Free Late in the Season by Felice Picano

get enough of them.

Chapter Eight

    Everything was ready but the fish. That was slowly baking in the oven, according to her mother’s recipe. Just before serving it, Stevie would cover it with a sauce and slip it under the broiler for a fast browning. Otherwise, everything was fine. The salad looked fresh and colorful in its transparent bowl; the cold asparagus were laid out accompanied by two little dishes of fresh mayonnaise; even the rice and pea mixture would be served cold. The table was placed by the windows onto the ocean deck, set for two, with the pale blue china her mother never used because it was too good for summer dining; the practical flatware shined to a glitter; two ceramic candlesticks found hidden in a closet. She hoped he wouldn’t bring the dead leaves, as he had teased he would. She’d collected some late-blooming irises and long-stemmed willows from the garden of the Winstons’ house, closed weeks ago.
    She should have told him which wine he was to bring. The house looked fine, finally. She’d spent all afternoon on it, hiding the awful throw pillows, taking down the paintings on the walls, those awful “textured” seascapes her father had bought years ago in the city, because he thought they were appropriately marine. Lord Bracknell. That fitted him. Neither a monster nor a myth; wasn’t that how Wilde characterized his character? That was Dad, all right.
    Really, if Mother were here, she would see right off how much better the place looked with all that extra furniture stashed away in the shed under the house, the walls bare; the knickknacks packed away; those awful curtains down; the windows exposed. Maybe Stevie ought to go into decorating. No, too many fags.
    She blushed then, looking in the mirror, applying her eyeshadow. Then she said out loud, “Idiot! What do you think Jonathan is?” and continued making up.
    Of course she was out of her mind inviting him here for dinner. But then, what harm was there in it? She was merely being neighborly. Friendly. Repaying her social obligation to him. Even Lady Bracknell would have to agree with that.
    “Inspection time!” she said, aloud.
    Not bad. She’d gotten excellent color on the beach. What a beautiful day it had been, what a gorgeous sunset too! The very one she’d thought about on her arrival here in Sea Mist. The sun had become a huge, deep-red disk, flat on either tip, and had slowly sunk through layers of colored sky, each pastel more delicious and impossible than the next: fluffy magentas giving way to marbled pinks, in turn making way for sherbet oranges, followed by salmon mousses. Amid all these cool-hot colors had been one thin cloud—cirrus, she recalled, was its name—that had been an electric yellow. It had forked at one point to enclose an area of the sky untouched by the prevailing red spectrum—a satiny neon blue, like her brother Jerry’s basketball shorts. Every second the colors shaded and transformed themselves into subtle new shifts of tint, layer by layer. Then she became aware of the sudden silence around her: the lack of wind, the sudden cessation of birdsong. It was as though the entire day suddenly sighed for a minute. Then, from behind her, she barely made out an approaching sound—the muffled, distant flapping of many large wings. In an instant they arrived—brownish gray, flying low over the housetops and pine trees, coordinated, in a loose V-shape—the geese!
    That had been exquisite. The second exquisite moment of the day—a day not yet ended.
    The first, of course, had been her discovery of Jonathan this morning. She’d felt that primarily as lust, but after she’d dashed into the ocean, she’d come back to the house and analyzed the surge into several layers of meaning. Uppermost was the new fact of her intense desire for a man—that man, where he was, as he was at that moment. That had never happened to her before, and it had overwhelmed her. She’d wanted to possess him: to caress him like