Well, of course Douglas was stuck with them too, but he seemed not to mind them. He did not pretend not to see them; he just didn’t seem to mind.

  Except for that intrusion, though, we were alone. His little section of rocky beach sat in a cove, so it was mostly private even as the season got on and other cottages up and down the shore were occupied. That couple, they must have been day-trippers, were the only persons we saw the whole time we were there. The only ones I saw, at any rate; he went into town every couple of days for supplies, walking the five miles or so in and out, and came back to update me: “The Jeffersons are here, they’re the second cottage down,” or “The Wilsons are early this year.” No one came by, though. I had been here for a weekend once before, with Jason. There had been lots of neighbors dropping in, and we had made the rounds as well. Maybe he warned them off.

  We swam nearly every day. I used to swim a lot, and loved it, but I was out of practice and out of shape. It was good exercise, and a good way to work off my frustrations and my anger. I swam sometimes for two hours with only the occasional pause for rest. He didn’t swim that long, of course. He was old. When he began to tire and grow short of breath, he would go sit on the beach.

  “And enjoy the view,” he said. He looked my still handsome body up and down and gave me a wolfish leer. What he really did, of course, was stand guard, in case anyone should approach. I stopped watching for them myself and trusted him. But they didn’t come.

  Evenings, he fixed us martinis, and I got into the habit of preparing dinner. I had cooked in the past, but I had gotten away from it. I found now that I enjoyed it. I took unexpected pleasure in fixing the things he liked, the way he liked them. Nothing too fancy: steaks or lobster or burgers on the grill, and when it turned out we both loved it, the tuna casserole that Jason had always turned his nose up at. The one with potato chips. I caught Douglas licking the salt off the chips and smacked his hand with the spatula. Later, though, I tried it myself when he wasn’t looking, and he caught me at it and smacked my hand.

  “I was in the hospital for eight weeks,” I told him petulantly. “You’re not supposed to hit someone when they’re recovering from surgery.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, and offered me a chip to lick. He wasn’t always elegant.

  We ate sometimes on the terrace when it was warm enough, and at the kitchen table when it wasn’t, and some evenings it was cool enough for a fire in the fireplace and we ate in front of it. There was no television, but he had a radio and a stereo, and somehow he had managed to stock a shelf with most of my favorite music. Sometimes he sat beside me, and he would shyly put his arm around me, and I would lean against him and put my head on his shoulder while we listened to music together, and watched the fire. We didn’t talk much, but the silence was comfortable. Always, when he said goodnight, he kissed my cheek. The bad one.

  After a week, when he started to turn away from me at my bedroom door, I said, “You don’t have to go to your own room.”

  It took him a moment to realize what I meant. “Are you sure?” he said, uncertain and hopeful all at the same time.

  “I’m sure.”

  I would have turned the lights out, but he wouldn’t have it. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve dreamed of seeing you like this?” he asked. “I never thought I’d be so lucky.”

  I was naked by this time. He looked me up and down with undisguised pleasure while he undressed. That part of me, at least, was still fine. I was glad, for his sake as well as my own. He deserved beauty. I turned the bad cheek away.

  He was naked too now, seemingly unembarrassed by his old man’s body. He dropped onto the bed beside me. He looked better dressed than undressed. Old men do, don’t they? I tried not to notice the spare tire, or the way his chest looked caved in, or the droop of his buns. That was just who he was. It couldn’t be helped.

  “That was when I was beautiful,” I said. “And please don’t say, ‘you still are.’

  “You still are,” he said.

  Without thinking, I put a hand to my face. “The canals of Mars?” I said.

  “Where I shall swim in ecstasy,” he said and kissed the scars. I watched and listened and felt carefully with all my senses for some hint of reluctance, of disgust or even discomfort, but if he felt any, he disguised it completely.

  He took hold of my hand and rubbed it across the pouch of his belly, where he had thickened about the waist. “If you’ll overlook this,” he said, and leaned over to kiss my lips.

