Summer's End (25 page)

“And when the bear comes, I'm sure it would be better if I were a dog, but in the meantime, don't you think there are some advantages associated with the fact that I'm a woman?”

“No,” he said bluntly. That was good.
No
. You couldn't get any simpler, any clearer, than that. “It's an incredible inconvenience, because all I can think of is that folded up over there is your nice dry sweat suit, and not only are you probably going to want to put it on, but you're also going to insist on taking off your wet clothes first, aren't you?”

“Of course, and it's worse than you think.” Amy lifted her sweater to her ribs. Her midriff was covered in black. “I have my bathing suit on underneath this. I have to take
everything
off.”

“Oh, Lord…that is bad news.” Jack shook his head. “But I'm strong. You do your thing, I'll do mine, and we won't pay any attention to each other.” He crossed his arms in front of him, yanked his sweater off over his head, and promptly crashed into the lantern, sending it swaying.

Amy started to laugh. “Don't laugh,” he protested. “That hurt.”

“Poor thing.” She reached over and started rubbing the spot where he had bumped his head. The knit of her sweater was brushing against his face. She was still laughing. “Are you rejecting me?”

“No,” he protested. “No, of course not.”

“Then what are you doing?” She mimicked his voice. “‘We won't pay any attention to each other.' If that's not rejection, what is?”

She was still sounding happy and light. He was confused. “Why are you acting like this?”

“I guess because I'm propositioning you since you don't seem to be propositioning me. Or is it a seduction? What's the difference between proposition and seduction?”

Jack had no idea. “Amy, are you out of your mind?”

She had both hands on his face, tracing her fingers down his throat. “All I know is that I had a wonderful day, a glorious day, and tonight is an opportunity that doesn't come along very often.”

“But what about the family? What about everything we were talking about at the campfire?”

“I don't recall that
I
was saying any of it,” she replied. “Jack, my family never knows where I am or what I'm doing. Why should they know about this?”

That made sense. Or did it? Jack didn't know…

“No one has to find out. We don't have to go back to
the lake and shriek it from the treetops. We can keep it to ourselves when we're around everyone else, and then at the end of the summer, we can do whatever we want.”

Well, if no one found out…

“You said I don't stand up for myself.” Her fingers were at the round neck of his T-shirt. “I'm doing it now. I don't meet many people I can trust, Jack. And I can trust you.”

That was true. She could trust him. He liked her so much. Yes, she was beautiful and strong, but he also just liked her.

So if they trusted each other…if no one found out…

He put his arms around her and bent his head, kissing her. Everything about her was soft and fragrant. Well, almost everything. Her sweater was damp. It was one of those Icelandic things, in which the sheep's rich lanolin caused water to bead up and stay on the sweater's surface. She might be staying dry, but he was getting wet.

“Your sweater's like hugging a barnyard. Take it off and then turn around.”

“Turn around? Why?” She pulled off her sweater and swiveled away from him, but craned her head over her shoulder so she could still see him. “Why did you want me to turn around? Are you being modest?”

“No. I want to look at your back.”

The delicate lines of her muscles ribboned down her back, framed by the deep U of her black swimming suit. The delts, the lats, the…she had muscles he didn't know the names of. He couldn't stand the way female bodybuilders looked, so bulky and bunchy, but her back was feminine, almost fragile-looking.

He blew on his hands to warm them, and then he touched her, stroking up and down, following the lines of
her muscles. He leaned forward, resting his cheek against her.

He moved his hands down to her waist. She had said to his sister that she had no hips or waist, and indeed her body fell cleanly below her rib cage without the inward curves of most women.

She was leaning back against him now, her head resting back on his shoulder. His hands slid upward. Compressed under the Lycra of her suit were her breasts, their softness reined in by the tightly knit fabric. Her nipples were hard, but they wouldn't be visible; her suit was keeping them flat. He pulled the shoulder straps down off her arms, and then against his palms he could feel the soft weight of her breasts, the tight bud of her nipples. She leaned back against him, her head in the curve of his neck.

She liked this. So did he.

But now what?

Jack considered himself a reasonably competent lover, no Don Juan by any means, but certainly someone who could maneuver his way through a romantic episode without a woman having to worry about logistics, about what happened next and what went where.

