the car atop a sun-blazed cliff a little after noon. Anne runs ahead, down the timber stairs, two hundred feet down the cliff. The wind lifts her bronze hair, she looks trim in her blue bathing suit. You follow, thoughtful. You are away from everywhere. Towns are gone, the highway empty. The beach below with the sea folding in on it is wide, barren, with big slabs of granite toppled and washed by breakers. Wading birds squeal. You watch Anne go down ahead of you. What a little fool, you think of her.
You saunter arm in arm and stand letting the sun get into you. You believe everything is clean now, and good, for a while. All life is clean and fresh, even Anne’s life. You want to talk, but your voice sounds funny in the salt silence, and anyway your tongue is still sore from that sharp fork.
You wade by the waterline and Anne picks something up.
“A barnacle,” she says. “Remember how you used to go diving with your rubber-rimmed helmet and trident in the good old days?”
“The good old days.” You think of the time past, Anne and yourself and the things that used to work out for you together. Traveling up the coast. Fishing. Diving. But even then she was a weird creature. Didn’t mind killing lobsters at all. Took a relish in cleaning them.
“You used to be so foolhardy, Rob. You still are, in fact. Took chances diving for abalones when these barnacles might have cut you, badly. Sharp as razors.”
“I know,” you say.
She gives the barnacle a toss. It lands near your discarded shoes. As you come back up you skirt it, careful not to step on it.