Wild Girl Running, page 19
In his youth, he had seduced a handful of women before he realized how silly it was to chase people that he didn’t have time for. Modern ladies were coy and embarrassed. The air was always rusty with shame.
No woman was like Estelle, however.
Estelle did not have any expectation, and so he was able to doubly thrill her. The sensual pleasures they shared were entirely unknown to her, in theory as well as in practice, and he felt at times as he had when he guided her from the woods and she first saw that bountiful sea of lavender. Then, as now, he had the sense that she had never conceived of such a thing—the potential for so much wonder all in one sprawling location.
And they sprawled together, Ulysses and Estelle. Their bodies intertwined and their hearts raced in time and their limbs and hips and minds seemed to match pace together. Best of all, he felt as if he had suddenly come into her domain—though she, of the two of them, was the one less-versed in all these matters.
Yet, she was a natural. Of course she was a natural. And, better still, she made him natural in turn. They did not speak except for names. Instead their bodies grew so close that they seemed all the time to be two parts of a single invisible entity. One soul, united in the current between these two splendid bodies.
Oh, to hold her! To hold her. He loved to hold her, before and during and after. With her warm body pressed naked against his own, he stroked her cheek and pushed her hair back from her face. He sang to her, which she had liked since the first time they met; and oh, how she smiled through her sleepy drifting-off.
The best part of all, though, was not that blurred consummation. Yes, of course their union was an achievement worth celebrating—but the real glory, the real moment that mattered most to Ulysses, was waking up to nude Estelle still in his arms the next morning. Ah, he had waited for this since the first night he spent with her! When he had wooed her with chocolates and furs on behalf the modern world as though he were making a pitch in the stead of Duke Orsino; and as it had happened to Shakespeare’s displaced messenger, Estelle had instead fallen for Ulysses.
But oh, there was no trepidation on his side as there was on Viola’s. Once they were away from the city, his every last doubt dissolved as if by some form of primitive magic. He watched her doze in the early morning half-light and, as she slowly stirred, he kissed the eyelids that seemed to shine in the dark. With a soft sigh and a long, almost feline stretch, Estelle opened those lovely eyes and batted them slowly up at him.
“Good morning,” he told her very gently.
“Good morning,” she said. Then, smiling—remembering the night before, it would seem—that dear wild woman trailed her fingertips over his chest. “Again?”
Again, and again, and again! She was as eager to celebrate their love as he was, and it was a terribly refreshing opportunity for them both. While her screams of joy echoed through the empty little cabin, his rapid panting filled his mouth with the humidity of her flesh. Those little claws of hers sank into his back but somehow the sting only served to make the pleasure that much better. Soon they were dozing again, and then again they made love; and only when they became insatiably hungry for something more than one another did Ulysses at last force himself to get up and prepare them some food. He set the fire to blaze in the hearth, then made a stew with the ingredients they had brought along plus water from the well out back. That and a jar of peaches later and suddenly it was nightfall again.
Suddenly one day had passed by to find them that much closer to the one when they would be forced to return. This was where a fragile sense of time did a person a favor. If only Ulysses were not so keenly aware of the ticking of those hateful clocks!
Ah, but it was an invaluable lesson in its own right. Noticing as he did his own preoccupation with the future, he had the opportunity—the choice—to turn his mind to present matters. It became an exercise to keep himself bound there with the pleasure, the joy, of Estelle.
And Estelle took such joy in life—especially now that they were where she, like all the other plants and animals around, blossomed.
It was not that Estelle had been depressed while in the city, per se. But being with her in the forest made him realize how cautiously reserved she had become when around the creations of Man. No doubt she had somewhat withdrawn into herself out of caution, putting emphasis on observing and absorbing rather than interacting. She daydreamed frequently, and sighed often, and gazed out of the nearest window to watch the world at every opportunity.
But now, in the forest, it was as though she had become an entirely different girl. Every step she took was a kind of dance—a celebration of wonder. With wide eyes and the drumbeat of excitement to her movements, she drew Ulysses into the forest the second morning while refusing shoes and anything more than her shift. This white lace ghost moved silently through trees, and caressed the moss, and got down on hands and knees to see closely the bramble-tangled tuft of gray fur that made her declare with bold excitement, “Wolf, wolf!” How filled with effervescent ecstasy she was to examine the flowers, the insects, the mushrooms!
The mushrooms.
He noticed right away, as he had not had the opportunity to before, that she seemed to especially revere mushrooms. He did not know how it was with her before she was brought out of the forest the first time, but now when she saw a clutch of the little things she would bend her head and whisper, “Hello!” as though greeting an old friend.
After hearing this a few times, and having taught her the word for mushroom after the first instance, he asked, “Did you eat mushrooms often while living in the forest?”
The girl parsed his sentence in only a handful of seconds this time, then shook her head. “Mushrooms smart. Smart, like Ulysses.”
He laughed at that just slightly, not understanding what she meant. She was magical to him—a mystical being, a wood sprite. While he watched, she climbed trees and found streams and picked berries that she pressed into his mouth. And when she found a spot she liked (for the plush bed of moss or the view of the stars through the supple fingers of trees) she would draw him down to the earth and beg him for his love.
