Granite

“I am not,” said Corinne, “getting on that.”

“It’s a very safe motorcycle.”

“It’s a 1974 Triumph Bonneville with a leather seat the size of a hymnal. It looks like something a Hell’s Angel would ride to his own funeral.”

“It was my father’s.” Emory ran his palm lovingly along the gas tank, which gleamed in the morning light like a great black-cherry gumdrop. “It sat in a barn in Windham for eight years. I rebuilt the carburetors on the kitchen table, and Mom made me do it on newspaper. She doesn’t know I’ve got it running. She thinks it’s still in pieces.” He looked up, grinning. “It’s the safest thing I own. I’ve never so much as scratched it.”

“You never scratched it. That’s what every man says on the morning of the day he does.”

“I’ve done forty thousand miles.”

“That’s the second thing every man says.”

It was the last Saturday in June, bright, windless, blue, and they stood in the gravel of her drive in front of the bike with the engine ticking quietly as it cooled. Her hair was in a braid. She wore her oldest jeans and a flannel shirt of his that came to her knuckles, and on her head, strapped under her chin, a white half-shell helmet that fit her with eerie perfection. She had noticed that. She had decided not to ask.

“Where are we going?” she said.

“A place. Two hours, if I take the back roads. Granite and pine and nobody.” He had a duffel on the seat behind him, and a bedroll, and a battered green canvas tent strapped across the rack, and a thermos she recognized as her own. “I packed us dinner. There’s a stove. I’ve got your tea.”

“You’ve got my tea.”

“And honey. And a blanket, in case it’s cold.” He took her hand and turned it over and kissed the pulse at her wrist, gently, like a man putting a stamp on a letter. “Please. You’ve been in that study for three weeks. You told me last night that you hadn’t seen an unbroken horizon since April. I want to put the whole sky in front of you and watch you breathe.”

She sighed, and then she laughed, and then she gave up.

“If I die,” she said, “my ghost will be unbearable.”

“If you die,” said Emory, “I’ll be sitting beside you.”

* * *

There are things you cannot learn without being afraid first.

She was afraid for the first twenty minutes. She sat rigid on the leather seat behind him, her arms locked around his waist, her cheek pressed against the back of his jacket, her eyes squeezed shut, while the engine thundered underneath her and the road poured past with a roar like the end of the world. Every curve was a death. Every pothole was a catastrophe. The wind tore at her braid. Somewhere around Thomaston, as they leaned into a long bend, she opened her mouth and screamed, a short, high, surprised scream that the wind carried away, and she felt Emory laugh, felt it go through his back and into her ribs.

“You can open your eyes!” he shouted.

“I’ll open them when I’m dead!”

“You’ll miss it!”

She opened one eye.

The world was green.

It was a green she had not seen since childhood, a rushing, tunneled, sunstruck green: the road ran under an arch of pines so tall and old that their tops met overhead, and the light fell through in coins and ribbons and dazzling slanted rods. The shadows flickered across her helmet. The air smelled of resin, sun-warmed needles, and hot asphalt. Between the trunks, in flashes, she caught the glitter of water, a blue lake, a white farmhouse, a field full of cows. And all of it was moving, flowing past her at the speed of a river, with her at the center of it, borne along on a thing that growled and hummed and leaned.

She opened the other eye. Her arms loosened. Her fingers, which had been knotted in the front of his jacket, unfurled.

Then, quite without meaning to, she began to laugh.

It was a ridiculous laugh. It came in gasps, breathless, ecstatic, and it was the sound of a woman who has been told for thirty-eight years to be careful and who has suddenly discovered that careful was not, after all, the only available speed. She threw back her head. She stretched out one arm into the wind and let it ride on the air like a wing. Under her cheek, she felt him turn his head, just slightly, as if to hear.

“Better?” he yelled.

“I love it!”

“I know!”

“How do you know?”

But the wind took it. And he only laughed, and opened up the throttle, and the road curved away beneath them into the bright and singing trees.

