Song

“I’ve got a job for you,” she said, and sat down on the piano bench next to him.

Roger finished the phrase he was playing near the end of the first movement of the Mozart Partita #3, improvised a key-tickling farewell to the ivory, and turned to face her.

He was used to jobs. His father grew up on a farm before becoming a mathematics professor at Hamberson College, keeping his practical abilities at carpentry, husbandry, general fix-it man all his life, but also keeping the half-reckless attitude it took to tackle whatever came his way. Some of that rubbed off on Roger who was only too happy to carry his father’s role into the next generation.

Something in Katrina’s eyes told him this wasn’t going to be a familiar request.

“It’s Stella,” she said.

“What about her?” he asked, remembering their long friendship, dating from the Iron Railing Music Workshops in rural Maine when he and Katrina were new members on the faculty and she was the bright young cellist.

“She’s 35,” Katrina said.

“So?”

“She needs a baby right now if she’s ever going to have one.”

Roger could agree but he couldn’t see where this was going.

“Don’t you understand?”

“Sure, but, I don’t... ”

Katrina cut in, “So, I want you to get her pregnant.”

After the stun-gun effect settled he found himself searching for a word of response. Finding none, he made a few gasping noises.

“You know the problem,” Katrina went on. “She has a knack for picking absolutely terrible men. And she’s so sweet. Something about psychology, I suppose. But now she’s running out of time and there’s no one in sight.”

His first thought was that she was so good looking she could get knocked-up by anyone she wanted. But he decided not to introduce that concept just now. His second thought was artificial insemination.

Katrina went on. “She doesn’t want insemination,” she said as if reading his mind. “She believes that for the child to turn out right it has to start with a physical relationship between two people who have feelings for each other. I happen to agree.”

Roger wasn’t saying anything. He knew better.

“She didn’t come up with this idea, I did. You’re musical. She’s musical. You’re both attractive and intelligent. You like each other. You’ll make a great kid for her.”

Roger was struck first by the preposterousness of the suggestion and then, at the same time, the courageous generosity he felt from Katrina. He’d known her compassionate streak. He’d sensed it first glance and then watched it flourish in silent admiration over the years. So much was her inclination to assist, that she often sacrificed personal wishes for the benefit of others. Roger, at times, felt he needed to protect her from herself. On top of that she was a great beauty. A rare combination in a human being.

Theirs was second marriage, the kind in which all mistakes made in the first had been put well behind them. They had three children. Katrina was happy splitting her time between motherhood and teaching flute and, as a little extra - though no extra might be needed, conducting the chorus in the local community college. Roger had a concert career as a classical pianist. Everything was perfect.

“I don’t think I know what to say,” said Roger.

“Don’t say anything,” said Katrina. “Just get your ruddy butt on the red-eye to London. You’ve got a three-day break before your concert in Trenton next week and she’s about to ovulate. One thing more. I ask just one favor.”

Roger was too flabbergasted to respond.

Katrina may have sensed Roger’s predicament or maybe she just wanted to finish this off and be done with it. In any case she didn’t wait for him to find his voice.

“I don’t want to hear anything about it when you come back,” she said. Then she turned away from him.

For the first time Roger had a moment to ponder his own feelings about the matter. He loved Katrina. Nothing would change that, not even idyllic lovemaking in the English countryside. In fact, if anything, this magnanimous gesture endeared her all the more to him. If he refused, he would be insensitive to Stella’s need and thwart Katrina’s good will. If he agreed, it might suggest an unsavory eagerness to make out with Stella. His best bet was to trust what appeared to be a plan based upon good intentions, shut up and just do what they told him to do.

Stella had paid for the ticket. She’d inherited a hunk of dough from her Iranian grandfather and was living on a country estate West of London. Roger was to spend twenty-four hours there. There were no plans, no rules.

On the plane he remembered the time he and Katrina first met Stella. They both thought she was about 15 years old but she was 24. She stood four foot ten and had that perennial quality of youth that, as best Roger could tell, came from the genes of her Near-Eastern father, generously mixed with the grace of a fine Parisian mother. Hard to believe she was 35.

That meeting had come not long after he’d first met Katrina and was very much in love or he might have pursued Stella. She was a great musician, had a quick, confident air and was drop-dead gorgeous. He still remembered his astonishment at the dress she wore the last night to the final gathering of faculty and students - black, mid-thigh length, hip-hugging with a subtle see-through top that, on close inspection, revealed her tight, bra-less breasts.