Yes, oh, Estelle! She was so pure. So natural and simple and happy out there in the forest.
And the thought of bringing this happy wild girl back to England with him—where nothing at all seemed natural anymore and where Cambridge would want to wring from her every last shining organic quality—made him feel sick.
It was difficult to say how he felt about what he had done to Estelle by bringing her from the wild. That it had been altogether a mistake? No, of course not—without bringing her from the woods and teaching her at least the amount of English he had already taught her, they never would have had the chance to fall in love.
Yet it did make him realize that the beauty of Estelle’s nature—her true character—lay in her innocent heart and sinless perception the world. It was in her freshness, her levity, her movement from moment to moment without that burden of the long-term future felt by Ulysses every day.
And the more time she spent in the city, educated in the means and mores of men, the more he squelched and tamed and restrained that gleaming inner nature until it was doomed to be a shadow of itself. What he was really doing, he realized, was not educating her, but domesticating her.
Worse…domesticating her for Cambridge.
Yes: during the first few days of their consummated romance, these initial periods of time as a couple, the researcher realized that all he had done was ultimately fruitless. He could never, would never take her to Cambridge. He would never chase the acclaim or the credit of her discovery.
But he would never let her go, either.
This resolve fomented in him on the day that she convinced him to try the mushrooms—not the ones out in the woods where they stayed but ones that, going by their brittle, dried-out appearance, she had evidently brought from her original home. They had been out through the woods on their fifth day of solitude when she nearly screamed with delight and hurried to see another bunch of mushrooms gathered on a log. “Aha,” she cried, trying to pick them. He gasped and caught her hand.
“Oh, no, no, Estelle—we can look, but we’d ought not to touch. Many mushrooms are poisonous, you know.”
The girl gave him a cross look at that, a young lady looking at an out-of-touch old man. “No,” she corrected, repeating with an avid point, “mushrooms smart. Teach Estelle. Teach like Ulysses, and more.”
Not understanding at all, he insisted again, somewhat lamely, “But they’re toxic, dear. Everything but the buttons and the morels are in question to the layman, even mushroom experts occasionally pick the wrong kind and die.”
Her eyes rolled and she looked at him somewhat sourly—but, with a huff, she did leave the fresh patch in the log. The girl gripped his hand. “Come, come,” she said, having picked up on one of his many manners of speech.
Soon they stood again in the cabin, where Estelle dug through her bag before producing something that quite shocked him. The dry and twisted mushrooms she extended looked like little phalluses, or maybe some kind of desiccated flatworm; he looked at them in astonishment, plucking one up and examining it in the light.
“Now these are interesting, but I would still have to talk to a friend in the field before I—Estelle!”
Making eye contact with him, the girl crammed about half of the dried mushrooms into her mouth with a high, wicked laugh. He dropped the one in his hand to grab her, insisting, “You must spit them out, Estelle—no! Don’t swallow—”
Too late. She gulped the chewed mushrooms down and then extended the rest, insisting, “Ulysses eat. Mushrooms smart. Make ideas, tools, dreams.”
Frowning, he accepted the mushrooms she insisted on holding for him, including the one she had picked from the floor and blown off in a habit learned from Bonnie whenever a pin was dropped in the wild girl’s dressing. Estelle waited, expectant, and he studied the things in his hand again.
“I don’t understand,” he told her after a moment. She rolled her eyes.
“Estelle eat mushroom lots. Estelle not hurt, Estelle happy—happy with Ulysses.”
In other words: I eat these things all the time! Aren’t I still here?
He supposed that was true, but it still didn’t make a lot of sense to him. Why would one eat a toxic mushroom and take the risk? What could the pay-off possibly be? Ulysses turned the twisted fungus over between his fingers. While Estelle clambered down the ladder from their loft to leave him to his decision, he recalled records of a strange case from a little over a hundred years prior.
In 1799, a family had picked mushrooms in London’s Green Park and, upon preparing a meal with the things, experienced all manner of bizarre but euphoric mental effects. Their pupils had expanded; they had burst into long bouts of spontaneous laughter; they had experienced what had been noted as delirium; but, ultimately, they had recovered just fine after the incident with no ill effects to speak of. The whole thing had brought to mind recorded instances of mass ergot poisoning, where whole towns were simultaneously stupefied—but not necessarily harmed—by the effects of fungus-infused grain.
The researcher frowned once more at the mushrooms that Estelle had given him: mushrooms that, unlike the fresh ones in the woods, he had not been able to stop Estelle from taking because they were already on her person. All at once, thinking of those historic incidents and of the girl wandering about downstairs with some kind of toxic fungus working its way through her system, Ulysses suddenly had to ask himself—
Why did he think he knew more about nature than someone who spent her whole life a part of it, rather than apart from it?
This was the first of many revelations that the night would hold for him. With a reluctant sidelong glance at the girl who had taken a position near the front wall of the cabin to see him from where she waited, Ulysses picked up one of the mushrooms and sniffed. It didn’t smell like anything, but oh, the taste of the first was so acrid that his mouth began to water and the nausea was evident at once. Somehow, Estelle had overcome that effect and managed to eat her entire palmful in a few enthusiastic chews. Ulysses had a hard time, especially as his saliva softened the dried things and left them repulsively slimy.