* * *

The headland was called Ledge Point, and it was not on any map she owned.

It lay at the very bottom of a washboard dirt track, at the end of a peninsula so thin that for the last half mile the sea showed on both sides, and when the pines finally fell away she stood at the edge of the world. It was an enormous shelf of granite, a vast, tilted, rosy-gray table of rock sloping down to the water in broad natural steps, split with long straight seams, and freckled with lichen the color of rust and moss and pale green coin. The sea beat on its foot in slow white rolls. Wind poured over it. Beyond lay a hundred miles of open Atlantic, cobalt and sparkling, strewn with islands like spilled bread, and nothing, nothing at all, between her and the edge of the sky.

She took off the helmet, with her hair stuck to her face, and stood with the wind dragging her shirt, and did not say anything for a long time.

“Well?” Emory said, behind her.

“It’s not a place,” said Corinne at last, quietly. “It’s an opinion.”

“Whose?”

“The planet’s. About how small we are.” She sat down on the warm stone, and drew up her knees, and laid her palms flat on the rock. It was hot as a stove. The sun had been on it since dawn, and the granite gave the heat back up in slow waves, like the flank of a sleeping animal. “How do you find these places?”

“I looked. For a long time.” He dropped down beside her, shouldering the duffel off. “When I was seventeen I used to take the motorcycle out, and just ride, till I’d run out of road. I didn’t have anybody to go with. I’d find a place, and sit, and not talk to anyone for a day.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“It wasn’t. It was the opposite.” He said it plainly. “It was the only place where nothing needed me to be anything.”

She turned her head and looked at him. He was lying back on his elbows on the rock, with his long legs stretched out and his face tipped to the sky, and the wind was combing his dark hair back from his forehead. In that light, he looked about nineteen. He looked, to her, a good deal more tired than a boy should.

She said, carefully, “Pip told me something once. At lunch. She said you had a rough time when you were seventeen.”

He did not move. For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard.

“What did she say?”

“Just that. That it was hard. She said it was a girl at school, and that it was nothing. She changed the subject.” Corinne brushed a moth of lichen off her knee. “I’m not asking you to tell me. I only thought — if you wanted to — I’d rather hear it from you than carry it around as a rumor.”

The wind sighed over the rock. Far out beyond the point, a lobster boat moved in slow arcs, trailing gulls.

“There was a girl,” said Emory.

He said it into the sky. His voice was quiet and even, and a little careful, like a man laying down tools one at a time.

“Her name was Tessa. She was in my chemistry class. She sat by the window and she drew in the margins of her notes, and I thought — I thought she was the most interesting person I’d ever seen. And I was seventeen, and I’d had a year where I wasn’t — I was grieving my father in all the wrong ways, I think. Obsessively. I read everything I could about him. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way he died. And she was kind to me, once, in the hallway. She said are you okay? And I decided that meant something.”

“And it didn’t.”

“It meant she was a kind person who said are you okay in a hallway.” The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “I didn’t understand that. I thought it was — a door. I started leaving her notes, in her locker. I thought they were nice. I thought, if she knew somebody noticed her — I started walking her home. A few blocks behind. I thought I was being respectful, not crowding her. And then she saw me, and she told her parents, and her parents told the school, and my mother had to go and sit in an office.”

“Oh, Emory.”

“I wasn’t dangerous. You understand? I never —” There was the briefest hitch, there and gone. “I never touched her. I never even spoke to her again. It was just misread. I misread everything. I thought being near someone was the same as being kind to them.” He lifted one hand and let it fall. “My mother made it go away. She was very good at it. She had a talk with the principal, and a talk with the parents, and by the next semester I was at a different school. It was my fault. It was a stupid, embarrassing, lonely thing, and I’ve spent six years making sure I never did it to anyone again.”

He turned his head, finally, and looked at her, and in his gray-green eyes was something so open and so ashamed that her heart turned over.

