“I am, though,” he insisted. “Feel my hair.”
With a short laugh, I declined the offer. “That’s okay.”
“Seriously, feel it.” He bent his head toward me. Reluctantly I stroked it, as if he were a puppy. The choppy edges of his haircut belied the texture, which was silky, slippery. “It’s the same as my mother’s,” he said.
“Softer than it looks.”
“Yeah. I have Asian earwax, too.”
I grinned. “What’s the difference?”
“It’s flaky instead of goopy. And I don’t stink when I sweat.”
Bemused, I considered whether I could remember evidence to the contrary. “Is that supposed to be an Asian characteristic? That sounds like a myth.”
“It’s not true for everyone, but it is for me. And it’s a good thing, too, because you ought to smell my dad sometime, when he gets working. He’s like an NFL locker room after a game.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Thanks for the warning.”
“So when do I get my coffee?”
“I’ll take you and Scott out after Madrigals on Monday.”
“What about tomorrow? My mom told you I’m working here all weekend, right?”
I sighed. “No, she didn’t tell me that. Does that mean I’m babysitting you tomorrow, too?”
He shrugged with unconcern. “I thought you were.”
“Then I guess I am,” I told him ruefully. “But the coffee will still be Monday.”
“I can live with that.” He hiked his headphones back onto his ears and hopped off the stool, heading back toward the playhouse with the bottle of tea in his hand. Today he wore a black T-shirt, almost outgrown, with no thermal beneath it. When he reached for the trim pieces on an upper shelf he revealed a stomach that was smooth and faintly muscular, divided, below his navel, by a narrow line of black hair.
I looked away.
Even the Style section of the newspaper was crammed with items about the repercussions of the Starr Report. Zach was right—it was unavoidable. I turned the offending sections over so he would not be inspired to perform another comedy routine. Instead, I picked up the Travel section.
I rolled my eyes and glanced at Zach. He squatted by the jigsaw and twirled the smallest plywood pieces past its blade, his fingers hovering just at the edge of the plastic guard. The neat muscles of his biceps leaped and danced.
I turned my attention back to the escape from D.C.
That night I had a dream.
In it I was a child, walking out to the garden to pick blueberries. The trees on either side of the path were green and full; straight ahead, the fallow field unfurled like a moonscape of brown earth. At the blueberry bush I squatted and began plucking berries from the bottom branches, where they ripened first, eating greedily. The juice left purple splotches on my fingertips and the hem of my dress.
Suddenly I heard a voice, a man’s voice speaking German in a friendly way. I looked up and there stood Zach Patterson on the other side of the bush, smiling and talking to me. I understood him perfectly, and even as I dreamed some small part of my mind marveled at my understanding. Instead of answering I kept eating, gorging myself on berries, letting the overripe ones fall onto the toes of my sandals.
I glanced at him carelessly and said nothing.
He came around the bush and crouched beside me. He wore the clothes of a farm boy—boots and stonewashed jeans, a ratty green T-shirt. When I felt his fingers beneath my chin, I swallowed. He brought his face to mine and kissed me on the mouth, soft-lipped, sensuously. But I was only a child.
I squatted still, let him kiss me like a man kisses a woman, and felt the doom of knowing I would be in trouble. Beside him I felt so small.
He parted my lips with his tongue. I understood English and, miraculously, German, but I had no word for this feeling in my belly, the hidden warmth in hidden cells awakening, this current coming to life along a skipping path. And yet, fused with the warmth was a pattering fear. Fear that crammed down into my stomach just above where the current swirled and roiled. Fear that trembled my mouth but did not close it, welcoming the surety and heat that his brought, the way his hard jaw steadied mine.
To taste another’s mouth is to enter their body.
And so into my belly he went, where the blueberries lay hidden away: the cavechild fruit, made by nature, devoured by fantasy.
6
On Sunday I brought a stack of my students’ old watercolor paintings and worked alone for an hour, cutting them down to greeting-card size and folding them in two, before Zach turned up. Annoyed, I was prepared to offer him a few choice words for wasting my time, but one look at his face silenced me. His headphones were already on, aggressive music buzzing through, and he wore the same jeans and T-shirt from the previous day, now much worse for wear. He nodded an acknowledgment and got to work fitting the trim onto the structure, wielding the screw gun as though he might also use it on the first person who dared get in his personal space.
I felt safer at the table, cutting out cards. It was just as well; I found it difficult to look at him without superimposing dream-Zach onto real-Zach, and standing face-to-face with the kid would surely be stranger still. When he squatted down to drill a piece of trim into place, I was struck by how accurate my mind’s calculation of his body had been. The proportions of his shoulders and arms, the tapering of back to waist, even the almost springlike
