Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham Page B

faintly luminous thread that fell, in little round spatters, on the smooth plane of his belly. “Mmm,” she said, and “Shhh.” Here was the smell of bleach. Here was the bucking surrender, frightening and sad. She held tight through his spasms, until his cock softened in her hands and his finger calmed and withdrew and she could lie beside him, comforting him, feeling the heat of his body.
    They didn't speak. If the night had not been cold, they might have slept. Susan lay with her head on Todd's chest, rising and falling with the smooth animal effort of his breathing. She loved this time, when she could lie with him, just lie peacefully in shared ownership of his immensity. She liked the idea that her own body would fit completely inside his. She could wear him like a suit of armor. A wet, frigid smell rose from the grass and she contemplated his belly, where little pools of semen lay, opalescent in the shifting dark. At first his discharge had repelled her but gradually her revulsion had turned to interest. This viscous juice came from Todd's inward, secret self. Todd, the senior class president, whose mother ironed his undershirts. The spilling of semen was so unlike him that Susan couldn't help but be moved. His ejaculations implied some aspect of loss, and she loved to console him afterward. She watched the small puddles, knowing that in another second they'd turn translucent and lose their density, flowing off along his ribs. But now they lay in thick white circles under the October sky. She put out a finger and touched a drop that quivered, perfectly spherical, on his abdomen, just above the tangle of his pubic hair. She told herself she was touching starlight and Todd's sorrow, the secret hungers he revealed only to her. She held her moistened fingertip up in the cold air, watching its dull sparkle, and then she put it to her tongue.
    “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “Tasting you,” she said. The taste resembled the smell, mushrooms and spray starch, although it had another thread, something raw and deeply human.
    She felt the pause in his breathing. “Jesus, Sooz,” he said.
    “Strictly for scientific purposes,” she said. “Youth wants to know.” But she heard the thinness in her own voice. She had miscalculated. What she'd done was not the province of people in love. She was sluttish, grotesque.
    He asked, “So, um, what do you think?”
    “Well, it'll never replace ice cream.”
    “I guess not,” he said.
    They both laughed, but an awkwardness had settled between them. Susan pulled his cardigan more closely around her breasts. “I'm freezing,” she said.
    “I know. I am, too.”
    “We should probably go.”
    “Yeah. We probably should.”
    They sat up and began putting their clothes on. Todd took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his stomach with swift unsentimental motions, as if he was cleaning the windshield of a car.
    “It's getting too cold for this,” he said. “I guess we won't be coming out here any more this year.”
    “No. This is goodbye to the golf course.”
    They looked around as if they were both suddenly surprised to find themselves there at all. Sand traps glowed in the black fields of grass.
    “We used to slide around out here on blocks of ice,” Todd said. “Did I ever tell you about that? At night, when I was ten or eleven. Dan and Ronnie and I used to come out here and slide down the hills on these big blocks of ice.”
    Her pulse quickened. As a little girl, she hadn't known what a golf course was. Every day, the shadow of a smokestack had ticked across the fa**c**ade of her family's row house. Now she was a citizen of another country, a lush green one, where a crescent moon answered the defiant snap of. the golfers' flags. She looked, quickly but deeply, into Todd's placid face. He had an innocent intensity wide as a mountain's. All Todd's features—his heavily symmetrical face, his stubby hands, the flat muscular planes of his stomach and