Tent Lights

At seven that evening Gideon was carrying folding chairs from the lawn to the tent, four at a time. His sister walked beside him with one.

“Don’t look round too obviously,” Bea said. “Kitchen porch.”

He looked. He kept walking and kept his distance, because he had been told not to stand where she would see him, and nobody had told him otherwise.

His mother sat on the bench by the kitchen door in her grey silk, upright, with her handbag on her knees. On the boards at her feet a child in a blue dress and red rubber boots was laying out glass in rows. She had four jars beside her. She held a piece up. His mother bent to it and said something. The child shook her head until her curls moved, took the piece back and put it in a different row.

“That’s the second time in ten minutes,” Bea said. “I timed it. Nobody has told Mother she was wrong since about 1988.”

“How long has she been there?”

“Since six. Lucille Bouchard is in the doorway with her arms folded. I wouldn’t cross her for the Chicago hotel.” Bea shifted her one chair to the other hand. “Mother hasn’t touched her. She hasn’t said one grandmotherly thing. She asked whether the brown ones were beer bottles and was told that was a good question.”

He set his chairs down at the back of the tent and stood behind a pole, where he could see. He felt like a spy and did it anyway.

The child put something small into his mother’s palm. Rosalind held it between finger and thumb and turned it to the low sun. Even from sixty yards he knew it was the blue.

At ten past seven Lucille said one word from the doorway. Tilly gathered her jars, counted them and carried them inside two at a time. His mother sat a moment longer on the empty porch. Then she came down the steps and across the grass to him, slowly, as she did everything.

“You were watching,” she said.

“From here. I’m not allowed nearer.”

“Nor was I, particularly. I was permitted a bench.” She opened her handbag, looked into it and shut it again. He had never seen her fidget before. “I have been informed that white is from old dishes, and that I had put a clear one that had gone cloudy in with it. I was told I held the blue too tightly. I was asked whether I was one of the ones who count. I said I was one of the ones who voted, and she said that was the better kind.”

“Did you correct her?”

“Not once, in an hour and ten minutes. Your father would not have believed it.” Her voice shook very slightly on the last word, and she steadied it. “She looked up at me, Gideon. I was not prepared, though I’d been told. One cannot be prepared.”

“No.”

“Her mother has said today is not the day. I shall wait for the day.” She drew herself up. “Beatrix is driving me to Burlington. I’m told your motel faces a feed store. Good night.”

She kissed his cheek, which she had not done since the funeral, and went.
***
The cake came out at eight.

He was at the back of the tent with the bar staff. The strings of small white bulbs had come on under the canvas, and the lake beyond the open side was pink. A hundred and twenty people turned in their chairs.

Camille and Arlo carried it between them on a board, down the porch steps and along the grass. She was in her whites with the blue bandana on. There were four tiers, quite plain, with strawberries from Emmett’s bed heaped on the top and a few white flowers among them. It looked like the inn. Paige Haskell put both hands to her mouth.

They set it on its table without a tremor. Arlo stepped back, grinning. Camille handed the bride the knife, handle first, and said something that made her laugh. Then she stood aside with her hands behind her back while the first slice came out. It was red and white inside.

She did not look for him. But when she turned to go back up the lawn her eyes went once along the back of the tent and stopped on him for perhaps a second. He could not read it. She went on up to her kitchen.

After that he did what was in front of him. He carried plates. He found the tent man a fuse. At eleven the band stopped, and at half past the last guests went up to bed in twenty-two rooms. He stacked a hundred and twenty chairs with Emmett, who did not say much and at the end shook his hand.

He had a paid room seven miles away. He ought to have driven to it.

He took the navy jacket out of his car instead, buckled it and walked out along the dock to the end. He sat on the new timber with his feet over the water.

He was not waiting for anything. He told himself so, and for once it was true. The inn was kept. He had not been the one who kept it. Pike’s key lay on a tablecloth. Next Saturday he would sit here from eight until nine with his back to a yellow cottage, and the Saturday after. If there was never more than that, he would still come. He found that he was at peace with it, which he had not expected.

Behind him the tent was still lit. Its lights lay on the black water in long shaking lines, all the way out to the raft.

It was midnight when he felt the planks move.

Somebody was walking out from the shore without hurrying. He knew the step. He did not turn round, in case he was wrong about what it meant.