But then, from her watching vantage, she called, “Hooray, Ulysses!”
And, well…Ulysses was far from the first man in history who ate something stupid because a beautiful woman seemed to approve.
At least he’d be able to write a paper about this someday, assuming he survived. With the bitter taste still clinging to his mouth, Ulysses lowered down the ladder and laughed as Estelle more or less threw herself upon him.
“You’re quite sure this won’t hurt us?”
It was a useless question to ask, owing to the fact that he had just eaten the things one way or another…but Estelle’s rapid nod did soothe his fearful mind. “Nice mushroom,” she assured him in approval. Then, stroking his face and smiling, she added, “Nice Ulysses.”
Ugh. Ulysses may have been nice…but as to the niceness of the mushroom, the jury was still out. Estelle had insisted on going outside right away, and hand-in-hand they resumed their natural explorations. Paying careful attention to both his condition and Estelle’s, Ulysses noticed after something on the order of half an hour that the girl’s pupils had grown to the size of dish plates. Worried, he examined her flushed cheeks and throat, then asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to go back?”
She laughed at that and shook her head. Soon, sighing with pleasure, the girl found a lovely clearing where a few small patches of wildflowers had grown up around a tiny crystal pond. Just large enough to wade into or maybe even swim without much risk of drowning, the secluded body of water housed a cluster of little frogs who hopped happily about until seen—at which point, they promptly disappeared into some reeds and fell completely silent. Giddy with the thrill of it, Estelle slipped her shift over her head and waded into the water: naked, lovely, her golden skin dappled with sweat and sweet pink blush.
“Be careful, Estelle,” he said, unable to help fussing after her, still wondering what those mushrooms were supposed to have done. Where was the ecstasy? Where was the delirium?
All things in their time. He noticed it first when he turned his head a bit too quickly and reality seemed somehow to lag—a bit like being drunk, he thought, although the novel qualities of this substance soon revealed themselves. Namely, as he sat amid the wildflowers to watch his true love splash around, his mind began to somehow float. It seemed to raise above him, away from him, into a new momentum of thought that was totally uncontrolled by the force of his will. He barely noticed how sweaty he was for quite some time: he was focused almost entirely upon his own mind, the chain of consciousness that sped off into the distance.
Look! The mushroom was perfectly harmless, wasn’t it? Didn’t seem to do anything, as it happened—maybe made Estelle a bit giddy, made the world sway around him. Other than that, what was the problem? Why had he really been so ignorant, so unwilling to listen to Estelle? His ego really was getting in the way. That Freud fellow in Vienna, he was really onto something with all that chatter about the ego and the superego and the id. Maybe not completely right, but onto something all the same. A person’s conception of themselves was often completely removed from the way others perceived them—the true, shining light of being was buried underneath all the stuffy pretensions of social expectation and political goals and career ambitions.
Why, Ulysses was so obsessed with proving himself ‘right’—proving his way of life was superior to Estelle’s—that for all his yammering about wanting to teach her and be taught by her, he really hadn’t learned a thing. No, no: he just saw a girl in need of education. Really she was a woman, more competent and wiser than he in the ways of basic human instinct and natural survival.
Hadn’t he been struck with terror at the mere idea of starting a fire on his own when he was lost in the woods and came upon her that first time? Hadn’t he become completely detached from his roots? Darwin, now there was another fellow who had a thing or two to say—why, he and Estelle and the monkeys and apes of the jungle all shared some shining common ancestor, some true Eve whose pedigree lay in all of them. Was his way of life not a disruption of all of that? An improvement, yes, but still a cloistering disruption to natural order? Was there not some balance that could be struck between a completely wild life of simian intelligence and the existence of the conscious human being with his buildings, his electricity, his clothes?
His clothes—Ulysses became aware of his clothes and the sweat plastering them to his body. He rose to take them off. Estelle, her smile as bright as the noonday sun, hurried over with a happy cry to assist him—then, just as soon as he was free of all these foolish human contraptions, she made fierce love to him. Under the effects of the mushroom it took much longer than normal, felt much more powerful than even that first time, and seemed to take him to a transcendent dimension of consciousness about which he thought he might like to write a paper someday. By the time it was over, the psilocybin had gripped hold of both their consciousnesses and the sun began to set.
He was almost worried about getting back to the cabin because he of course had no idea of the way—then he realized that was how Estelle probably still felt every time they went to the park. To her, the buildings of the city were as wholly indistinct as he found the trees of this forest. Estelle, however, had no worries. It seemed to him that the only time he had ever seen her worry was when he was out playing poker with Tom and Jason. Oh, they’d never believe this story! He wasn’t sure how he would describe it to anyone.
After all—it was such a personal, intimate experience, not just between one another but with themselves. Sometimes each one of them would lapse into intense silence, whether they were embracing or on different sides of that lovely clearing. Mostly, though, they communicated in whatever way felt right, through speech or silent caress. Eventually they ended up on their backs together, watching the stars.
