that moment when their blood had spoken together through their palms and made its own kind of promise, better than any their mouths were making.
Duncan had promised it would be dry, and it was: it was all as dry as a dream, and sounds vanished into this indifferent air. I looked for trees, for grass, for flowers, even for weeds, and found none of them: I looked for faces I could speak to, and charm in the way I knew, with my conspiratorial smiles and sympathy, and found only faces like dark gnarled wood in the shadow of thick hats, and women like the fat floury scones they were so proud of.
I saw now that the dryness of sandy Duncan, which had been exotic to me in the steamy fleshiness of the city, was what was normal in this place, and his lankiness and his freckled lizard qualities fitted in here, where the air was so thin and dry there was hardly enough of it to breathe, and it made me dizzy with its buzzing nothingness. Duncan, suddenly substantial, was no stranger, but he seemed strange to me, here in his world where I was the one who did not seem to fit. But he was no stranger to me in the nights, in the gigantic bed we were allowed now that our knot had been tied.
Joanie, can I make you happy? Duncan asked, one night when we sprawled, sated, under a sticky sheet, and the question surprised me into silence, because I thought my pleasure had been obvious.In fact I had wondered, in those silent nights with only stars and space outside, how far my cries of bliss might be carrying, perhaps to the outbuilding full of those men in hats who did things with bits of wire and horses, or perhaps even as far as the dry river bank where the black folk lived. Did they all wink at each other by their fires, and did those skinny-shanked black women laugh so their loose breasts shook, hearing the excesses of pleasure to which their boss was inciting his sallow wife?
You know you make me happy, Duncan, I said at last, in a suggestive way, and squeezed his bump of nipple. He lay silent, and I wondered then if I had misunderstood, or what more it was that he somehow wanted. Do I not make you happy, Duncan? I enquired at last, but felt a pulse of indignation at having to ask, for was it not I, Joan, whom Duncan possessed: Joan, charmer, sensualist, wit, woman of destiny? What kind of dullard would it take, not to be made happy by such a person? Yes, Joanie, Duncan said on a sigh, and took hold of the hand playing in the vicinity of his tool. Yes, but that is not quite what I meant.
I lay feeling rebuffed and wanted to cry out: What else is there to mean? What else can there be but skins together? But around the edges of my being there was a fringe of chill, and for the first time I began to doubt myself, and to wonder if there might be something I did not know about, that this simple man Duncan understood, something to do with happiness, something beyond skins that I had no inkling of. I was dismayed: I had always thought myself whole, more whole than most others in fact, but I was recognising now that there was something that I, Joan, might be lacking: I did not know quite what it was, but I could feel it, a hollow or pocket within my being, full of void.
But I was born to make history, I tried to remind myself. Duncanlay now with the sheet round his cheeks like a nun, smiling in his sleep in a way that could have softened me, if I had watched too long. He was a sweet sleeper, full of innocence and heavy trusting warmth, and I lay awake beside him often while he slept, because my destiny worried me in the long nights when I felt it sliding away from me, out here in this empty land that could swallow any amount of human ambition.
In the morning, Duncan woke to serenity: his eyes smiled when they opened and saw me there beside him, and his arm, still heavy with sleep, held me tightly even before he was fully awake. I never thought to be so much in love, he whispered with his eyes soft on me. I would have thought it was just words. I
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