  It was good sex. Not great, but good. Of course, sex had been a solitary pastime for me since the accident. Jack off and think of Jason, think of Jason and jack off. Maybe at this point in time, anybody would have made it seem good. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I suppose that is one of the advantages of age, though: practice makes you, if not perfect, pretty adept. He was. He made love to me. I had never experienced that before. Lots of sex, none hotter than with Jason, but no one had ever made love to me. It was nice. I kissed him when it was over, and kissing him, actually forgot about how I looked. He stayed the night in my bed. I slept comfortably in the crook of his arm.

  I realized when I woke in the morning that I had forgotten, too, how old he was.

  After that, we slept together every night. He could not have been more tender, more loving, and I stirred myself to be as good as I could be for him as well. It got better, our sex. I wanted it to, and it did, it got very much better. I stopped jacking off remembering Jason. I didn’t stop remembering Jason, but I stopped jacking off remembering him. Stopped jacking off altogether, to tell the truth. Who had anything left to shoot, the way we were going at it? He was insatiable. The old goat. It was flattering. Exhausting, but flattering.

  One night when we finished, he rolled on his back with a gasp and said, “If you keep it up like that, you’re going to kill me. I’m an old man, remember?”

  “You’re not so old,” I said. And, to my surprise, I meant it. I’d been to bed with men forty years his junior who weren’t the lover he was. Or, maybe they were. What I really mean is that I hadn’t gotten the pleasure, the same kind of pleasure, from them that I did from him. Maybe that was in part the pleasure that I was giving. I had never thought of it like that before: taking pleasure in giving it. I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to please him. When I did, and he made it quite obvious that I did, it made me happy too.

  That was a new one for me.

  We divided up the housecleaning. The one who scrubbed the bathroom got to pick the music. Since that was not one of my favorite chores, we listened to a lot of Sarah Vaughn and Dinah Washington, both new to me, but I quickly fell in love. It would no doubt have looked a little funny to someone else, him scrubbing the tub and me mopping the kitchen, and both of us bellowing “All of Me,” along with Dinah. His lack of pitch didn’t seem all that important. It was a while before I realized: I hadn’t sung in years. Even before the scars. Where, I wondered, had the music gone?

  I learned that he liked to read aloud. I’d never had anyone do that for me, but I found that I enjoyed that too. He had a lovely reading voice, multicolored and far more musical than his singing voice. He read Vanity Fair, a chapter an evening. Listening to him, watching the fire, it was easy to sink into the story. Becky Sharp winked at me from the flames. I liked her.

  I liked the beach at night, too, maybe because I didn’t have to think about anybody seeing me. Anybody but Douglas. I would sit and watch the surf, and he would lie on his back and gaze up at the stars.

  “I wonder,” he said one night, “when we look at them, is it the stars twinkling, or our eyes?”

  “My eyes don’t twinkle,” I told him.

  “Oh, but they do,” he said, sitting up with a grin and looking into them. “They get like Christmas lights when you’re about to come.”

  “That is so ridiculous,” I said. “You are so full of shit.”

  We made love in the warm sand, the murmur of the waves like muted strings to our dissonant chorus of sighs and moans. He went down on me, and just as I was about to go off, he jumped up over me and said, “There, they’re sparkling like crazy.”

  I couldn’t help laughing, and he laughed with me, and hugged me. I had almost forgotten how to laugh.

  After a while, I lifted my head and looked down at myself. “Were you planning on finishing that?” I asked.

  “Try to stop me,” he said, sliding down in the sand.

  Sometimes, after swimming, his hips bothered him. “A touch of arthritis,” he said and I quickly got into the habit of massaging them for him.

  “Are you going to massage me all over?” he asked with a naughty grin when I told him to strip and lie down on the floor.

  “I’m going to work on the parts that are sore.”

  “Oh, have I got an ache here,” he said with a laugh, and cupped his balls in his hand. I slapped his butt hard.

