Hunter's Moon Read online

  “It’s not boring, not the way you tell it. Your husband—”

  “We’re not going to talk about him. Not the kind of conversation I’d like to have, all right?”

  Lisa motions at his plate, on which two grouse carcasses have been picked clean. “Finished? I’ve got dessert. Blueberry pie with ice cream.”

  “Sure. I’ll walk it off tomorrow.”

  As Lisa stands to clear the table, Gaetan rises with her, picking up his silverware and plate. She steps over to him and, taking advantage of a chance to touch him, rests a palm on his shoulder.

  “Uh-uh. You cooked; I’ll do the cleanup.”

  She signals him, with a light pressure of her hand, to sit down. But he interprets it as a signal of something else, and she knows in her heart that he’s not misinterpreting, which is why she doesn’t resist when he clasps her waist and draws her to him. They kiss, tentatively at first, then, Lisa locking her fingers around the back of his neck, with the urgency of pent-up adolescents. They hold the kiss until her lips hurt. There is, in her, a sense of the inevitable. From the moment on the first morning when she stooped at the sideboard and her shoulder pressed against his arm and he refused to move, she’d known that this would happen. Not consciously but known nonetheless.

  He drops into the chair, pulling her onto his lap. She straddles him and, feeling wild and wanton, bumps and grinds.

  “In there,” he says in a thick voice, motioning at his room with his head. She shakes hers. Klaus is in there. She doesn’t want to deal with Klaus—he’ll break the spell as surely as a knock at the door. Nor does she want Gayle to find stained bedsheets when she comes in to clean tomorrow. Taking Gaetan’s hand, she leads him outside, and under the Milky Way’s dusty arch, they quickly cross the backyard into Lisa’s cottage. Inside, tearing at their clothes, they don’t speak, for a word now would also shatter the spell.

  She falls onto the bed, he leans over her, his palms flat on the mattress. She is half hypnotized by his body, the muscles in his arms long and tensile, like tree roots under his skin. Gaetan is a skilled lover, maybe a bit too skilled. There is a practiced quality in what he does with his hands, in the way he kisses her breasts, going from one to the other, giving each equal attention, his tongue tracing the outlines of her nipples. Practiced, accomplished, yet he enjoys giving her pleasure, and she responds, grabbing his cock, filling herself with him. Is this the lust of a woman celibate for too long? Of course it is; yet there is more in it than raw desire.

  It is she who climaxes first, a shuddering spasm that provokes him into frenzied thrusts. Her nails drive into his back. He very nearly slams her head into the headboard when he comes. She doesn’t object to the brutality, because it is needed; the rancor and sadness and Bill’s ghost must be driven out. This is exorcism as much as it’s sex, and exorcisms are always violent.

  He rolls off her, onto his back. Turning onto her side, she feels a warm stickiness under her thigh. Ah, fluids, she thinks. Odd, how sex can be as repulsive as it’s rhapsodic. They lie there, still and silent, for several minutes. Gaetan’s hand rests on her tummy. She is conscious of its bulge.

  “I’m a little flabby, I know,” she says.

  “I’d say you’re Rubenesque.”

  “That’s kind of you. Tell me something—why would a guy who’s been all over the world come here? Every year for the past ten, you said.”

  “I like to hunt wild birds over pointing dogs.”

  “You could do that in a lot of places. The U.P. is a backwater. I’ve met people who don’t know where it is or have never heard of it at all.”

  “Maybe because I’m familiar with it. Ever hear of the Huron Mountain Club?”

  “Sure. Just about everybody up here has.”

  He turns sideways to face her. Their noses are within inches of touching. She can see, sparkling in the table lamp’s light, the stubble of beard that scraped her when they kissed.

  “And what have you heard?” he asks. It is his voice that captivates her, more than the rugged face, the athletic physique. He could make a weather report sound thrilling.

  “Let’s see—it’s near Marquette. It’s thousands of acres; it’s got pretty lodges; you need megabucks to join and it’s very exclusive. Just a handful of people belong. It’s so damn exclusive that Henry Ford had to wait years to get in.”

