Lauchlin of the Bad Heart by D. R. Macdonald Page A

shore of St. Andrews Channel, a prospect too sweet to pass up, and always had been.
    It was chancy, unless they had planned it ahead of time, taking this long, twisting driveway down through young hemlocks and old spruce. A getaway cottage, it had no phone, but he had liked that risk, tossing the dice for Maddy, they both had. The small clearing was hidden close to the shore and he couldn’t know if her husband were there or not, he might even meet him on this narrow roadway with no ready excuse for showing up, but a blustery exchange of ironic platitudes—Making house calls now, are you, Lauch? Only when you’re not here, buddy—would get him through that. The truck rocked through mudholes lazily.
    When she’d been a younger colleague at a high school years ago, almost from the first they had traded stories and jokes, some mildly off-colour. Then it seemed that she was turning any topic in a sexualdirection, whether it was the food in the cafeteria or a newspaper item or whatever Lauchlin mentioned about himself, and he liked to let it go where it might, teasing it here or there. I’d ask you out, Mad, he said at one point, if you weren’t married. Well, she said, I guess we can’t go out together, but we might find a way to stay in together. Ah, Maddy, I don’t know what you’re getting at, too subtle for me. I think you do, she said. She enjoyed discussing anything sensual with him, and her candidness grew. She asked him straight out at lunch one day if he liked oral sex, I mean its sophisticated varieties, she added, not what these kids are up to. Students were milling around the grounds and Lauchlin glanced at them. Don’t worry, Maddy said, they’re too absorbed in each other to listen to us, they think teachers never do such things, let alone talk about it, so why would they eavesdrop? Our lives are dull fare, eh? Leaning across the table, she took a bite out of an apple and narrowed her eyes at him. I’m thinking about you right now, she said, about a certain part of your anatomy. A good student from one of Lauchlin’s classes walked past and he smiled pleasantly at her. If they only knew how your mind works, Maddy, he said. If they did, she said, I’d never get a speck of algebra past them, would I? Lauchlin said, Just what part of my anatomy did you have in mind, Mad? She picked up her leftovers with finger and thumb, pinching them with exaggerated fastidiousness, and dropped them in a paper sack. She slipped on her big sunglasses and regarded him. If you’d like to find out, I’ll see you tomorrow night. It’s Friday. And Ralph? he said. She whispered, Out of town. I’ll leave a note in your mailbox. And she did just that, though he hadn’t dared open it until he was home and could stare at the address of her house. Morag was long gone to Boston by then, he had yet to accept that his heart had limits beyond the ring, though he had stayed away from women for a while, more out of depression than any medical fear. But with Maddy he’d got past that—she loved having sex with him, and all its pleasures.
    One car, hers. He stopped in the grassy clearing. The shore was no more than fifty feet behind the cottage and two slack lounge chairs lay opened out back. The swimming was poor here but she liked to lie out in the sun. A strip of sand gave out into shingle at the waterline, the stony beach dropping quickly into rocky depths. A grease-blackened barbecue on legs had seen recent use, but like all run-down cottages, the place looked forlorn in sunless weather like this, drained of mirth. The wide channel was grey and choppy in an east wind, the hills of Boisdale low in the distance. A door latch turned behind him.
    “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I thought you were the milkman.” She leaned in the doorway, her head tilted against the jamb, her dark brown hair mussed on one side as if she’d just woken. She was chubbier than he remembered but it didn’t change her much, and she still looked