Roger looked around the plane. All these people here, he thought. And they’ve got no clue what’s going down, no clue whatsoever. He chuckled to himself in smug astonishment.

The plane was met by a distinguished looking chauffeur holding a sign with Roger’s name on it. The black Bentley glided with ease through the countryside to an estate that looked like something out of Jane Austin, about an hour and a half from Heathrow. Stella met them at the front drive and shook hands with Roger with an air of formality almost as if meeting him for the first time. But for the riding clothes she was wearing, she looked the same as she did the first time he saw her.

“Do you like horses?” She asked.

“Sure.”

“Then we’re going for a ride.”

It was mid-afternoon in the English countryside. Roger was a little off-kilter from the time change and the airplane food had left him with a queasy discomfort somewhere in that mysterious space down below his breastbone. But his excitement, however, was first rate. He had energy for horses.

They rode in wordless silence for an hour returning at four. As they dismounted she told him he would have time to settle in to his room and rest before cocktails at six thirty. Then she disappeared.

Roger didn’t know what he had expected but his thoughts were so dominated by sexual imagery that he found it hard to believe no effort had begun in that direction. He wasn’t sure if he should take a more aggressive posture but she’d allowed no opportunity for that. Trust the plan, he thought. Trust the plan.

But this slow beginning kept him floating out over what by now he would have to confess was a frankly sexual hunger. To know they were intended make love ahead of time and to be delayed and feel distanced, created tension the shape of a slow, agitated crescendo. There was little to be done but comply. The rewards, he reckoned, would be well worth waiting.

“I hope you like lamb,” she said as they met for champagne in the reception hall outside the oversized dining room.

“Quite,” said Roger, aware that he was becoming a little too English with his choice of words.

She appeared ravishing, not at all like the girlish woman he had gone horseback riding with earlier the same day. He tried to figure out why the magnitude of change when he hit upon it. She was wearing the same dress she stunned him with years ago. How did she do it? Was she aware of this?

“My chef believes there is no perfect food, she said, only the idea of perfection. The pleasure comes in striving for it. I have always thought that is a good metaphor for music. I let him do what he wants. You will see, he does a good job.”

Somewhere around the Artichokes Barigoute, the third course which had followed the Cornets of Salmon Tartare with Sweet Red Onion Crème Friache, and then the Bilini with Toasted Sweet Peppers and Eggplant Caviar, she told him the chef was a disciple of The French Laundry and believed in the principle of diminishing returns, that is, that your first taste of an exciting new dish is its best. The second taste, slightly less exciting, the third... therefore, he serves small portions and many courses, taking away the plate when you still want more, bringing another surprise in a small package. We have had pleasure already, she said, yet we have not tasted the Salmon Chops with Celery and Black Truffles, the Double Rib Lamb Chops with Cassoulet of Summer Beans and Rosemary or the Poached Banana Crepe.

For some reason Roger’s love life flashed in his mind - limited, he thought, compared to the example set by this meal. The analogy made him tingle inside. More pleasure, he thought. Pleasure, in this case, within the parameter of loyalty. Then another image came to him, a surprising image: a shimmering ovum in a darkened ocean, cilia, like fronds of sea anemones reaching for it, a soft current beating along a succulent chamber. The fact that this was happening right now inside the soft chambers of this beautiful woman across from him made him quiver inside. Wasn’t it true that in a critically short time the ovum melted into the heart of the womb? Could it be this elaborate dance was all about anticipation and timing?

Stella had her mind on Beethoven, his deafness, how he tried to conceal it, conducting his own symphony, arriving at the finale cadence four measures too late. His courage, his genius, the tearful appreciation of the audience when they realized what they had witnessed.

The courses of beauty and taste and pleasure had passed. Dessert passed. Stella looked up. “Now a little music,” she said.

She took him by the hand and led him down a long hallway. This was the first time they had touched since the moment of the handshake at the portal.

She held on to him, leading a half-step ahead, almost pulling him until she came to a doorway and stopped. “Now we make music,” she said and opened the door.

Standing in the center of the room was a seven-foot Hamburg Steinway, shiny, jet-black, the lid half-open, in the appropriate position for accompaniment. Next to it a small rug, from the Caucasus, Roger judged, and on it a straight chair, classic 18th Century English. Leaning against the chair was an old cello with an antique, battered finish that told of many owners, many concerts. History leeched from the patina of its lacquer.