  “Ten years,” Gaetan says. “And it’s twenty thousand acres and fifty families are regular members. That includes the Clynes. I inherited membership from my father, who inherited it from his.”

  This revelation impresses her more than the christening in Saint Peter’s or the aristocratic godparents, because she can relate to it. Bill’s father had tried to get into the HMC and been rejected, despite his prominence and modest fortune. Apparently, the fortune had been too modest.

  “My dad grew up in Lake Forest, started going to the club when he was a kid,” Gaetan goes on. “When he got posted back to the States, he would bring us there for two weeks every summer. Fly-fishing. Swimming. Sailing. Tennis. The perfect WASP holiday.”

  He says this with a muted but distinct note of contempt.

  “Begs the question,” Lisa remarks, even as she thinks: I’ve been fucked by an authentic blue blood.”Why are you here instead of there?”

  He rolls onto his back again and, clasping his hands behind his head, stares up at the ceiling fan. Its paddles, she notices, need dusting.

  “It’s boring, a monoculture,” he answers. “Everybody’s loaded, votes Republican, thinks and says pretty much the same thing. If you’ve ever been trapped in a room with a couple of CEO types yakking about which flies work best on the Yellow Dog or the Salmon Trout—when they’re not bitching about the corporate tax rate, that is—you’d know what I mean.”

  “That’s an experience I’ve missed out on,” she says, injecting a little acid into the statement. She wishes he would stop flaunting his privileged life by scorning or making fun of it. “If that’s how you feel about it, why don’t you hand in your membership card? Do they have membership cards?”

  “Oh, the club does some good things for conservation, the environment. And we do stay there in the summer sometimes.”

  “By ‘we,’ you must mean your family.”

  He is quiet for a beat. “Does that bother you?”

  “Bother me, why? Because I’m a good girl who would never knowingly sleep with a married man? Or because the lonely widow is looking for a husband?”

  He lets out a breath, and it seems to her that some of his confidence, his aura of command, leaves with it. Lisa swings herself on top of him and, in a movement more aggressive than erotic, pins his shoulders to the mattress with the flats of her hands.

  “That’s not what the lonely widow is looking for, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  She believes this declaration to be true and looks down on him, trying to read if he does, too. But Mount Rushmore’s expression doesn’t reveal anything.

  “So, is that what’s on your mind?” she says.

  “No … No…”

  “Maybe we can have an encore tomorrow night,” she says, with a boldness that surprises even her. “And then I’ll have other guests coming in and you’ll be on your way home to Barrington and that will be that.”

  “Will it? All things being equal, I’ll be back next fall.”

  “And we’ll see what happens then.” The fog of lovemaking has completely cleared from Lisa’s mind. She feels sure of herself, as sure as she ever has.

  * * *

  Lisa becomes the Other Woman for a week or two weeks for the next five autumns. She thinks of this as a kind of annual holiday season, like the period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. Its discrete beginning and end, and the distance that separates her and Gaetan the rest of the year, are guardrails against skids into messy emotional entanglements—the deep ditches where most affairs wind up. Gaetan lays down a rule: There is to be no communication between them—no texts, emails, phone calls, letters, or
notes—beyond his making, and her confirming, his annual reservation. Lisa gladly accepts this regulation. She’s in little danger of losing her heart, he of losing his, and the brevity of each liaison preserves its intensity; passion is not dissipated by routine or everyday cares. Passion is what she needs most. Bill’s ghost is a powerful spirit requiring repeated exorcisms, and tenderness is not always up to the task. Passion is demanded, and she doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind at all, if it involves some roughness. Nothing kinky or perverse—just rough.

