As always, Thurston led the way. A shambling bear of a man in his bulky Irish sweater, he tramped resolutely through the forest, footfalls chuffing in the litter.
Rebecca came plodding behind, fending off whippy branches, skating on pine cones and stumbling on roots. At home in the early-morning darkness she had pulled on her lederhosen imagining that their trek up the forested flanks of the Cascades would be a lighthearted stroll on grassy avenues in a sunny sea of flowers and bird song. O sure, she thought as she slogged on, yodeling ‘Valdaree Valdarah’ maybe.
The woods were dark when they started. Gossamer mist floated in the shadows. Beautiful, thought Becky, like a calendar painting. But her glasses kept fogging up and a clammy chill crept under her clothes. the beauty of the woods was the last thing on her mind.
Soon Eventually smoky shafts of sunlight pierced the olivine gloom. Trees began ticking and steaming in the warmth of the coming day.
“Well, dear?”
The lusty shout came from Thurston. He was up the trail, standing with his fists on his hips, frowning back at her as if her inability to keep up were a deliberate attempt to annoy him.
She jogged clumsily up to him and was rewarded with his famous eye-crinkling smile. “I think we’re looking at the last of the serviceberry, my dear. I’d be surprised if it ventured any higher than this.” He held out a handful of small, brownish berries. “Have some. They’re good.”
“Thank you, Thurston.”
She scratched them out of his palm.
“I hope it’s not boring you, sweetheart. Do you find these outings tedious?”
“Oh, no,” she smiled gamely, “I knew you were a botanist when I took up with you.”
“’When you took up with --’ Ho, that’s funny, you know. As if I were a jazz musician and you were a chorine.
“And your legs, my dear? Are they any better?” he asked. “Is the lotion helping?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Poor Becky. You’ve certainly made your nutritional contribution to the mosquito population, haven’t you?”
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Well,” he rumbled, “you won’t have to worry about mosquitoes much longer. Getting too high for ‘em. “He started off as if commencing a long march. With ponderous jauntiness, he held his finger in the air and bellowed, “Come on Becky. Try to keep up. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Fix the pole star over your shoulder and it’s straight on ‘til morning.”
Rebecca lost no time falling behind. She trudged doggedly up track, scanning the trail for slick patches, rocks, roots and pine cones.
They’d been underway for more than an hour when Rebecca looked up and was surprised to find herself in a meadow. She shielded her eyes with a salute and surveyed miles of grassland tilting up to a peacock-blue sky and a billowy cloud resting on the horizon. Breezes combed the tall grass. In the distance, Thurston beckoned impatiently.
Rebecca tried to catch up, but she was exhausted and simply couldn’t work her legs any faster.
How long had it been? she wondered. Two years? Two and a half? Had they been married that long? As she pushed through the meadow, she returned in memory to her first sight of Thurston. She had been a first year graduate student and Thurston von Bredow was a legend.
The rumpled, pipe-smoking old gentleman with his wild tangle of gray hair, leprechaun’s eyebrows and twinkling eyes had been principle author of nearly sixty journal articles. He received the Knowlton medal at fifty. He was a botanist’s botanist, a legend.
Late one evening, while searching for a journal in the archives, Becky turned a corner and nearly fainted. There he was. She’d been flustered and embarrassed.
He recognized her; greeted her cordially and told her he was impressed to find her in the stacks at such a late hour. His nearness had been like an anesthetic. Becky couldn’t manage a single word. She smiled, feeling like a fool.
She found him intimidating; was never at her best around him. She recalled the morning in plant anatomy lab; she had been preparing slides. Dr. Von Bredow bent over her shoulder to inspect the work at hand and she had gone soft inside at the scent of his bitter cologne, the whistle of breath in his nose.
She was teased by her roommates about romantic designs they imputed to Dr. Von Bredow. Rebecca laughed along with them, but she had to admit that Dr. Von Bredow did seem fond of her. He paid a lot of attention to her, especially at the teas. Working her way up the meadow, Rebecca’s lips twisted in a bittersweet smile as she reflected on those damned teas. She hated them. Everyone did. Ghastly fireside affairs where attendance was de rigueur for any graduate student wishing to demonstrate her seriousness of purpose. Quiet, turgid, affairs they were, where the smiles were rictuses of pain, where youngsters barely out of their teens balanced teacups on their knees, spoke in low tones and sprinkled their conversation with mature locutions like “quite frankly” and “notwithstanding.”