  “Now you’ve got one there, too,” I said. But I kept my word and massaged that for him as well. Everywhere he said he ached.

  He kept finding new places.

  He was getting ready to walk into town one day—it was a month or more after I had arrived there, though the time had passed with astonishing rapidity—when he asked with a sly expression if I wanted to go along.

  “Don’t be fucking stupid,” I snapped, angry out of all proportion. “Did you plan to sell tickets?”

  “Come here,” he said. He took my hand and brought me into his bedroom. There was a large mirror over his dresser. Mine had none. This one and the little one on the medicine cabinet were the only ones in the cottage. I could shave in the medicine cabinet mirror without looking at the scars. The whiskers didn’t grow on that side. There were advantages to having your skin burned off. Think about it, if you don’t like shaving.

  When I saw where he was leading me, I held back. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t be cruel. You know I don’t want to see.”

  “But you do,” he said, and would not let go of me, and all but dragged me to the mirror. “Look.” I automatically turned the bad side away from the glass, but he put a hand on my chin and stubbornly turned my face.

  It would be dramatic and exciting to say that the scars had disappeared. They hadn’t; but even I could see that they had faded considerably. I still looked like the surface of Mars, but viewed through an out-of-focus telescope. Someone—not everyone, but probably one or two here or there—could look at it and not want to vomit.

  I put a hand up and ran my fingers over my cheek, as if to confirm that it really was my face, my present face, and not some photograph he had taped up to fool me. I couldn’t think what to say. I shook my head, bewildered.

  He grinned and kissed my cheek, the bad side—the not-quite-so-bad side now—and said, “I’ll be back in an hour or so. Anything you want?”

  It was maybe a week after that, the day he went down to the beach alone. The weather had turned cool, and I decided to stay on the terrace and read. I read and dozed, and thought about what had happened to my face. I had only looked once since that first day, afraid that I would realize I was merely a victim of wishful thinking. It wasn’t that, though. The scars were still there, but the ugly raw-liver red of the canals had faded to patches of dusty rose. I couldn’t understand it. I wanted to think about it. The doctor had given me a special salve. I hadn’t bothered using it, thinking there was little chance of significant improvement. Now I applied it assiduously morning and night, not minding the rotten-potato stink. If Douglas minded it, he never said.

  Still, I was afraid to look, afraid to jinx whatever was happening.

  Douglas shouted something from the beach, interrupting my reverie. I sat up and looked. He was holding a starfish aloft, waving it for me like a flag. I laughed and waved back, and he tossed it into the water again. Some would have kept it for a trophy, letting the living thing within the shell die. He wouldn’t. He was too good a man. I had never known a better one, my whole life, or one—it surprised me to realize this—whose company pleased me more. Our days had flown by. How could I have thought him a bore, in the past? How could I have been so vacuous?

  He began to climb up the rocks, coming back. I watched him and it occurred to me all at once that he looked different. His waist was trimmer, and that little paunch had shrunk away. Seeing him like this, at the distance, he might have passed for a man in his forties. His early forties. All that swimming, I thought; all those hikes into town and back.

  Or, something.

  “Something is happening to us,” I said.

  He smiled; I don’t think I had ever actually noticed what a sweet smile he had. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, look at us. Look at you. You look fifteen years younger than you did when we came here. Twenty years, maybe.”

  He lifted his head to look down at his naked body. “I’ve lost some weight. That’s your cooking. I lived on pizza in town.”

  “But it’s not just your weight,” I said. I rolled onto my side and ran a hand across the surface of his belly, the way I had done our first night in bed. “Look, it’s hard as a rock.”

  “That’s not the only thing, in case you hadn’t noticed,” he said. He took my hand and put it on his erection.

  “Okay, case in point,” I said, but I did not take my hand away. “We just fucked, not even ten minutes ago. When was the last time you were raring to go so soon afterward?”

