Saturday night, I heard a soft but somewhat formal knock at my door. Not the kind of knock that says, “Hey, it’s your neighbor,” but a more tentative, respectful knock, and on the lakeside, where no one ever entered. I opened the door and there she was. My heart skipped over several times, and I just stood there smiling at her.
“Would you like to have dinner with me on the island?” she asked, seeming far more normal than when we’d last met.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Do I need to bring anything?”
She shook her head no.
I was in shorts and a T-shirt and tennis shoes, but I didn’t dare request time to change, for fear she might go up in a puff of smoke since she was so mercurial. I locked the door and followed her over the embankment and down to the shoreline, this time not landing on my behind. She laughed anyway.
“Are you remembering that I fell down this hill the last time we met?”
“I remember that my aunt said I would recognize you because you would fall.”
“Angelique said I was clumsy?” That revelation put me off a little.
“She said that’s how I would recognize you. She made no comment as to your agility.”
I liked the rather elegant way she phrased things, carefully choosing her words. And I liked the way she moved—strong strides and then leaps like a dancer.
“How do we get to the island?”
“I have a boat.” She shot me a look. And she never forgets anything.
I climbed into her duck boat—a wide, flat-bottomed, green metal craft that was sturdy but slow—and she motored off out of the cove, handling the boat as someone would who’s done it all her life.
All around the lake were neat boat docks with small fishing craft tied to them, belonging to a tiny armada of fishermen here for a few weeks of recreation. About a mile farther, into the middle of the lake, a small island rose out of the water. Guiding the boat onto the shore, she told me to step onto the land, not into the water, because there was no beach. I stepped onto the boat’s first metal bench seat, then bounced off it to the second, and then leapt onto the prow and made another leap onto land, trying to appear agile, in case Angelique is watching, I thought, but truthfully, in case Levade is watching.
The underbrush was heavy, the island uninhabited save for a few rain-soaked campfires left behind, a sign that others had enjoyed this reclusive spot.
She spread an old horse blanket, bearing the initials LF discreetly stitched in one corner, onto the ground and unpacked our dinner from a modest tan wicker basket, which gave me a few minutes to look at her. She was small, but her short-sleeved T-shirt revealed tan and sculpted arms, and the calves of her legs were muscled. She was physically quick, but wary of her surroundings like a small animal. Her hair was more than blond. It was golden, and it seemed to swirl in directions that focused you on her ethereal blue eyes. Her ears were small and close to her head, and her nose aristocratic, like those I’d seen on Grecian marble busts. She had a relatively long neck that led to a determined chin and a magnificent smile, which she flashed in my direction as she unpacked chicken and some sort of pasta.
“I thought you’d be vegan,” I said.
“I thought you’d be fried chicken.” She smiled and then gave me a penetrating stare that didn’t feel like we were talking about fried chicken. I swallowed nervously. Why does this woman make me so uncomfortably excited?
She asked if I liked the food, and I told her it was the best fried chicken I’d ever eaten, and it was, but I wasn’t hungry. My stomach was in knots, over what I had no idea. I was just nervous and jittery and happy. It was as if she had an energy field around her, and I had entered it and started vibrating to a frequency I’d never known.
I smiled at her, and she said, “You know of course that you have a very sexy smile. You should never stop smiling.”
“Not a hard request in this environment,” I said, and never stopped smiling. “How did you end up here?”
“I invited you to dinner.” She grinned mischievously and then grew serious. “I came to stay with my aunt Angelique when I was young, to help with the horses. When she died, she left the cabin and land to me. And before you ask, I promised her I wouldn’t sell it. I was raised forty-five minutes from here. My parents divorced a long time ago, and my mother died of dementia six months ago. So it’s me, and Alizar, and of course Angelique.”
“Doesn’t make for a very big Thanksgiving dinner,” I said. “My parents live on a small farm in Missouri, and I don’t see much of them. Ben, my ex, didn’t like the center of the country. But it’s on me. I could have taken a vacation and gone there if I’d wanted to.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I laughed. “You’re the psychic. You tell me.”
She pursed her lips and was silent for a moment, then drew little symbols in the dirt with one finger as she spoke. “They don’t like what you write…too many murders. And they wish you’d married a nice farm boy twenty years ago and given them grandchildren.”
“You are psychic.”
“You should go see them.” She brushed away her drawings with the palm of her hand.
“Is something wrong? Are they sick?”
“No. You just need the connection.”
“I’ll put that on my to-do list. That’s quite a subzero promise you made your aunt, that you’d never leave here. Don’t you get lonely, particularly when summer is over?”
“Sometimes. But my aunt promised me…” her tone indicated even she knew the promise was a bit futile, “that if I would stay, she would send me someone who would love and protect me.”
“And has she made good on her promise?”
“Over the years, she’s sent me a few people.” Her eyes were suddenly riveted on me. “But she and I have different taste in women.”
