Punish Me with Kisses Read online

  Even when his words were lost to her she was able to fill them in from memory. The poem still moved her, which amazed her nearly as much as stumbling upon this boy, sitting on the rocks, his voice sharp, fierce, flinging poetry against the wind and spray.

  She was inspecting him with extreme curiosity, wondering just who he was and what he was doing and how he'd gotten himself down upon those boulders, when, seeming to sense her presence, he suddenly turned around. "Hi!"

  She wanted to run away. It was awful to be caught like that, staring down like a spy. "Sorry," she said. "I was passing. I heard you and I—"

  "Where?"

  She didn't understand him. "What?"

  "Where were you when you heard me?"

  She pointed at a spot a hundred feet farther along the ledge. He stood and raised his hand to shield his eyes. "From all the way down there? Wow! I had no idea I was reaching back that far."

  He was beautiful—she recognized that at once; like a classic sculpture, she thought, an Athenian, dark, lean, his cheeks sheer, his lips full, lovingly carved. She was marveling at how beautiful he was, how finely made and poised, but when she saw that he was going to climb up to where she stood she began to back away. She thought of fleeing, running back along the cliffs to her bike. Then angry with herself for being afraid, she stood her ground and watched him climb. He moved lightly, with the suppleness of a gymnast. His bare torso, gleaming in the sun, looked all the darker against the pale rocks and foaming surf below. As he twisted and stretched to pull himself up the last few feet, she gasped at the beauty of his back, his straining flesh taut against his spine.

  "Hi. My name's Jared. I'm with the theater company at Hull's Cove."

  Such a beautiful actor he was, she kept thinking, as they shook hands and began to talk. She gazed at his sculpted cheeks while he explained that he'd been practicing throwing his voice; she searched his dark liquid eyes as he spoke of the need he felt to project himself into every crevice in the rocks.

  "Like in the theater, I want to reach into all the corners, even underneath the seats." He laughed, and as he did she regarded the perfect whiteness of his teeth. "Kind of old-fashioned, I guess. Everyone else likes to mumble and scratch." He scratched in mimicry of them, scratched at the curly dark hairs on his chest which matched the thick curls around his ears. She found herself becoming extremely conscious of his body, even the little droplets of sweat upon his brow and beneath his lips; quite unaccountably, she wanted to wipe the drops away.

  "Seen us?" She shook her head. He shrugged. "Not surprised. We do these warmed-over Broadway comedies, and we don't do them very well. The company's practically bankrupt anyway. The guy who owns the building keeps threatening to throw us out. I doubt we'll last the season. The people who summer up here—people like you, I guess —haven't picked up on our act. Hey—" He placed his hands on her shoulders. "Don't be afraid of me. I won't eat you. Relax." He smiled. "You looked good, really good standing up here. I had to climb up to see you close, see if you really looked so good." She didn't say anything. "Well —you do." Slowly he raised his arms toward her and put his hands on her shoulders. "Kind of like a Muse, the way you appeared up here. You were listening for quite a while, weren't you? You like poetry. I bet you do."

  He was looking directly into her eyes, and she could feel the strength in his fingers as he put pressure on the back of her neck to gently coax out her reply.

  "I know that Hopkins poem," she said, surprised that she could speak at all, very conscious of his touch. "I once memorized it myself."

  "What else do you know? Tell me."

  Later she would remember the moment well, a turning point she'd think, a moment upon which her life suddenly pivoted. Below the sea smashed upon the rocks. In the distance, on the horizon, a sailboat with an orange spinnaker cut the pale blue summer sky. The smell of Maine was there, too, pine forest and seaweed, and then something of this young man, something coming off his body, an essence that made her dizzy, reel, flush. Yes, it was just then, in an instant she'd fix forever—feeling his hands link behind her neck and draw her slowly toward him, seeing his lips part and his head tilt down, knowing that he was going to kiss her, knowing that in a second her mouth would feel the warmth of his—it was just then that she knew she could let go. She was so happy, thrilled at the discovery, the dry destiny she'd feared for herself dissolving as she closed her eyes. She was crossing the line, she knew, from thinking to feeling, from books to life, and having crossed it she knew she'd never willingly return to the other side.

