“You’re hot,” Heidi said. “I bet they hit on you all the time at work.”
“Not really. It’s always the same-the one you want isn’t interested and the ones you can’t stand won’t take no for an answer.”
“God, does that sound familiar.” Heidi raised her glass in a silent toast.
A couple came over from the bar. The woman had perfectly straight blond hair cut in a pageboy. The man looked a little younger, maybe mid-thirties, and more nervous.
“Do you mind if we sit here?”
“Of course,” Heidi said. “Lots of room.”
The woman sat beside Delorme. The man sat on the far side of Heidi.
“My husband,” the woman told Delorme, “thinks he would enjoy seeing me make out with another woman.”
“What a shocking idea,” Delorme said.
“I think what he really means is he wants to do it with more than one woman at a time.”
“No, no,” the man said. “I don’t necessarily have to be involved.”
Heidi leaned into Delorme, a little too hard, her cold nose hitting Delorme’s neck before she righted herself. She cupped a hand to Delorme’s ear and whispered, “He’s pretty cute, doncha think?”
“I think,” Delorme said, “I’m going to save it for the third floor. Assuming I get up the nerve.”
“My name’s Janey, and this is Ron. We’ve never been up there,” the woman said. She had a wide forehead and authoritative cheekbones, the sort of face you might cast in a movie as a senator or a judge. Not a Janey. “Maybe we could venture up there together-assuming, as you say, we get up the nerve.”
When Delorme placed her foot on the bottom step of the stairs to the third floor, she had the sensation of something collapsing inside her. But she forced one foot in front of the other, following the woman, who was following the man.
“I’m staying behind you,” Heidi said, “to make sure you don’t chicken out.”
In the ladies’ room, with the locker door open before her, the collapsing sensation was replaced by something else. Delorme slipped out of her dress and hung it up, and it was as if a flock of birds had been released inside her chest.
“Are you sure you’re okay with it?” Heidi was saying to the woman. “Won’t it bother you to see your husband with someone else?”
“I think I can handle it.”
“They’re not married,” Delorme said.
The woman laughed. “Guess it shows, huh?”
“Really?” Heidi tottered a little, pulling a shoe off. “Sometimes I’m so dumb I amaze myself.”
“You gonna keep the underwear on?” the woman said to Delorme. “I think we’re allowed to.”
The third floor was designed for sex and nothing else. There were no chairs. All the surfaces were meant for lying down, not for sitting. The colour scheme was devoted entirely to the red end of the spectrum, the darkness relieved by sconces turned low.
Delorme thought she had thrown her numbness switch upon ascending to this floor, but the sight of a naked couple engaged in slow, quiet but unmistakable sex shorted that particular circuit. A hot blush, invisible in this place, spread upward from her rib cage. Her face burned with it and a fine sweat broke out across her shoulders.
Other men and women were arranged on the floor around the couple. None of the men wore clothes. Two of the women had tops on, the rest wore microscopic panties.
“Why don’t we sit over there?” Heidi pointed to the far side, where there was a gap in the circle.
The fluttering in Delorme’s stomach was not going to settle down. She had never even glimpsed a couple having sex before, let alone watched one. Thanks to the tastes of more than one boyfriend, she had seen porn movies. She had found them exciting in parts, though those parts depicted things she did not necessarily want to engage in herself, no matter what ideas the boyfriends might have had.
“Do they know each other?” she heard someone ask.
“Just met,” came the hushed reply.
The couple were in their early thirties, and they went at it with a kind of solemn devotion, aware of their audience but focused on each other. They were lying on their sides now, facing each other. A woman in the outer circle reached out and caressed the man’s back. If he made any response, Delorme didn’t hear it.
Delorme was surprised at how unsexy it was. Perhaps this was due to the complete absence of fantasy. These were real people, and Delorme found their realness constricting in a way that fantasy was not. She found herself looking at the floor in an effort to avoid eye contact. She could feel the pulses in her wrists and ankles. How strange that, while seeing the couple engaged in sex was not wildly arousing, the fact that they were doing it was. The fact that this attractive young woman was opening her legs to someone she had just met. That this well-built young man, probably with a responsible job and a good income, possibly a good father and kind to animals, was willing to share the sight of his erect member in action with a group of naked strangers. It was not what they were doing but the fact they were doing it that was rearranging the tumblers in some heretofore unseen lock on Delorme’s self-knowledge.
A cool hand touched her upper back.
“Okay?”
Delorme looked back over her shoulder. Janey was looking at her, eyebrows raised. Behind her, Heidi had fastened her mouth to Ron’s, her bra already abandoned.
Bruce Turcotte stopped his snowmobile and sat for a few minutes just looking up at the magnificent fire tower before him. Middle of the bush, and here you have this perfect structure-not beautiful, but completely suited to its purpose, and built with an economy and integrity that spoke to the engineer in him. He had made his preliminary inspection a few days before and had been looking forward to the return trip.
Turcotte had been employed by the Ministry of Natural Resources for over twenty years, and in that time he had suffered his share of lousy assignments. He’d nearly frozen to death in James Bay one year, all but perished of boredom carrying out projects near communities so small they hardly deserved a name, and been driven half mad by blackflies more often than he cared to remember.
This assignment was a peach. In the days before satellites, the Ontario government had addressed the issue of forest fire prevention with the construction of more than a hundred lookout towers. Anywhere from eighty to a hundred feet tall, these mini-Eiffels were set atop the highest elevations in the province. The earliest ones were wooden and had long ago been torn down for safety reasons. During the fifties they had been replaced with steel towers, and these were the subject of Turcotte’s current assignment, which was to inspect each one and make a recommendation based on his engineering expertise as to whether it should be torn down, preserved for restricted duty as an unmanned fire alert outpost (webcam only), or refurbished for recreational value in the ever-growing system of hiking trails that were replacing the province’s extinct railroad, logging and mining operations.
The project required the collective wisdom of a small team of experts: a retired fire warden whose blood pressure gave him the face of a candy apple, a railroad executive whose first response to every request was no, and several representatives from Parks and Rec, including a dry stick of a woman, a vegan whose every utterance had the narcoleptic power he had formerly associated solely with the heavier opiates-not least because she spoke so slowly.
“Honestly,” he told his wife, “when this woman starts to talk, I feel like I should go out, get in the car, drive to the beer store, maybe fill out a couple of lottery tickets, pick up the dry cleaning and stop off at the hardware store while I’m at it. And then maybe, just maybe, when I get back to the table, she’ll have got to the end of her sentence. She must be from one of those planets that have an orbit of ten Earth years-and that’s when she’s talking about something interesting.”
But the team entered the picture only after Bruce had come to his decision about structural safety, and to make that decision required a couple of solo trips. He had been to some wild places, seen many beautiful sights in his years with the ministry, but nothing had prepared him for how this new experience would resonate within him.
Each tower was crowned with a cupola, a more or less hexagonal structure with windows on all sides. The vistas he made him silent and thoughtful in a way nothing in his life ever had. “I’m a chatty guy,” he said to his wife. “I don’t have to tell you. Not the most introspective bastard you’re ever going to meet…”
