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Show 278 spent most of the two weeks screwing. The experience was relatively new to both of them, and Alice was in a state of great excitement the whole time. There were things she had always wanted to do, and she made Richard let her do them, with the result that Richard was baffled and sometimes uneasy, and more than once he felt he was not taking charge enough. The cabin was small and dirty. It had a fireplace with grease on the hearth and no screen. It had a wooden table salvaged from a picnic ground, with names and initials carved into it but painted over with a woodsy brown enamel that your arm stuck to if you leaned on it too long. It had a dusty couch and a three-way floor lamp by the window that looked onto the garbage cans. The forest and the lake were visible only from the front door, which had been nailed shut to keep it on its hinges. The bed was lumpy, the rugs were worn through and stained with food and dried bait. The kitchenette had a refrigerator that leaked into a funnel that someone had drilled a hole for in the floor, and a gas stove, only one of whose four burners worked. The walls were painted brown and the owner had hung pictures of bears and otters and a baying elk. A narrow shelf above the bed held greasy paperback novels. Alice loved it and Richard thought it was a healthy thing to live in the woods for a couple of weeks and come to terms with yourself. People in the other cabins came and went past the window, wearing their woolen plaid shirts or their hats pricked through with fishhooks, but the newlyweds stayed mostly indoors. When they went out it was during everyone else's dinner hour, and it was usually a fast run to the woods, where Alice would pull off all her clothes, put her tennis shoes back on, and run off among the trees, calling to Richard to catch her. ("You don't mind my telling you all this, do you?" she asked. Lorin said of course not, and wiped the plate he was holding with great care. |