  "Hey. Hey. Hey." His voice, soft, hushed, even softer, more hushed than her father's encouraged her. "Hey—you're beautiful, babe. Really beautiful. Really good." He'd unbuttoned her shirt after he'd kissed her. Now they were on the ground, she lying on her back, her knees bent, he sitting beside her, lightly tracing his finger upon her breasts. "Feels good, doesn't it? Yeah—I could tell."

  "What?"

  "You'd like to be touched."

  "How'?"

  "How did I know that?" He laughed. "I knew."

  There was no clumsiness about him, no desperate grappling. She felt like a treasured harp which he plucked and strummed.

  "You like that."

  "—yes."

  "I knew you would. I knew."

  "Oh, God—"

  Seagulls were circling above. A single cloud, full yet lightly spun, hung magically in the sky.

  "Sun feels good, doesn't it?"

  "Uh-huh."

  He bent down. She poised herself. She knew he was going to kiss her again. She placed her hands on his cheeks, felt the roughness of them, then probed with outspread fingers into the thickness of his hair. And then she was lost, lost as he whispered to her, encouraged her to open up, to yield. His whispering was like a spell, and all her control weakened, ebbed away as he undressed her, touched her, kissed her, stroked her, and came inside her while she lay back and stared up at the sun.

  She'd never felt anything like it before. She was melting, melting away. If she sometimes became heady when she read, now she was intoxicated, giving herself to his dark hard body, gripping, feeling something deep within her erupting in pants and sighs.

  "Don't stop—"

  She was shaking, moaning and she didn't care. Pinned down by him, writhing beneath him, she felt the power of his sex and a counterforce within herself rising with a fury that made her blind.

  "Babe—"

  "Oh, yes—"

  Later, bicycling back to the house, she couldn't quite believe what she'd done. He was a stranger, an utter stranger, they'd barely talked, she had no notion of who he was. And yet she'd given herself to him, with hardly a word spoken, had lain naked beneath the sun while this strange strong dark young man lay upon her. They'd ground themselves against each other, wriggled, cried out, let go. They'd met and parted like wild animals in the forest. There'd been tenderness between them, but also something so lustful, direct, unguarded and shameless she could hardly believe that she herself had been involved.

  At home, she inspected herself in the mirror, looking for evidence on her body. She could find nothing, no marks or other hints of what had taken place. Perhaps she'd dreamt it all. That was the sort of thing that happened, she knew, with repressed and lonely girls who lived in worlds of books and dreams. Still there was something faint on her, a trace of something male, a smell perhaps, that same essence that had made her reel and feel weak when he'd linked his hands behind her neck. She wasn't sure. It seemed to come and go. She caught it, sniffed hard, then lost it again. Finally, reluctantly, she bathed.

  That night, ensconced in her rocking chair, in her nightgown and her robe, peering down at the poolhouse waiting for Suzie's latest lover to arrive, she didn't feel envious at all. She could be like that, too, now, she knew—stroke skin, taste flesh, requite desire.

  She made love with him a second time in the forest and twice on successive rainy afternoons in the little room he shared with another actor in a boarding house in town.
The last time they'd smoked pot and everything had been slow and strange. Afterwards they'd collapsed together, spent limp bodies welded with a seal of sweat.

  He called her "babe," and she liked that a lot—it made her feel sexy, like a girl in a popular song. So did the rides they took on his motorcycle, zooming along the winding roads of the resort, her arms clasped around him, her head pressed against his back. Vibrations coursed through her as she shut her eyes and squeezed his chest. She thought of herself as the subject of an impassioned ballad sung by a wild-haired rock singer to a huge raucous audience in the night.

  He didn't tell her much about himself, only that he'd been in the Marines, that he was twenty-four years old, that he'd appeared in a few TV commercials and acted in what he called "some third-rate independent films." He joined the Bar Harbor summer theater company to get out of New York during the heat. He was ambitious, he told her, to hone his craft and to play important roles.

