Fruiting Bodies, page 18
“Oh,” Agnes groaned, from the depth of her throat. “Geb. Delicious. That’s so good.”
“It is very good,” Arthur said. “Who taught you to cook?”
“I added more garlic this time.” I reached over and speared a mushroom off Agnes’s plate affectionately. “Do you like it?”
“It’s great.”
Arthur had rested his chin on the top of the couch. “What kind of things do you draw?”
“Oh.” Agnes chewed and contemplated. “Little surrealist things, you know. Just sketches. Animals. Things I see in the woods.”
Arthur levered himself up on his elbow, his face smooth and sincere. “You shouldn’t undersell yourself, you know? I think women sometimes undersell themselves.”
Agnes hummed around the fork in her mouth.
“Would you like me to take a look?”
“That’s all right.” She shook her head, so the pale tips of her hair dusted her shoulders. She dabbed her napkin against the pink corners of her mouth. “I don’t think so, but thank you.”
“I used to be into figurative stuff like that,” Arthur said. “You know, stuff that really draws on nature?” He paused, holding up his plate in my direction. “Hey, do you have anything else to eat?”
“No.”
He tilted his head at me a little, again like a dog, wanting a treat. “It looked like there was more.”
I got him an apple.
He pointed his finger at me. “You’re the best. Anyway . . .” He seemed to be having trouble sitting up, the pillows slip-sliding a little beneath him as he shifted his body to compensate. “I’m getting more into, you know, earth art lately. Have you girls ever been out to Spiral Jetty?”
Agnes shook her head.
“Oh, it’s amazing. It’s”—he held his hands a little apart; his palms were big; his nails were not clean—“this great big installation. When the tide goes in and out”—he turned one of his hands palm down, slid it back and forth—“it covers and uncovers the art, yeah? The earth breathes, and the art changes.”
Just slightly, Agnes changed the angle of her face, so that I could see the razor’s edge of her smile. I covered my mouth with my hand, but not subtly.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“Are you done with your plate?”
“Oh, sure. Anyway . . .” I took the plates back to the sink, rolled up my sleeves. I used to do dish duty in a lot of kitchens, finding work here and there, and have always liked to run the water so hot my skin turns red. With the sink on I could ignore their voices, which was nice and then unfortunate, because as I turned it off Arthur said, “Maybe I could stay for just a couple of days, while it heals.”
I went to the kitchen island, and put my elbows on it. I tried to find Agnes’s eyes across the room. Her expression looked guilty, flushed with an antelope anxiety.
“It could have gone into bone,” I said. “You might need surgery.”
Agnes thinned her lips. “Geb.”
“It could get infected.” I gestured to the white space of the bandages, the seeping blood. They’d need to be changed soon. “We don’t have enough antibiotics. Or what about tetanus?” A new thought, but was it even a wrong thought? The builder’s nail rusting and jagged in the middle of the path, if it had been in a path, if it had been a nail. “You get that from rust, don’t you?”
“Well.” Agnes tipped her head, that voice, thoughtful and lightly impressed, that said I’d actually thought of something she didn’t. If Arthur had not been here, dragging her focus off, there would’ve been a soft little curve of her lips. “Have you had your booster shot?”
“My what?”
“Your tetanus booster.” Agnes would have made a good doctor, I think, though I am not sorry she didn’t become one. Too many strangers, too much of her self with them. When she buried her heart in rotting leaves, at least, it always came back up. “You need one every ten years. That’s a no?” Arthur shrugged, and it reminded me of a child. Sullen, exaggerated.
Agnes touched her lip thoughtfully, the dip just above the cupid’s bow of her mouth.
“If I don’t stay, what else am I supposed to do?” Arthur gestured to the window, palm open, fingers spread wide as if to encompass the night. “Walk?”
“Of course not.” Agnes got up, went to the window, as if she might see the headlights of a car through the trees, a helicopter landing. She rocked a little on her feet.
“We can just call 911,” I said. “They’ll have something.”