Roger was drawn to the piano where, on its rack, was a yellowed manuscript. Beethoven. Opus 69: Concerto for Piano and Cello in A Major. His best, thought Roger, written in his wonderful middle period, 1807-8, a time when he had just discovered he was rapidly going deaf. a solitary work, the first piano-cello concerto in which the cello assumed a balanced presence with Beethoven’s dominant piano.

Roger had heard her play this piece before at Cambridge with a visiting professor from Julliard. With his mop of blond hair and quick-flash smile he was very engaging but Roger thought the playing distinctly uninspired. Roger could do better. He practically lunged at the piano and began adjusting the piano stool, thumbing through the manuscript with the anticipation of a young boy.

Stella placed the cello between her legs. She hiked her skirt to the angular place where the legs meet the torso and rested her instrument there. She began tuning. Her legs fell naturally around her cello with a grace that happens only after long years of affection and strife.

Roger looked at Stella. Stella at Roger. Stella began the rare a’ capella solo that starts the first movement, establishing the independence of the cello right away, her shoes off, her heels digging in to the Caucasian carpet, her toes curled under as if in the cinch of ecstasy. She was five measures in now, flowing through the dipping part of the phrase that is the idea carried through the entire first movement, the part that reaches up from below to the long tonic tone. Roger was not counting. He didn’t have to. The music was so natural that entrances started themselves. He waited instinctively till the seventh beat of her sustenuto, began the singing quality of his own phrase, and they were off.

All thoughts outside the tight chamber of crafted notes were so far into forgetting they did not exist. An instantaneous concentration characteristic of great musicians prevailed, in which a conversation begins, one voice echoed by the other, lifted from their instruments by the gift of talent and will, floating through the room.

Beethoven was perfect for this dark space, its lone fireplace glowing in the distance, two music lights illuminating the musicians with isolated intensity, their circles touching at the perimeter where light and music flowed into each other. There was fury in the passionate interplay of the voices returning again and again to the dark mystery of the primary theme.

In the brief silence before the second movement, they each made a few gestures to recover from the physical expenditure of the first and repair for the technical runs and arpeggios they knew would follow. No words but those of their bodies were spoken. In this sacred place they could be lost in each other far away from the circle of language.

Syncopation now. A lurching feeling that moves their torsos into and out of their instruments as they attack the afterbeats. Now a droning bass line and staccato voices in parallel thirds above. Trills in the cello offsetting the thunder of the piano. Double stops. Stella accompanying herself over the falling waters of Roger’s bass line. Each listening for the other to sing as they knew the music would make them, their faces contorted in pain and pleasure. Recapitulation now. A little dance. And again fury. Changes in mood so familiar, no explanation need be offered. Ending downward. Ending soft.

Roger felt himself heated from within, the moisture of his brow but one of the many manifestations to go unnoticed under the cloak of passion and performance.

Slow movement now. Adagio. Singing in that Germanic way that embraces both sorrow and desire. Now straight into the sprightly finale. Flashback to earlier melodic lines, interwoven. Now presto. The fingers flying over keys and fingerboard. Bodies bent over their labor with an unselfconscious loss of inhibition in which they weaved and swayed and grimaced and smiled and between phrases lifted their arms in gestures of articulation... lips puckered, tongues nipping at the open air, head jerking, breath escaping on the down beats. False climax. A return back a few measures and charge again, as if wanting to end but not wanting to be over, stretching the pleasure as long as the soul can bear it without crashing. And at the last moment, downbeat, downbeat, cadence.

They were exhausted. Sweaty. Muscles delighting in deep fatigue, their bodies trembling with pleasure and repose.

They sat where they landed and breathed deeply for what seemed like a long time with no need nor desire for words.

Stella held up her hand, as if hearing his thoughts before they materialized. “I have to do something first,” she said. “Please bear with me.”

Slowly she lay her cello down and stood up, straightening her clothing. Roger watched her hands pull down her hemline, caressing her waist and hips to smooth the wrinkles. She stood and faced him, then walked deliberately near to him, so close he was conscious of her breathing. “Follow me,” she said.

She took him to a small room he guessed must have been a parlor. In the center was a glass-top table with bottles and glassware. It seemed there was no light in the room but for the light rising from the table.

“I love Katrina,” Stella said. “And what she has done makes me love her more. This is very hard for me. I hope you understand. But in order to do this I have to be completely drunk.”

This was an unexpected turn. He wasn’t sure how this was going to work.

Stella was pouring Sliebowitz into delicate glasses shaped like diminutive Martini glasses except that they had thicker stems and smaller flares at the top. I know exactly how much, she said. It takes two and a half of these to wipe me completely out.

