Light Errant Read Free Page A

Sallah sat neatly, tightly on the edge, her small feet barely reaching the floor. They talked in soft Spanish, too fast for me to follow. Figuring that meant my attention was not immediately required, I went over to the corner of the room, where forethought had laid a bottle of rosado in my washbasin, keeping cool in water. Sighing one more time for the afternoon that wasn’t going to happen, I fished it out and fetched three glasses from a cupboard.
    Observant little creature of virtue that she was, Sallah hardly ever drank anything stronger than coffee, and never where she might be seen by another believer. The occasional glass of wine, though, with an infidel or two, that didn’t seem to be a problem: like other things forbidden to her—like the conjunction of bodies on a shuttered afternoon, an animal act without benefit of law or blessing—she would give it as much solemn attention as she gave to her prayers or her cooking or her English lessons, and take as much pleasure from the doing of it as she did from the taste or the touch or the tingle. And as much pleasure again from doing it not, back in the bosom of her family. It wasn’t a Catholic-style guilt thing, she didn’t sin the better to repent after; I thought it was a control thing mostly, Sallah demonstrating to herself that she did govern her own life, that even her religion was of her choosing and its rules subject to her willing acceptance, not she to their arbitrary diktat.
    Here in my room, a little light or sometimes concentrated sinning was second nature to us both. Today I didn’t even ask, I just poured her a glass along with Marina and myself. I thought she needed it. If she disagreed, the steely gears of her mind would lock that decision into place, and she’d set the glass aside and never think more about it.
    Ordinarily, at least. That was my expectation, but I’m good at getting things wrong. Scary sometimes how firm she could be, how certain in what seemed to me a highly debatable world; scary today how doubtful she seemed, how hesitant, how needful. There was a tremble in her fingers when I passed her the wine. I cupped my own hands around hers for a moment and pressed gently, warm palms against cold fingers against cool beaded glass. Her smile was unconvincing, her eyes were not. Ridiculously big always in her small, fine-boned face, today they were to die in, deep dark pools of danger rimmed with red where she’d spent half the night crying by the look of her. Crying silently, I was sure, crying face-down into her pillow not to wake anyone else, not to worry her family...
    I kissed her fleetingly, squeezed her hands again and went to fetch Marina’s wine, and my own. Autre temps, autre moeurs : if this had panned out the way I’d planned it, I might have been sinking to the floor at her feet right now in one of those deliberate, delicious moments of delay, resting my head against her thigh, feeling her long fingers in my hair teasing and twisting, starting to tug...
    But the two girls filled the bed: space enough for three, perhaps, but emotional room there was not. I retreated to the window, and perched there.
    â€œCome on, then,” I said softly. “Who’s going to tell me about it?”
    Actually, I already knew the answer to that. Sallah came to me for private tuition, and she worked hard, but her English wasn’t strong enough to hold against such tension as I could see in her now. Nor could my Spanish keep up anywhere off the phrase-book paths of dalliance, even if it could have handled her immigrant accent.
    One mute glance she gave, towards Marina; but that was for form only, and quite redundant. They’d worked this out already. They might even have rehearsed.
    â€œBen,” Marina began, “you know Sallah’s family, that they are not lawful here?”
    Yes, I did know that. A little I’d had from Sallah, what exchanges of confidence we could manage in