“I said I don’t have insurance.”
I glanced down at Arthur, splayed flat on the couch like a deer in the road. “When you die from tetanus, your jaw locks. Your muscles go rigid. You can seize so bad your bones snap.”
“Geb,” Agnes repeated, her voice a little sharper. I looked steadily back at her. I’ve often thought that Agnes and I were so close we could have our own silent language. Agnes does not always consider every possible risk. I clenched my jaw. Some mushrooms grow very quickly, some appear overnight.
“We don’t have to let you stay here.”
Arthur widened his eyes at me, and then turned the look to Agnes, whom it was really meant for. “I can’t walk on it. I can’t.”
“But—” Nine-one-one had to come and get you, I was sure, even if you didn’t have insurance.
Arthur touched the corner of his eye. “I think I’d pass out. It hurts a lot. Walking here I almost threw up.”
Nervously, Agnes tugged on the strap of her dress, resettling it on her shoulder, revealing the small red trail its elastic had bitten into her. “Maybe . . .” She pressed her lips together. “Maybe you can just stay here tonight. And we can talk about it more tomorrow.”
* * *
“I wish you wouldn’t be so hostile,” Agnes said.
Sound traveled fleetly in our cottage, the walls were not thick. I sometimes pictured our tight arrangement of rooms like the curled shell of a snail, the bathroom, our bedroom, Agnes’s office, the living room and kitchenette. Once, shortly after the mushrooms began to grow, Agnes was angry with me and asked me to sleep on the couch. I lay there on my back all night listening to the sound of her breathing.
I lowered my voice. “He just showed up here. Out of nowhere.”
Agnes crossed her arms. “He’s hurt.”
“But what’s he doing here?”
“He’s hurt.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and tugged my socks off, looking at the floorboards instead of Agnes. Sometimes my face did things she didn’t like. “We’re miles off the hiking trail.”
Agnes was wriggling out of her dress, shimmying it over her stomach, and I turned around to watch her. She still undressed with her back to me sometimes. Like she didn’t want to see me see her. “Not miles,” she said, with the fabric over her head. “It can’t really be miles.”
“At least a mile. I think it’s two.”
“Well . . .” She shrugged. Her hair fell feathery over her back. Her bra and underwear pressed lines into her body. The shape of her around them. “He said he got lost.”
“He said he got lost,” I agreed. In impatience, she turned to me, and I pulled my tank top over my head. A neat way of avoiding her gaze, and when I met it again, her smile was gentler.
“You can’t be so paranoid all the time.” But as if to soften it, she came over to me and put her hands on my shoulders. She hooked her fingers under the thick straps of my sports bra, ran them down its seams, paused, stroking at the center of my back. “You can act so jealous.”
There is a way Agnes has of saying something that is both teasing and not.
Jealousy was a kind of game between us, once, when we went to Agnes’s work parties, when she had work parties to go to. She would drift, leave me in corners so that I could watch her laugh and disappear into other people’s conversations. There was an ache to it, but also the knowledge that if I went to her, and put my arm around her waist, and my chin on her shoulder, she would lean against my chest, or touch my hair. Because there were limits, there were lines.
Maybe Agnes missed parties.
I reached around her back and took her bra off. In the valley of skin between her breasts, a miniature grove of enokis was sprouting. I pinched their stalks between my fingers.
“Oh.” Agnes looked down at them, at their small white faces. “Really?”
“Yes.” I took two of the slim mushrooms and tugged.
The slight, clever curve of her mouth, and she plucked at the elastic of my bra. “I don’t make a habit of walking around naked in front of strangers.”
She was beautiful, but I wanted her to be serious. I put my hands on her hips, and held her at a distance. “He’s going to see.”
“You worry.”
I put my forehead on her shoulder. “I do.” I had worried since that first champignon, since we walked out of the doctor’s office. I had worried every time she left the house, even with the mushrooms newly shaven, that they might burst forth and betray her, that if she walked down a public street, head after head might swivel to follow, hungrily scenting her strangeness. I had worried even before there were mushrooms at all.