They sat at the table. “Don’t be offended,” she said. “I’ll probably do better after the first time. And I want this to be a pleasant experience for you. Once I’m out, you have my permission to do anything you like with me. I mean that. Anything.”

Roger shivered.

Stella paid no attention.

There was a water glass and two white pills to one side. “To avoid the hangover,” she said. “Aspirin and water.” She downed them and turned to the Sliebovitz.

Before Roger could get adjusted to what was happening she had downed the first one and was pouring herself a second.

“My advice to you,” she said. “Is that you stop at one. Only one of us should be under the influence and you’ve got a job to do.” She was barely able to hold back a smile which she covered immediately with a serious face.

That was the second time he’d heard this referred to as a job.

Her fingers, which a moment before were flying over the neck of the cello, now trembled. She held her glass with two hands and sipped it half-way.

She was smiling unreservedly now. Relaxed. “It’s not that I don’t find you attractive,” she said. “I do. You probably know that already.” She seemed to be struggling with her words, not for articulation but accuracy of meaning.

Half a glass more.

“I think I always have,” she said with her eyes modestly drifted down to the glass she was holding. “Found you attractive, I mean. If it hadn’t been for Katrina I might have made a play for you right away.” Suddenly she was embarrassed. She wiped her mouth and raised her eyebrows. “Funny how things turn out.”

She was done with the second now. “All that remains is the half glass,” she said, and poured out her measure.

She looked at it. She looked at Roger over the top of the glass. She waited a few beats as if to gather courage and downed it all at once. And in the same motion, dropped her head to the table.

Roger looked at her for a long moment, taking in her form, her words, her music, her silly drunken attempts to ready herself for this adulterous interlude. This charming, desirable, sexy lady had, at great cost, thrown herself to him.

At last he picked her up and carried her to her bedroom. He was aware how her pliant body was, molding to his, her waist arcing to the curve of his ribs, her breast pressing unreservedly against him.

Her bed had been turned back in that angular manner which exposes one pillow and the length of sheets three quarters down one side. He laid her in the open fold, knees bent gracefully to one side, her shoulders turned the opposite direction, opening her to the intimate space narrowing between them, her delicate body slipping into the seam of bedclothes with a sigh.

He marveled how beauty comes forth even in stupor. He could do nothing more than look at her a long moment. Then he ran a fingertip along the rising curve of her hips, down the slow undulating line of her legs to her ankles. Her long hair had fallen over her face. He brushed it away with the backs of his fingers and as he did so, allowed them to graze her cheek. The corner of her mouth drew down with a brief quiver in a manner reminiscent of an infant turning to feed. He wasn’t sure how to begin but decided her sleeping-not-sleeping body was going to tell him.

His eyes fell on the lone pearl dangling from her necklace and from there to the arch of her breasts on either side. He was unchecked, examining closely the rounded forms, the light brown nipples tenting the fabric. He watched them rise and fall with her shallow breathing, imagined they were breathing too. He began to unbutton her blouse, slowly, so as not to miss each new unveiling. She turned her head slightly to one side and spread her arm out on the pillow in a dream-like motion the body sometimes makes unselfconsciously in the trough of sleep.

He stopped mid way down the line of buttons and let his hand drift out to her breast, wrapping his fingers around its base, lifting gently so as to raise it closer to him, brushing its tip with his thumb. It seemed to nuzzle his hand with each arc of breathing. He watched her face, as, in symmetry, he put a hand on her other breast. She seemed to rise a little, as if reaching, her forehead furrowed and mouth fell open just the slightest amount as he massaged her through her clothing.

He returned to her buttons, now almost completely undone, and finished, drawing her blouse open like curtains on a new morning. She was naked to her waist. Her skin glowed in the amber light. He reached for the sunrise of her waist, trailing his fingertips up the curving horizon to the base of her breasts, then back to the flat abdomen, its little mound in the center, its delicate hole of a navel which he circled and probed. Then, continuing the thrusting motion of his hands around the arc of her belly, lifted his palms under her, raising her at the wing bones, bending her chest upward toward him where he buried his face on her, blowing hot breath, moistening her from neck to waist.

She was lying higher up on the pillow now, her head leaning back, her body outstretched below. He grasped the elastic band at the top of her skirt and stretched it over the rise of her hips until a low panty line emerged. He paused to study the rest of her, piecing together each new revelation.