Dr. Von Bredow held the gatherings at his house and he was the only one who ever seemed at ease. Draped in his trademarked cardigan, he ensconced himself in the room’s single Regency chair like an avuncular lion and in his rumbling basso profundo, regaled them with anecdotes. He had a way of guffawing with his lips pressed together that some of the more ambitious male students were already starting to imitate. It was at one of the teas, in a moment of genteel laughter at one of Dr. Von Bredow’s mordant stories, that Rebecca caught him staring at her with an odd, whimsical smile. As if his anecdote had been for her alone.
When it came time to assemble a thesis committee, she summoned the courage to ask Dr. Von Bredow to preside over it. He gave her an eye-wrinkling smile of pure pleasure and said he’d be honored. As chairman of her committee, Dr. Von Bredow met with her regularly to discuss her progress. Eventually she felt less shy. She began to relax and there were moments when she had the temerity to believe they were actually becoming friends despite their ages and stations in life.
She found Dr. Von Bredow remarkably easy to talk to. He actually listened, he responded. He was attentive and sYmpathetic, so unlike the younger, unformed males of her acquaintance. She found him to be, in his way, quite youthful.
And there was something else. Rebecca could hardly help noticing his occasional hungry glance at her chest. She knew the look; what woman didn’t?
One morning in his office, he settled back in his crushed leather chair, steepled his hands and gave her a forlorn look. In a soft, mumbling whisper, he awkwardly revealed to Becky that he was interested in her as a woman as well as a graduate student.
She slowly realized he was proposing marriage.
To say Becky was stunned wouldn’t begin to describe it. No man had ever shown the slightest romantic interest in her. She had thrown herself into botany fully expecting a career that would supplant marriage and family, a profession that would sustain the focus of her active years and provide for her dotage.
There was no denying that Thurston was a fascinating companion. And there were any number of solid reasons for accepting his proposal. But love, she reluctantly admitted, wasn’t one of them.
Rebecca always tried to see a thing from many angles. She reminded herself that marrying for love was a recent innovation. Throughout most of human history, men and women had teamed up to fend off wild animals and hostile neighbors and to breed children for security in their old age. If love grew from such an alliance, so much the better, but it had never been the main reason to marry.
And why should it be? Especially when the odds on connubial success were no better than flipping a coin? Surely their mutual passion for the plant sciences provided Thurston and her with a strong foundation. Love could be learned, she was certain of it.
And Rebecca had always been a good learner.
Rebecca Fetzer Von Bredow.
She lay in bed that night, blotting her eyes with a forearm, weeping soundlessly.
# # #
In late August, Rebecca Fetzer Von Bredow stepped into the hush of Thurston’s fieldstone house to stay. There were Turkish carpets on polished oak floors, mahogany book cases, oil landscapes under track lighting. There were cloisonne bowls, credenzas, shady nooks and cool Spanish arches.
It didn’t take long for Mrs. Von Bredow to realize that for all Thurston’s cordial bonhomie and boyish charm in the lecture hall, he was a tired man, more elderly than she’d thought, heavier, and his hands were like ice.
He was unfailingly charming and solicitous, but there was a distracted air about his attentions, as if she were an amusing child who had come to live with him.
He made few demands on her. He spent his days at the botany department and most of his time at home was spent in the lath house.
Life with Thurston, if not brimming with warmth and affection was, at least, secure, stable and quiet, Rebecca thought. And when she was visited by the occasional beacon-flash of her future as a faculty wife -- teas and committees, somber afternoons caring for a distracted, elderly man -- she swallowed hard and tried to count her blessings.
# # #
Afternoon found them in a conifer forest. They had stopped for lunch and a rest. Rebecca had was walking easily again, under the tall pines on springy carpets of matted needles. They entered a glade spangled with blue daisies the size of dimes.
