I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’D go away for months, just like that, without me.”
“You knew I was applying, Maudlin.”
“I didn’t think you’d go. Don’t call me that.”
At the end of his junior year, Danny was beginning to look no longer just boyishly pretty but manly and so, even to Maude, handsome. They were in a bucolic park she had asked to go to, where people offered stale bread to swans and geese along a calm, narrow river flowing between bands of velvet grass, blooming shrubs and trees, and artful groves. She had just used up her last bread—the last of a loaf Nina had made, that collapsed back to what seemed a state of raw grain in Maude’s fingers—gulped by the greedy geese who looked astonished by what they had taken in, their heads popping up like burps at the ends of their long necks almost in Maude’s face, they were so tall. She had been laughing, talking to them like overgrown children. Then the couple came to the giant beech that was like a cathedral inside the dark embrasure of its branches, and he had said casually that he’d been accepted for the two months in Africa that summer. Maude had her hand on the grainless bark, over the scar of a heart cut into it with two names inside. HOLLY+DAVE4EVER.
“You’d never carve my name on a tree,” she went on, low Maria Callas tremolo.
Danny dug into his jeans pocket and came up with the red enamel of a Swiss Army knife.
“No. Don’t hurt the tree.”
He threw it up in the air, casting his gorgeous, lustrous eyes to heaven.
“Don’t make fun of me!”
“Maude. Maude.” He took her wrists. “Stop giving me orders a second.”
She let him hug her and in fact clung to his neck, pressing into him. Then pushed him away:
“I hate you. You don’t give a shit about me. Just about some people you never met, because they’re poor and black and—chic.” She knew this wasn’t true: he was the kind of person who would refrain from something like joining the Peace Corps if he thought it was too easy a way of looking good. Not that he was old enough for the Peace Corps; his program was a sort of pre-premed clinic in tropical diseases. “The cost of your plane fare could probably keep a whole village healthy for a generation.” She flung herself out of the beech cathedral through a wall of leaves.
Danny bent to retrieve his penknife from the cool grassless ground before following her out. It was a shock to come back to sunlight on the broad lawn. Maude was standing in the middle, surrounded by acres of perfect grass, clearly lost in her own darkness. She let him walk up to her without running away.
“How do you know you’ll come back? You might get some horrible disease. The plane might—. Or maybe some nice medical student—some girl who actually likes science, someone sensible, someone literal.” By this time she looked as tragic as if she’d already lost him.
“Maude—I’m here, for God’s sake. Look up! I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re not?”
“I mean, I am going, but I’m with you. Don’t you get that?”
“No,” she moaned. “No. I don’t see how—”
“It’s two months.”
“When my brother—I remember exactly when it was two months. I kept like expecting every day, today he’ll come back—if I just believe, if I just have faith—and I’d trick myself into seeing him. You know how you can see someone disppearing around a corner, you’re sure it’s them—I’d go unlock the door at night after Milt checked that it was locked, so he could get in. My father patrols the house every night to make sure we’re safely locked in. In this really angry way. Anyway, it was when I realized it was exactly two months that it occurred to me I might never see him again. He might be—”
“I’m not your brother, for God’s sake. Don’t map your family onto me. I mean, really. Here I am. How can you talk about your brother?”
“But how can you want to leave?”
His eyes, normally so soft and lustrous, sparked, and his lower lip stiffened with anger.
“Please don’t be angry at me.”
He made a helpless sound and let her burrow into his arms.
“Please don’t leave,” she said into his warm, delicious shoulder. “I wish you wouldn’t.” He would leave no matter what she said. “I don’t understand why you want to go.”
“It has nothing to do with you, Maude. Don’t you see? It’s just something I want, and being temporarily away from you is just an unfortunate side effect.”
“I don’t understand how you can want it if you can’t be with me.”
He let out a great compression of air but just patted her back. They both knew she’d lost.
Perhaps to give her something, almost by way of a promise, the next time they were alone together in his bedroom of a future professional, he helped her slide on a condom and guide him into her.
She had wanted to from the start—it had been he who was cautious, even when he said he couldn’t stand it. She hated his self-control. Repeatedly, she couldn’t stand it but had had to bear it. By this point, they had been naked together, had touched each other everywhere. To let the most intimate parts of themselves go inside and embrace each other’s seemed at once surreal and unremarkable, not a big deal.
But it was. He was slow and careful and, still, it had been so painful. She knew it had to get better or women wouldn’t be able to stand it. The thin, sensitive tissue seemed to strain and pull less when he was all the way in, but each time he moved, she was shocked at the intense jab she felt where she had never before experienced sensation. She showed the pain by no more than jagged intakes of breath. “Are you all right?” he’d say, halting, and she’d say yes, to encourage him to go on.
By the next day, the very soreness felt pleasurable, triumphant, and at the same time like a seismic gulch gaping to be filled. At the least she already doubted what she remembered and needed to test the sensation again, like a second olive or a second sip of a parent’s martini. But he was flying that day. She had thought consummation would give her a way of holding on to him while he was away. But—much as adults had always warned—it made it more painful.
They said goodbye on the phone. They had agreed it would be better if she didn’t have to go with his parents to the airport she still thought of as Idlewild—his prosaic parents, the baldish, matter-of-fact businessman father and stolid mother who it seemed astonishing should have hatched him, these people who couldn’t even have imagined him.