But at the moment the logistics were a problem. He was sitting sideways across a narrow tent, his back hunched to follow the slope of the walls, his legs pulled up because there was no space for him to stretch them out. Amy was sitting between his legs, facing away from him.

Normally a graceful pivot would solve everything, but there was no room for a pivot of any sort, and there was that goddamn lantern still swinging from the last time he had banged his head.

How long did he have before she got cold? You always
had to figure that in, at what point a half-naked woman was going to get cold…although she was an ice skater; ice skaters were probably used to being cold.

Thank God for something.

Amy twisted her head again, trying to see his face. “What's so funny? Why are you laughing?”

“Haven't you noticed that we are stuck in this position?”

“No,” she answered and leaned back against him again, shutting her eyes. “Keep going. I'll tell you when I notice.”

He looped his forefingers into the belt loop of her jeans, hoisted her out of his lap, and deposited her in a corner of the tent. Then he clambered to his knees and tugged on her feet, stretching her out, hitting his head only twice.

Her black bathing suit was bunched up at the waist of her jeans. He unzipped her jeans and gave them a good pull. A moment later she was naked.

Her body was sleek and compact, her hips narrower than her rib cage. Her pubic hair was dark gold, and she had surprisingly little of it, just a narrow triangle. He had never seen anyone with so little pubic hair.

“Do you do something to yourself down there?” he asked.

“Of course. Skating costumes don't provide much coverage.”

“Do you shave?”

She shook her head. “Wax.” He must have looked puzzled for she continued. “They paint hot wax on your skin, and then when it cools, they rip it off and the hair comes with it.”

Ouch. Hot wax on your pubic hair? This was
not
something Jack wanted to think about. He was as realistic as the next guy, but really…did he have to know about this?

Amy was running her hands over the V-shaped crease at the top of her legs. “I haven't had it done in a while. I'm getting a little stubbly. You want to feel?” Obligingly she flattened her back into the sleeping bag, raising her pelvis up. “Really short pubic hairs are like daggers; they can poke through a pair of tights.”

If there was anything on earth that would make Jack not want to touch her pelvis, it was this…and she knew it. “My sister said you were amazingly unself-conscious about your body.” She was chattering away stark naked while he was fully clothed. That would have given most women pause.

“I suppose I am. My body is what I skate with. I don't usually think of it sexually.”

He wasn't surprised. “Doesn't that cause some problems?”

“Not in the least. Given that I have no sex life, it's probably an advantage.”

“But you have had one at some point, haven't you?”

“Occasionally, but it never seems to work out. You know how it is—sleep with someone and he thinks that gives him the right to control your publicity or produce your shows.”

“I think I can promise that won't happen to me.”

“I know. That's one of your charms.”

They had been talking a long time. Jack didn't mind. He liked shooting the breeze with her. It seemed like a waste of time with most people, but not with her.

But he had to wonder if they were avoiding something
by all this talk. “Tell me about yourself when you do have a sex life. What do you like?”

“Actually, I'm very efficient. A little bit here”—she gestured to her breasts—“a little there”—she waved her hand near her pubic region—“and I'm done.”

That did surprise him. He would have expected things to be more difficult for her. That was true of many women.

“Why are you surprised?” she asked…even though he hadn't said anything. “I can focus, I can be in the moment, my muscle memory is great. It's really just a physical thing, isn't it? And I'm good at physical things.”

Just a physical thing
. That seemed like a pretty stark way to describe sex. But maybe her encounters had been on the stark side—female orgasm, penetration, male orgasm, and then on to the good stuff, producing her shows. No wonder they were chatting away here; it was her way of prolonging what she assumed would be very brief.

“If you're so efficient,” he asked, “does intercourse sometimes feel like an afterthought?”

She lifted her head, startled. “An afterthought?”

“Or something like that.” He tried to explain. “Sometimes when you make love, everything seems like it's in very separate, defined stages, and—”

She interrupted. “I know what you mean. It's just the word, afterthought. That's how I used to think of myself, as an afterthought. Amy the Afterthought.”

He suspected that she was probably Amy the Mistake. “Well, do you? Think of intercourse as an afterthought?”

She sighed. “I suppose I do.”

He suddenly felt very…well, he wasn't sure. She was
like Sleeping Beauty or Rapunzel, one of those fairy-tale ladies who was trapped inside a castle. Her profession made her very matter-of-fact about her body and left her surrounded by men who were uninterested in her sexually.

