Read Online Following the Summer by Lise Bissonnette - Free Book Online

for an hour that she is wary of granting her. She advances firmly now, she knows every knoll, every patch of dried mud under the dead ferns, she will even walk by herself around the water tower whose fence seems to be permanently open. She wishes she could speak to the guard there, learn where he finds the cuttings and whether he knows all the names in his jungle. He is not like the foreigners, he has a belly and shoulders like those priests whose only abstinence is from women. Perhaps he too travels to the Holy Land, or to the Christian Americas of the south, with their forests of perpetual rain. There is coolness between his machines, she will go farther inside it today, the water tower belongs to the town after all, it’s not a private house.
    Vapour falls almost in a mist as soon as she crosses the threshold, a great milky flower has burst on a stem that returns to the earth, she doesn’t recognize it. An orchid, most likely, the only exotic flower Marie can recall, from a plate in some encyclopedia. Their names must be in Latin here, a mass of vowels that give even more grace to the green. There are palm trees that ooze a kind of oil, as if it was born from the vibration of the pumps.
    And brief groans, a soft, regular hiss. She sees, then hears them. Underneath the hammock, directly on the cool earth, they breathe heavily with their exertions. The man on his back, stomach slumped across on either side, arms along his body, eyes shut, naked to the knees which are imprisoned by his clothes. The woman straddles him backwards, buttocks offered to his unseeing face, riding the penis that is visible down to the root, she is masturbating, her eyes howl. Her breasts sway inside the blouse she hasn’t shed, a red spot where the sweat is darkening. There was wetness in her groan, she’s coming hard.
    She’s finished before the man and now it’s he who can be heard, she is making a spectacle of him for Marie, eyes locked on hers, contented. With both hands she spreads her buttocks, forcing him a little more, he comes in their mingled bushes. Corrine wipes herself with her underwear, unfolds herself, sways the hammock to fan herself, stretches, puts on her clothes. She is there, very close, closer even than the first time. Flings an arm around Marie’s neck, plasters her sweat against her hips. “That was good, nice and juicy, I wouldn’t mind starting over.” Her loud laughter as she pinches Marie’s thigh. “Come here.”
    The storm will wait until five o’clock on the rock where they lie to talk about flesh and folds. It is Corrine who says everything, Marie who learns. There are some men who give more pleasure, often those who sleep in strange places, who have no woman. You have to be able to guess who they are and be quick to take them. They laugh at his flaccid belly, his hissing groan. No matter, he is sleeping now, satisfied, and they are here and they’ve survived the summer.
    A wave on the lake, then two. The rain will stop before their hair is even wet. Thunder booms, an Angelus.

Eleven
    W ITH THE MARRIAGE CAME AN EIGHT-DAY vacation. Marie would have liked to find a sea still warm in October, but Ervant had waited till fall so that he could finally touch New York in all its commotion, between seasons when his cousin who was lucky enough to live downtown had told him the weather was better. She quickly agreed because she also liked the hotels of novels, and she’d recognize those of New York, their windows always open to the sound of sirens. You made love there surrounded by the smell of other casual visitors, the rugs retain it, and the wallpaper next to the bathtubs. The doorman would whistle down a yellow cab, they never go to houses.
    It was raining on La Guardia at dusk, and on the island of Manhattan where the first thing they found was the night. A torrent that lashed the embankment, that washed away graffiti from the overpasses. They drove across