Americana

I introduced Sullivan to the family, and then Mrs. Yost, Laura, told us they had been waiting dessert until we got there, peach pie and vanilla ice cream, and we all sat down to talk and eat. The Yosts kept telling fu

"Can we get right at it, Gle

"The pantry's in there," he said.

"Maybe Bud and Sully and I can go in right now and get it done. Take only a few minutes."

"Won't it be too dark?" Laura said.

The pantry was just off the kitchen. Gle

Laura was not in the dining room. Gle

She stood on the sidewalk looking at me come down off the porch. It was unlike her to wait. I had expected her to be halfway up the street and then I thought of the way she had stared at me all through the last sequence, those two or three minutes when I was not sure where I was. Something soft drifted off her now. The streetlights were on. I had the camera on my right shoulder.

"I'd like to take a bath," she said. "We've been taking sponge baths in the camper. When it's warm enough we go down to the river. At first it was only a nuisance. Now it's a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life."

"Have the others seen you without clothes?"

"We use great tact, David. I assure you. Elaborate schedules have been worked out. Pike is a master at that sort of thing. A quartermaster in fact. He's taken to posting all sorts of rosters, dockets and inventories. I assure you, it's all very discreetly done."

"Let's go to a motel," I said. "We can get a cab to take us."

"Is that necessary?"

"I don't think they care for men taking women up to their room at the hotel. They're pretty, you know, stodgy."

"We'll unstodge them."

Sullivan spent close to an hour in the bath. I sat looking at the partly open bathroom door, trying to think of nothing. Then I stood in the doorway. She lifted one leg out of the water, as I knew she would, and moved her hands along her calf and looked back at me over her shoulder. A word arrived then from the eye of the deacon Yost. Abomination. I went back to the bed and sat down. She had looked at me to see if I was pleased. I sat waiting. Then I turned on the lamp by the armchair and switched off the overhead light. She got out of the tub. I went in quickly and watched her dry off with a large white monogrammed towel. Then I moved closer and moved my hands over the towel over her body slowly. We said nothing. I was following her toward the bed, following a sense of unimaginable pleasure, knowing this was old Yankee guilt, salt and peter. The walls were black and white and she was at the bed. Abomination.

She was covered now, even her breasts, and lying rigid, a message that this was the end of a stanza, that now she would wait for the turn of my turn. How much she knew about that moment, and taught me, in her absurd concealment; that the true and best lewdness, that is to say the ugliest, is nothing more than modesty so fanatic it ca