Her hips were narrow, quickly falling off to her thighs, which were lithe as necks of swans. He drew the skirt down to her ankles and together with her slipper-like shoes, dropped them to the floor.

She was out cold. And gorgeous. It was a strange feeling to be so aroused and at the same time realize she was helpless, completely at his mercy. It was a measure of great trust, he thought, and at some level, great affection.

She was his. He no longer questioned how. He let the will of the body take over.

Naked but for the filmy panties, cut low and tight across her sex where it bulged from within with a furious darkness, he could not resist reaching out to touch her - in one place only - a fingertip against the membrane of silk spreading before her unseen cleft, and there, rubbed gently. She moaned and looked for a moment as if she would awaken. But she fell back into her chosen halcyon. He could feel her wetness through the silken membrane. He became aware he, himself, was half hard under his clothing, moist at his tip.

Keeping his finger in its slippery valley he undressed, removing it briefly to slip his shirt over his hand. His penis rose and bobbed over her, not hard enough yet to penetrate her, because, he reasoned, of the little trace of guilt undissolved in him from the conflicting triangle of relationships. Didn’t he have permission to be hard, permission to take her? The women had set it up so.

Anything you want, she had said. The remembrance of that promise caused him to exhale sharply in that involuntary, contractile rush of the breath when excitement takes over the body. He brought himself above her, dancing over her closed eyes for a moment and then placed his tip on her parted lips. She made no resistance as he pressed in, separating her teeth gently with his swelling head. The sharpness of unwithdrawn teeth gave a little pain which thrilled the excited skin as he halted then moved in and out of her a few times, quickly fully erect.

He moved around to the foot of the bed and with both hands, hooked the wings of her panties, bringing them down in one smooth motion. He looked up into her, her body open to him. He knelt between her legs and pressed his cock in the mouth of her opening. She was tight. Must not have had sex for a long time. But very wet inside, as if, even in stupor, ignited with desire.

She moaned a little as he pressed halfway in, her face turning to one side, her arms making an abbreviated fluttering motion. He let himself down on her, sweeping her under his arms and legs as if containing her within the cocoon of him and pumped her gently.

The bed flowed as water under them, she, like a leaf, pliant on the surface, curving as the curve of the waves moved her. He, the maker of rhythms, like sunlight on water, as if together they assumed the wave form of a single note, an harmonic high above the treble cleft in which they could ride and ride with the resonance of the universe.

He felt come surging in the wedge of his pelvis and as it did, he thought of her words: anything, anything... it gave him license to pump hard, to penetrate as deeply as he could, his silvery liquid flowing into her, to shine in her darkness, making love to her a million million times from within.

At that thought he seized uncontrollably and turned loose everything. There was nothing he could withhold from her.

He stayed in her a while savoring the long diminishments of motion, pumping less frequent, as if ringing her from within with small echoes, diminuendos of romance in the deepening darkness.

When he had softened and crawled out of her he placed his hand flat on her tummy, feeling her breathe. He imagined he could feel himself swimming inside her. As he turned slightly, he noticed a small tear had collected at the corner of one eye. He lifted it to his fingertips, drew the covers over her, and turned out the light.

Sleep was molasses. But in the night he woke to the realization he was in bed with a beautiful woman and hugged her backside to him, his arms circled over her breasts and belly. She was deeply asleep. And as he thought back over her reluctance and her courage he realized, once again, a deep sense of attachment.

He squeezed her closer, moving one hand to her sex, still watery with lust and juices and wiggled a finger just inside. She cooed unconsciously, as if encouraging him from a deeper level of spirit to continue, which he did, pressing his tumid penis long-ways against her valley from behind, pulling her toward him until hardness raised his point once again into the mouth of her sex which he entered from behind, finding excitement there, penetrating her in the manner that felt somehow tighter, her tubular sex turned away in an attitude that pinched against him.

In his excitement he rode over on top of her, rocking over the rounded hills of her hips, curling himself in broader and broader arcs, to reach into her.

She was flaccid and unwaking, as if by default, granting her body to his, accepting his thrust and jut, grunt and tug, sustenance after a long fast, letting her body speak for her, for her will: My body to encompass you, to hold your struggle, a crucible unto your offering.

With his hands cupped into the little bending places where the thighs meet the body, he pulled her into his thrusts and raised his come to the bursting point. Holding against the rupture as long as he could, grasping the bed sheets that spread like the plateau before the waterfall edge, he, with all his substance, froze a moment, held beyond the holding point that which would not be held, then exploded into the rage and demand of release.