“That’s why I ask,” he said. “Every time. Is this okay. Do you want this. Tell me to stop. It isn’t charm. It’s that I learned the hard way what it looks like when I get it wrong. I’d rather ask a hundred times and annoy you than not ask once.”

She was quiet. She crossed the warm granite on her hands and knees, in her enormous flannel shirt, and settled beside him, and put her arm over his chest, and laid her head on his shoulder.

“We all misread things at seventeen,” said Corinne.

“Not like that.”

“When I was twenty I wrote a boy named Dylan eleven pages of poetry because he said I had interesting wrists. He shut me out on a fire escape in my bare feet, in February, because I’d said the wrong thing about his friends.” She felt him go still. “Being young is a country where everyone gets lost. You learned. That’s the only part that matters. Some people never do.”

His arm came up and closed around her.

“Thank you,” he said, into her hair.

“For what?”

“For not looking at me the way she did. My mother. For a long time.” His chest rose and fell under her cheek. “She looks at me sometimes as if she’s waiting for something to go off.”

“That’s a mother’s face. It isn’t a verdict.”

“I know,” Emory said. “I’m trying to believe it.”

And she held him, in the roaring light, on the warm stone, with the whole Atlantic breathing at their feet, and thought: a lonely boy. A lonely, clumsy, unlucky boy, and a mother who never forgave herself for not seeing. She thought: no wonder he asks.

It did not occur to her to think anything else.

* * *

They made camp on the lee side, in a hollow of the granite where the wind could not reach.

He pitched the tent in eleven minutes, with the gravity of a man conducting a sacrament: stakes at forty-five degrees, guylines taut, the green canvas snapping once and settling. She was put in charge of dinner, which was an honor, and a catastrophe, and which Emory took over after she tried to boil an egg in a cup. They ate on the rock, cross-legged, from tin plates, rice and sausage and slices of a very good peach, with the sky going down the long violet stair of evening. They drank her chamomile out of enamel mugs. A pair of cormorants flew low along the water, black as handwriting.

At about nine, a man came along the ridge.

He was a climber, or a hiker, a tall man in a gray shirt with a pack, walking fast along the seam of the rock, and he came over the rise three hundred yards away and stopped, with his hand lifted against the sunset, and lowered it again. He nodded in their direction. Corinne, in a warm daze, smiled and raised her mug.

Beside her, Emory’s hand tightened on her waist.

It was a small thing, a sudden hard clasp of the fingers, so abrupt that she turned. His face was perfectly pleasant. His eyes were on the man, mild, pale in the dusk, and for a half second they did not look mild at all. They looked flat, and still, and entirely attentive, like a heron over water.

“Do you know him?” she said.

“No.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.” The grip eased. The hand moved gently up and down her side, as if smoothing a crease. “He looked at you for a long time.”

“He looked at the sunset. There’s a sunset. It’s a notable feature.”

“I know.” The man had moved on, over the ridge, and the rock was empty again. Emory exhaled, a long, slow breath, and laughed at himself. “I’m sorry. That was stupid. I’m not good at sharing the view.”

“Sharing the view.” She was delighted. She poked him in the ribs. “You’re jealous of a hiker.”

“I’m jealous of anyone who gets to look at you without paying for it.”

“Then you’re going to be jealous of every man in the state of Maine.”

“I know. I’m working on it.”

“Are you going to glare at a hiker?”

“Only a very little.” The crooked smile came back. He pulled her into his lap, and she let him, and the last of the sun slid down the edge of the world, and the sea turned from copper to lead.

It was an ordinary, silly, boyish flare of possessiveness. She kissed his temple. She forgot it by the time the first star came out.

* * *

The rain came at midnight.

It arrived without ceremony: a single fat drop on the canvas, then four, then forty, and a long hush, and then a roaring that swept across the granite in a gray curtain. She woke inside it, in the narrow nest of sleeping bags, wrapped in his arm, with the tent walls thrumming like a drum, and lay for a moment listening. The air smelled of wet stone and ozone. Somewhere out on the point, a gull yelled in outrage.

