“Shakespeare said that,” I told Laurel, losing confidence before I got out all three of those words. I could see from the hesitation in her eyes that I was wrong, that I hadn’t got the reference right, and hadn’t really understood it either. I thought then that one was the purse you kept your cash in, while the second lay between your legs …
But Laurel had been to college, and not only that; she knew a number of things I didn’t. All of a sudden she dropped to her knees and began to burrow in a milk crate that had been half covered by a swatch of the batik spread over her mattress. She came up with a book, already reading:
Love is a bear-whelp born: if we o’erlick
Our love, and force it new strange shapes to take,
We err, and of a lump a monster make.
Were not a calf a monster that were grown
Faced like a man, though better than his own?
Perfection is in unity: prefer
One woman first, and then one thing in her.
Her laughter drew mine out of me, as if we were sharing some old secret. Bits of a title I could make out in splintered silver letters on the broken blue spine of the book she was holding, but those printed words meant nothing to me; it was all in the sound of her voice. Then she pulled me into it, catching her free hand around my waist. We propped on our elbows on the mussed covers of her low bed. Her finger traced the lines as she read them to me.
Her swelling lips; to which when we are come,
We anchor there, and think ourselves at home,
For they seem all: there Sirens’ songs, and there
Wise Delphic oracles do fill the ear;
There in a creek where chosen pearls do swell,
The remora, her cleaving tongue doth dwell.
Gilt bells of laughter poured from her; it seemed the laughter as much as her lips that kissed me then, just grazing the corner of my mouth. Innocent as two little girls in Eden, she made it seem, so quick I’d have wondered if it had happened at all if not for the tingle that remained, sank deeper.
“But look—here’s the part you mean.” Laurel caught me by the nape of my neck to show me, saying the words with a husk catching in her throat.
Rich nature hath in women wisely made
Two purses, and their mouths aversely laid;
They then which to the lower tribute owe
That way which that exchequer looks must go …
I understood as much of this as I needed to. Enough to get us on our way. It wasn’t the first time I’d been with a woman, but—
The salt taste of her was extraordinary; I haven’t forgotten it even now. It was like I had some mineral deficiency and couldn’t get enough. Behind my closed eyes was the picture of a red salt block for the cows across the road down home, and once I’d wormed under the fence, as a tiny girl, to get a lick of it for myself. My mother spanked me when I was caught, because it was unsanitary (smack!), filthy (smack!), dirty (smack!) and I almost wished she could see me now with Laurel, about to squirm right out of her skin from all the pleasure I was giving her, with that same red salt taste on my tongue, a scatter of cinnamon umber on her white froth, the ring of her laughter swelling into her transported cry.