He rolled away and slumped immediately into a deep sleep that didn’t break until he she stood over him in morning light, nudging his shoulder and saying, “wake up, prince charming, your breakfast is cold. And put on some blue jeans, won’t you. We’ll be going to the stables after breakfast.”

On the terrace were rolls and croissants, jellies, potato pancakes and towers of fresh fruits. The sun was warm and playful through the sycamores.

Stella was talkative. Chattering away about horses, trade shows, musical contacts she had made in London, agents who promised bookings with the best European orchestras.

The conversation fell to Jeremy Crenshaw.

“What a prude,” said Stella.

“Maybe, but he could play a hell of a fiddle.”

“Prude, prude, prude.”

Roger laughed. “Aw, he just spent a little too much time in the practice rooms at Curtis Institute. Other than that he was ok.”

“Bor-ing.”

“Well, one thing for sure, he sure did have a crush on you.”

Stella fidgeted. “Can you see me with him? We’d be miserable. I’d be telling him when to go to the bathroom for god’s sake.”

“I suppose, but it could be worse.”

“And has been,” said Stella. “Oh, Roger, it’s not that I can’t recognize the good ones I just can’t bring myself to be with them.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I’m more comfortable with my own kind.”

“And what is that?”

“I don’t think you’d understand.”

“Try me.”

“Well, what it really is, is... abusers.”

“You don’t mean it. You haven’t an abusing bone in your body.”

“Maybe not, but my father did. Brilliant in physics and Tanquerey, we used to say. To the detriment, if I may say so. I’m probably not the abusive kind but I’m more familiar with those who are. Familiarity breeds comfort, you know. You may not believe this but good people make me nervous.”

Roger laughed.

“You’re different,” she said, reading his mind. “Family of the best kind. No threat.” And after a little pause she added, “and very loving.”

Her eyes filled and she trembled a little.

“Life will get better,” said Roger.

“You always were a blithering optimist.”

“Optimist, certainly, blithering, I hope not. Blithering, blith-er-ing. Sounds like Fig-a-ro, Fig-a-ro.”

Stella laughed.

“Really, Stella, you’re a treasure anybody’d die for. You’ll find Mr. Wonderful someday.”

“Blithering, blith-er-ing,” she said. “And meanwhile I’m 35 years old. And my goddamned eggs are getting fried. And by the way, what’s all this fucking psychobabble, and at breakfast, for Chris-sake. You’d think the scones were laced with LSD.”

Roger felt the subject. It was escaping in a way he could not stop, anyway.

“Time for my stables,” she said. “I’d rather behave like a teenager running around in barns than have to go through psycho-analysis at breakfast.”

And with that she sprang up, just like a teenager, Roger thought, and skipped down the stone walk to the stables. Roger had to hurry to keep up.

“These are my champion Clydesdales. I breed them each season. You’d be surprised what they bring in stud fees.”

“That’s Ruthy,” she said before he had time to draw any analogies, “my favorite. My mare. Often suited, never bread. I think we understand each other.”

They paused at the stall where a new foal had just been born and lingered there, petting and stroking his ears and head. “I guess it doesn’t take a genius to have babies,” she said.

She brought him to an open, barn-like structure with shafts of light streaming in through a high window. She pointed upwards and said, “there’s the hayloft up there.” Roger thought he saw a wink as she said this but her eyes hadn’t moved. “Come on,” she cajoled, “I’ve always wanted a toss in the hay.”

The ladder to the loft was straight up and directly over them. She started up, unabashed, her small bottom swaying this way and that as she ascended the ladder.

Roger looked up at her. Ordinarily his modesty would have demanded he only glance, then look away out of respect. But he meticulously examined her as she climbed, visualizing her folds where they pressed against the tight cinch of her jeans. The cloven hoof of her sex. I’ve been there, he said to himself.

At least he thought it was to himself, for Stella had reached the top of the ladder now and looked back as if she heard what he said. She laughed and tossed her head playfully. Roger thought, how wonderful it is to have the freedom to act as you wish and suffer no consequences, no, beyond that, to even be encouraged by a return of affection. He started his climb, two rungs at a time, almost falling in his haste.

Bales of hay were stacked around the walls, some places arranged in towers, some in stair step fashion so if you wanted to you could climb them all the way to the ceiling. In the center, a wood floor, briefly visible here and there in the bare spots where loose hay opened into cloudless patches. Stella was arranging a few saddle blankets on the floor, using nearby bails as chair backs.