My heart slapped against my chest as it had in the subway when I thought a woman’s life was in danger, perhaps this time mine.
“I’ve talked to her about that.” She laughed, and I found myself giddy and laughing along with her.
So I’m on an island with a gorgeous lesbian, or bisexual, or pan-sexual who has prepared me a picnic dinner, and I don’t want to delve into the meaning of that, and I don’t want this evening to end.
“I think I was behind you one day when you were in the post office.” I nervously changed the subject as we ate. “You don’t talk very much when you go into town.”
“You followed me.”
My cheeks flushed. “I did. Because there’s no one up here who—”
“Because you like the way I look.” Her pointed delivery skewered me whenever I tried to state something that wasn’t perfectly true.
I must have gone from red to purple, because she laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with liking the way people look. I like the way you look. You have an elegant but just slightly disheveled appearance. Like you know how to dress but you don’t really care. My aunt was like that, and she was more psychic than I am, but she didn’t advertise it. Why are you here, Taylor?” Her tone startled me. I felt like I’d been voted off the lesbian love-island and deposited on a therapist’s couch. “It’s not just about writing.”
“Well, good question,” I said, giving myself time to decide what I wanted to share. “I’ve been married, and, in fact, I’ve had several other relationships, but nothing’s really worked. Men are so different from women.”
“How’s that?”
“Men are ‘in the moment’—let’s eat, let’s fight, let’s fuck. Women are more in their heads—let’s think about it, analyze it, organize it. So when you put men and women together in a relationship, they’re just not seeing things the same way, or maybe I’m not your normal woman. Anyway, emotional connection with my lovers was always my challenge, so I’m told, and it got worse with Ben. I’ve been jammed, and that’s affected my ability to write, and, I guess, I’ve been trying to…waiting to…” I paused, searching for the right words.
“To feel something.” Levade supplied them.
“Yes.” I hadn’t really been able to articulate that idea, and it seemed to beg that I reveal more than I wanted to, so I quickly shifted to a lighter topic. “Feeling something is easier in the city, because you’re always in sensory overload, but I’m not a true New Yorker. Having been raised in Missouri, I struggle a bit with the culture—lusting after Gold Rush nail polish at a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a bottle, or craving a massage from a Japanese guy who jumps up on the massage table and walks on your back.”
“You don’t like massages?”
“I do. It’s just not something…” And before I could finish the sentence, she was behind me, rubbing my neck and shoulders. Her hands, intensely strong, massaged up and down my arms, then clasped my neck, kneading the tightness, running up and down my spine, massaging each vertebrae, her palms coming to rest beside one another at the nape of my neck, then separating quickly, whereupon she grabbed my shoulders, squeezed firmly, and then threw her hands into the air as if discarding my pain into the universe.
“Your energy is blocked,” she said, and I moaned, though I could just as easily have toppled over or gone into a trance. I felt like I was up above the pine trees, over the lake, floating with a feeling so warm and relaxing I never wanted her to stop. “You’re way too tense,” she added for good measure, and then suddenly, I felt her focus shift.
Before I could thank her for the amazing massage, she had danced away and was packing up the basket and folding the blanket, as she signaled for my silence. I was physically limp and completely confused as she hurried us into the boat.
A silver flash of light from the metal prow of a fishing boat caught my eye, and I could barely make out two men mooring their craft on the opposite side of the island.
“Who are they?” I whispered.
“People I don’t want to see.”
I caught a glimpse of them. “I think that’s the taxidermy guy, Frank, but that’s not his boat.”
Levade didn’t answer but deftly rowed us away from the island, apparently not wanting the motor to give us away. The oar clamps rubbed against the oarlocks, making a rhythmic metallic squeak with each stroke, and I wondered if the men on the island heard it in the quiet of the evening.
“Did he really kill his wife?” I whispered.
“Yes,” she said, and put more force behind her rowing.
She pulled in at my dock and I hopped out.
“Aside from escaping pirates and fleeing the island, this has been the best evening I’ve had in a long time. It was wonderful. Would you like to come up to the cabin?”
“I better not.” She seemed to be warring with herself on that decision. “You’re an addictive woman. Must be the smile,” she said, and pushed back, motoring off to the Point. I watched her until she disappeared.
Addictive. I smiled to no one.
Opening my computer, I typed in Levade, and a definition popped up describing a movement made in the show ring during which a horse raises its front legs, tucks his back legs under him, and balances on his deeply bent back legs, forelegs drawn tight.
I looked at the dictionary photo of a beautiful white horse performing that movement. It takes such balance to keep from falling, I thought, and wondered if the same was true for Levade.
* * *
That night I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was in the moon and the reflection on the lake. She was in the whisper of the pine needles. Why was I feeling this way? Because she’s psychic, and she’s opened my third eye, or cleansed my aura, or elevated my kundalini, or some damned thing. I tried to push the feelings back, but all I wanted was to see her again…alone.