  There is the freakishly warm afternoon—a week into October and it’s almost eighty degrees—when, to spare his dog, Gaetan does not hunt and goes blueberry picking with Lisa in a barrens well off a back road. They stoop and pick in the Indian-summer sun until they come upon a swale of the wheat-colored grass called blanket grass for its flannel-like softness. They set their buckets down. She removes her sweat-spotted shirt; he strips off his. They are soon naked, except for their socks, which makes them look ridiculous, but they are too avid for each other to bother pulling them off. She squashes some berries, rubs his cock with the juice, and, kneeling, licks it off, his scent damp, pungent. She brings him to the verge, then withdraws her mouth. His penis, stained the color of dark blood, veins twined around it like tendrils, looks like a quivering root. Then he crushes berries in his hands, nudges her onto her back, and smears the purple liquid on her inner thighs, into her pubic hairs. His tongue almost draws a scream from her, and as her own smell reaches her nostrils, a salty odor like low tide, a scene she’s read—Mellors taking Lady Chatterley in the rainy woods, short and sharp … like an animal—springs into her mind. She turns partway onto her side, only partway to entice him into doing what she wants. Grasping her waist, he flings her over on her belly, pulls her rump into him. A trembling in his loins, his seed leaps into her, short and sharp, short and sharp, yes.

  * * *

  Mellors the gamekeeper, Gaetan the game hunter. She joins him once in a while, for the exercise and for the enjoyment of watching him stride through the woods, confident and alert. She doesn’t carry a gun herself, turning down his offer of one of his—a lightweight 20-gauge. Although Bill had taught her to shoot on a skeet-and-trap range, although she’d grown up around guns—her father and brother were hunters—she doesn’t like them and what they do. Gaetan rhapsodizes about the beauty of a well-trained bird dog fulfilling its nature. The dog work, that’s what this is really about, he says, claiming that he doesn’t hunt in order to kill but kills in order to hunt—an awfully fine distinction. Too fine. Killing is what this is about. She isn’t squeamish; she’d seen her mother wring the necks of chickens for those Sunday dinners, her father butcher hogs. She’s aware that life and death are not separate but knit as tightly as the threads in a blanket. Yet her heart freezes when Gaetan’s shot finds its mark and the wild bird plummets to the ground.

  He talks a lot—way too much, Aileen says. She knows him from the diner, where he stops in for lunch every so often and is likely to corner her or a customer and soliloquize on whatever subject has grabbed his attention.

  One gray, nippy morning, while he and Lisa tramp down a long-disused logging road, the topic is the financial collapse.

  “I saw it coming way before the smartest guys in the room found out that they weren’t the smartest guys in any room,” he says. They’ve been walking for forty-five minutes; Klaus hasn’t flown a bird. A slow day, when hunting becomes, in his words, “armed hiking,” always brings out his inner orator. “I’d been reading in, you know, Barron’s and the Journal about subprime mortgages and credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, all that Wall Street bullshit. I was long in a helluva lot of bank and financial stocks. So about six, seven months before the house of cards came tumbling down, I called my guy and told him to unload them, like pronto. Harry Taylor, he was with Oppenheimer in Chicago. I called Harry—Unload!—and he asked why and I said, Because they’re holding all these sliced-up subprimes, millions of them. Mortgages from people who shouldn’t have them, people with credit ratings lower than a subway rat’s ass. If they default, and, Harry, believe me, they’re going to sooner or later, those investment banks will be in a tailspin and take just about everybody with them. Well, we’d made some nice profits and Harry was sure that I was making a mistake. That I sounded like a street-corner nut shouting, Repent! The end is near! He said, ‘It would take the collapse of the whole friggin’ system for that to happen.’ His exact words. And I said, ‘That’s what I’m talking about, Harry.’ My exact words. So he unloaded. Saved myself from losing my shirt—hell, my socks and underwear, too. I didn’t make any money, like that hedge-fund guy, the one who saw the handwriting on the wall and shorted everything and made a killing; he’s famous now. I wasn’t smart enough for that, but at least I was smarter than the guys who thought they were the smartest ones in the room.”

  As much as she likes to listen, the monologue leaves Lisa feeling pummeled. The jargon—credit-default swaps, collateralized-debt obligations—might as well be Arabic. A few weeks ago, she’d mentioned to her mother that the North Coast Inn was getting fewer reservations from out of state because of the recession. Gladys sighed into the phone. “Oh, yeah, this Great Recession they keep talkin’ about on the TV. All these folks losin’ their houses, losin’ their money. We haven’t noticed it. Nobody we know has. Can’t lose what you ain’t got, and that’s a fact.”