  She didn't care about his past; she preferred him as a stranger, dark and sensitive, who caressed her with powerful hands until she moaned. She'd always dreamed of a lover, someone fierce-looking but gentle, who would come upon her like the lion sniffing at the sleeping shepherd in the painting by Rousseau. Now she'd found this actor who rode a roaring motorcycle and shouted out poems against the sea. He was a gift to her, someone she'd stumbled upon in time to save her from despair.

  On the fifth day she invited him to the house to play tennis. That was a mistake.

  "Oh, Pen—he's gorgeous."

  "Eat your heart out, Gin," Suzie said.

  "You just found him there, on the rocks?" Cynthia wet her lips. "God—I don't believe it. God—he just makes you want to drool."

  Suzie and Cynthia were supposed to be off sailing that afternoon. But they'd been bored by the boys they'd gone with and came back home referring to them contemptuously as "duds."

  "Where've you been hiding him?"

  "Come on, Gin—leave her alone."

  "Let us know when you're finished with him, Pen. Let us know soon as he's up for grabs."

  Suzie took her aside, told her not to pay any attention to Cynthia. "She couldn't take him away from you if you tried. He is gorgeous, though." She touched Penny on the cheek. "Congratulations, Child. Thought I'd scoured this joint. Never thought of that theater crowd myself."

  Her father flew up in early August to stay on through Labor Day. There was a local painter who came by in the mornings to work on his portrait, a larger than life-size thing which would adorn the Chapman boardroom in New York. The painting was to show him on his sailboat, waves behind, wind-filled sails, the boat heeling as he tacked, but he posed in his study at a helm that had been transported to the house, standing erect and grave as if he were really wrestling the elements, his hair artfully brushed so that it looked windswept. She paused in the doorway one day and watched the scene, the painter, intent on a successful completion of his commission, dabbing seriously at the canvas. When her father caught her eye, he laughed. "Well, kiddo," he said, "now you know what a fake I am."

  One night at dinner her mother sat bored and listless as he described how he was taking over an armor-plate company in Detroit. His plan was intricate, involved an exacting use of pressure, a careful wielding of power. Suzie was excited by the details. Her eyes shined brightly as he explained his manipulation, his squeeze-play, his final offer, the bluff they'd never call. "You sure know how to break balls, Daddy-O," she said at the end. Then she flung down her napkin and strode out of the house.

  "She's running wild," her mother announced after they heard the whirl of tires in the drive.

  "She'll come around. Just a stage."

  "I wish she didn't hang around with Cynthia. I don't think Cynthia's very nice."

  "Well, who is nice?" her father asked. "I'm not nice, nor, in my experience, are very many people in the world. No one's nice around this house except maybe kiddo, here."

  "Oh, no," said Penny. "I'm not nice. Not at all."

  "Well, there you are," he said and grinned. "No one's nice. No one in this family, anyway. So—what else is new?"

  Her mother glared down at the remnants of her cheese.

  It was never a question, Penny was certain, of her sister trying to steal Jared away. It just didn't happen like that, although later many people would say it had. She knew it had been her fault—not Suzie's, not Jared's, her own. She wasn't sufficiently sexy, she thought, probably just a "D minus" in the sack. She'd been selfish, had been too passive, hadn't asked him enough questions about acting and the theater, who he was and what he dreamed. Then everything had been inevitable. Suzie'd been there, Jared had seen her, and that had been enough. Suzie was so vivid, so striking, so purely physical, she knew that by comparison she must seem pale and flat. Jared was sweet to her as he slipped away, tried hard not to hurt her feelings, but when he turned up at the pool it was clear whom he'd come to see. She watched, angry at first, jealous as he fell under Suzie's spell. Then, feeling helpless, diminished, aching but refusing to blame anyone but herself, she was grateful that at least she'd tasted a little crust of life, and she turned back sadly to her books.

  "Come on, Child, down to the pool. He's been waiting now an hour."

  "I'm busy."

  "Why don't you just put down that book?"

  "It's Ethan Frome."

  "Well, hoopty-doo."

  They stared at each other for a while. Then Penny turned the book over on her lap. "He's not here to see me anyway, so what difference does it make?"

