Gwen, in Green

He walked around the pond idly and saw tracks on the far side. Kids were always coming onto the property. He didn’t really mind, but he didn’t want to think of the little bastards hiding there on the far side of the pond watching them on the balcony. Wow. Here he was the one getting touchy about sex, thinking that they’d better not do it outdoors in the daytime again. Well, what the hell. If she wanted to. Give the little bastards a thrill if they snuck up and saw them. When he was a kid there was this couple in the neighborhood. They got drunk on Saturday afternoons and forgot to close the bedroom shades. A boy could stand in the alley, hidden behind a row of tall okra in the garden, and get an eyeful. He chuckled and turned to see what Gwen was doing. She was on her knees, staring and motionless. She apparently didn’t feel his eyes on her. She was about twenty-­five yards away. She was close enough for him to see clearly when she cupped her hand in the black, acid earth, lifted it, looked at it thoughtfully, and then took a bite of the dirt. She just lifted her hand, opened her mouth, and took a bite. Just like that.

He didn’t mention it to her. When she came up to the house, with several new flytraps to be potted in rich, acid soil, he noticed a smudge on her chin. After that he started watching her more closely. He felt like a spy. He felt disloyal. He wanted to talk it out with her, to say, “Honey, why the hell did you eat dirt?”

Instead, feeling guilty and a bit scared, but not too upset—because she was, after all, his Gwen, and he knew her, and she was probably just going through a stage of nervousness brought on by the constant noise of the heavy equipment—he dropped in on Dr. Irving King the next time he had to go to Port City to the electronics supply house. He let it all hang out, as the expression goes. He talked about her former sexual hangups and the great change, the attachment to the flytraps, her loss of weight, the circles under her eyes, her sleeplessness, and her uncharacteristic remarks about wishing all the construction workers dead.

King seemed to be more interested after that. And when George got around to the dirt eating, he was positively avid for more information, asking questions and waving his cigar, animated. One question was a gasser. “Do you have any reason to suspect that your wife could be, ah, indulging in marital infidelity?” the doctor asked.

George felt anger at first, and then he considered it. “No, none at all. She definitely would not do that.”

George talked about the constant noise. King wanted details of the construction project. He got them. He leaned back, puffed on his dead cigar, and then chewed it thoughtfully. “Mr. Ferrier, I think it advisable that you bring your wife in to see me.”

“I don’t think she’ll come,” George said. “I’ve been trying to get her to go in to see our family doctor. She finds a million excuses not to go.”

“I see,” King said. “You once invited me to visit you.”

“Sure,” George said.

“I think I will drop in the first of next week.”

“Let me know and I’ll make it a point to be home,” George said.

“I think not,” King said. “I’ll arrange it to arrive late in the afternoon. Then I can have a chat with Mrs. Ferrier before you come home from work.”

“Well,” George said, “if that’s the way you want it.”

When a man is eighty-­two, he feels the days growing shorter. The first of the week can mean Monday, Tuesday, or even, in extreme procrastination, Wednesday. But Irving King’s curiosity was aroused once more, and when you’re eighty-­two, if you put things off until Wednesday, Wednesday might never come. He drove to Pine Tree Island on Monday afternoon, arriving at the Ferrier house just after three o’clock. He found it to be a charming place, if a little weedy out front. He walked up the steps to the front deck and looked for a doorbell. There was none. He knocked. Waited. When no one came, he went down the steps carefully and walked around the house. He stood for a long time, with his heart acting up to the point of making him uneasy.

It was not the voyeur in him which caused his agitation. He was too old even for that. It was sheer intellectual excitement, the feeling of finding something. At eighty-­two he was being given a second chance, and the coincidence of it was so striking that he had a very good feeling about it all. It was as if some kind god looked down and said, “Irving King, you blew it once. Now here’s your second chance.”

He could, of course, be aware of the erotic aspect. She was obviously enjoying it. And there was a certain element of perversion, since she and the teen-­age boy atop whom she was performing had an audience, another teen-­ager who watched as he slowly dressed.