Dark of the Moon

ate pizza, drank beer, and watched the thunderheads grow from white globes into pink anvils, as the sun slid down in the sky. Joan gave him a talk:
    “I was thinking about us last night, and I don’t think this is a real relationship. You’re my transition guy. You’re the guy who gets me back into life, and then goes away.”
    “Why am I gonna go away?” Virgil was feeling lazy, lying back on the blanket, fingers knitted behind his head as a pillow; and he didn’t disagree.
    “Because you are,” she said. “We’d be serious about as long as one of your marriages was serious. You’re a good guy, but you’ve got your problems, Virgil. You manipulate. I can feel you doing it, even if I can’t figure out what you’re doing. That would drive me crazy after a while. And I have the feeling you’re pretty happy when you’re alone.”
    “That doesn’t sound so good,” he said.
    “Well, you’re gonna have to figure yourself out,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not giving you the gate. I’m just saying…”
    “…we’re not for all eternity.”
    “We are not,” she agreed. “But the sex has been grand. I didn’t even remember how much I used to like it. My husband…I don’t know. It just got tiresome. He was more interested in playing golf than playing house, that’s for sure.”
    “Good player?” Virgil asked.
    “Not bad, I guess. The last year we were married, one of the most intimate things we’d do is lay in bed, and he’d tell me about every one of seventy-seven shots on the golf course that day—the club, the ball flight, what happened when it landed, bad breaks, good breaks, what he was thinking when he putted. But you know…someday, you just gotta grow up.”
    “Why’d you marry him in the first place?” Virgil asked.
    “He was good-looking, hard worker, available,” she said.
    “There are worse things in the world.”
    “Yeah, but he just didn’t flip my switch,” she said. She plucked a long grass stem and nibbled on the butt end. “I thought we’d grow into it, but we didn’t.”
    “A lot of women think men are like raw lumber—something that you can build a house out of, with a lot of hard work,” Virgil said. “But some guys, you know, they’re going to do what they’re going to do. Can’t work with them. They’re not good lumber.”
    “Is that what happened with your wives?”
    “Oh…no. I just married them because they were hot and I was stupid. Actually, all of us were stupid. Didn’t know what we were doing. Somebody had to work. Couldn’t go dancing all the time…”
     
    T HEY WERE STILL talking about it, watching the birds, arguing about whether the thunderheads were coming in or would slide to the south, eating pizza…
    And a slice of a woman’s laughter slid over the hillside like a butterfly, fragile, attractive, and definitely there.
    “Who’s that?” Joan asked, sitting up.
    Virgil shrugged. “I haven’t seen anyone…”
    “Somebody in the dell,” Joan said. “Come on. Let’s sneak up on them.”
    Virgil thought: Oh, no. Stryker. “Joan, maybe it’d be better, you know, let it go.”
    “Don’t be retarded,” she said. “C’mon. We’re missing something.”
    “Joan, I think it might be Jim. And Jesse.”
    She looked at him for a moment, a wrinkle appearing between her eyes, then, amused, she said, “So what? Let’s go, you sissy.” And she was off across the hillside, using the scrub brush as cover, moving through the weeds in a crouch, a country-girl sneak. Instead of approaching the dell from the top, she led the way around to the north side, and then got down on her hands and knees as she crawled up to the edge of the bluff, where they could look down into the pool.
    When Virgil eased up beside her, she whispered, “Oh, my. I never suspected Jim even knew about that.”
    Stryker and Jesse were on an air mattress on the same rock where Virgil and Joan had left their clothes and bags. Jesse was naked, on her back, her hands on Stryker’s head, which was between her thighs. “That’s disgusting,” Virgil said. “They’re like a couple of animals.”
    “Shhh, they’ll hear you. Did you tell Jim about doing this? Or did he think it up on his own? I’d hate to think you were sharing our little secrets.”
    “Believe me, I’m not sharing our little secrets,” Virgil said.
    Joan said, “Whoops, here we go. Main event.”
    Stryker was moving over Jesse, stopped at her navel, her breasts. Joan pulled at