yet inside the house he could hear a low, unsteady noise.
Jacob knocked again, louder. Again no answer. The staggered, muffled noises inside the house grew louder and more rhythmic. Someone, it seemed, must be inside.
He decided to try the back door and walked around the yard, climbing with some effort through blackberry brambles and hickory saplings.
The sounds could be heard more clearly here, rambling yet melodic, each tone flowing away from the previous one in a mocking, playful humor, as though the ground itself were making up earthy songs about the foibles of nature. Then he recognized something familiar in the melody, and while he was pondering this familiarity he walked around the corner of the house and discovered inside the screened-in porch a young, completely naked blond woman, seated on a broken glider, her head tilted to one side, playing a bright red guitar. Her eyes were closed, her mouth partly opened, an expression of concentrated effort on her face.
A wide, sequined guitar strap fell over her right shoulder, and the additional weight of the instrument rested in the cleavage between twin pale thighs. The slender fingers of her right hand plucked vigorously at the four coiled strings as her left hand darted up and down the neck as quick as a weaver’s, searching for some combination of movements to free the notes she hoped to coax from the instrument. The motion of her hands was relayed by a thick black cord issuing from the front of the guitar onto the porch floor, around her naked right foot, and through the back door, leaving the impression that the house itself amplified the muted stirrings into heavy, spacious, romping tones. Because of the angle of the guitar, her left breast remained partially obscured, hidden. The other stared amply ahead, apparently aimed through its ripe focused nipple at the bridge of his nose.
She opened her eyes, raised her head, and looked directly at him. The music stopped at the same moment that her uncommon beauty announced itself inside Jacob’s mind, like the bright pain following with brief delay after an openhanded slap.
Jacob felt accosted. A barrier had been breached and he was immediately surrounded by a number of aggressive and uncomfortable revelations. He was thirty-eight years old, and his feet were stuck in a pivotal spot in history in which six million years of instinctual male responses to naked females of childbearing age meeting the highest standards of pulchritude needed to change. Indeed, it had fallen solely on Jacob, the responsibility of crafting a Better Way of reacting to young, unclothed women, based on unassuming contractual and egalitarian considerations, shared ideals, and mutual respect. His obligation, it seemed, required him to ignore the synaptic and endocrinic associations that men were assumed to hold in regard to such women: leafless bouquets, genetic rewards, orgasmic flutes and funnels, slippery wine skins, squeeze toys programmed by Nature’s Cunning Twin to reduce even the most sober, mechanically oriented minds to mush. He reminded himself that beauty was subjective, interpretive. The viewed object-in-itself did not possess a wild nympholeptic spirit able to reach inside him and command his allegiance. The only reaching going on within his present circumstances lay within his own jurisdiction. Everything happened inside him. His memories and loneliness were directly contributing in some unknown but potentially understandable way to the perception that Diana herself had come to be seated inside the porch—Diana or some other mythopoeic creature of such alarming loveliness that ordinary human relations became temporarily suspended. He was projecting these alluring symmetries onto her and he needed to take responsibility for doing so, now. A woman on a porch, nothing more. Everything else about the situation he was simply making up. Someone dying of thirst and stumbling upon a cavern filled with dark, wooden casks of chilled wine will not be the most reliable judge of viniculture.
In addition, a hateful thought soon informed Jacob that the young woman before him so far surpassed his late wife in physical beauty that they could not be compared. In other words, there was a comparison but no one who loved his wife or at the very least the memory of her would propose it. This woman communicated an exuberant compact burgeoning that had years ago departed from Angela, whose bodily form had been consumed in a losing battle against disease. But even in her best days, Jacob feared, before illness had begun to exact its limping toll, Angela had never possessed this creature’s combination of raw visual appeal and unrehearsed grace. She glowed with health. Her neck, stretching out of the extraordinary suppleness of her shoulders, mimicked in every detail the curving stem of a lily rising to its flower. And the problems posed for him by the rondure of her hips were addressed in his imagination, one after another, before they blossomed into conscious questions, only to be posed anew.
Jacob felt ashamed of these thoughts. Protective of Angela’s memory, he attempted to lay them aside. It could only mean that fate had endowed one at the expense of the other. Angela had not escaped the harsh levies that fall on all who would be honorable and true, while the beauty of the young woman before him obviously issued from outrageous good fortune, undeserved luck, and perhaps even outright theft.
As though to confirm this thought and wound him further, Gail shifted slightly, and in this nearly imperceptible twitch of positioning her beauty became even more pronounced—a trick of proportioning magic. She had instantly crafted an enhanced visage through which to be seen, arriving in it with an effortless flinch. A wicked shiver moved through Jacob.
Gail looked up and discovered someone behind her screened- in porch, someone in stained clothes with greasy hands.
Her first conscious thought was terror. Her imagination dutifully informed her of impending doom, illustrated in lavish detail from its arsenal of anticipated horrors, but this soon subsided. Even strangers can know things about each other, and the stance of her unannounced visitor seemed too upright, his gaze too worried, his hands, though thick, unwilling to play the roles her imagination scripted for them. Indeed, all those brutish qualities he shared with other men were supervened by a determined refusal to face up to the fact that he had them. This guy thought too much, lived too much in his head, and, whoever he might be, he was no threat. Something about him was broken.
Her next worry concerned her privacy. A sense of violated propriety—her house, her yard, her porch, her her—found expression in contemptuous anger mingled with mild curiosity and surprising embarrassment at being discovered naked. Without looking away from him, she rose to her full height, slowly untangled herself from the sequined strap, set the guitar on the glider, turned around, walked in hieratic, ceremonial steps inside the house, and closed the door.
A minute later, she emerged in denim cutoffs, yellow top, and yellow running shoes.
Both pretended the earlier moment had not occurred. Something completely unrelated to it caused them to be unable to make eye contact.
“July Montgomery said I should come over and check your lawn mower. I’m Jacob Helm.”
“Hello,” she said, without offering her name.
“I called earlier, there was no answer . . . I knocked on the front door, but, I’m sorry . . .”
“July should have said something to me. I hate him. Nobody minds their own business anymore.”
“No, I don’t suppose.”
She stepped off the porch and into the back yard. Jacob looked away from her mouth to the ground, but soon had his attention drawn to a yellow shoelace, untied, falling loosely over her instep and quickly gathering significance—a drama threatening to invoke the scene of her ankle—and he looked up again.
“Did you look at it?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“It has gasoline but it won’t start.”
“What?”
“The lawn mower.”
“I