“Did you ever do this as a kid?” she asked.

Roger wasn’t sure just what activity she was referring to so he said, “no.” To which she said. “Neither did I, but I always wanted to.”

She came up to him and pushed her body against his. She placed a finger hard against his solar plexus. “I suppose by the fact that I could barely walk this morning you attacked me pretty good last night.”

Roger smiled.

“Fine-O,” she said. “Now it’s my turn.”

Roger felt a surge rise through him like a hot wind off a prairie. He hadn’t ever been “attacked” by a woman, at least as far as he knew. And, as a matter of fact, wasn’t sure what that meant. One thing was clear, she meant to have sex here and now. He was glad not to have to take the initiative, because to be perfectly honest, he wasn’t sure how much rising power he’d have after spending himself so thoroughly the night before. Then there was that pesky business of her being fully conscious.

Stella was on him like a wet cloth. She had him sitting down and was kissing him all over his face. “Hayloft,” she said between kisses. “Sex play. Teenagers doing it for the first time. Doesn’t the idea just blow your mind?”

She pushed him back on the blankets and straddled his mid-section. “Want to see my breasts?” she giggled.

“Absolutely.”

“There’s a price to pay.”

“Name it.”

“You’ll have to lick them all over and then you’ll have to let me watch you get hard.”

“No problem,” he said still not sure there wouldn’t be one.

Roger remembered her timidness from the night before, how she had to get sloshed to be a participant, but now... what made the difference? Was it that they had already done it, even though she was hardly there? Had that action taken away all resistance? Was it that she had flipped over into another personality, like the ones we all have hidden inside but are kept in check by a strict code of morals governing family and society, a liberated personality hidden under the surface of decorum until the scruples that held it in check were blasted away... he didn’t know, but, you know what, it didn’t matter. He was to be a happy player in this theatre of wild permissions.

She unsnapped the multiple snaps on her cowgirl shirt in one spreading motion, this time revealing a black lacy bra that provided stark feminine contrast to the boyish clothes she was wearing. She tossed her hair and laughed, drawing Roger’s hands to her, pressing into them her playful breasts.

She reached around and unsnapped her bra, bringing the loose ends over her shoulders until the part remaining was that which covered her, pressed there by Roger’s hands.

“Like?” She said.

“Plenty.”

“Now I get to make you hard,” she said, “and watch every delicious stage.” She rubbed her bottom against his abdomen a few times. “But first, your payment.”

Roger let drop, like a fig leaf, the last fragment of her bra. She swung her breasts playfully over him, avoiding his nipping, giggling at his feeble tries until he held her against him and pulled her into his mouth. She gasped and with a thrust of her shoulder, shoved herself into him, opening him as wide as she could. Then rose...

And then sliding down his legs to his knees, she unbuttoned his fly. She fished him out even before she had loosened the last button and, still soft, sucked him to his root.

“I love it,” she said, taking him out for a minute and looking up at his face, “when a man is soft enough to swallow.” She then went immediately down on him again, pulling apart his jeans to get him deeper.

He was medium hard. So much for his concerns. He could feel it growing hard in her mouth, she, mewling at each little jump in firmness, adjusting the angle of her neck and her body to accommodate him.

She took him out, breathless, and still holding on to him, rose above him until her face was over his.

“Now the denouement,” she said.

Holding on to him with one hand, she unbuttoned her own jeans with the other and worked them off on to the floor. She brought her sex directly over his.

“My turn to work,” she said, and brought her self down to his tip, rocking her cleft forward and back until both tip and cleft were glistening. With a few quick pulses she impaled herself onto him, emitting his tip down to the spreading helmet of his glans.

She looked at him. A smile curled at the margin of her lips. Her curls were falling over her face, beautiful she was, in her ruffled muss of hay and hair and desire.

She said nothing more. But watched his face as she pushed further onto him, her eyes closing occasionally as they deepened. Now pressed fully in, she flattened her body onto his, wriggling back and forth a little, biting at his chin and rocking him. His pants, still half-mast around his knees, made him feel indeed like a teenager, like this was a stolen moment at the barn while the parents weren’t looking.

She was grinding herself against him, getting aroused, quivering slightly between thrusts and melting softly. He grasped her bottom and tugged her harder onto him, friction in the heated wedge between them. Her murmuring raised its pitch. She grasped his neck, planting her lips on his. Almost immediately, she shuttered and lurched and cried, throwing her head back for air. Her breathing pulsed erratically, thrusting parcels of air out into the moist space between them.