“Emory,” she whispered.

“I’m up.” He was already up, propped on one elbow, a darker shape against the dark. “Sorry. I thought it was forecast to hold till dawn.”

“It’s not a flood. It’s a — it’s a shower.” She had begun to smile. “It’s warm.”

“It’s June.”

“Let’s go out in it.”

He was silent for a second. “You’re joking.”

“I have not been rained on on purpose since I was nine.” She was already wriggling out of the bag, tugging up the tent flap, the cold wet air hitting her face like a slap. “Come on. Nobody here. Nobody for three miles. Nobody to see, nobody to care. I’ll get down on my knees and beg.”

“You don’t have to beg.”

“Then come on!”

They tumbled out of the tent into the dark, barefoot, in T-shirts, laughing, and the rain hit them like a hundred thousand tiny hands. It was warm as bathwater and loud as applause. The granite under her feet was slick and sleek and still faintly hot, a living thing; the sea below them roared; the sky was the color of a bruise. In seconds she was soaked to the skin, her hair streaming, her shirt plastered to her ribs, and she flung out her arms and tipped her face up and shouted at the clouds: “Do your worst!”

“Corinne!” Emory was laughing so hard he couldn’t stand straight. “You’ll bring down the lightning!”

“It’s fine! It’s —” She grabbed his hand and swung it. “Dance with me.”

“Again?”

“Yes, again. You owe me a dance on a rock.”

“I don’t know the steps!”

“There aren’t any!”

So they danced, on the wet granite, in the roaring dark, without music, without form, in a long wild lurching waltz that was half slide and half stumble. She stepped on his foot. He spun her under his arm and nearly sent them both into a pool. The rain streamed down his face and plastered the dark hair to his forehead and ran in rivers down his throat, and he looked at her with an expression of such pure and helpless astonishment, as if he could not, even now, believe she was real, that she stopped dancing.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He was breathing hard. “I think this is the best moment of my life.”

“It’s raining.”

“I know.”

“You’re soaked. You’re going to catch pneumonia. I’m going to have to tell your mother that you caught pneumonia dancing on a rock with a woman who’s got no sense at all.”

“Don’t care.”

“Emory —”

He kissed her.

It was the rain that undid her. It ran between their mouths, warm and salty, and her lips tasted it, and the taste of the sea and the sky and him all ran together into one. She dragged him down by the collar. The wet fabric of his shirt was a second skin under her palms, and she could feel the whole long engine of him shuddering with laughter and want. His hands slid under her shirt, to the small of her back, and the shock of heat against her chilled skin made her gasp aloud. The thunder muttered somewhere out to sea.

“Inside,” he said hoarsely, against her throat. “Inside, or I’ll have you on this rock.”

“That,” said Corinne, “is not a threat.”

* * *

The tent was a small green cave, and the rain a roof of drums.

In the darkness she could hear nothing but the rushing of the water and his breathing and the pounding of her own pulse. They fell onto the sleeping bags in a tangle, soaked, shivering, laughing, and for a time it was clumsy: elbows, knees, a tent pole that caught her in the ribs, a zipper that wouldn’t, a wet shirt that refused to leave his shoulders until she had to put her foot against his chest and pull. He was laughing the whole time. She could feel it, the helpless shaking of his ribs against hers, and it undid the last of her self-consciousness. She had never made love laughing before. It seemed an enormous discovery.

Then the laughter softened. It softened because he was looking at her in the faint blue gleam of the storm that came through the canvas, a flicker of lightning, a pale wavering green, and the look in his eyes had changed. It wasn’t hunger, exactly. It was reverence, intense and wordless. He took her face between his palms, and kissed her eyelids, her cheekbones, the corner of her mouth, as if he were setting each one down on a map.

“Cold?” he murmured.

“Not anymore.”