“Look darling,” Thurston cried, “Cog’s Eye daisies. Just where Gunderson said they’d be. Who would have thought Bellis glabrous could eke out a living up here in this acid litter?”
He slipped his pack off, propped it against a moss-covered log. He hunkered down unfastened the plant press. “He needs twenty specimens for his Taxonomy 400 class,” he explained.
Rebecca set her pack next to Thurston’s. She swung her arms a little to loosen up and then got down and began troweling up cog’s-eye daisies.
Thurston arranged each specimen for best display on a square of herbarium cardboard, covered it with a sheet of absorbent paper and stacked it in the press.
When they had twenty good ones, he placed the top of the press on the herbarium sheets, threaded the canvass belts, stepped heavily on the top and yanked the belts tight.
Rebecca sat on a log, tipping her face to the sun. She closed her eyes and let herself be warmed. Thurston sat beside her. He scooted close and whispered, “You really are quite lovely with a sheen of perspiration on your skin, you know.”
She opened an eye and peered at him. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Oh no, my dear, I mean it, I really do.”
He astounded her by draping an arm over her shoulders. “You know something?” he murmured in low, intimate tones, “I feel like, hm, perpetuating the species.”
“Sweat makes you feel like -- Thurston, you’re not serious.”
He pressed fervent lips to her temple and planted a line of hot little kisses down her neck.
She turned away and laughed helplessly. “Thurston,” she whickered, “Thurston, this is too much.”
He pulled her roughly to him and petted the front of her lederhosen.
“Thurston,” she grabbed his wrist with both hands, “what is wrong with you?”
“We’re married, aren’t we? Rebecca, for God’s sake, we’re alone here, free -- really free; free to do whatever we like.” He stood up, pulled his sweater over his head and let it fall to the ground. He began undoing his trousers. “Free to love,” he croaked dryly. “Free to... make love.”
“Oh, Thurston, please --” She averted her eyes from the sight of something red protruding from his shirttails.
He held his arms out, displaying himself in a sort of Falstaffian glory, belly and breast shining in the glade’s watery light.
“Rebecca,” he whispered.
Oddly comical with his wagging erection, he came up to her and tried to unfasten her lederhosen. There was a struggle, and then, like a bad dream, Rebecca was in her brassiere, doughy flesh bulging over the tight leather waist.
Thurston pirouetted in front of her, doing a strange dance with her blouse.
She hugged herself. “Give it back, Thurston. Please. I’m cold.”
Urgently he kissed her chest, fumbled with her brassiere fastenings. “You’ll be warm, I promise. Warm-warm-warm.”
“Don’t, Thurston, please...”
“What?” he asked crossly. “What are you afraid of? Aren’t you the girl who told me she wanted to do it more often?”
“Not here.”
“And why not here? There’s power here Rebecca, the power of wilderness, the sky, the earth, the forest. This is where we were designed to make love.”
She stiffened as he yanked impatiently at her brassiere fastenings. She never dreamed Thurston would be capable of anything like this. . and yet, perhaps if she could think of him as a stranger. . maybe if she imagined herself to be someone else, all this might be sort of . .
She drew a sharp breath and folded her arms as Thurston lifted away her brassier. He clapped his large hands over her breasts, palping them ardently, kissing her everywhere, wet and sloppy.
“I don’t want to.”
“Please, Rebecca, please.”
“I’m not clean.”
“That’s how I want you.”
“What if someone comes?”
“No one will come.”
He worked her lederhosen down to her knees, then her underwear. Finally, she sat naked on the log, knees tightly together, eyes squeezed shut. He moved in close, held her and suddenly there was no place for Becky to put her arms, except around Thurston.
He threw their clothes on the ground, flattened them and gently twisted her off the log. Rebecca fled down a tunnel deep into the mind of her mind, trying desperately to ignore Thurston’s rough, dog-like muzzling.
But in her sphere of silence, a voice whispered: Isn’t this what you wanted? More energy? More pggsion? Well. look at him. Rebecca. let him in . . .
His hands were leaving warm trails on her skin as he caressed her.