Agnes sighed, and her hand slid up her chest, where she took the enokis between her thumb and forefinger. Her sleek fingers holding that small grove of white trees.
“Is it that you want me all to yourself?” She slid her other hand down her hip, tracing the lines of herself. “Is it that you would like to keep me?” There was a certain twist to her mouth, to the way she straightened her body. I am not always the best at telling what people mean.
“How long is he going to stay?”
“Until he can leave.” Agnes shook her head, her bright hair falling mussed around her face. “Let’s just not fight, all right? I don’t want to fight with you.”
I thought of Arthur, through the thin skeleton of our door, lying on the couch with the sinking pits of his ears open. Listening. But Agnes said, “Take your bra off,” and I did.
Naked, Agnes was a body carved from damp wood, porous, soft, replete with the surfacing noses of her mushrooms. “I don’t want to fight.” She took my hand and put it in that space where the enokis were blooming. Their heads were slick eyes on my knuckles. Agnes stroked my flank as one gentles an animal. I felt like an exposed nail bed, like skin that was never supposed to touch air. I put my mouth between her breasts, and closed my teeth on those rice-noodle stalks, held them tender in the moment between consumption and severing. Agnes’s hand slid into the waistband of my shorts; the silver berries of the enokis lay in the hollow of my throat, and I bit.
I ate of my lover between her breasts, and held the little heads of the enokis in my mouth for her to taste. I ate of my lover at the musty crease of her belly, where the smallest frill of oyster mushrooms had begun. “My beautiful thing,” I said, while I pulled her underwear down to her knees. “My agar wife.”
She laughed. She kissed her palm and then lay it on my shoulder. “Mushrooms don’t grow in agar,” she said. Agnes laughs during sex, this giggle, gasping and disbelieving; she is always startled by something. “Just bacteria.
“I can’t believe you want me sometimes,” she said, when I kissed her stomach again.
“Why wouldn’t you believe that?” I said, and leveled the heel of my hand above her clit. “My damp wife, my rotten-log wife, my mushroom wife. What’s unbelievable”—I lowered my head to her thigh, and nipped the yellow head of a chanterelle—“about any of this?”
Her nails pressed deep into my scalp. “You are,” she murmured, “so good to me.”
* * *
Agnes needed more sleep than I did, ever since the mushrooms began to grow. It was as if some of her energy went into birthing them.
The next morning I unwrapped the blankets from myself and laid them over her again. I could hear Arthur in the living room, the sound of his body on the creaky sofa. I did not want to go out, but I also did not want to leave Arthur alone any longer in the small cavity of our cottage. I wriggled into sports bra, jeans, tank top. There is a safety in simple, narrow clothes. I have always liked my body, the promise and the tool of it.
Arthur was still on the couch, his head lolling back across the pillows, holding a notebook over his head.
“You can walk a little, then,” I noted.
“Good morning.” He put the book down on his stomach. When I opened the fridge door, it obscured me from him, but also him from me. Agnes had started the overnight oats last night, and I took them out, the strawberries, the brown sugar from the cabinet. “You look nice today,” Arthur said, while I stretched to reach the box.
“You got up this morning.”
Laughing, he raised one hand over his head. Like I was pointing a gun at him but he wasn’t very impressed by it. “Sure did, Officer. I didn’t want to wake you girls up to help me piss.”
What an unpleasant thing to say.
I laid strawberries on Agnes’s oatmeal, with their points turned out like a flower blooming. I put a small, perfect well of sugar in the center of it. “Do you think you’ll be able to leave today?”
“Do you think I could get some of what you’re making?”
Agnes came out while the coffee was brewing, after I had given Arthur some oatmeal, in the hopes that he would put it in his mouth instead of talking. She was singing to herself. Sleep-easy and glowing in her blue silk robe, which draped lazily over fawnish shoulders, revealed the fine bar of her clavicle. I wondered if she had forgotten Arthur was here. I wondered if she hadn’t.