  While Klaus ranges in the woods, a fat grouse hops out of a culvert onto the logging road. Gaetan snaps his shotgun to his shoulder, and the bird takes flight; but instead of vanishing into the trees, it wings straight down the road, an easy, wide-open shot that Gaetan misses.

  “That’s your comeuppance,” she says, teasing.

  “What for?”

  “It’s a good thing you’ve got that distinctive voice. Stops people from getting the wrong impression.”

  “What impression? And what’s it got to do with my quote, unquote, distinctive voice?”

  “It distracts from what you’re saying to how you’re saying it. If you’d made that speech in a normal voice, somebody would get the impression that you were bragging that you’re the smartest guy in the room.”

  “Like you, for instance?”

  She bumps a hip into his. He lets out a quick, throaty laugh. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, thank God.

  * * *

  Once, not long after their first time together, she googled him. His website came up first, and she learned from a brief bio that his wife’s name is Marlene and that he has two sons in college, Richard and Michael. That’s all she knows about his family, and even those tiny bytes are more than she cares to know. He never talks about them, not a word about his personal life in Barrington, Illinois. Lisa is grateful. Additional details probably would excite her curiosity about Marlene (Plain? Beautiful? Bright? Pleasant? A bitch?) and satisfying it would bring on some weird combination of guilt and jealousy. Adulteress. The archaism, a word her grandmother might have used, seems fitting, yet it doesn’t make her as ashamed as she feels she ought to be. It carries a hint of scarlet wickedness, even of glamour. It lacks the hard, condemnatory edge of stalker or home-wrecker or slut.

  The year 2009 marks the third autumn of their episodic affair. She had turned forty in August. No longer a young widow, she is middle-aged, childless, and likely to remain so. Bill had not wanted children—he’d done his bit, had two by his first wife, and that was enough for him. Lisa went along willingly, knowing that she was too self-centered to be any good at motherhood. Also too much a romantic. Children transformed lovers into parents, the magnetism that had drawn them together neutralized in a bath of nighttime feedings, dirty diapers, packing school lunches, car pools, report cards, parent-teacher meetings, and, when the time for them came, lectures on safe sex. Without kids to worry about and care for, Bill had been the sole recipient of all of Lisa’s passion and devotion. With his death, the manner of it, something had gone out of her, and she sometimes felt that i
t was gone for good: the willingness to surrender her heart with her body. Now she’s able to keep heart and flesh separate. It’s a trick men manage instinctively; women have to learn it, most women anyway.

  With Gaetan it’s all sex. Sex with him is what she revels in, the high carnal fever. They give each other pleasure, and the reciprocity, she feels, saves her from selfishness. Gaetan has also freed her from the chains of memory. Bill’s intrusions have ceased almost entirely. Thinking about him does not evoke the usual ache marbled with bitterness. She feels a wistfulness, nothing more. It isn’t that his ghost has let her go; she’s let go of it.

  Gaetan leaves Vieux Desert, as always, right after the Columbus Day weekend. She will miss his embraces for a while; for a while she will think about him, four hundred miles away in Barrington with Marlene or jetting off to some distant location to shoot an ad. But business has picked up and she has a great deal to keep her busy. Preparing and serving breakfast; washing up afterward; helping Gayle with the housekeeping and laundering; checking in guests. She has also been elected secretary of the county’s chamber of commerce. The position doesn’t involve much work, but it fills up what idle time she has. Once in a while, she joins Aileen and Alex for drinks at the Great Lakes Brew Pub. Mostly, at the end of the day, she reads or watches TV, content in her own company, and is asleep by nine-thirty. Widowhood seems to have brought out a sense of self-possession in her. She doesn’t dread loneliness, as she had in the months after Bill’s death. She’s discovered the difference between loneliness and solitude.