The Sweetness of the Pear: Sylvia

***

When I woke up the next morning, Sylvia was not there. I thought maybe she had gone to the bathroom, so I waited a while in bed. But eventually I got up and went out to the kitchen. Tom and Ilsa were making coffee.

"Good morning," said Tom. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yes, thanks. Very well."

"I thought we might take a boat along the river today. Would you like to see the floating market?" He set out four cups. I assumed that Sylvia was around, perhaps doing a chore.

"Great."

Sylvia did not show up until the breakfast things had been put away. She was naked, not even wearing sandals, and slightly out of breath.

"Morning, all." She helped herself to some coffee and a bit of sweet rice.

Tom seemed to take her absence in stride. "We've been talking about taking a boat down the river. Maybe have lunch in Prabang."

"Oh, that will be lovely. We should be leaving soon then. Can you just give Hector and me a couple of minutes?"

***

"I'm sorry I slipped out of bed on you. I wanted to see the sunrise, and I thought I would be back before you woke up."

"Did you see it?"

She laughed. "Turns out it's pretty hard to see the sunrise in the forest."

In Calandria, the act of love is not considered to be fully consummated until it has been consummated twice. A second helping, if you will, to lovingly frame an amorous rendezvous, a pleasant day together, or a warm and tender night. This has always struck me as an amiable custom. It imparts an additional touch of ritual to romantic encounters, and it weaves them more intimately into the fabric of the day. I was touched that Sylvia wanted to share this with me.

"Did you like what we did last night?" she asked.

"It was . . . exciting."

"It's not for every day. Tom doesn't like it as much as I do."

She lay down on the bed and held out her arms to me. She was in part just performing her duty as a hostess, but she was also unabashedly greedy for it, and greedy that I be greedy for it too.

I had fantasized about this moment, but in my fantasies her presence had never been as compelling as it was now. I lay down in her embrace. I kissed her breasts, the swelling breasts that I had so long admired. I ran my tongue around her expansive areolas, and sucked her fleshy, now substantial nipples. I remembered the pink squiggle that drizzled toward her anus, but she gently pulled me back up. She reached down and guided me in. She lifted her legs and spread them very wide, so that there was only one slip bearing of physical contact between us. But she looked deeply into my eyes, an earnest, vulnerable look that said: Be here with me. Share this with me. Let us do this together.

I could hardly do otherwise than to return her gaze. She was expecting an answer. I'm here. What else could I say? I'm here with you.

Can you feel what I'm feeling? her eyes asked. This tenderness? This closeness?

I thought of all the times that I had made love in the dark, or with my eyes closed, my partner and I each in our own private worlds.

But let us be together in the same world this time, her eyes replied.

This is Ilsa's friend, I thought. She is engaged to be married.

Life has brought us together. Everything will be all right.

I have always felt intimidated by you. I've always held myself aloof.

Then let us make a new start. Here and now. You are dear to me, I want to be dear to you.

I worked my penis in and out.

Yes, her eyes acknowledged. We are animals. We must thrust just as we must breathe. But we are souls as well, and how can love be truly made except between two souls?

I've never known who you were. I've always been afraid to know.

Here I am. This is who I am. Nothing more. Nothing less.

***

The boat had a thatched roof, but Tom stood at the tiller in the bright sunshine, naked in the native tradition. We drifted downstream along the wide river, through interminable stretches of forest and narrow, cliff-lined gorges, past gravelly bars where families had come down to bathe. A pair of emerald parrots circled in our wake. As we came toward the market town there were more and more boats, colorful and gay, some passing us by, some falling behind.

I could still feel vividly the path that Sylvia's hand had blazed along my spine the night before. I could still feel the precise heft and warmth of her bottom on my lap. Her corporeal incarnation sat across from me, trailing a stick in the water and watching the eddies swirl away. How could she be both there and so tangibly touching me at the same time?

The floating market was a kaleidoscope of scents and colors. We bought turmeric and saffron from a wizened lady in an ancient canoe, and roasted yams from a floating kitchen. The traffic was so dense that Tom and I had to get out the poles, and Sylvia and Ilsa had to wield the bumpers. We dropped the anchor just outside the channel and ate our bobbing lunch, watching the comings and goings on the water and along the main street of the town. Then we let ourselves drift a little farther along to where the river widened out and found a quiet spot for our siesta.

I thought of the searing intensity of Sylvia's gaze that morning when we had made love. Where I had always before averted my eyes, Tom must have looked straight on. Did he meet that blinding incandescence with an incandescence of his own? Wouldn't that be enough? Wouldn't one be able to endure anything that the world could throw at one, as long as one knew that that perfect sympathy would be waiting at the end of the day?

After our nap we didn't bother to put our clothes back on. Tom let me steer. The river became wide and lazy. We passed a girl on the shore leading a water buffalo. She wore a straw hat for the sun but nothing else, and she was more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen. She watched us pass with her hands hidden behind her back, shy of strangers but not of her nakedness.

***

"Do Calandrians ever get jealous?" I asked Ilsa in bed that night.

"Yes, of course. Why do you ask?"

"It's hard for me to understand how Tom and Sylvia can share each other so freely."

"Let me ask you this. Were you jealous of Tom and me last night?"

"A bit."

"Liar," she said. "I think your mind was occupied with other things. Did you ever stop to think that maybe Tom had other things on his mind last night as well?"

"But we're not engaged."

