Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll by Paul Monette Page B

Since the house was not open territory yet, I roamed outside, on the beach and in the dunes and fields, and came back to rest on the porch. At meals, I was more and more quiet and felt like I was floating.
    "He's become a yogi," Madeleine said one night at dinner. "His body temperature has dropped to forty, and his blood doesn't move at all."
    "I don't think so," David said playfully. "I think he's becoming a creature of the wildwood. He used to want to fill in the sea with cement, and now he looks as if he might go off and be a sailor. I bet he could live on roots and berries if he had to. He has burrs in his hair."
    David. Somehow, David had pulled in his horns. He came down to my room from the tower in the middle of the first night and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark. "What do you want?" I asked, and he said "Nothing." He stayed there, I think, until I fell asleep and made no move to touch me. It was a major change in tactics from the old days, when he would try to counter my bad moods with his hands in my pants, not seeming to realize that the sex would be bad and the afterimage snarling and gloom. With David, loving never lost its aura as a cure, however much I might finish up staring at the ceiling. Besides, he was blessed with a capacity not to see sex as good or bad. Its primary feature for him was its way of turning everything else erotic. We both were always wanton, but the difference was this when we came together to live: I did it every day for fifteen years in order to put it behind me every day, and he thought about it the whole day through and didn't need to do it much at all. He loved to jerk himself off and would lie in bed for an hour bringing himself up to it. He once compared it to a man rowing in a single shell on a river clear as glass. When I did it, I felt stunned and alone and knew I had made a mess. So it probably turned him on just to sit on the edge of the bed. He knew he had made a mistake to smother and attack me on Sunday afternoon. He also could see that I had arrived back at Mrs. Carroll's in a euphoric state—"wide open to the cosmos," he called it in himself—and he wanted to keep in touch, however marginally. If he kept his hands to himself, I was willing to let him.
    On the morning after the second night, I awoke to find that he had fallen asleep next to me, still in his clothes. On the fifth morning, I saw he had taken his clothes off and crept in under the covers. I was brushing my teeth on the seventh night, Sunday, a week to the day we fell into this, when his face appeared in the shaving mirror above the sink. He leaned there in the bathroom doorway.
    "Why don't you come on up to the tower tonight?"
    I ducked and spit a mouthful of foam into the sink. When I stood up, I didn't turn around but held his eyes in the mirror instead.
    "I thought I turned down that offer."
    "I thought I'd make it again. Now that you're such a beachcomber, I think you'll fall in love with the view. It's like living in a lighthouse."
    "Does it warn the ships at sea that there is danger here?"
    "They already know," he said. "They avoid us like the plague. I'm glad, though, because if a ship docked here, you might ship out on it."
    And he turned and left. Wait, I nearly said, I haven't answered your question. Yes, I'll come up to the tower, but please tell me when you started to sound so world-weary and stripped of illusion. You sound too old. I saw that he was not going to twist my arm now either, but neither was he going to pretend it was a good idea to go on this way. He accused me in the neutral tone of his voice. Still, he was trying to show me that I could hate the boy who left me five years ago without losing the time I had with the man who had just appeared and disappeared in my mirror. More than he wanted us making love again, he wanted to have it out about the past. A week ago, he wanted to make love first. So I had won, if you could call it that.
    I had not yet been in the tower. When I came