James gestured towards the conversation centre as Laura came in. “You were telling me about Fergus when we left off before the holidays. Why don’t we go back to where we were? So what happened next?”
“In order to be with Fergus, I stayed in Boston over that summer and worked at the hospital, rather than go back to South Dakota as I had in previous summers. During September, I was invited to accompany Dr Betjeman to a medical conference in Miami where he was giving a presentation.
“Fergus was uncomfortable with this separation. It was the first time we’d been apart since we’d been seeing each other and he voiced strong reservations. There wasn’t much to be done about it, however. He couldn’t come to Florida with me and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity; so despite his vociferous protests, I went.
“The experience didn’t turn out to be quite as fun as I’d thought it would be. I felt adrift in the world of ordinary people, which seemed so bland without Fergus. I was short of money and unable to do much except sit in the conference hall and listen to medical researchers droning on. My heart just wasn’t in it. So once Dr Betjeman gave his presentation, I decided to return to Boston two days earlier than planned and surprise Fergus.
“It was about 9 pm when I got home, so I was startled to hear the doorbell ring soon after.
“‘Who’s there?’ I asked cautiously, as my old-fashioned door didn’t have a peephole.
“‘May I come in?’ said a familiar voice.
“‘Fergus!’ I cried in surprise and opened the door.
“‘Welcome back. Here. I’ve brought you a present,’ he said. To my utter surprise, he held out a bottle of burgundy.
“‘Thank you,’ I said and took it from him.
“He leaned forward to kiss me and I could smell he had already been drinking. ‘I hope it’s a kind you like. I’m not very good at this sort of thing. But as you grew up on South Dakota beef, I reasoned you must be a red wine drinker.’ He laughed.
“I felt unsettled. While I had come home especially for him, I had expected to be the one doing the surprising. It was unnerving to find him at my door so quickly. Moreover, I wasn’t accustomed to his drinking, or drinking with him. It all seemed out-of-character from a man who had so often made me feel a full night’s sleep was self-indulgent.
“‘Well, aren’t you going to invite me in?’ he asked and took the wine from my hands. He slipped on by and went into the kitchen. ‘Where do you keep your corkscrew?’
“I followed him in and fished around in a kitchen drawer. ‘How did you know I was back?’ I asked.
“‘How could I not know you were back, Laura?’ he replied simply. Reaching into the cupboard, he took down wine glasses.
“Leading the way into the living room, he flopped into an armchair. ‘God, I’ve missed you.’
“I looked at him. Familiarity had stolen some of the intensity from his dark eyes and made him less startlingly handsome to me. I tried to look at him as a stranger would, to see what one would see who did not know him.
“‘I have been so depressed since you left,’ he said. He drained the wine from his glass and reached for the bottle to refill it.
“We drank in silence for several moments. The wine bottle was soon empty. It had tasted very good to me, as it clearly had to Fergus as well, and I was toying with the idea of going to see what I had in the house. Would Fergus want me to suggest another bottle? It still seemed peculiar to drink so casually with him.
“‘I’m going to get us something more,’ I said and rose. I went into the hallway, because once Fergus had begun reforming my dietary habits, I’d moved what little wine I owned to the floor of the hall closet so that he wouldn’t know I still had it. My wine cellar now consisted of four bottles in a wooden rack pushed beneath the winter bedding. Most had been laid down before Fergus had come into my life, and as my income had never extended to any seriously good wine, the majority was probably now vinegar. Opening the door fully, I knelt down and started to pull them out. I hadn’t bothered to put the hall light on. The hallway itself was minuscule and there was enough light cast from the kitchen to read the labels.
“Fergus materialized in the gloom behind me. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he leaned over to look at the bottles. As always, the heat of his touch caught my attention.
“‘There isn’t much good in here, I’m afraid. All cheap stuff,’ I said.
“He knelt behind me. Leaning forward over my left shoulder to read the labels, or so I thought, he instead gently slipped a hand into my blouse and cupped my breast. I paused but didn’t pull away. Fergus continued to fondle my breast, his fingertips massaging the nipple into erectness. He pressed his body tightly to my back and I could feel his penis hard against my spine.
“‘Fergus, not right now,’ I said. ‘It was a lot of travelling today. I’m really very tired.’
“He began undoing the buttons of my blouse.
“‘Fergus, please. I don’t want to.’
“‘Yes, you do,’ he said.”
