Voices from the Moon by Andre Dubus Page B

the couch in the living room, barefoot and wearing a leotard, drinking iced tea while her sweat dried and her body cooled. Across the room were two windows facing the back lawn, and at their sides pale blue curtains moved back and forth with the breeze, as though someone stood behind each of them and gently, rhythmically, pushed. She was looking at the curtains and the windows and nothing in particular beyond when she saw Greg: he walked into her vision from the right of the window, where the driveway was. He walked slowly on the grass, profile to her, his hands in the pockets of his khakis, his hard stomach pushing against his blue shirt and protruding over his belt. Her only movement on the couch was to reach for a cigarette on the coffee table and light it, as she looked at his dark muscular arm—the left one—beneath the short sleeve of his shirt, and at the side of his clean-shaven dark face, slightly bowed, as if with thought or fatigue. She did not know why his arms were so well-muscled; nor why, at forty-seven, his biceps had not begun to flatten, his triceps to sag. He did not know either. She had asked him, had jokingly accused him of clandestine push-ups or isometrics or some other exercise that no one did anymore. Or no one she knew. Nearly all her friends, women and men, had rituals of aerobic exercise, and many now had joined clubs where they used a Nautilus machine. She meant to join one tomorrow. But Greg told her he did nothing at all, had not done a push-up since the Army, and would never do one again on purpose, unless it was to raise himself from a barroom floor out of his own vomit. His vanity about not being vain was endearing. Also, she knew that, at times, the refusal of his arms and legs to age normally gave her confidence in the longevity of his body.
    Now, at the fountain and birdbath, he turned from her, and stood looking down at the water that trickled over the sides of the bath, into the stone fountain, watching it as if he saw ideas in its motion. About what, though? Larry and Richie and Carol? His walk along the Amazon? Sometimes when he was tired and a little drunk and bitter, and certain he would never see, much less walk in, that jungle on that river, he said: Surely by now some sons of bitches have laid a highway; while Brenda imagined the riverbanks so thick with trees and brush and vines that, after hacking with machetes for the first mile, they would give it up, then travel the river by boat. Still, she would go with him. She would go with him because he wanted to, she would go with him there before Venice and Athens and the Greek islands and Spain, the places where she wanted to walk with him on city and village streets and eat long and leisurely dinners and sleep till lunchtime and make love in the afternoons that only hotels, and especially hotels in a foreign country, could give you. She had done that in Mexico City on her December honeymoon with Larry, and in the afternoons there she never felt that she was distorting daylight by performing a nocturnal act in defiance of schedules and telephones, commitments and errands and chores. In Mexico City, she and Larry knew no one, and did not speak the language anyway. It was odd, she thought, perhaps even sinister, that the world had contrived to give lovers only the night; and the world wanted those nights to be earned, too, by what used to be the sweat of the brow, but was now too often foolish work in rooms with temperatures so regulated that they did not seem to exist on the earth, with her seasons. Then, on the purchased bed, surrounded by the dwelling and the acquisitions that filled it, you could have the night. Yet afternoon was the time she felt most erotic, and before dancing today, she had masturbated on this couch. She would go with Greg first to insects and discomfort because she loved the boy she had found in his older man’s body, beneath his man’s style. She called it Peter Pan, to herself, and she called him that when