Timidly, she pecked the corner of his mouth. His tongue spilled into her mouth and his other tongue spilled into her other mouth and they groaned.
Rebecca flushed crimson, her muscles tightened and a growl crawled out of her, a sound she hadn’t known she could make.
# # #
Pine boughs plashed gently in the breeze. Peeps and soft warbles floated out of the woods.
Rebecca lay on her back staring torpidly into the pine boughs. Thurston sprawled across her breast like a sleeping baby. She massaged him tenderly. For the first time in her life, trite as sounded, she felt like Fat little Becky Fetzer from the Bronx. a woman. had been well-fucked.
She liked the sound of that, the freedom of saying it (even if only to herself) and best of all, having it be true. Becky Fetzer. you’ve been well fucked.
Her wantonness made her smile.
“Thurston,” she whispered, “that was wonderful.” She eased out from under him, tugged her clothes free and when she was dressed, she knelt beside him and said, “Hey, sleepyhead.”
She kneaded his shoulders affectionately. “Thurston, darling,” she whispered, “it’s getting late.”
She nudged him and tipped him over onto his back. He had an enormous erection.
“Oh, my,” the new Becky vamped.
Thurston’s eyes opened, but he didn’t look at her. He gazed fixedly into the pines.
A deer fly spiraled down to land on his forehead.
Thurston didn’t move.
The fly walked crookedly toward his eye.
Thurston didn’t move.
Thurston was a noisy sleeper. So where were his usual snorts and muttering?
And why isn’t he shooing that fly?
Because the man is sleeping, that’s why, Rebecca told herself. He’s an old man, he’s been hiking since sun-up and then all this. . . rolling around. He’s having a post-coital sleep.
The fly waded into his eyelashes.
# # #
Thurston’s face was gray and jowly. Large bruises mottled his chest and belly and the muscles on the backs of his hands contracted, spreading his fingers like talons.
Rebecca sat on a log, face in her hands.
Suddenly Thurston farted.
Rebecca looked up, laughed. “Say, ‘excuse me,’ Thurston.”
Thurston said nothing. She expelled a burst of hissing, hysterical laughter that ended in strangled sob.
“You scared the hell out of me, you know. . Thurston, say something. . . anything.”
# # #
In the powder blue evening, she hunched over a small fire heating coffee. She had wrapped Thurston in a canvass half-shelter. He was a dark, brooding cocoon in the firelight.
“Can you hear me, Thurston?” she whispered. “Thurston, darling, are you here? I want you to know how sorry I am. What did you ever see in me, anyway? Just a dumb little grad student . . .” She put her face in her hands and mewled.
She lowered herself to the ground, her chin fell to her chest and in spite of everything, sleep enrobed her.
# # #
Cold, gray morning light seeped into the sky.
Rebecca climbed to her feet, her stiff muscles making an agonizing tai chi demonstration of it. She rummaged through a deadfall until she found a couple of branches, thick enough, dry and reasonably straight. She snapped off the side growth and dragged them back to the glade. She used rope and canvass straps to lash together a sledge. She rolled Thurston onto it and secured him with webbed belts from the plant press.
She lifted the handles of the sledge to her shoulders and started down the mountain.
# # #
Decades later, time brought an end to Rebecca.
Her daughter Naomi flew in to make the arrangements. She stayed in her mother’s townhouse, sifting through the place, cleaning and straightening up and assigning everything to one of four categories: Keep, sell, donate or discard.
In her mother’s bedroom closet, Naomi found a metal box filled with documents, certificates, commendations and awards. The box held a bound copy of her mother’s Ph.D. Thesis and below that was a manila envelope.
Naomi sat down on the bed and pulled out the contents. There was her parents’ wedding license. And a photograph of them on their wedding day. Naomi smiled sadly at the beaming, heavy-set young woman in braids and the somber-looking older man, her father.
The envelope had been stiffened with a sheet of herbarium paper. On it was a crudely-mounted cluster of what looked like faded blue dandelions. In the lower right corner someone had scrawled, “Bellis glabrous and a date. The cardboard was scuffed and water damaged.
Filthy, she thought, tossing it onto the discards.