The sight of her in orgasm so excited Roger, he came, almost without knowing, almost without feeling it - as if it were not his but Stella’s, circling back through him - her orgasm, her demand, her taking him this time.

She rolled off and looked at him, now without a trace of girlish play.

“On my back,” she said, suddenly mature again, “have to give those little bumpers a chance to find their way.”

They laughed. He’d almost forgotten the theme of this visit. It brought him back to reality, thoughts of home, Katrina, the children. He sighed and stood up, putting his clothes on feeling the edge of modesty creeping back in. He sat on a bale of hay.

Stella remained on her back, still naked, holding onto her sex to hold the gism and its cargo in place. How quickly a love history can be generated. They talked as if they’d been lovers a long ago, an affair now passed from their lives, one that still brought them tenderness and respect, Stella’s nakedness not uncomfortable in the least to them, an old friend, with them, once more.

And they talked for a long time in that timeless, no-particular-subject manner of speaking in which something internal in both of them entered the other a little distance, no longer feeling the need for protection, mingling like motes of hay scent, clover, alfalfa, sweet in the morning air.

Lunch was delicious but unmemorable, not that it was middling but their minds were occupied. He was to catch a plane at four which meant leaving shortly after. They were filled with that savage nostalgia that comes in advance of parting and mingles with feelings of anticipation for the life they, now changed, must reenter.

Roger had dressed his comfy tweed traveling coat and khaki’s that had become his trademark. Stella wore a sari. As the plates were cleared she turned to him. “Just one final music,” she said.

Roger wondered what it would be.

She led him to the sunroom, filled with plants and tiles. Water falling pool to pool in the fountain. Birds audible through the transparency to the outside world. It was as if she had enclosed a box of outdoors and made it habitable.

A brilliant Boesendorfer stood at the center. “Best for Dvorak,” she said as she picked up her cello from its case against the greenhouse wall.

The score was unfamiliar, still in manuscript form, new, as if recently made.

“Concerto in B minor,” she said reading his thoughts once again.

“So that’s it,” he said. “But where did you get it? I didn’t know a piano reduction existed.”

“Friend of mine at Julliard,” she said. “He created it from the orchestral score. We’re going to premier it at the Open Air Music Festival in Bohemia this July. Want to try it out?”

“Are you kidding?” Roger said, and sat eagerly at the piano, turning pages in the presence of rare treasure.

Roger began the long orchestral prelude that presents the two main themes. Stella enters, her sweet voice discusses the two themes, but then embarks on a formidable virtuoso passage in which the themes are embellished and respoken in different voicings.

In the beautiful slow movement which passes between tender and somber feelings, Stella was magnificent in her reaching arpeggios and fierce vibratos, as if filling a song of longing and anguish. Roger eyes misted as he played, so sweet were her sounds.

Then, a march-like cadence, the strict rhythms of the final movement, the melody now passing in conversation back and forth between Roger and Stella. Then Stella with her intriguing decorations over Roger’s passages. Roger’s eyes on Stella between photographic accretions of the score, anticipating her entrances, responding to her gestures with entrances of his own, anticipating her, clicking into her emotions, her fierce attentiveness - now languid, now bombastic, a range of emotion full and rich, rising through the notes to fill the lighted chamber with desire. Summer. Midday. Light with a memory of shadow.

And the movement ends... like a breath with reminiscences...

And for the first time he could see her pain - her body open, all the way down to the deep amber breath of sorrow.

It was that quality of sorrow that is without shame, he thought, as if the time for shame were long past, as though through this intimacy of the senses all need for apology was gone. His seeing, was her willingness to be seen, which now she gave without reservation, that which the mind sometimes, in its own protection, in its own need to hide, fails to untangle. Suddenly, he knew how long the winter had lasted, the sun outside browning the grasses, feathering the maples into brilliance. The breezes no longer tied to the earth, lifted in forms of their own making, as lovers, flowing into each other’s grasp, he at her knees, the place where her cello rests in the moment of singing, the chamber of her music, he was on her and in her, and she in him, lost, as if being lost were a manner of being found, and finding, a fragile hesitation rarely apprehended, the leaves outside suspended in air, swirling in the long spiral ascension of desire.

His hand flat on her stomach like a prayer, the song within, unseen, unheard, the score not on the page, the coachman waiting, the airplane waiting, the family, Katrina, waiting...

He touched her like he would never touch her again.

Blessings, he said.

And then he was gone.