Thirty Girls. Susan Minot

he said, making no other sound. Did he even breathe? His hands in the dark were moving her around, traveling over her. Noises stayed in the back of her throat. That’s …, she began. Where were the words?

      What? he said.

      That’s. It’s. Oh.

      But, she wasn’t expressing it in the least. Then her breath took over and she went to where words didn’t go or matter anyway.

      Shhhh, he said.

      His hands made her feel small and pliable, and all her nerves were lit. He shifted around and his weight came down on her.

      Oh God, she said rather loud. He covered her mouth.

      He was there close, but too dark to see. She thought of the rough wood on the walls. She felt his face sort of become her face. She heard the river nearby foaming down the hill and saw the line of the mangled trees she’d seen earlier in silhouette against a pale yellow sky. Then she felt she was in a green forest. Then she was on a porch. It was not a porch she knew, it was a porch in America. There were children playing down the block under leafy branches and it was summer somewhere in the South with beds and white chenille bedspreads and old light fixtures on the walls and railings twisting up the stairs inside. A man and a woman were having sex in the hallway. Then it was Jane having sex with a man in the hallway. Wisteria vines filled the screen door and the door banged shut. Another man was getting out of a truck; he was partly Harry. He came over the threshold wearing boots and pulled open her shirt. No, he came into a side room and threw her on a table and pushed her legs apart ignoring her face. He’d seen her earlier in town, he said. His face gazing at her breasts had only one thing in mind driving him. He shifts her to the side and lifts her against the door, holding her underneath, having to crouch and bend his knees. I’ve been thinking of this all day, Harry said with his legs pressing her knees out and her back against the rough wood, pinning her, legs dangling, toes just touching the floor. One foot has a sandal on, a strap tight on her ankle. He held her from beneath, lifting her against him, pressing his hips so she’s on the verge of collapsing but is thrown back, her wrists braced against the frame. He grabs her ass and her feet slip off the floor into the air, with one hand flailing to get a grip on the sink anchoring her, inside the sound of their breathing, and she feels in a sort of tornado as if she’s going up a hill powered by wind with gusts rolling dust around and still going up farther and not quite at the top, reaching a crest. Everything starts to shake and unravel with the earth splitting at her feet and the road cracking sideways and air erupting like glass shattering. Her legs flung wide sent off needles of light or song and she had the feeling of falling at the same time rising, of going out and out as she’s gathering in, feeling her arms and legs dissolve into a bright bank of dust and finally stillness.

      I’m old, you know.

      Which means?

      I don’t know, just I am.

      I happen to like old.

      Right.

      The older the better, he said.

      Okay, so—what—you’re perfect?

      More perfect than you know.

      They were twisted into a bound shape on the bathroom floor. They untangled themselves and shuffled, attached, back to the living room.

      In the morning they woke next to other lumped bodies under blankets and thin covers, pushed like waves against the stone walls. Jane opened her eyes to see a shirtless man unbend himself from their Indian bedspread and stand in rumpled underwear. He walked slowly toward the sound of the river picking his way over the bodies and disappearing in the light at the door, the back of his head in a rooster’s plume of hair. She thought it was the pilot. On the other side of Harry were two heads touching and four arms draped toward each other.

      Her head rested on Harry, on the shoulder of this new person. Her mouth was dry and her eyes heavy, but her body felt loose and light. Some people you met and right away knew they were important. Or it might take a while for you to understand how that first moment when you felt taken aback was a jolt not away but to this new person. And if it turned out the other person had a similar thing happen, then it was one of those connectings that happen not often.

      She lay on his shoulder and thought that Harry was now important. What important meant she could not have said, but the word was there. She pictured the letters carved in wood. She thought of his voice in the dark, saying, Take this off. It sounded a little cruel. She drifted on the thought of it, playing it over in her mind.

      Later that day they were in the car driving back to Nairobi.

      Harry told her about the girl he liked, Rosalie. He saw her at a party, wearing a jumpsuit with zippers. She was small, with skin so pale you could see her veins. Everyone was dancing. Harry had broken his foot and was dancing with a crutch which he threw across the floor and she jumped over. After, they went driving and stayed up all night, sitting on the top of her Jeep and watching the sun rise over Lake Elementaita. She had a boyfriend, so nothing happened. That is, no touching happened, but something had happened. Her hands, he said, looked like an old person’s hands. Rosalie told him that she had to give some thought to her boyfriend now, now that she’d met Harry. Afterward he wrote her a letter and she wrote back. She still loved her boyfriend, she said, and didn’t know what to do. They kept writing letters to each other. She was still deciding.

      What do you write to her? Jane asked.

      That I’m waiting for her.

      Jane lay across the seat with her head in his lap. Harry pushed back her hair. It had been a long time since she’d touched a person. It made a person feel transformed. Before falling asleep in the bumping truck she thought of how she had come to this other country wanting to disappear, but now felt more vivid than ever. It seemed possible that she might actually be finding herself in some new form.

      They reached Nairobi after nightfall. On the Langata Road less than a mile from Harry’s, their tire blew and they thumped to a stop. Harry changed it as Jane sat on a dead tree watching in the eerie quiet. A lone streetlight shone amber far down the road like a figure from another era. Harry popped the tire off and cranked the jack, and she watched how youthful his quick movements were and how smooth was the skin of his neck between his parted hair and how nicely shaped were his strong arms, and the perfect contentment she’d felt all day deflated a little with the arrival of her first wish—for more. If only she were that young. She had a keen longing then to be a younger girl whose freshness would make him delirious, the way his was making her.

      They were back from their mission, she told herself. Mission was what Harry called it. They’d had a nice moment, she explained to herself. So that was probably that. She would be happy with that, then. Happiness came in pieces anyway. One had to be happy with the pieces as they came. She was trained in gathering pieces. When you had the bad luck to love a person who cared for drugs more than you, then you adjusted to the netherworld of Nothing’s perfect and Whoever said you got what you wanted and It will get better. Those pieces were sharp and cut you, but you still collected them. You justified the cuts.

      They went back to Harry’s house. He referred to it as his parents’ house, even though he’d grown up there. A few spotlights shone outside a garage and at one end of a large roof. She followed him across a dark lawn of stiff tropical grass to the guesthouse. Inside was a wide stone fireplace and heavy wooden furniture and to the side a small bedroom with a mattress of clean sheets in the middle of a cement floor. Harry was under the covers when she returned from the bathroom and she switched off the living room light. She slid in next to him and had the lovely surprise, which always remained surprising, of the first contact with the skin of another warm body which felt, well, like a miracle.

      He turned her sleepily. She wasn’t wishing for anything then, only this. All right, more of this, then. She felt as if she were on a train, jerking to a start. The slow chugging of the engine was her body coming alive again. As the speed increased, possibilities of the trip expanded. Maybe the journey would not be short. There was hope in the body against her. Maybe it would be a long trip. The Orient Express or the