30
“ISN’T IT INTERESTING the way all knowledge is interrelated?” I said.
“Not now, Peter,” said Ariane. “Wait for the commercial.”
I knew I was breaking Ariane’s rule by speaking to her during a movie, but I was out to impress her, and I was impatient. I had brought a volume of my encyclopedia with me that afternoon, Volume C (Cat paradox; Causality; Cavendish laboratory; Combination lock; Como conference; Complementarity; Compound nucleus, theory of; Copenhagen school of physics; Correspondence principle), hoping that she would appreciate the intellectual patina I was acquiring, but I’d arrived a little late, the movie had already begun, and she didn’t want to be diverted. I couldn’t calm down. Why wouldn’t the damn movie hurry up? Why did she have to pay such close attention to it anyway? I began to fidget. I opened the book. I turned some pages. I closed the book. I stretched. I opened the book again. I closed the book again. I shifted position. I crossed my legs. I uncrossed my legs. I recrossed my legs. Finally she said, “Will you settle down?”
“Sorry,” I said. I tried to sit still. I opened the book again. I tried to read. I tried to breathe slowly and regularly. As I worked to control my breathing, I became aware, again, of the odors in the room—the mustiness of the sofa on which we sat, the slightly scorched fabric of the dress Ariane had been ironing, the cabbage soup drifting in from the kitchen, the river below us, and the aroma of Ariane. Little by little, her delicious scent seemed to displace all the others. It’s diffusion, I thought. Like Miss Rheingold’s perfume. This thought was, of course, accompanied by a vivid mental image of Miss Rheingold’s legs, but it faded quickly, overwhelmed by a dazzling thought. Ariane’s diffusing. She’s filling the room. I took a long, deep breath. I’m inhaling Ariane. I took another breath, deeper, and another and another. I tried swallowing as I breathed, swallowing the aroma of her.
“Now what?” she said. “Are you snoring?”
“Sorry,” I said. I—”
“Come here,” she said. Magically, she patted her hip. Oh, that hip, that hip, that satiny, slip-covered hip. That smooth expanse, where the satin stretched over the rounded prominence of it! That hip! The silvery sheen of the television light (released when electrons struck the fluorescent coating inside the television tube—Volume T) formed a vaguely ellipsoid brightness around it, like the contour line around a drumlin (Volume D) on a geological survey map (Volume M). Oh, that hip! I did as she suggested, acting quickly, so that she wouldn’t have time to reconsider, but with great care not to appear too eager. I pivoted on the sofa. I stretched myself out. I began to lower my head toward that glowing hip.
I wasn’t quick enough. She pulled a pillow from the back of the sofa and padded herself with it before head hit hip. I hid my disappointment and settled onto the pillow. She put her hand on my chest and patted me as if I needed comforting.
“There,” she said. “Now just settle down. Settle down and shut up until the commercial.”
Did she know how I felt, reclining there against her, how she made me feel? At the time I supposed that she didn’t. I thought I was getting away with something. Now I think otherwise. I think she understood me better than I did myself. I think she was being generous to me, but I think she got something out of having me leaning against her, too. She couldn’t have failed to see how fascinated I was by her, and my fascination must have been flattering. She must have liked knowing that she was responsible for the pounding of my little heart, and she couldn’t have failed to feel it pounding beneath her hand.
The scent of her at close range, so dense, so rich and delicious, quite befuddled me. Inhaling, I was reminded of the time, years earlier, when I had gone with a school group on a tour of a candy factory. At the end of the tour we were invited to take a piece of chocolate from a barrel of imperfect pieces, misshapen rejects that had been culled from the line by sharp-eyed ladies wearing hair nets. I took one, but I didn’t eat it until the next day because breathing in all that chocolate aroma had filled me up. Ariane’s aroma was richer than that, much richer.
[to be continued]
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🎧 628: “Isn’t it interesting . . .”