He warmed her. That was the only word for it. He warmed her the way a man warms a thing he cannot afford to lose, with the whole length of himself, with slow hands and a mouth that learned each shivering inch of her. The wet cloth came away piece by piece. The air in the tent was close and humid, thick with the smell of canvas and wet earth and skin, and rain beat the roof in a long unending rush. She heard herself make a low sound, and he answered with one of his own, rougher, deeper. She slid her hands up his back, over the ridge of his spine, the hard planes of his shoulders, the old thin scar below the left blade she hadn’t known about, and he arched into her touch like a creature starved of it.

“Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what you like.”

“I like — oh. There.”

“Here?”

“Just — yes. Yes.”

He took his time. He always took his time. It was the thing she would never get used to: the endless patience, the way he treated her pleasure as though it were a difficult and beautiful piece of work, never to be rushed or botched. The heat gathered in her slowly, from the soles of her feet and the backs of her knees, in long slow surges, like water filling a lock, and when at last she broke she did it with her fingers knotted in his hair and his name torn out of her in a voice she didn’t know she owned. He held her through it. He kept her against him, whispering, there, there, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, until the shaking passed, and she lay limp and boneless in the dark with her face in his neck.

“Now you,” she managed. “Come here. Come here.”

He came. She wrapped her legs around him and drew him in, and for a long while there was nothing in the world but the two of them moving in the dark under the storm: slow, then fast, then slow, a rhythm as old as water. His breath came harsh and ragged against her ear. His mouth found hers. The rain thundered down on the canvas, and her whole body rose to meet him, and the green dark spun, and flared, and went white.

* * *

Afterward they lay tangled in the damp ruins of the bedding, listening to the storm blow itself away.

The roaring thinned. The drumming softened to a tapping, the tapping to a drip. Somewhere beyond the tent wall, the wind dropped, and the breath of the sea took over, huge and slow. Her head was on his chest, her leg thrown over his, her hand spread over his heart. His fingers moved idly in her wet hair. She could feel the whole day settling in her body like silt: the ache of the motorcycle in her thighs, the salt on her skin, the long slow warmth of being utterly, entirely held.

“You know what I thought,” Corinne said drowsily, “when you handed me that helmet?”

“What?”

“That it was too perfect a fit. I thought, he must have measured.”

“I guessed,” said Emory.

“It was a very good guess.”

“I’m good at guessing heads.”

She smiled into the dark. “What was I thinking, at Ledge Point? When I said it was an opinion. About how small we are.” She traced a line along his collarbone. “It doesn’t feel small. I thought it would. All that water. All that sky. But I felt larger, somehow. As if someone had cleared a room inside me and let the air in.”

“That’s what it did for me,” he said softly. “The first time.”

“Is that why you brought me?”

“I wanted to give you the thing I’d found.” His voice was drowsy, and very close. “I’ve never brought anyone. Not once. I’ve been here forty times, and I’ve never shared it. I wasn’t sure it would survive being shared. But it did.”

“It did.”

“It’s the only place I’ve ever been,” said Emory, “that I wanted to keep forever. And then you came. And I realized I’d only been waiting for you to be in it.”

She lifted her head. In the dim green light she could just see his face, relaxed, boyish, wet-eyed, utterly open. It was such a naked thing to say that she could not answer it. She simply settled her cheek back on his heart and held on.

Beneath the canvas, beneath the pressing weight of the dark, the granite kept the day’s heat, and gave it up to them, slowly, through the floor of the tent. All night it warmed their backs. It was a quiet miracle. She fell asleep thinking that stone, of all things, could remember the sun.

When she woke, it was dawn, and the whole world was washed and dripping, and on the shelf of rock outside the tent a small blue flame was hissing under a kettle, and a man was sitting beside it in his bare feet, with a thermos, and a mug, and a slice of peach on a tin plate, waiting for her.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” said Corinne, and she knew, with a clarity that astonished her, that she had never in her life been so completely at home.