Trust Exercise(39)
“Don’t you think we should go downstairs?” she begged him.
“If you’d fancy a drinkie I can pop down and get us some beers.”
“It’s just—what if someone comes up?” That the door had been open—the unthinkable humiliation of exposure grew more narrowly evaded in retrospect, as if, with enough dawdling, the past might be rewritten and the awful thing take place after all. How often was she going to do this, fuck someone in public? If he’d only get dressed!
“But Jim isn’t here. Did you think he was here? He’s at the opera, he and Tim. They’ll be gone hours.”
“He and Tim aren’t home?”
“No!” Liam laughed.
“But do they know we’re here?”
“We’re their guests! We’re allowed to be here.” At last he was pulling his clothes on, growing handsome again as his flesh disappeared. Halfway into his shirt, he pulled her against him and again pushed his pointy avid tongue down her throat. “D’you know I’ve been mad for you?” he asked huskily. “Wanking day and night, thinking about you. Almost drove poor Martin out of his mind.”
“Oh my God.” She laughed hollowly, twisting away. He tried to pull her hand into his just-buttoned pants but playing the coquette she escaped him, and rushed out the door and down the flight of stairs into the second-floor hall. A murmur of voices and music reached her from the opposite end of the house. As she pursued it Liam caught up, wearing the gaze of devoted assurance she longed for from David.
“I adore you,” Liam whispered as they emerged, pungent and nest-haired and obvious, into the kitchen.
There stood Joelle and Theodosia and Lilly and Rafe and a handful of the popular Juniors, whom Sarah had never known Joelle to spend time with, sharing a joint. Joelle gazed at Sarah as if from the deck of a ship that was moving away from the dock toward a glorious distant horizon; and Sarah saw herself, in Joelle’s steady gaze, marooned on the dock, shrinking down to a pinprick, vanishing.
“My my my,” Rafe said to Liam, “where’ve you been, Master Candide? Learning your lessons?”
“I’ve been alphabetizing the porno. There’s ever so much of it.”
“Oh my God,” Rafe said, blurting out smoke. “D’you all know about the porno? No end of it. Martin told us he’d thought he was putting on 8? by Fellini and what came on was gents shoving their fists in each other’s a-holes.”
“Noooooo!” shrieked the popular Juniors, covering their faces, their mouths, or their ears.
“Martin’s such a bloody liar, he knew exactly what tape he was playing,” Lilly said to laughter.
“Do I hear my own revered name?” Martin said, appearing in the doorway that led from the yard with his dingy hair even more scrumbled than Liam’s. “Did you miss me, my darlings?”
“We’re just talking about what a pervert you are.”
“Be good now, be good. For fuck’s sake take the joint back outside.”
Karen wasn’t with Martin, or anywhere Sarah could see. Unobtrusively Sarah tried to peer through the darkness seeking Karen or David as she passed outside into the yard. Her palm was wet and cold from the bottle of beer she was clutching. The small of her back squirmed beneath Liam’s palm where he kept it attached as if with adhesive. She craved escape from his touch at the same time as feeling wild gratitude for the obstacle he made, like a shield, between her and Joelle, between her and the prospect of David. No sooner did this occur to her than she became afraid he’d change his mind and in her fear grabbed his hand, and felt him gratefully squeeze in return. Then they were smoking in the gazebo with Simon and Erin O’Leary, who clung to each other with the stunned despair of lovers so overcome by their lust they cannot take the first step toward solving it; they could have walked indoors and fucked in any of several unoccupied rooms as Sarah had just done without meaning to, but the simplicity of this solution escaped them. Their mutual grip was white-knuckled. Also in the gazebo were Colin and Cora, Cora who had been housed with Pammie and had thrown her over and moved in with Karen. Sarah wanted to ask Cora where Karen was, but Colin and Cora, unlike Simon and Erin, were noisily necking, grinding and groping, indifferent to their audience. And Rafe was there, bantering filthily with Liam, his arm slung around Katrina from Dance. Every one of the visiting English had paired off soon after arriving, none of these couplings was news, there had even been time for breakups and betrayals—only the grown-ups, Liam and Martin, had remained outside the dance, bemused by it, exempt; “horny little fuckers,” Martin had said. But now Liam had chosen Sarah—she could feel this information emanating through the darkness, altering her status, though in what way she couldn’t yet gauge. And Martin? “We’re just hanging out,” Karen had sneered. Sarah remembered sitting in this gazebo with Julietta and Pammie and Greg Veltin, those three linked in a circle of joy to which Sarah could not stay attached though they’d reached out their hands to keep her. Theirs was a love she had rejected by reflex because of its very simplicity, its undiverted, untranslated eruption from the heart or the guts or wherever such feelings came from. Sarah didn’t have such feelings anymore. Here she sat in the octopus arms of a man whose attractiveness she had to keep scolding herself to perceive and for whom she felt nothing but, now, an uneasy responsibility, as he slobbered and groaned his undiminished longing into her ear.