Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

light embrace. “Can you believe?” she asked. “I haven’t danced since my junior prom in Philadelphia.”

“Well, then,” he said, dipping her gingerly, then pausing as “Stranger in Paradise” faded out and “If I Loved You” from Carousel came on, “consider this your present. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you. Thank you very, very much.” Her appreciation struck him as touchingly genuine. “When is your birthday?”

“It was back in July.”

“And you didn’t celebrate?”

“Lost track of the calendar and forgot all about it—until sometime in the middle of the night. Then I got up and went out in the desert and tried to count the stars. Astronomers claim the human eye can see no more than five thousand stars at any one time, but I swear I counted nineteen thousand. Not including asteroids and major planets. Of course, I may have counted some black holes by mistake. But it was a splendid celebration.”

Domino squeezed his hand and folded against him, moving in his arms like a pendulum moving in a grandfather clock. “I should like to have done that for my birthday: counting stars.” She sighed close to his ear. “Better than vespers, maybe.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, they’re still up there. Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri, the Big Dipper, Orion, neutron stars, pulsars, novas, supernovas, red giants, white dwarfs, purple people-eaters, the whole twinkly-assed crew. We could. . . .” He motioned toward the door.

“No,” she whispered. “Not tonight. I must go soon.” Her voice brightened without rising. “But tomorrow night? We could, if you want, count stars tomorrow night.”

“Sure. I’m free. I’ll meet you around ten. At the gate.”

“No. It’ll be cold and windy out there in the open. We’ll meet in the tower. You know? At the top of—what do you call it? The ladder.”

“As long as it isn’t the corporate ladder, I’ll be happy to climb it.”

They, in their dancing, had kicked over all but one of the candles. The dining hall was so faintly illuminated they could no longer ascertain if Bob and ZuZu were still in the room, yet Domino’s eyes seemed luminous, even though partially closed. If it was the wine that was responsible, either on her part or his own, he would ever be wine’s loyal friend. He swore it.

“My grandmother,” he said, “confessed to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise.”

“Sounds not quite a proper method to me. Are you drunk, Switters?”

“Certainly not. But it’s a state that might be beneficially attained were I to gain access to that last bottle back in the kitchen. In the interest of knowledge, of course. We could see if I pass Maestra’s test.”

“You’ve rearranged enough furniture for one night.” She smiled, glancing at the combined tabletops over which they’d been (at times, precariously) skimming. The ballad from Carousel had ended and a lively, up-tempo tune from South Pacific was intruding on the mood. She pulled away from him. “See you at the tower. Bring your calculator.” She was going, and he was prepared to let her go, but, abruptly, before either of them could step aside, each of their faces moved forward, as if attracted by a sudden mutual activation of atomic dipoles or else shoved together by formless relatives of the Asmodeus. And they kissed. They surprised themselves utterly by kissing.

It wasn’t a lengthy kiss, as kisses go, yet neither was it a friendly peck. (As the Egyptians knew full well, Platonism never stood a chance in this world.) It was a kiss of moderate duration, devoid of all but the sweetest hint of tongue, yet a kiss fraught with pressure, irrigated with mouth moisture, and animated by some force that transcended the mere contracting and relaxing of oral musculature. It possessed a muscular rhythm, however, as well as a kinetic inquisitiveness, and a systemwide excitation was somehow synergistically precipitated by the crude, unsanitary, and yet glorious co-mingling of lip meats.

How could anything as commonplace—and in their pink, fatty, babyish way, dumb —as human lips produce such mysterious pleasure? Accompanied by tiny noises like carp feeding or rubber stretching or fallen kumquats returning to the branch? Fusing one pair of lips to another must be akin to attaching an ordinary prefix such as re or a or ex to an ordinary (and rather harsh) verb such as ward or rouse or cite. Looking at it from another angle, their kiss was like a paper airplane landing on the moon.

When at last they began to pull apart, a thread of spittle as slender and silky as a spider’s wire connected them for another second or two, as if they were continents linked by a single transoceanic cable. Then, with an inaudible pop, they were disconnected, staring at each other from opposite shores.

“A demain,” she said, a little breathless but not rattled in the least. “Tomorrow night.”

“The stars.”

“Count them.”

“Every damn one of them.”

“Okay.”

The following night, and every night thereafter for seven months, they lay on a Bedouin carpet in the roofless tower and looked up at the cat-black sky. Not many stars got counted. On the other hand, lest one jump to conclusions, not many carnal apples got bobbed, either—at least not in the sense of conventional sexual intercourse. What transpired nightly in the room at the top of the tower was at once more uneventful and more extraordinary than routine copulation and sidereal enumeration. And, no, that wasn’t a typographical error back there: it persisted for seven months.

The first night that they met in the tower and lay on the rug (Switters never dared to test that floor with his feet), admiring a moon that looked as if it had been oiled by a Kurdish rifleman and pointing at the satellites that skittered from sky-edge to sky-edge like waterbugs crossing a cow creek, Domino confessed, with a minimum of embarrassment and no shame at all, that she had “a big crash” on him. Switters, ever the language man, was on the verge of correcting her English when it occurred to him that being infatuated with the likes of himself was, indeed, probably more akin to a “crash” than a “crush.”

He reminded her, as she had once reminded him, that the very first time he laid eyes on her he’d blurted out that he loved her. He now had, he said, nothing to add to that declaration nor nothing to subtract. In all likelihood, he had been, as charged, out of his cotton-picking mind back then, and whether or not that condition had improved he was in no position to say. However—however—whatever he felt for her (and he could only describe the emotion as being as satisfyingly poignant as it was pesteringly agreeable), or she felt for him, it had been established—had it not?—that he was not her type, since he was a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace.

“I may have been wrong about that,” she conceded. “You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world’s confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It’s all part of the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than . . . ummph.”

Although shutting her up was probably not his sole or even primary motive, he kissed her before she could define him further. He kissed her hard—and soft and long and deep and dreamily and urgently, and she kissed him back. In a sense, Domino’s kisses were rather like Suzy’s, which is to say, they were both eager and shy, adventurous and uncertain, yet there was a strength in them (or immediately behind them), a solidity that made him feel that this simple, oddish act of osculation, was somehow supported by and connected to each and every one of what Bobby Case’s ol’ Chinese boys called “The Ten Thousand Things.” Indeed, there was a sense in which a kiss was a thing as well as an act, and Domino’s kiss, inexperienced in terms of execution but seasoned in terms of foundation, might be compared to new spring growth on a venerable tree, or (despite Switters’s disrespect for pethood) a puppy with a pedigree. Moreover, being a thing in and of itself, her kiss, while undeniably a concretized expression of an emotional state, was not necessarily a mere prelude to other activity, the leading edge of a larger biological urge. He liked that about it: the self-contained, concentrated isness or