Envious Moon(45)

“Make a toast,” I said.

“To what?”

“I don’t know. To us. Something.”

“To us,” Hannah said, and I raised my glass and she did, too, and we drank.

I said, “I bet they have a bathtub.”

“So?”

“You could take a bath.”

“You want me to take a bath.”

“No,” I said, “I just thought you’d like it, that’s all. When these steaks thaw, I’ll cook them up. You must be hungry.”

“Okay,” she said, and she stood and left me, climbed the stairs. She walked with the lifelessness of the exhausted. I didn’t blame her, it had been a hard couple of days.

A few minutes later, I heard water running through the pipes. I lighted a cigarette and looked at the fire. It was a real good fire. Yellow-and-red flames rising above the burning wood. That great fire smell spilling out into the room. I stared up to the balcony where Hannah was. I looked around this great room. The high ceilings and the leather furniture. The rectangular windows up high that the moonlight slanted through. I ashed my cigarette into a large painted vase next to my chair. My arms, running along the supple leather of the chair, were suddenly heavy. Not that it mattered. I had everything I had ever longed for. I remember thinking that there was nothing else I needed.





I fried the steaks in a cast-iron pan and pretty much smoked out the whole kitchen. I ran around opening windows until it cleared out some. We ate the steaks with salt and pepper in front of the fire. Hannah wore only a tank top and her underwear. Her skin was flushed pink from the hot bath and her hair was still damp and stuck to her head. She was ravenous. I watched her eat her steak and when she was done she looked up at me with her big green eyes and in that look, I saw the little girl she once was. The mask of the years fell away and she was eight or nine, wanting to leave the dinner table. My heart went out to her. She seemed so vulnerable.

We slept that night in the master bedroom. We had a giant sleigh bed and with the windows open the cool mountain air came in. The comforter was down and soft and underneath it we locked our warm legs together. At one point I woke full of need and we made love silently and slowly, and afterward I kept my arms wrapped so tightly around Hannah that with my open mouth against her bare back I could taste the salt from her sweat.

In the morning we drove through bright sunshine out of the new complex and down to the village to a general store and bought cigarettes and coffee, bread, eggs, and some loose potatoes. We didn’t leave the house for three days. We laid around with the curtains drawn and played games. We played marathon games of Monopoly, and Hannah always won. She seemed to get the big properties right away and she always killed me. We drank the beer and the rest of the champagne. We ate scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast and every day I thawed something different from the freezer. Steaks, chicken, lamb chops. We took long baths together in the big tub, my arms wrapped under her arms, her hair in my face. We made love on the couch, on the living room floor, in the bathroom.

It was a lovely time, and I didn’t want it to end.

We drank a lot of beer one night and when Hannah drank she often became sullen. This time she became almost euphoric, and at one point she stood and jumped onto the leather couch, and facing toward the fireplace, she began to dance. There was no music but it did not seem to matter. Her arms moved from her sides up to her hair. She would mess up her hair so that it streamed in front of her face, and she shook her slender hips, and she dipped her arms down to her toes and then up to the ceiling. She jumped up and down and she spun around. I sat cross-legged on the floor and I watched her. She moved with abandon. She moved without fear. I had wanted nothing more than to watch her let go, really let go, and now that she was, it was almost too much for me to handle. She danced to the beat in her head. She danced until she could not anymore. Then she ripped off her shirt and stood in front of me bare-breasted, her hair falling down and obscuring her eyes, her arms defiantly at her sides.

And in the middle of the night, we fought.

Hannah had been asleep for an hour or so but it wouldn’t come for me. I lay next to her and I watched the pale moonlight stream through those high windows and I listened to her breath. I thought about home, about Galilee, and the cool air reminded me of the season, and that there were not many trips left for the swordfish fleet. If my life had not been turned upside down, I might have been on the North Atlantic that very moment, maybe on watch under the stars. Or maybe I would be sleeping on my bunk below, exhausted enough from a hard day’s work to ignore the peaks and valleys of the ocean that we moved through. And I guess I knew then that I had given up a lot to chase this girl. And it’s not that I had regrets, because I didn’t. I made the decisions I made because they were the only decisions to make, and when I looked over at her sleeping face, I understood how right it was. Still, lying there in the dark mountains of Vermont, I longed for the life I had always had. For the simple clarity of the sea.

Next to me Hannah started to thrash around a little, dreaming. She was having a nightmare. I slid next to her and I reached for her hair and ran my hand through it.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s okay. Wake up. It’s okay.”

I meant to bring her to slowly, but I startled her. Her eyes full of fear and then she slapped me. Hard, right across the face.

“What the f*ck?” I said.