“Agnes!” he said, and held his arm up with the book in his hand, held so tight that the pages bent down around his fingers. “I’ve been looking at your sketches.”
Agnes stilled. She pulled each silky blue side of the robe closer over her chest and tightened the sash. Her flush was a blotchy pink up to the roots of her hair. “My sketches?”
“Yeah.” He peeled the book open, one of his fingers smearing over pencil lines, showing us Agnes’s deer, with its fecund horns of thriving mushrooms. On the next page, Agnes’s own face, blooming with fly agaric bright behind her ears, with an overhang of lovely red coral fungus above her brow.
“Oh,” said Agnes, “those really aren’t ready to be looked at.” She tried to take the book, but Arthur caught her quickly by the wrist and tugged her down on to the couch with him. He tucked his legs back, so there was enough space for her to sit without touching him, but barely. He laid the notebook in her lap.
“Really.” Agnes moved to cover the drawing with her palm.
“No.” Arthur grabbed her hand again. I thought of the beak of a crow, pressing sharp through flesh, picking a morsel away and exposing bone. “Look,” he said, and pointed at the drawn Agnes’s nose, “you have a wonderful line quality, but, I think”—he shifted his finger along the plane of a cheekbone—“your features aren’t quite properly set. You have the individual components down, but I’m not sure you have a grasp on the underlying structure.”
“When are you leaving?” I pictured a knife, and skin gathering like cloth at the end of it, creating a valley in the body.
Agnes shook her head at me, an aggrieved weariness on her face. Like it was me.
The body on the next page was mine. My body naked, my ribs in the lines and shadings of her pencil. Agnes drew me in motion, stretching on the hardwood floor in the morning, the strain of muscle in my arms, the plane of my stomach and chest, the dark fuzz of hair, down over my scalp, my neck. My body as if it, itself, were carved from hardwood, sleek, shining, knotty; the perfect effigy of myself.
“You model for her?” I watched Arthur measure my shape, compare it to the sketch.
“She does,” Agnes said, with my body dangerously visible in her eyes.
Arthur was still looking at me, at my arms, the skin of my throat, the places where my blood flushed. “You must be very close. You know”—he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth—“I ran this figure drawing workshop at my community college. It’s a skill, posing a model well, working with them.” He fluttered his hand toward Agnes. “This is good.”
His palm landed on her arm, on that bruisey flush of skin at the crease of her elbow, and he paused with two fingers pressed over her soft skin. “What’s this?” he said, and pinched a bit of her flesh, where a pale bump was rising.
* * *
I went into town that day, to do the grocery shopping. Of course I did not want to leave Arthur alone with Agnes, but of course we could not live on mushrooms alone. She was working on one of her articles in the office when I left, and Arthur was on his back on the couch.
“Isn’t there someone you could call?” I said, as I passed him.
He levered himself up on his elbows. “Geb,” in a voice like a foot in dry leaves, “have you thought about why you feel the need to be so confrontational with me?”
When a body is put out to rot, bacteria begin to break the cells down, and the enzymes in the pancreas cause the organ to digest itself. Fluid leaks from the mouth and nose. Maggots use their hooked mouths to spoon up the body’s liquids, as they squirm in through the skin, out through the eyes. Carrion birds up above take note.
“Don’t bother Agnes,” I said, as I turned toward the door. “She’s working.”
The ride into town was long, a pleasure with the sun on the back of my neck. I liked those fleet moments when Agnes was a fair maid closed in a tower and I was a knight running her errands, with a favor wrapped around my forearm. Town did not always seem so estranged from us. Agnes used to go in more than I did. She used to go to her book clubs, to her work, to her parties. The first time she asked me to come with her, I had to ask her if she thought that was a good idea.
She laughed. “It’s fine.” And shook her head with all the ease in the world. “They’re scientists, they’re not like that. Maybe some people around here are, but they’re not. It’s fine.”
