The Serpents of Paradise by Edward Abbey

Author:Edward Abbey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 1994-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

THEY SPENT the remainder of that summer at the fire lookout on North Rim. The regulation ninety days of passion came and passed and even so he continued to marvel in her, to dote upon her, to adore each detail of her flesh and hair and mind and character. They quarreled about nothing, now and then, when the isolation of the place cast a pall of melancholy over her spirit but resolved each quarrel in a warm solution of sexual salts, weeping, laughter, plenty of wine and long walks through the woods.

Mornings she worked on her Mozart sonatas and Bach partitas, sawing away on her fiddle inside the board-and-batten shack, sitting on a rickety chair before her music stand, turning pages. While Henry in his open-aired lookout ninety feet above closed his book or put down his binoculars and listened, found himself leaking tears over the perfection of Mozart and struck into awe by the vast echoing unanswerable vision of the grand Bach chaconne.

In the afternoon Claire straddled her ten-speed Peugeot and bicycled fourteen miles in a couple of hours to her evening job at the lodge, where she worked as hostess in the restaurant. Henry would meet her at the end of her shift, spend half her tips on drinks at the bar with buddies from the fire crew and their girlfriends. Half tipsy then they loaded her bike in his pickup—their bike, their pickup—and motored easily, idly through the woods and past the open meadows where deer grazed in the moonlight and up the dirt lane under the aspens to their cabin and tower on the highest point of the entire Kaibab Plateau. The air would be chill by then but a fire was set in the stove: Henry lit the fire and by its light undressed her (tired poor working girl) inch by inch and rolled her on her belly and putting his large hairy hands to practical use massaged her neck and ears, her shoulders, her shoulder blades and back, the small of the back above the twin dimples at the base of her spine, her rounded, full and lightly suntanned rump, her thighs calves ankles feet toes—and then, and then he made the return journey up her legs but always hesitated, paused near the midpoint of his pilgrimage to bite each plump buttock once, not too gently, and to roll her over again or perhaps to simply slide upon her as she was, belly down, and spread her legs with his knees, take the nape of her neck in his teeth, grasp her breasts in each hand, whisper sweet vile proposals in her ear before inserting himself to perform his duly obligated lawfully approved formally licensed divinely consecrated conjugal duty. She murmured in reaction, half asleep, then less asleep began to whimper like a child, like a girl, like a roused and dangerous woman until she had squeezed from that curious inner-space probe of his the last full measure of devotion. After which, sprawled and tangled limb on limb, they slept and snored innocent as babes in the wood.

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