She sat down beside him, about a foot away. She was still in her whites, and she had pulled the old orange jacket on over them and tied it. The bandana was gone. There was a streak of buttercream dried on her left sleeve. She took off her clogs and put her feet in the lake, and let out a long breath.

“I’ve been standing since three o’clock this morning,” Camille said.

“The cake was right.”

“The cake was right. Luc’s mother had two slices from the bottom and told me she’d always hated lemon.” She moved her feet in the water. “Tilly knows the inn stays. I told her at lunch. She said, ‘Then Winnie was right, but she still didn’t know.’”

He laughed. It hurt a little on the way out.

“I told you not to come near the dock,” she said. “You’ve done it two weeks running.”

“I have.”

“You sent word first, both times. You came by the cedars.” She was looking at the lights on the water. “I’ve been cross at you on my paper for twelve days. My daughter gave me leave. I want to say some things now, and I’d like you not to help.”

“All right.”

“You lied to me in my kitchen and you went to a lawyer behind my back. Those were the two things. Winnie made me count them. They were bad ones, and I haven’t decided they weren’t.” Her voice was low and steady. “Then you sent me a file that made you look worse than I could have. You told your mother before anyone could do it for you. Today you stood up in front of your whole board and my whole staff and told them what you’d done to me. You said it with dates. Nobody made you. Pike couldn’t have proved the six days.”

He kept quiet. It was hard.

“And you put down forty-five shares. I didn’t see that coming. I stood there holding a chair and thought he’s going to lose it, he’s going to let it be lost sooner than keep it for me.” She turned her head and looked at him at last. “You told the truth today where it cost you. You gave up your vote sooner than decide for me again. That’s a man I can stand beside. I couldn’t have said so on Monday. I can say it now.”

His throat had closed. He nodded.

“So here is the part that’s mine to say. I had it ready two weeks ago, on this dock, and then I didn’t get to.” She drew her feet out of the water and turned to face him on the planks. “I love you. I never stopped. I just stopped saying it to a returned envelope.”

He had thought, an hour before, that he was at peace. He had not known what peace was.

“I love you,” he said. “It’s the second time I’ve told you. The first time I hadn’t earned it.”

“You hadn’t. I heard it anyway.”

Her face was a foot from his, tired and clear in the light from the tent. He had kept his hands on his own knees for twelve days.

“May I touch you?” he said.

“Yes,” said Camille. “Please. I’ve missed it badly.”

He put his hand against her cheek. She turned her mouth into his palm and kissed it, on the old rope burn, and then she leaned across two life jackets and kissed him. It was awkward and slow. He felt her smile against his mouth at the bulk of the things.

“These are a rule,” she said. “The rule stops at the shore.”

“I’ve no room. I gave Winnie the key.”

She reached into the pocket of her whites and held something up. It swung on a loop of tarred twine.

“Winnie gave it to me at ten o’clock. She said there’s six hundred dollars against it and Doreen made up the bed this afternoon, and that nobody asked Doreen to.” She closed her fist on it. “My mother’s at the cottage. She told me not to come home before I had to.”

They walked in off the dock with their shoulders touching. He hung both jackets on the rack in the boat bay. Biscuit lay on her fenders under the tarp. Camille went up the outside stair ahead of him and stepped over the fourth tread from the top.

Doreen had put clean sheets on the iron bed and folded the old quilt at its foot. She had opened the window on the lake side. Nobody lit the lamp. The tent lights came up off the water and moved across the ceiling in soft white bars, and across the wall, and over Camille when she turned round in the middle of the floor.

He remembered other light on that ceiling, red and gold, a long time ago. He did not say so. She was looking up at it too.

“Stand still,” he said. “You’ve done everything for everyone since three this morning. Let me.”

Her chef’s jacket had a double row of cloth buttons. He undid them one at a time, from the collar down, and she watched his hands do it. Under it she wore a thin white vest, damp at the back from the kitchen. He slid the jacket off her shoulders and laid it over the chair, with the buttercream sleeve uppermost. He lifted the vest over her head. Her skin smelled of sugar and strawberries and clean sweat. He kissed the place where her neck met her shoulder and felt her sway.

“I’m so tired my knees are going,” she said.

“Then sit.”

She sat on the edge of the bed. He knelt on the boards and took her right foot in both hands. It was cold from the lake. He pressed his thumbs slowly along the arch, and she made a sound he had not heard from her before, a long helpless one, and fell back on her elbows.