That didn't seem right. Sex shouldn't be efficient. It should be an extension, a continuation, a part of the way you lived. Its roots should thrust all the way down to the moist, urgent earthiness that connects your body to your soul. Despite all the frilliness in her life, the fancy clothes, the sequins and TV cameras, in her core she was like him, a physical person, someone who lived through her body, someone who expressed herself through her body, someone who loved the here and the now of sensation and exertion.

She shouldn't be efficient in bed.

Tenderness…that was what he was feeling. Desire and tenderness—he hadn't known that they could go together, but clearly they could. He wanted to help her escape from that castle…not because it was some big, macho challenge—the whole high-walls, pretty-girl thing—but because she shouldn't be stuck in there, not when her body was so alive in every other way.

He wished that this could be perfect for her. But there was no way. There was no music, no soft lights, not even any cushioning under the sleeping bags. The tent was so cramped that in the end he was going to have put her underneath him in the most old-fashioned of ways, and since neither of them had come prepared, everything was going to have to be more incomplete than he liked.

It couldn't be perfect. But maybe it would be a little better than what she had had.

Amy rolled to her side and tucked her hand under her cheek. She could hear the wind in the trees. The heavy pine boughs were rustling thick and soft; the slender branches of birches flicked against one another with light clicks. The morning light filtered through the gray-green tent walls.

Last night had been wonderful. It had been so…so simple, so natural, unstudied, and honest. She didn't like it when a man tried to create an atmosphere with soft music and low lights. That always made her feel uncomfortable; music and lighting were things you worried about when you were performing. But with Jack she hadn't felt that she was performing. It had been more like the canoeing, something the two of them had done together, using their bodies because that's the kind of people they were. Maybe that wasn't the most romantic comparison, making love and paddling a canoe, but she had had a really good time paddling that canoe.

Jack started to stir. She leaned forward to kiss him.

He lurched back, turning his head, holding up his hand. “My breath will be awful.”

She laughed. What a perfect thing for him to say.
People had morning mouth—not a pretty thought but the truth. And Jack viewed it that way, as a simple physical fact. More romantic types tried to pretend it away…which didn't work.

“I don't care,” she said.

“Oh, yes, you do.” He sat up, rummaged among his clothes, and triumphantly pulled out a toothbrush.

They began to dress. Jack found it difficult to maneuver in the tight space, and she made sure to get in his way so that he was always bumping against her with his elbow or hip. “You have to be doing this on purpose,” he said at last. “I'm no model of grace, but I'm not this clumsy.”

They scrambled out of the tent, Jack going up to the ranger cabin to return the lantern and see if the ranger could spare some hot water again while Amy went to the water's edge to get the food pack. The plates and cups were still on the top of the canoe. They were slick with rainwater, and Amy had to brush the pine needles off them with the side of her hand.

Jack returned from the ranger cabin with coffee. Their menu was the same as it had been last night, tuna fish sandwiches and dried fruit. The ranger had offered to give them a hot breakfast. “But he's a talker,” Jack said. “We would be there forever.”

“This is fine.” Amy sat down on a rock to eat her breakfast. It would have been more fine, she decided an instant later, if the rock had been dry, but it hadn't.

Jack squatted down, resting one knee against one of the logs. The knee of his jeans would be damp and dirty, but better to have a damp knee than the wet tush that she had.

He picked up his sandwich. “Do you really think we can keep this from everyone? I think it's important that we do.”

“I don't see why it would be a problem.”

“Everything would be different if there wasn't this family stuff. I'm not a one-night-stand kind of guy.”

“I know that.”

She had answered instantly, and he looked up, a little suspiciously. “You do? How?”

“My great insight into people, and the fact that I'm sharing a room with your sister. Don't you think I know everything there is to know about your love life?”

He groaned. “So I suppose you've heard this whole Jack-as-rescuer thing?”

She smiled. Of course she had. Holly said that Jack had never been in a true partnership. The women had needed him; he had probably not needed them.

“Well, it's not like Holly says.” He was determined to defend himself. “It's just that I'm not so great in the expressing-my-true-feelings department, so I do better with women I can do stuff for. You put a new radiator in someone's car, and she gets the message that you like her. You don't have to rattle on quite as much.”

