Chapter 9: Remembering

It's raining today, an indoor day, and I'm in a cloud, kind of. I'd call it pensive, except that my thoughts aren't really coherent enough for that. It's a sit-in-front-of-the-fire day, and my spouse and the cat and I are doing just that. She's on one couch reading today's New York Times (my wife, I mean, not the cat), and I'm on the couch opposite her, my laptop on my lap, the cat between us at a comfortable distance from the fire. I know that if I put my hand down on the cat's belly, a reliable compass for telling which direction the fire is in, as if anyone really needed that, it would be warmer than the rest of her, maybe even too warm. But then, cats seem to have a built-in meter for knowing when enough is enough, and she moves closer or further away as it suits her.

The rain is streaking the windows, to our dismay when we first saw this happening, since when we bought the house a few months ago we spent several thousand dollars oiling the roof and putting new gravel on and cleaning and repairing the gutters. This after seeing in a heavy rain when the house was first on the market the water cascading from the gutter in front.

So I went outside. It wasn't raining that hard, after all, and saw that the water wasn't coming from the gutter at all. It's coming from the clay tiles that form that part of the roof in the front of the house. It appears they extend a little too far over the gutter itself, so the water runs off the edge of the tiles, misses the gutter entirely, and falls straight down.

Does this have anything to do with Julie, with watching? Well, yes and no. In fact, it really doesn't have anything directly to do with her. She's off again with Stephanie for the afternoon. I think they're at Stephanie's house, although I'm not sure, and they're supposed to be finishing their English essays which are due tomorrow, Monday. They're supposed to be writing their own essays, and I'm pretty sure they are.

I'm imagining what they do when they take a break. I'm wondering whether they're horny all the time like I was when I was their age. It's a joke, really, something that every kid, at least every boy, discovers when he reaches puberty. You're hard all the time, it seems, even if you don't necessarily stay hard. Sitting on the school bus on the way to school can do it, if there are enough potholes and enough friction. Thank god most of us are beating off enough so that we don't come in our pants when that happens.

I wonder if it feels to Stephanie and Julie that their skin is on fire, that every touch burns? Mine did. It was like a thousand tiny pricks on some days. Even a breeze was enough to set those little fire tongs going. I thought it would drive me crazy. On some days I think it did. How does anyone make it through adolescence, anyway? It's a wonder the whole thing doesn't turn into a mass orgy, each and every day.

Fireplaces. That brings back memories, it does. There's something about the flames, something about the heat, especially at night and especially if it's raining. My spouse and I have spent many happy hours in front of fires, and we've made love in firelight more than once. I have a feeling that we haven't been unobserved, either.

I'm writing this long after the events of the summer I started telling you about. You'll remember I told you about the Christmas party we let Julie host in December, the mistletoe, and a little extra zing to the kiss I received from Stephanie's mother, Mary. We had a little experience with Mary later that winter, in fact. Now, I'm thinking that maybe we three, my spouse, Mary and I, weren't quite as private as we thought we'd been. Another subject that maybe we'll learn more about from Julie one day, depending on what she chooses to share from that diary of hers.

It was sometime in February, I think. Stephanie was staying the night and her mother had brought her over after a really long day for the girls. They were doing some kind of intense winter workouts in the gym in between the fall water polo season and the start of spring swimming. I think they'd been at it for most of the afternoon, and it was two pretty pooped kids who showed up at our house early in the evening.

Mary seemed a little at loose ends, and my spouse and I decided to invite her to stay for pizza. She accepted, gladly, it seemed, and we all chowed down. Don't let anyone tell you teenage girls can't put pizza away. These kids ran on it, seemingly, but they worked out enough that it didn't seem to stick, unlike the way it seemed to stick on us. Girl athletes have good appetites, and not just for food.

Anyway, we all ended up watching some stupid movie after the pizza disappeared. Funnily enough, the girls were the ones who ended up heading for bed. Usually it's the other way around. We're ready to crash but the kids are just getting going. They're too young to drink, in bars, anyway, but they discovered a 24-hour coffee shop down the road a ways, and that's become their new favorite late night place to hang out. I don't know how much coffee they put away, but there's always someone who has a car and can take them. Not Julie, not yet. She has her license, a full license, in fact, so we're paying full insurance rates, but she's got to complete an as-yet-undetermined number of hours behind the wheel with mom or dad before we'll let her solo. I doubt we're going to let her have more than one friend in the car with her at first, either.

We know Mary well enough by now that there's no need to keep up a conversation just to hear ourselves talk, so sometimes we talked and sometimes we didn't. I put water on for tea after a while, but we let the firelight and the fire's warmth fill the room and ourselves open to the light and the warm air. I think I got about halfway through my tea when I started to doze. I woke up when I heard my spouse.

"Mary, have you ever been to a spa?"

"Yeah, we went to that one in Napa last year."

"The clothing-optional one?"

"That's the one."

I opened my eyes when I heard "clothing-optional." Well, I didn't hear the hyphen, of course, but that's a minor detail.

"All of you?"

"Yup. Jeff, Stephanie and me."

"Did you go bare?"

Mary looked at my spouse, then at me.

"We did."

She laughed.

"It was quite a trip, let me tell you."

My spouse was interested, I could see that. She leaned forward.

"Did Stephanie go bare, too?"

Mary laughed again.

"She sure did. To tell the truth, I was kind of surprised. We didn't make her, she decided for herself."

Mary shook her head.

"I thought Jeff was going to have a heart attack at first. You should have seen his eyes bug out."

She laughed again.

"Then I thought he was going to have a permanent hard-on. That's pretty much a no-no at clothing-optional resorts, you know. Either get it down or get out. And they frown on public sex as a remedy, usually.