“Once he had his arms around me, I forgot my protests. We made love right there on the floor in the half-light provided by the kitchen doorway, the bottles of merlot and burgundy rolling around us, clinking softly against each other. A little fierce-looking in the gloom of the hallway with his thick, unruly hair and his dark, dark eyes, Fergus pressed me to the carpet and mounted me with such forcefulness that it would have been frightening, had I not anticipated it. He was a dynamic lover, and my body responded as if foreordained. With no time to prepare for it, I climaxed very quickly. My body was wracked with it, more consumed than satisfied, as wave after wave of sensation overtook me with no interlude to recover. Indeed, there was such an uninhibited ferocity to Fergus’s love-making that I was left doubting whether or not love actually came into it. It was in its way more like a battle between us.
“Finally Fergus climaxed himself and as he did, he kissed me. It was a hungry, devouring kiss, as invasive as his penis, or perhaps more so, because I hadn’t been antici-pating it. With his coming, however, some of his energy seemed to dissipate. He kissed me further, still deeply but less forcefully. Finally, he relaxed onto the carpet beside me.
“We lay together on the floor for several minutes and did not speak. As so often happens, it was the tiny things that began to make an impression on my consciousness first – the feel of the shaggy carpet on my back, the faint, faint smell of carpet shampoo, the irritated skin of my elbows, rubbed sore from friction.
“‘This is how it should be between us,’ Fergus murmured in a soft, satisfied way. ‘Just like it always was.’
“‘Mmm?’
“‘Don’t you remember?’
“I looked over to make out his features in the darkness. ‘Remember what?’
“‘Atlantis.’
“‘Atlantis?’
“‘Yes, don’t you remember? When you were queen and I was your lover. Your secret lover. Remember how I came to you at night? How I came in my little boat and moored it up alongside that stone wall? Surely you must remember that. Cast your mind back.’
“‘Fergus, come on. You don’t have to bring all this into it. What we have between us is great all by itself. You don’t need to turn it into something else.’
“‘No, Laura, close your eyes. Look back. Free your soul and look back to that stone wall. Can’t you see it? Those huge, square blocks the masons made, how they built that great wall running from the palace down to the water? And the wooden pier? Our secret pier. It’s night. Remember? Remember how you would always wait midst the trees for me? The moon was shining on the dark water and I was pushing my little boat up. Fly free with your soul, my queen. Don’t you see it? Don’t you see me coming to you? Dying for you, there on the pier?’
“The thing was, I could see it, the whole scene unfolding rapidly in my mind with such eidetic clarity that I saw the moon-cast shadows, the ripples on the black water, the blood on the stones of the wall. With my acute ability to visualize, all he needed to do was construct the merest mood and I, lying in the darkness, dropped into an entire world instantly.
“‘You do see it, don’t you?’ Fergus said confidently.
“‘I’ve created a picture in my mind, yes. But with my kind of imagination, Fergus, I can create anything. You know that. I can picture the dark side of the moon, if that’s what I go after.’
“‘But is it a picture? Or is it reality? What proof is there that you’re not really seeing the dark side of the moon? That what you’re seeing isn’t real?’
“‘Because I’m making it up,’ I said.
“‘Laura, Laura, Laura, whatever will we do with you?’ he moaned softly. ‘Where do you get this resistance that so ill becomes you?’
“‘It isn’t resistance. I only said, why do I have to believe? Isn’t it enough that it’s there in my mind? Why does it have to be real?’
“‘Clear these continual doubts out of your mind. They lower you.’ He leaned over to kiss me.
“‘But why can’t you accept things for what they are, Fergus? Why does everything have to be more than it seems? Why must you grab at even the most tenuous ideas in an effort to connect everything to everything else?’
“‘Because everything is connected.’
“‘Is it? Does it have to be? And does it matter, if it isn’t? I mean, I’d be happy if there were other lives, if I’d been a queen in Atlantis and we’d been lovers, but I’m still happy even if we weren’t. We made good love, Fergus. Why does it only have value in your eyes, if we were once lovers in Atlantis?’
“‘Because otherwise nothing would make sense, Laura. If nothing was connected, there’d be no meaning to what we do. What would be the point of anything? Why exist at all?’
“I had no answer to that. But as I lay in the darkness the scene from Atlantis came into my mind again. The wall, built of dressed grey stone, was to my left. A cobbled boat sloped into the water between the wall and the small wooden pier. The water itself was not a lake, but a river of huge, Nile-like proportions, moving sluggishly in the right-hand direction. His little boat, moored to the pier, bobbed in the dark water. It was crudely made and easily sunk.
“Not only could I see this scene, but the story formed quickly around it – how my husband, the king, had discovered my unfaithfulness and sent the guards; how my lover’s death sparked rebellion among the commoners and brought about the downfall of the kingdom; how I ran, panicked, through the darkness, the branches of the shoreline bushes flicking my face as I struggled to escape my own inevitable fate.
“I lay, seeing the faces, hearing the voices, and wondering: Why does my mind do this to me?”