  "You know, you're really silly, brooding, staying up here all the time, feeling sorry for yourself. Come on down now, OK? You'd really make me happy if you would."

  "I don't see the point—"

  "Look—do I have to beg? Is that it? Huh?"

  "Of course not—"

  "Then get your ass in gear for shit's sakes. Before Cynthia gets her disgusting mitts on him. OK?"

  Suzie was staring at her the way she stared at boys when she sized them up. Penny looked up at her again.

  "He's not all that interested in me anymore, and I'm not all that interested in him."

  "Well, he's sure as hell not going to get re-interested if you hide yourself up here in this lousy room."

  That made her mad. "You know what I wish, Suzie?"

  "Tell me, Child. Tell me what you wish."

  "I wish I were a free-spirited totally liberated good-time sexpot bitch just like you, someone who could fuck everyone I wanted, every tits-and-ass man in the whole Ivy League if I felt like it, and never feel a qualm. But since I'm not like that, I'm really not, I wish you'd just leave me alone."

  She squeezed her eyes shut to push back her tears while Suzie stood very still, then finally cleared her throat.

  "That's pretty tough talk, Child, as I'm sure you know."

  "Yes. I know." She met Suzie's eyes head-on.

  "OK. I'll see you later then." She paused at the door. Penny prayed she'd go before she saw her cry. "Maybe you'll change your mind and come down a little later on. I hope you do. OK?"

  That was the closest they ever came to a confrontation. She had spoken harshly, had said things she regretted the moment Suzie left the room. Afterwards there were no opportunities to take them back. Suzie avoided her, and then an almost palpable tension began to build up in the house.

  Her mother's hands shook all the time. When she ate, her silverware shivered against the china plates. Her father, closeted mornings with the painter, went off sailing by himself in the afternoons. Suzie, with Cynthia French, continued to entertain callers around the tennis court and pool. Jared was among them now, panting around Suzie like the others, different only in that he was darker and older and not going back to college in the fall.

  Penny, starting a new Jane Austen, found it difficult to concentrate. There were too many clashing thoughts, anger and resignation, emotions that didn't cancel out. Sometimes when her confinement became oppressive she'd get on her bicycle and ride toward the sea, then a
long the same path above the cliffs where she'd discovered Jared the first time. He seemed like a figure in a romantic dream to her—a vague personage who'd appeared out of nowhere, had entered her life for several days, then had gone his own way, leaving little trace except the memory of a scent and a sadness she now savored even as she hurt.

  Puzzled, seized with vague premonitions and a sense of doom, she went about her life much as she had before, rising late, reading through the afternoons, watching from her rocking chair at night. Sometimes crossing the path of a member of the family she felt she was living with people trying to avoid contact at almost any cost.

  Her mother, drinking steadily now from morning to night, stalked the lower part of the house with a mad smile that seemed painted on her face. Her father ate his meals alone in his study off a tray. Sometimes, passing his door in the evening, she could hear him whispering, dictating a lecture he was to give, about the reconciliations between humanism and business, before a manufacturer's convention in the fall. If her mother hardly left the house, Suzie hardly entered it. She had her meals served to her in the poolhouse. Twice Penny saw Cynthia French carrying polyethylene garbage bags to her car.

  Penny watched every evening, expectant, waiting, and then, finally, it happened—she heard Jared's motorcycle coughing in the dark.

  She wished that night that she could feel bitter, could hate him for coming, could hate Suzie, too, for luring him in. But she couldn't. As much as she longed to feel hatred, she could not quell a lingering affection for Jared, a sense of gratitude for what he'd been to her, and a fascination with Suzie and her nocturnal rituals, a fascination that she recognized as perverse. That was what was so strange. As painful as it was for her now to watch Jared steal across the fog-shrouded lawn, and approach the poolhouse, knowing as she did that he was going to make love with Suzie, knowing how he would do it, wishing, imagining that he would do it with her, still she felt the cold almost cruel power of the voyeur, seeing yet unseen, surveying the pool-house from her dark hiding place above, looking down, spying, as thrilled as a tourist in Africa hidden in an observation post high up in a tree watching wild animals congregate, drink, copulate and growl.