The Peacock Emporium(79)
He turned toward her. “Then why do you let it make you so sad?”
“I’m not sad. And I don’t let it bother me that much. I just don’t agree with the system, is all.”
She sat down, pulled up a piece of long grass, and placed its stalk meditatively between her back teeth. “It doesn’t rule my life or anything. It’s not like I’m sitting in a dark room somewhere sticking pins in a voodoo doll of my brother.”
She heard him chuckle, as he sat down beside her and folded his legs beneath him. She heard the quiet rustle of grass as he adjusted himself, watched, surreptitiously, as his legs stretched out beside hers.
“The estate was never yours, right? It belongs to your father?”
“And his father. And his father before him.”
“So it was never yours, and it will never be yours. So?”
“So what?”
“Exactly. So what?”
She raised her eyes to the heavens. “I think you’re being a bit na?ve.”
“For telling you not to let your family’s land eat up your happiness?”
“It’s not that straightforward.”
“Why?”
She kicked out at an insect that had landed on her foot. “Oh, everyone’s such an expert, aren’t they? Everyone knows how I feel—how I should feel. Everyone thinks I should just accept things the way they are and stop railing against them. Well, Alejandro, it’s not as simple as that. It’s not as simple as making yourself not want something. It’s about families and relationships and history and injustice and—” She broke off, stole a glance at him. “It’s never just about land, okay? If it was just about land it would have been sorted out long ago.”
“Then what is it about?”
“I don’t know. Everything.”
She thought suddenly of the greater troubles he had probably seen, of Jessie’s situation, and her voice sounded childish, petulant, even to herself. “Look, can we just leave this?”
He pulled his knees up, glanced sideways at her over his shoulder. “Don’t get mad, Suzanna Peacock.”
“I’m not mad,” she said crossly.
“Okay . . . I think maybe you have to make a decision. I think it is very easy to let yourself be swallowed by your family, and by its history.”
“Now you sound like my husband.” She had not meant to mention Neil, and felt his unwelcome presence in the air between them.
Alejandro pushed back his hair. “Then he and I are in agreement. Neither of us wants to see you unhappy.”
She did look at him then, studied his profile, and as he turned toward her, let herself ask silent questions of those brown eyes, the knowing mouth. There was the faintest hint of puzzlement in his face, as if he was trying to work something out.
You are just another crush, she said to herself, then flinched in case she had said it out loud. “I’m not unhappy,” she whispered. It seemed important to persuade him of this.
“Okay,” he said.
“I don’t want you to think I am.”
He nodded.
From the way he looked at her, it was as if he understood, as if he knew her history, her guilt, her unhappiness.
He must be a crush, she thought, dropping her head abruptly to hide her sudden blush. I’m getting fanciful, imposing feelings on him that I don’t even know he has.
She sat, her forehead resting on her knees—until she felt his touch, electric on her shoulder. “Suzanna,” he said.
She glanced up at him. Against the sun, she could see only a blurred, unnaturally slimmed silhouette. “Suzanna.”
She took his proffered hand, made as if to stand, accepting somehow, in this strange, dreamy afternoon, that she would follow this man anywhere, that she would let herself be sucked into his slipstream. He did not stand, but pulled her slightly toward him, and she watched as he lay back on the grass. As her breath caught in her chest, he fixed his eyes on hers, something mischievous in the invitation they carried. Then, with a childish whoop, he pushed himself off on a trajectory, and began rolling down the hillside, his legs bumping against each other as he built up speed.
For several seconds, she stared in disbelief at the figure flying away from her, and then, the tension of the past moments released, she threw herself down after him, letting the sky and the earth dissolve into a blur, letting her senses be consumed by the rushing grass, the smell of the earth, the gentle bump of her bones as they met the ground. And she was laughing, lost in the ridiculousness of it, spitting out bits of grass and daisies and God knew what else. She was laughing, her hands stretched above her head, letting herself fly down a hillside, a child again, knowing she would be caught at the bottom.
He stood over her, as she lay giggling and panting in the grass, her head still spinning from the descent. He swayed above her, one hand reaching forward to help her stand up. She was gradually able to make out his beaming face, the livid grass stains all over his trousers. “Happy now, Suzanna Peacock?”
She could think of no sensible response. And so, giddily, she lay back, laughing, her eyes closed against the painfully blue sky.
* * *
—
They had reached the center of town shortly before seven. They might have made it back sooner, but their pace, by mutual consent, had been measured, perhaps to allow them more time for conversation. It came easily now—their infantile physical release had freed something between them. She knew a little more about him: about his housebound mother, the maid, the political situation in Argentina. He knew about her family history: her childhood, her siblings, her anger at having to leave the city. Sometime later, she would remember that in several hours of conversation they had not mentioned Neil, and would feel not quite guilty enough about the omission.