“Nobody has ever done that,” she said to the ceiling.

“Then I’ll do the other one.”

He did the other one. He worked up over her ankles and the hard muscle of her calves. He undid her trousers and drew them down, and she lifted her hips to help him. He kissed the inside of each knee and went on kissing upward along her thigh, without hurrying, until her hand came down and gripped his hair.

“Gideon. Come up here. I want your weight.”

He stood and stripped off his shirt and the suit trousers he had worn to the board. She moved over to make room. He lay down along her, skin to skin, and she wrapped both arms round his back and held on hard. For a while that was all they did. He could feel her heart against his ribs. The light went over them in slow bars.

“I looked for your lamp every night,” she said into his neck. “I’d told you to go. I looked for it anyway and hated that it was dark.”

“I sat in a motel and looked at a feed store. I read your letters. I can’t talk about them yet.”

“You don’t have to. You read them. That’s all they were ever for.”

She kissed him then, deeply, with her hands on either side of his face. It was different from the other times. In the storm they had been hungry and half afraid. At her cottage he had been learning to ask. Tonight there was nothing held back on either side, and he could feel the difference in her body. She was loose under him and sure of herself. She touched his shoulders and his back and the scar through his eyebrow as though they belonged to her.

He took his time over her breasts, with his mouth and then with his hands. She arched under him and said his name in the dark. Her thigh slid up along his hip. When he moved his hand down between them she caught her breath and held his wrist where it was.

“There,” she said. “Slowly. Yes.”

He watched her face in the moving light. Her eyes had closed and her lips were parted. Her hips lifted against his hand, a little faster each time, and he stayed with her. He had made a great many mistakes in his life, and none of them could reach this room tonight.

She opened her eyes. “Now,” she said. “My jacket pocket, the left one. I’m the presumptuous one tonight.”

He laughed against her shoulder and reached for the chair. She took the thing from him and saw to it herself, with her quick sure fingers. That nearly undid him before they had begun. Then she drew him down and into her with one long breath, and locked her ankles behind his back.

They moved together slowly. The iron bed sang its old note. She kept her eyes open and so did he, and after a while she smiled up at him, wide and unguarded. He had not seen that smile since she was twenty-five.

“I love you,” she said, with him inside her, as if she liked the taste of the words. “I love you. I’m going to keep saying it now I’ve started.”

“Say it as often as you like.”

“I love you, Gideon Hallett. That’s the right name. I checked.”

He could not answer. He buried his face in her hair and felt her tighten round him. Her breath broke, and she cried out with her mouth against his throat. Her whole body shook in his arms. He followed her a few strokes later with her name in his mouth, and she held him through it with both hands spread on his back.

Afterward he pulled the old quilt up from the foot of the bed. She lay with her head on his chest and one leg thrown over his, heavy and warm. The band’s generator cut out up on the lawn. The lights on the ceiling went dark, and there were only stars in the window.

She slept almost at once. He stayed awake and listened to her breathe, as he had in her white bed eighteen days ago with a lie in his mouth. He had nothing to hide from her tonight.

She woke a little after four, as she always did, a few minutes ahead of any clock. The window was dark blue. She lay still for a moment and then pushed herself up on one elbow and looked down at him.

“You’re awake.”

“I didn’t want to miss it.”

She traced the line of his collarbone with one finger.

“Listen to me, because I’m going to be in a kitchen in half an hour and I want it said first. You have me. I’m not giving you part of me, and it isn’t on trial. The paper I wrote in April still stands, every line. We’ll sit down at my table this week and talk about what goes in front of a lawyer, and I’ll be the one who rings her. But you have me.”

“Camille.”

“I’m not finished. With Tilly you still have three Saturdays to go, and I can’t give you those. I stopped the lessons and I can start them. They start again this week, in the boat, with the rope off. But the count is hers. I can’t tell her seven is eight because I’m happy. She’d know.”

“I wouldn’t take them if you could,” he said.

She studied him in the blue light.

“No,” she said. “You wouldn’t.” She bent and kissed him once, firmly, as a person signs a page. Then she swung her feet to the floor and reached for her whites. “Eight o’clock on Saturday. Wear the jacket. She’ll have the sixth one in her hand, and she’ll have a good deal to say about your mother.”
***