“I think you express yourself very well.”

“Then you're the only one.” He drained the last of his coffee. “So this will all work the best if you give me a list of chores. Like your gutters…do you need your gutters cleaned? I like cleaning gutters.”

He wasn't talking like someone who was planning on a secret relationship. “I don't have gutters. I live in a high-rise, and the building has a maintenance staff.”

He grimaced. “A maintenance staff? No woman who already has a relationship with a maintenance staff would have any reason to have a relationship with me.”

“I think I can find something to do with you.” Amy folded the Saran Wrap her sandwich had been in and stood
up. “But we've got plenty of time to sort this out, because we can't really do anything until the summer's over.”

“I guess that's true,” he agreed.

They packed up quickly, and as Jack was pushing the canoe out into the water, she turned in her seat. “Let's see how fast we can go.”

It was an absurd idea. There was no need for speed, and yesterday had been grueling.

“Sounds good to me,” he said.

As quickly as they had traveled yesterday, they had at least been prudent. They hadn't known what difficulties lay ahead; they'd had to stop and check maps. But this morning they knew the route, and there was nothing stopping them.

The wind was at their back, and they flew through the water, carried on by the air currents and their own strength. They made a game of it, plotting where to beach on each portage to save themselves a few steps, a few seconds. Even though the sun was still low in the sky, their shirts were damp with sweat. It was utterly pointless; it was completely exhilarating.

“Wouldn't it be fun”—Amy spoke over her shoulder—“to come up here sometimes and really push ourselves to see how far we could go?”

“With your strength and my lack of sense, we'd probably be at the Arctic Circle in a week's time.”

That was what she needed, not a repairman but a playmate, a buddy. She would love to try new things physically. She'd always wanted to roller-blade, mountain bike, cross-country ski, horseback ride, but she never had. She wanted to go to a state fair, ride the roller coaster, and have someone win her a big stuffed animal. She wanted to have fun.

They could have their own camp, the two of them, Camp-Amy-and-Jack. It would be a traveling camp. They would meet for weekends in Montana, New York City, Maine, wherever there was something to do, and they would have fun.

It didn't have to be hard. As soon as the summer was over and the family was all scattered around again, they could pick some dates. Amy's assistant Gretchen would make the travel arrangements. It would hideously expensive, but very easy.

She knew that this would work. She always felt doubts first as a tightening in her throat. It has harder to swallow, harder to exhale when she felt a doubt. When she doubted herself on the ice, it seemed that she never quite got all the air out of her lungs. The old air would settle in her stomach and her legs, weighing her down.

Confidence she felt in her arms, a prickling, flashing, bubbling certainty, making her arms curving and graceful. Beauty flowed from that confidence, and she would know that however she moved her arms, however she held her fingers, the line would be beautiful.

Time and again she would find a piece of music and no one else thought it would work, and she wouldn't know
how
it would work, and for days, weeks, everyone would keep questioning her, joking with her, urging her to give up, and then suddenly it would work, and everyone else would be grimacing, apologizing, acknowledging that she had been right. “It was my arms,” she would say. “I knew it in my arms.”

Most people dreaded summer's end. Amy could hardly wait.

Other canoes, other parties, were entering the water. The ones going upstream were struggling against the
wind. Across the surface of the larger lakes, waves broke and foamed against the silvery canoes. The shore curved away from the lakes in arching shells, the deep green of the trees reflecting a fringe on the blue-brown water.

One more portage and they would be in sight of the island campsite. It was not even nine o'clock. They had been gone for only eighteen hours.

The four little kids crowded down the rocks to meet them, shrieking and jabbering. It wasn't until Ellie reached the shore that Amy and Jack could piece together the story. The plane had come at five this morning. It had found the campsite easily. They hadn't even had to paddle out to the center of the lake and flap orange ponchos to identify their location. The kids had been looking forward to that.

“Nick got off okay?” Jack asked.

Ellie nodded.

By now the adults had joined them. “I'm wildly impressed,” Giles said immediately. “You just left twenty minutes ago, didn't you?”

“You got to the ranger station last night?” Phoebe marveled. “We couldn't believe it when the pilot said that was when the message came in.”

