Free My Summer With George by Marilyn French

wife. Although she had left him over five years before, he was still apparently smarting from it. I wondered at pain that long-lasting. Maybe Marsha was right about him.
    “So you have a daughter?”
    His face lighted up, and for the first time, he spoke easily. He had raised his daughter himself. Liddy was a joy and a delight to him, bright, had done well in school.
    “How did it happen that you got custody?”
    “Her mother was crazy,” he said. I would have challenged such a statement from any other man, but I said nothing. He adored Liddy, he had loved raising her, and she was terrific. She had done well at Radcliffe and then gone off and joined the Peace Corps. She was working in Ghana now; she loved Africa. She was doing good works. He was proud of her. She was twenty-four. She was great.
    I smiled. “She sounds it. I have kids too—four of them.” He expressed no interest in my kids. We were midway through our pasta when a sudden downpour drenched us. George handled our damp remove indoors—a test for most men, I think—with good temper. Still, once our watery dinners lay on a dry table before us, we could not face finishing them. We sat with dripping hair, shivering in the air-conditioning. I ordered a decaf cappuccino; he ordered coffee. I gazed at him and thought he looked a little tired. The evening was over, I felt. But we sat making conversation for another half hour, the way lovers do at the very beginning of an affair, when they are reluctant to part. At least, that was how it seemed to me. It was good, I told myself. Especially since, as we were saying good night in front of my building, he asked:
    “You want to have lunch tomorrow?”
    The entire world seems to be heating up these years—at least, compared to my youth. It was hot and muggy that Thursday night, but I didn’t turn on the air conditioner because I dislike its noise. I turn it on only when there is no other way to sleep. Again I could feel myself starting to have a bad night. I lay naked on my cream satin sheets, while fantasies of George and me together played in my imagination. My body was hot, every one of my pores was open and parched, panting, noisily demanding nourishment. And what they wanted was George’s hands on them. My poor starved body. My hands felt huge and empty, tingling with emptiness; they wanted to be on his body.
    Then he was there, transported by magnetism. We had only to look at each other, only to think about the other, for our breath to come more quickly. Hot, with quick, shallow breaths, we turned our bodies toward each other. When they met, we jumped with electricity.
    Each of us instinctively understood the other’s body, knew where to touch: the soft places behind the ear, on the eyelids, in the crook of the neck and arm and leg, on the upper thigh near the groin. We moaned. Kissing, our mouths were unwilling to let go. Electric charges ran from mouth to groin to toes in each body in which body in both bodies. We pressed against each other, we could not get close enough to each other, we wanted to be inside each other, but we held off. We got hotter and hotter, we twisted and squirmed, we pressed and kissed and stroked, and only after a long time, when the tension was unbearable, did I rise up and sit astride him, and when I put him in me, he cried out in relief, and I rode him, slowly, slowly, bending to kiss his chest, his eyes. But we were both too hot, we couldn’t wait, and before we wanted to, we exploded, hot liquid spouting out of us, we both screamed in pained ecstasy, I kept crying out, kept going and going, and he kept going for me, until I was completely spent and fell on his chest, he with his arms around me, my cheek on his breast, our bodies still together.
    Oooohhhh.

4
    M OST WEEKENDS, I DRIVE out to the country, to my Sag Harbor house. I leave early Friday morning, hitting the LIE long before the endless line of cars queues up for the Hamptons. But this Friday, my women’s group was