  “The last time? Probably I was jacking off thinking about you,” he said. He rolled over to face me, and took me in his arms, and kissed me, and for a while, we had no more conversation.

  Really, he was insatiable. The old goat. Damned good, now, but insatiable.

  But he wasn’t an old goat anymore, either. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop looking at him. Before, at the beginning, I had mostly averted my eyes when he was naked, embarrassed for him, turned off for myself.

  It wasn’t just curiosity that had me staring at him whenever I could now, though I was fascinated by the changes in him; it almost seemed as if I could see them happening. I looked because he was terrific to look at. It wasn’t only his body. He might have had the world’s most successful face-lift. The jowls were gone, the laugh lines, the furrows on his brow. His thin hair was thicker, and lustrous. He had always been handsome in an old-man way, handsome-distinguished. Now, he was just plain hot. Had he always been? Had I always been blind?

  “Is this still sore?” I asked him, massaging one hip.

  “Not since you started working on it,” he said. “You’ve got magic in your hands.”

  I stared at him. At his round, hard butt. I still would not look at my scarred face. I was too afraid of what I would see. Or not see. But his butt was lovely to look at. I looked every chance I got. Both of us enjoyed the massages.

  Of course, he wasn’t going to let me avoid that other sight.

  “Look,” he said, holding the mirror up in front of me.

  I turned away from it, like a vampire afraid that he will see no reflection. “No, I don’t want to,” I said sharply. “I’m afraid.”

  “Look,” he said insistently and again put the mirror in front of my face. I had no choice but to look into it.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “I see…” I hesitated. Did I really see what I thought I saw? It was almost—not quite, but very close, to what I had used to see, in the past; before the accident. My face. Not that hideous thing that had been foisted on me, but the beautifully sculpted cheekbones, the mouth that Jason had always called “too kiss-able,” the little rounded chin.

  The smooth, porcelain skin. “It’s me,” I said, in wonder. “The canals. They’re gone.” Nearly, at any rate. I had to lean toward the glass, peer closely, to see their faint vestiges.

  “Yes. I wanted to say something sooner, but I wanted to be sure,” he said.

  “I’m beautiful,” I said. I put my hand up to touch my face, still not able to comprehend.

  “You always have been,” he said. “To me. It’s just the surface stuff that’s changing. That’s really not all that important. There never really were any canals, you know.” I looked my puzzlement at him. “On Mars, I mean,” he said. “It was a bum lens in somebody’s telescope, badly focused, the way I understand it, and somebody mistranslated the word channels, so it was all a misunderstanding. Later, when they could see it better, could look at it through a proper lens, and somebody corrected the translation, they realized there weren’t any canals. Never had been.”

  “But mine were. And now they’re gone.” I looked at him, kneeling over the bed, at his firm, youthful body. “We’ve both changed. You look entirely different as well. What can it mean?”

  “Maybe,” he said, putting the mirror aside, “We were just looking through the wrong lens. Maybe we’re just seeing one another now through the eyes of love. Maybe we had the word wrong, too. Maybe what we thought that was, was something else.”

  Love. I thought about that for a while. Was that what this was? It wasn’t like anything I had felt before, nothing like what I had thought love was. Nothing, for instance, compared to what I had felt in the past, for Jason. And yet, it felt good, in a way I had never felt for anyone before. It felt good knowing he loved me. Whatever it was I felt for him, that felt good too. I was afraid to call it love, though. What I had called love in the past had gone from me in a twinkling, had drowned in those canals on Mars. Before they got the telescope straightened out.

  He saw my expression. “What?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About?”

  I looked directly at him. “About Jason,” I said.

  I could see that it had hurt him. His eyes, so bright a moment before, went dull, although he managed to keep a faint smile on his lips. “Still hurt, does it?”

  I sighed. I couldn’t lie to him. Maybe that was love, when you can’t lie to someone. How would I know? About love? “Yes.”

  “You’re thinking, if he saw you now, just like you used to be, that he would fall in love with you all over again.”

 

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