I believe I thought we might be able to talk of it like adults, but I never even got as far as telling her I was pregnant. When half the truth was out I saw it was no good. I'd forgotten her God had a blueprint for all these little difficulties. I goofed.... This business about doors: admittedly Freudian slanguage is treacherously pictorial, deceptively so, as Edith pointed out once, only, damn it, it FEELS like a slammed door. Not quite locked. Now may I—please—
Once upon a time there was an orange-gold-brindle kitten named Bonnie who lived (happily ever afterward) at Aunt Cora Winwood's flat in Greenwich Village, and she was sentimentally tame, small enough to curl up in two human palms. Which Aunt Cora liked to demonstrate, transferring the sleepy morsel to Callista's hands. They had called it "pouring the kitten." After Papa died, reason after reason why she mustn't go visit the Winwoods. Only three subway stops away, and Papa's own sister. "Tom Winwood drinks, dear, and is not reliable. I do not intend to have My Little Girl exposed to Anything Like That. Nor do I wish to be reminded, Callista, that your father approved of your going there. His judgment was not always—entirely—sound. Mr. Winwood was in fact largely responsible for certain aspects of your father's Condition. Now I think I need say no more." Yes, Mother, and No, Mother. Yes, Mother, now and forever you need say no more.
Eyes closed, cheek wincing at the blanket—but twitching over to the left side would be no better—Callista resolved not to remember nor count the days since she had last drawn down her lover's face to her, seen gaunt cheekbones grown large beyond vision above her, accepted the pressure of his desire and her own. And therefore, inevitably, remembered and counted the days. Sometimes his hands sweated and were cold.
Not the first time, that May-Day afternoon in the woods—why, then (at first) Jim had been almost pagan, natural, free, coming on her suddenly in the damp green hollow where spring growth was riotous. Startled and—yes, temporarily set free. He must have been, or he could not have acted with such quick certainty, tenderness and aggression blended for once in a most invincible rightness. In the very first moment, when he pushed aside the hemlock branch and saw her, his face had been comically legible as his mind abruptly discovered a woman in place of Homely-Blake-Girl-Who-Used-to-Live-Next-Door. To the best of her memory, Callista had not smiled; only sat waiting where spring sunlight lay scattered, random gold; waiting and looking up, needing words no more than a grown-up Bonnie would have needed them at the first cruel-kind approach of a yellow-eyed lover across a back fence. Still she had used words, a few, standing up, leaning back against the rough gray body of an oak, something foolish: "Oh—I'm afraid you've started up a dryad." He might not even have heard that, his hands pressing the tree on either side of her face, his growing need as obvious as the sunlight. I think he never so desired Ann. Such hungers (I know he thought this) are not for good women.
His first kiss had fallen in the thin hollow of her shoulder. He had carried her to a softness of hemlock needles. I think I helped him a little with my shorts. Pain of course, the wrench of the torn hymen a required crash of dissonance in the symphonic flow. I suppose I screamed—had my teeth in his shoulder for a minute—he understood that. Drowsy exhaustion afterward deeper than his—
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda....
"What, Cal? What did you say? Was that Italian?"
"Latin. Thing—happened to remember."
"Oh."
She had come wide awake then: no Kotex of course, tiresome clinical necessity of a handkerchief for the unimportant bleeding—and had presently given him some sort of English translation that stumbled along on two left feet: "Suns may set and rise, but when our brief light is gone, the night is an eternal sleep." Jim hadn't liked any of that, much. The Latin, or the bleeding. That must have been the first time that the worry-wart crinkle appeared between his thick black eyebrows, the first time the poor guy had said: "Cal, darling, what the devil are we going to do?" I think I laughed at him, a bit. Not inside me of course.