The Clairvoyants(53)

“What?” William said. His eyes had grown hard to read in the office’s half-light. Beyond the high window it was night, and the walk home across the dark, windswept campus loomed ahead of us.

“It’s going to be cold,” I said.

“I already called Geoff,” he said. “He’s coming to pick us up.”

And then he hefted the box he’d packed in his arms, and checked the room one last time, as if for anything else he needed. His gaze took in the desk, and I knew he was thinking about the portfolio, and I almost confessed to having seen it just to clear the tension in the room, to ease my guilt. Then he reached out and tugged on the desk drawer, as if to make sure it was locked.

“Hurry up,” he said. “Get your coat.”

His voice was cold, distracted. Dumbly, I grabbed my coat off the couch, longing for the times we’d slipped in here to have sex, the sound of students passing in the hall, the occasional knock on the opaque class, the way we’d suppress our movements, our breath, until the person had left. I thought of the sandalwood smell, and William with Del here in the office together, and though I had no real proof she’d been there, I was filled with a rush of resentment and anger. He was mine and she had no right to him. I reached out and took William’s hand, and was surprised to find how cold it was—as if he’d been outside.

“Do we have to hurry?” I said. I pressed his cold hand to my cheek. “It’s so nice and warm in here.”

And like the first time, when I’d awakened to find him in the duck-carved chair in my apartment, his face changed, and his hand slid around to the back of my neck, and he tugged me in to kiss. This time his lips were cold and hard. He dropped the box to the floor, and he kicked the door shut—although no one was around who might have seen us. The office, lit by the desk lamp, was filled with shadow, and he pulled me down onto the couch and tore at the clasp to my jeans. When I tried to help him he pinned both of my hands beneath his. I cried out, and maybe he took my cry for that of passion. His movements became harsh, his breathing ragged. He pulled my hair to tip my face up, and kneaded my breasts, and pressed my legs open.

I’d thought I was initiating sex—but this wasn’t that. Had it been my fault for being duplicitous? For desiring proof that he was mine? I was afraid, though I tried to not show it. I hurried things along so he would be done. I left myself, and watched him as if from above, like one of the dead. Later, there would be the familiar bruises from the pads of his fingers, from his mouth. I could not erase the past. I had only spun it, like a wheel, away from me. And I had gotten a small reprieve, but now it was back. What goes around comes around. For whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. He would make a joke about that night and tell me I surprised him, and I would think he didn’t really know what surprised was. If he wanted to be surprised, well, I could do that.





22




That afternoon in August, the summer David Pinney died, I watched him walk across the lawn to the barn, the dry grass flattened under his feet, and I pulled myself out of the pool and followed him. I had often gone into the barn to be alone. It had been three years since my grandfather died, and my sisters were afraid of the place, but to me the barn, with its strips of sunlight and its stone floor, was reassuring and cool. I would sit in the little area where I once saw Sister Martha Mary, near my grandfather’s workshop that smelled of milled copper. There was stacked hay for the sheep he’d raised once, the few cows that would get loose on the golf course, old Bonnie, the mare with her large head and frightening whinny. I’d sit on the bale of hay, draw my legs to my chest. The hay was rough and stuck to my bare skin.

Usually, I sat in the barn and waited for something. I expected to see my grandfather, busy at his bench once again, the sparks from the mill flying out onto the stone floor, his pants loose on his bony hips. I sat on the bale of hay waiting, much as Sister had once waited for me. Now I entered, looking for David Pinney. Up in the barn’s rafters, swallows flitted. I didn’t see him at first, and then he stepped out of the shadows. I felt a small misgiving, but I ignored it.

I showed him the old lightning rods, the coiled cable shining like a new penny. I told him how the rods worked, how the cable, buried in the ground, drew the strike away from the highest points of a church, or a barn, or a peak in a roof. The sun came in and out, blinking through the old barn’s slats.

“People were afraid of lightning,” I told him. “Once, they thought it was sent by the Prince of the Power of the Air.”

“And who would that be?” he said.

“Satan, you know.” I picked up one of the rods. “They called this the ‘heretical rod.’ They didn’t think it was right to try to control something that came from God.”

He took the rod from my hand, hefted it, and then set it down. “These must be an easy sell.”

“People aren’t really afraid anymore,” I said.

“They don’t believe in the devil so much?” he said.

Water from his damp hair ran down his shoulder.

“Playing to people’s fears, that’s sort of like that church you go to,” he said.

“I don’t go to that church,” I said.

He looked at the ceiling and the scattering birds, and he laughed. He moved closer to me, and his wet shorts dripped onto my feet. I felt the closeness of his bare skin.