“But you didn't really get all the way there on your own, did you?” Joyce asked. “That's what I said. You must have found someone with a motor or a cell phone.” Motors were not allowed in canoe country, and cell phones didn't work. Joyce knew that. Amy couldn't imagine what she was thinking.

“No, we made it there ourselves,” she said quietly.

Ellie and the kids were unloading the canoe, obviously planning on carrying up the packs. The two boys were already fighting over who was to carry what. Amy and
Jack followed Phoebe and Giles to the longer but less steep path up the rocks.

Phoebe and Giles confirmed that everything had gone well. The butterfly bandages had held, although the wound had oozed throughout the night. They'd had to send Nick off alone; otherwise there would not have been enough adults to bring all four canoes back.

“He'll be all right,” Jack said.

Everyone agreed. Nick was a survivor.

“If he went alone,” Amy put in, “then where's Maggie?” She had not seen the other girl.

Phoebe and Giles exchanged glances. Then Phoebe spoke carefully. “She's in her tent. She is in a bit of a snit.”

When wasn't Maggie in a bit of a snit? “What happened?” Amy asked.

“We haven't pieced it all together”—Phoebe was speaking softly—“but Ellie says that she thinks something happened between Maggie and Nick. He went off for a walk yesterday afternoon, and the little kids said that Maggie followed him.”

“And?” Jack asked.

“That we're not sure of, but they are a pair of teenagers. Then a half hour later he was out collecting wood with Ellie—”

“Which he clearly volunteered to do,” Giles put in. “I was planning on going with her.”

“So no doubt,” Phoebe continued, “Maggie viewed that as a kind of rejection.”

“Do you think they had sex?” Amy asked. Both Maggie and Nick did have an alert animal presence to them, an awareness of their bodies, their sexuality.

Phoebe shrugged. “Who knows? She was probably willing.”

Jack was shaking his head. “If there is one person on earth Nick has any respect for, it is my mother. He might have had a sense of how disruptive this could be, how tough it would make things for her.”

“And that's why he didn't have sex with a willing girl…out of respect for his aunt?” Giles didn't sound convinced.

Jack grimaced. “It does sound a little lame, doesn't it?”

They were now at the worst part of the climb, and Giles waved for Amy and Jack to go on. A moment later Amy spoke to Jack softly. “When you were talking about things being disruptive for your mother, it wasn't Nick you were talking about, was it?”

“I was supposed to be this great role model for him, and so far all I've seemed to manage to teach him was how to seduce family members.”

Amy would have slipped her arm through his if she could have, but Giles and Phoebe were behind them on the path. “First of all, if you check the timing, whatever did or didn't happen, Nick and Maggie went first, and second, it's not clear that Nick was doing the seducing…or you either, for that matter.”

Jack rolled his eyes. He was not convinced.

Amy longed for something to say that would persuade him of what she knew, that Camp-Amy-and-Jack wasn't going to hurt anyone, that it was a perfect way for them to be together.

 

With Amy and Jack back safely, the others decided to leave the tents pitched and take a day trip to a little waterfall. Phoebe urged Amy and Jack to stay at the campsite and rest. “You've paddled so hard. Take it easy for the rest of the day.”

That sounded wonderful. Amy hadn't expected to be alone with him until after the summer's end.

But of course, the minute Maggie heard that the two of them were staying behind, she announced that she wasn't going either. That left too many people for two canoes, but not enough for three, so Joyce said she would stay back too.

And rather than spend the day with the two of them, Amy and Jack quickly chose to go on the day trip.

 

The obvious arrangement for the return trip home the next day would have been to move Maggie out of the middle of her parents' canoe and have her take Nick's place in Jack's. But the obvious thing was never done when Maggie was involved. Complicated negotiations started, and Amy was not going to get involved. This was not regression, this was not a return of Amy the Afterthought, this was just smart. She went and sat on a rock. A minute later Ellie came to sit by her.

“You're keeping out of this too?” Amy asked.

Ellie nodded.

Ellie didn't have Maggie's sexual presence; she simply did not.

Amy reached over and ruffled the girl's hair. “Does it drive you nuts that Maggie gets her way all the time?”

Ellie looked up, startled. She hadn't expected to hear that from Amy. “Yeah, I guess. It just doesn't seem fair that she should be so smart and so great-looking.”

“Maggie has a very dramatic look, and that's in fashion right now. In the fifties people would have thought that she was ugly.”