Read Rocks, The for Free Online Page A

watching Montserrat swing her lean thighs and narrow hips around a table. Her quick eyes and hands adroitly covering a table. She had strong hands. Her genetic makeup contained eons of domestic skills. She could probably herd goats just as well, with children on her hip. He imagined her in Paris. Reading a book on religious iconography in the Luxembourg Garden. In his apartment. He imagined the view from just above the knees upward between Montserrat’s thighs. Maybe she could transfer to the Sorbonne.
    He’d got her all wrong, he realized. She wasn’t ugly at all. Her face was a Picasso.
    His mother was, of course, right again: What was he doing with April? Like a good Californian, she was skilled in bed, but with a rote avidity that smacked more of conscious performance than lust, and was, not astonishingly, beginning to bore him. He would undoubtedly bore her too before long, with his frame of reference that might as well be allusions to the Upanishads for all that April understood at any given moment what he might be on about. He ought to find someone like Montserrat, warm, real, unconcerned about his mother’s sexual protection. Like old Gerald had done: married a local woman who’d given him a child and stuck to him, and devoted herself to him until she’d dropped. He imagined the children he and Montserrat would make together: dark-haired, beautiful, artistic, extraordinary, asymmetrical. They would all be Picassos—
    “Hey!” said April.
    Luc tensed reflexively as she dropped into his lap with a proprietorial heedlessness.
    “Look. What. Your. Mother. Gave me,”
she said, her voice full of amazed reverence. “Aren’t they just, like, incredibly beautiful?”
    “They are,” he agreed.
    They were straps of braided gold yarn containing glinting metallic filaments. They looked exotic, fabled, Levantine. They had the burnished golden hue of ancient coins.
    “You wear them on the top of your feet,” she said, raising her bare foot.
    “I know. I’ve seen them before.”
    April didn’t seem to hear him. “You put this loop around the second toe, like this, and then they go over the top of the foot and then around the ankle and fasten like this.” She put the pair on her feet, which were like a child’s feet: pale, unveined, undistorted by ill-fitting footwear, now dressed as if for a toga party.
    “Your mother just, like, floated over to me when I came in and gave them to me. To keep!”
    “She’s taken a shine to you.”
    “Really? Aw. She is totally beautiful. Look, what do you think?” She lifted her legs, pivoting them for angled views of her adorned feet, unaware (or perhaps not) of the way her buttocks ground into Luc’s lap.
    He looked over her scissoring legs at Montserrat, who had moved off to a more distant table.
    “Aren’t they amazing?” said April. “You wear them on bare feet, without shoes.”
    “Yes, they’re amazing. They were made in the sixties by someone who lived here. A friend of mine.”
    “I’m going to wear them tonight.”
    April rubbed her gilded foot along Luc’s leg. She moved her buttocks again, consciously now. “Mmm. What’s this?”
    Only his body’s brainless response; Luc wasn’t interested in pursuing it. “Nothing much.”
    April got up and stood beside Luc. She raised her leg, stretching her foot aloft balletically, and then brought it down onto Luc’s lap, pushing into him.
    “Hey,” he said.
    April gazed at her feet. “These things are making me feel, like . . . I don’t know . . .” She raised her arms and began to sway. She’d shown him her belly-dance technique several times. That’s what’s coming, he realized. He stood up as the towel around April’s hips began to twitch and her gold-topped feet darted toward him. Again, he looked at Montserrat, across the patio.
    “Okay,” he said. He took her hand and tried to lead her toward the barracks, but April, gyrating slowly, pulled her arm away. He turned and walked on quickly