It Goes Both Ways

As soon as Petra and Cliff got back from date night, he switched on a documentary about the Cathedral of Amiens. Research he claimed, but it was a ploy to avoid writing his book. He turned up the volume to drown out Petra’s kitchen fussing. 

When she walked back into the living room, Cliff captured her hand.

“I had fun tonight.”

As he said it, his eyes stayed on the screen, which showed a close-up of a woman in stained glass. The saint lady was dressed in electric blue. She was watching a lamb with serenity, but to Petra she looked wan and drugged.   

Petra’s studio was a mess of mahogany shadow pinned back by a desk and stacks of canvases that had started to stick together. Petra sketched a listless, broken egg and titled it, Yolky Oh-no. It was useless, starting work at the end of a day. She opened a drawer and saw her over-thumbed separation papers. Her dad had made the appointment a month ago, and it had seemed right to do so. