by Cheyenne Blue
(05/28/03)

Marianne lived in a house surrounded by sunflowers. Sunflowers, wheat, and vines. Symbols of abundance, the good life, fecundity, indulgence, and lazy, hazy summer days.

It had been four years since I'd seen her last; long enough that she'd produced a son, the heir that her husband demanded. Long enough that she had settled into her life in rural France, shouldering her way uncompromisingly into the community, talking French with her strong American accent. French to the villagers who shrugged with Gallic nonchalance and pretended not to understand. English to her son, who only answered in French.

I arrived in a rental car. She greeted me with a flurry of laughter, hugs bursting out onto the stone driveway, a reunion under the pale blue sun-washed shutters. A meeting that rolled back the years to when we were young and stupid, and drunk on what we might become.

Marianne screamed her joy, and there were tears in her eyes as she hugged me.

"Suzie! Merde, it's good to see you!" she said, when the euphoria had subsided enough that we could speak coherently. "Come in and have a beer!"

The farmhouse was cool and disorganized. A stone-flagged kitchen, with a haphazard collection of her son's toys and empty wine bottles by the door. A playpen under the stairs, a ripe, oozing farmhouse cheese collecting flies on the counter. She pulled glasses from the cupboard, a bottle of Picon, small bottles of lager, crackers, the cheese, and then we were outside on the uneven patio, sitting on the wooden bench, raising our glasses to friendships old and renewed.

Her husband, a military man, was away again, this time on a peacekeeping tour of duty in a foreign country that maintained an uneasy truce with its neighbor. A parry here, a thrust there, the bluster and ever present threat of chemical weapons and nuclear attack.

"When he's home," she said, "my heart rejoices, for oh...about three weeks. Then I count the days until he leaves."

We toasted her husband, her reason for being here, in the country, by the estuary, where the salted air encrusted on her washing, coated her vegetables, coarsened her hair. We toasted her child, a precocious darling with a funny little voice, a child of two cultures and of none.

We sat, the two of us, and drank and talked, watching the sun lower itself into the sea. The beer ran out, so we opened a bottle of wine, and then another. Her boy ran around us, in and out of the vines, bringing us small treasures for admiration -- a perfect curled young green vine leaf, a favorite picture book, a ripe tomato from the vegetable garden.

The long twilight drifted into dusk, and dusk into night. Stars rose, silhouetting the tangled rows of vines, washing the farmhouse in a surreal light. The buzz of small insects shrilled into the soft night, as we sat and drank and talked and drank and laughed. Marianne's son gave up trying to capture our attention and fell asleep on the couch in the untidy lounge, curled up in a knot with the sun-washed sheets, taken in from the clothesline.

We talked on, and the talk gave way to drink-induced euphoria. Marianne put on some Latin rhythms, and returned through the doors, her hips twitching, her long russet hair streaming behind her as she salsaed her way back to the patio.

She sat again, and we clasped hands over the armrests in that unspoken communion that women sometimes share. She poured more wine, sloshing it over the rim of the tumblers so that it puddled like blood on the wooden table, then pulled me into a hug, tight, close, so that my head rested on her shoulder. I turned my cheek so that I could feel the pulse in her neck, warm against my skin, and slipped my arms around her waist. We stayed like that, rocking together for a moment, before she pulled away, standing unsteadily, and moving inside.

I waited, a faint sense of disappointment. She was tired, she had gone in to crash, and I was not ready for the night to end. I laid my head back against the stone wall of the farmhouse and closed my eyes. Then the music blared again, and she was back, pulling me to my feet, slipping off her shoes.

"Let's dance, Suzie!" she cried, and the moonlight glossed her cheekbones as she threw her head back, highlighting her face with an edgy beauty.

I allowed myself to be pulled to my feet and obediently followed her stumbling lead, into the garden, past the raspberry canes. We danced on beyond the end of the orderly part, down through the waist-high weeds, to where the sunflowers and vines met in a tangle of muddled cultivation. A step, step, hop, a stumble, then a laugh as we blundered our way along, the gasps of hysterical laughter wafting away, bouncing off the solid walls of the farmhouse, floating over the nodding heads of the sunflowers, down to the estuary, down to the sea, over the ocean. Who knows how far our laughter traveled that night? A glance back at the house to chart the familiar, then Marianne tugged me forward, into the vines, where the leaves curled out from their strings, tendrils of entanglement and enticement.

I held her waist, and followed her lead, a step, hop, and a kick. Down the rows we salsaed, following the music in our heads as we moved between the lines, brushing off the curling green leaves. The loamy dirt pushed between our toes, our bare feet sinking slightly into the soft earth. Our dance disintegrated into a shuffle, then an amble, and finally we just relaxed into the night, our arms around each other's waists, as we stopped midway along a row of the vines.

My senses burgeoned, a combination of wine and moonlight, loam under my feet and the fresh smell of new growth, the distant tang of salt sea air. Marianne turned her head, and I saw her lips, softly parted, before she came closer, kissing me softly, on the side of my mouth, and, when I didn't resist, on the lips.

We kissed, hesitantly at first, then with increasing ardor, but with such tenderness, such a simple extension of our friendship that it grew in intensity as naturally as the vines around us bore grapes. When she stroked my hair, when I ran hands along her shoulder blades, when she pressed soft kisses to my eyelids, there was no decision to be made, it just was.

Her hand slipped under the hem of my T-shirt, stroking the skin above my waistband with a soft touch, each finger imprinting itself on me. She dragged her hand slowly up towards my breast, and when she cupped it, stroking a careful thumb over my nipple, the die was cast. It was just Marianne and I moving further along the line to love.

I pushed my hands into her hair and continued to kiss her. Slow languorous kisses, deep drowning, falling kisses, where we moved and melted into each other. There was no hurry. Unlike our earlier frenzied laughter, now our movements had a slow gliding quality. The advance and retreat of tongues, mating and withdrawing, had the ritualistic, well-honed precision of a ballet.

She pulled her T-shirt over her head, allowing me to explore her breasts. I did so slowly, carefully, tracing a line with my tongue, examining the fine hairs around her nipples, chocolate-drop mother's nipples. Her body intrigued me; long arms, wiry muscles and bumpy elbows, and I put my mouth to the splatter of freckles on her shoulder, opening over them, scraping gently with my teeth. Her long hair -- coarse from the soap she used to wash it and the salt air -- drifted over my face, tickling my nose. I kissed my way up to her neck, burying my face in the curve of neck and shoulder. She stiffened slightly as I breathed over her, the ridge of muscle pushing into my face, then relaxed again, humming and sighing in an undulating pitch, as I stroked her skin with my tongue.

Marianne's skirt slid to the earth and my shorts lowered to join them. Then her fingers were underneath my cotton panties, feeling, exploring, pushing, and then I felt a concentrated pressure on the side of my clit, the wonderful friction dance.

I swayed, closed my eyes, let her fingers push me to the edge, and swayed some more. The wine, the night, the darkness all combined to disorient me. So much so that when, on the outer edge of orgasm, I opened my eyes and saw stars, I didn't know if it was the wide swathe of the French night, or if they were purely behind my eyes.

Marianne withdrew her fingers, and I shuddered at the loss. I kissed her again, let my own hand trail down her body, down to the thatch of curls between her legs. She shifted slightly, trying to balance her legs apart. I was taller than she, and the dynamics were wrong. Behind her, the trailing arms of the vines stretched their way along the strings. Every so often there was a post, rough hewn and sturdy. We shuffled back, until Marianne rested against the post. She stretched her arms along the strings, spread her legs, and threw back her head. Such a picture of wantonness, of earthiness, of need.

For a moment I just watched her, saw how the pale fingers of new growth tickled up between her fingers, how the shoots caught in her backswept hair, as if somehow she was becoming part of the living earth The image was sudden, but I saw her merging into the ground, her toes turned to roots, gnarled and clinging, her fingers pale and green, slim filaments of vines, inching along the strings. It seemed as if a tendril of leaf curled inward over her thigh, but that was surely an illusion.

Dropping to my knees in the soft, yielding ground, I parted her with gentle fingers. Marianne's head was now bent forward watching me, her hair falling over her face. Through the disarrayed curtain I saw her eyes, slitted, glittering with pleasure. She hissed in anticipation, and held my head there, as she swayed back and forth on her heels.

The air curled in moist salt eddies around my face, and her pubic hair tickled my nose. She tasted of the sea, but strangely sweet, different from me. And it was natural to kiss her, and swoop my tongue around and over her, gauging her response, until her breathing quickened and I thought she would come. She did. Her upper body jerked, her pelvis pushing into my hands, her head thrown back to the stars as she arched in bowstring tautness up, up into the sky, with a long lupine howl of satisfaction and completion. She slumped back down to earth with an abruptness that made me stagger back a pace, as her weight slumped forward. I rose, turned her in my arms and we embraced. She slid her arms around my waist and we sighed into each other's necks, soft exhalations of pleasure.

We slept together that night, sprawled over her big bed in a tangle of damp limbs. And later still, when the birds sang the oh-so-early French morning into existence, Marianne and I rose and shared a silent cup of strong dark coffee, drunk from bright, chipped pottery bowls. Her son staggered in rubbing his eyes, and she scooped him up onto her lap, murmuring to him in English.

We walked outside, she and I, with her son between us using our hands as a swing. We walked down to the end of the garden, to where the tangle of vines began. Far off, the muted sunlight reflected off the distant estuary, and the taste of salt was in the air. The vines trembled in the light breeze.

Marianne slung an arm around my waist. "It's not so bad here, really," she said.

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