Woman on the Edge of Time

“You dance just as wickedly as when you were eighteen. Shameless still, shining on the dark. And that dress, it’s decadent. You’ll go down like Sappho at eighty, still greedily nibbling young lovers!”

“Diana, it’s you. Don’t tease me so.” She tried to turn her head but Diana had her pinned. “This is Connie, the person from the past.”

“I’m Diana, the person from Luciente’s past,” Diana said flamboyantly, laughing deep in her chest. “That flimsy chills me,” she crooned, sighting down her long nose. “Reeks of the same taste that dressed Achilles and Patroclus over there.”

“Diana!” Luciente twisted around in the loop of the scarf to put her hands on the taller woman’s shoulders. “You didn’t come looking for me to crit my flimsy.”

“To take it off perhaps?” Diana released the scarf. “Come walk with me … . It’s been a long time since we walkedtogether under the moon.”

Luciente gave a short joyful ringing laugh. “You fake! There’s no moon tonight. And you can’t bring off sounding forlorn with your mob of sweet friends giving me those looks from the steps!”

“Always so literal. Yet you can’t tell what looks they give from a hundred feet! I wear my moon—come!”

Bee said in her ear, “Now you’ll have to salvage with me.”

Luciente turned toward them, her face begging their pardon, blushing like a fifteen-year-old; then she gave her hand to Diana and they went off quickly among the dancers and in to the dark.

Connie looked after them, perplexed. “I’m not a goat for dancing,” Bee said at her side. “Came out to collect you when I saw Diana bearing down. When I like music, I want to let my mind sail on it.” With that easy comfort, he took her arm and ambled her off the square. His big hand felt warm and heavy on her: an affectionate acceptance of her like Luciente’s but not like Luciente’s. Because her arm swelled, grew enormous and hot with blood, with his touch on her.

“I don’t know you,” she said haltingly.

“Only through Luciente we know each other.”

“But you remind me of someone.”

“Is that so?” Amused and accepting at once. Past the range of the music—loud enough in the square but damped off by baffles beyond it—the night softened to small noises. Someone was singing to a mandolin. People went linked arm in arm, entwining shoulders and waists, to little huts where lights had begun to blink on and off again. Otter, her long hair released from pigtails and hanging straight and black as a flood of satin to her waist, stood under one of the floating lights staring at a youth who stood staring at her. Otter was touching the other’s face with her fingertips and then she laughed, breathlessly, as if she could hardly breathe. An old person, drunk, with gnarled face bent back and mouth open to the stars that could be seen now and then through the floating lights, sang with thin voice in a minor key:

“How we loved,

laid in one bed,

while night ran through us

like swift water, sped

onto the teeth of the dawn:

I must let go,

go on.

My side aches.

The bow has shot its

arrow and the twine

breaks.”

In the dark another heard and began pushing the song through the bell of a trumpet. The brassy honey and vinegar seeped through her. Her hand clasped Bee’s hand harder. He squeezed her hand back and then dropped it, and she felt ashamed until his arm came around her, pulling her closer to him as they strolled still more slowly, her hip bumping his thigh. She could not speak, her flesh heavy and sweet on her bones. She felt swollen equally with old tears and present wanting, the memory of Claud and the presence of Bee. Who was not Claud. But who made her remember. Whose big hand on her waist, the thumb just touching her breast through the flimsy that parted for his thumb hot and fat, asking her and getting an answer as her knees half buckled and her breath sucked in and swayed in instinct faster than decision against him. Thumb messenger of the member she could feel as she pressed against him for his kiss. As his lips moved onto hers in a patient, long, sensual kiss, a voice was singing in a low throaty joyous voice:

“How good to fight beside you,

people of my base.

With you I work

forehead to forehead.

With you I plant corn,

stand in the tree picking apples.

How good to fight beside you,

friend of our long table,

mother of my child.

We share the soup and the bread,

the trouble and the meetings

that last till sharp dawn.

How good to fight beside you.

An army of lovers cannot lose,

an army of lovers cannot lose.

How good to fight for each other.”

“How can anybody sing about fighting on such a night?” she asked against his chest, drawing a deep breath.

“On such a night people die at the front, like any other,” he said. “This flimsy gets in the way with its bubbles.” He gestured into the dark. “Here is my space. Will you come in?”

“You know I will.” She laughed. She was startled then to hear that old happylaugh from her chest, that sensual laugh Claud had loved to feel with his hands against her. In the last years she had laughed little and never like that.