"I think Tom and Sylvia as sure of each other as they are of themselves. They revolve around each other so effortlessly that you sometimes don't see the connection. But it's always there, like gravity, action at a distance."

***

The next morning we walked several miles to visit some relatives of Tom's. They lived in a beautiful whitewashed villa surrounded by vegetable gardens and orchards. The patriarch was retired and he and his wife now lived there most of the year. Several of their grown children had come down with their families to spend the weekend, and a few neighbors and other relations had dropped by for the morning. The children were playing a noisy game in the yard, although there also always seemed to be at least two or three of them buzzing around their grandmother at any given time. A circle of women were shelling beans and talking and laughing. Some of the men were sitting on the porch and some were standing under a banyan tree. Tom and Sylvia received a hearty welcome, and everyone was pleased to meet Ilsa and me.

A few of us walked over to see the neighbors' double-dug sweet potato patch, which was setting all kinds of local records. The daughter was in her final year at the university. She had flowing black hair and bewitching eyes that I noticed were often directed my way. Someone had brought a little motor bike, and I held her hips and pushed her off when it was her turn to ride it.

Lunch was served picnic style on mats in the yard. Plantains, sweet potatoes, roast pork, rice, pickles, fresh yogurt, mangoes, guavas. Inquiries were made about the wellbeing of relatives and friends not in attendance. The price of coffee, the rainy-season forecast, the prospects of the local football team, the best methods for making cheese, and the opening of the new art museum in the city were likewise discussed. Sylvia came and sat beside me. One of the aunts told a long funny story from her childhood about the engagement of her elderly neighbor to the even older man across the street, a transaction in which she had played the role of middleman with hilarious and nearly catastrophic consequences.

Then Tom told a story about the time that he had gone up to the city with his father. His mother thought the trip was just a boy's weekend off, but its real purpose had been to buy her tenth anniversary present. Tom's father had saved up enough money to redeem the bamboo ring with which he had married her for a gold one. It was Tom's first time in the city, and he was overwhelmed by the broad boulevards, the multistory buildings, the endless throngs of people---more people than he had imagined existed in all the world.

Just down the street from their hotel was a furniture shop with a big picture window, and each time they passed by it his father would stop. In the window was a magnificent mahogany headboard, grander and finer than anything they had in their little village. The idea slowly began to take shape in his father's head that this headboard might make an even more appropriate anniversary present than the ring---not only a resolute symbol of their union and of his devotion, but an incipient family heirloom, an earnest of the future generations that their love would engender.

Summoning up every ounce of his resolve, Tom's father entered the shop. The headboard was exquisite, with intricate curlicues and ornately carved hibiscus blossoms. The cost was not that much more than the cost of the ring. They went back out of the shop again and walked for what seemed liked hours, his father not saying a word. Tom had to run half the time to keep up.

Finally they found themselves back at the shop. They walked right in and bought the headboard. Did they want it delivered? No, they would take it with them. Two men carried it out to the sidewalk. Someday, Tom's father beamed, this will be yours.

They spent the night not at the hotel but in the park, with the headboard propped up against a bench. They had no more money for a taxi, and the bus driver would not let them bring such an unwieldy piece of furniture on board the bus, so they had had to carry it all the way to the train station. Tom tried his best to hold up his end, but he was just a little boy. They would not have made it had it not been for the kindness of a series of passersby who helped them block by block.

At the station, Tom's father counted out their pennies. They had enough for two third class tickets or for freight passage for the headboard, but not for both. Tom's father pleaded the situation to the station master---the tenth anniversary, the future generations---and the station master begrudgingly tagged the headboard as personal luggage.

Rail travel was not as streamlined then as it is today. They had to transfer three times, and each time Tom's father had to suffer through the offloading and the on-loading and to see one more curlicue flattened and one more hibiscus garland stripped of its petals.

By the time they reached Tom's station, the headboard looked as if it had already weathered four or five of its anticipated generations. But despite its mars and gouges, it was still a marvel in the little village, and there was no shortage of enthusiastic helpers to convey it the last several miles to Tom's house. The procession picked up people as it went along, and by the time they arrived, two or three anticipated generations later, they had half the district in tow.

Tom's mother came out of the house to see what the commotion was, and found herself being serenaded by a yard full of proud villagers. It was a local courtship song: "Lovelier than breadfruits are your lovely breasts, sharper than the hawk's eye is your discernment." And right in the middle of the throng, happiest and proudest of all, stood her husband and her little son, displaying between them an immense piece of battered mahogany. She could not work out the exact meaning of it all, but she could not help but be overcome by the emotion, and she wept for joy.

Most of the audience, of course, had already heard the story many times before. But not Sylvia and I. And even though Tom had played it out mostly to the eyes and ears down at his end of the mat, I could tell that he was really telling the story to Sylvia, and I saw how deeply she was moved.

***

"A penny for your thoughts."

Ilsa and I had caught the evening train, leaving Tom and Sylvia to spend one more night at the summer house. I realized that I had been silent for several miles.

"Just organizing my snapshots, I guess"

"We'll have to get you out into the countryside more often. It has quite an effect on you."

"Do you think they'll be happy?"

"They already are, wouldn't you say?"

Another mile clicked by.

"Do you think you'll ever get married?"

"I've always assumed that I will some day."

"How will you know that you've found the right person?"

"Silly goose! Don't you know? A little bird will tell me. And then I won't have a single thing to worry about for the entire rest of my life."