Read Online Storm Tide by Marge Piercy, Ira Wood - Free Book Online Page A

are,” she said. I lifted my fingers to her breast. She grabbed my hand. She was fast. Strong. “What are your goals?”
    “I’m supposed to ask you that.”
    She studied my face. She wasn’t smiling now. She spoke slowly, forming every word. “I want to be with you, David Greene. I want us to be happy.” The game was over. She whispered, “Let’s make love now,” and led me to my bedroom as if it was her own. She was wearing a little cream-colored camisole through which her nipples stood up hard and brown. She was mine for the night, all night until morning, and I kept myself from sleeping even after we’d made love a second time, after she succumbed to sleep. The scent our bodies made together, the lingering stickiness of her sex on my face: I wanted it to last.The moonlight overlaying the furniture and our clothes on the floor; her panties where she stepped out of them like a puddle; all mine for one night.
    Late the next afternoon, she phoned me from court. Her case wouldn’t finish until tomorrow. She would have to work late at the office but she was going to sleep there. Would I like to join her?
    The following day at work, my sister seemed preoccupied. I went my own way all morning. By noon she was shoving things around her desk, avoiding me in wide conspicuous arcs.
    “Is there something the matter, Holly?”
    “Why, David, have you done anything wrong?”
    Only one thing I could think of. “Does this have to do with Judith?”
    “Are you fucking anyone else?”
    “How did you know?”
    “David, your own mother knows. She heard it at the beauty shop.”
    I started to laugh. I was thirty-seven years old. “Am I supposed to care?”
    “I think it’s a pretty cruel thing you’re doing, don’t you? Screwing a sick man’s wife. Or did you think you could keep it a secret? If so, you shouldn’t have parked your bright red truck with the name of my business on it outside her office all night.”
    “ Your business.” Holly had always treated me as a full partner although I’d had no money to buy in.
    She sighed, “Mine and Marty’s.”
    “Is that what this is about? Did he go out for his morning New York Times and hear the gossip at the Binnacle? Did he blame you?”
    “He’s protective of Gordon,” she said. “He thinks what you’re doing to Gordon is wrong. And so do I. And if you were thinking about anything but getting laid, so would you.”
    Judith didn’t talk a lot about Gordon, but he was a presence, always; a looming figure, like the portrait of a great progenitor. She never acted guilty about sleeping with me, never complained about their marriage. I assumed myself to be a pleasant secret; that however brightly Judith glowed in my dim life, I was only a flicker of warmth in hers. My sister, like her husband and a legion of former students and ex-colleagues, saw the man as a living legend.
    Gordon Stone’s compound had been notorious for dancing that lasted until daybreak when people coupled off in the dunes or lay in heaps around the fire to sleep. Holly will still talk about the night Gordon’s guests, men and women both, came to blows over politics, then tore off their clothes and ran naked into the bay. She’ll tell you thatJohnny Lynch wrote the town’s antinoise, anticamping, and antinudity bylaws as a response to Gordon’s annual summer solstice celebrations; that people still remember the FBI men snooping around and the marijuana bust—a small-scale military operation at four-thirty A . M . that sent one of the summer neighbors to the hospital with a heart attack. Since then, Gordon’s botanical projects were legal: He collected hearty succulents, yucca and cactus from all over the world, so that the compound looked like a patch of high desert in the New England sand dunes.
    Long before Judith arrived in his life, Gordon had laid out a courtyard with a mosaic of stones and beach glass. He had no vision of a compound when he began, Holly said, but followed his whims.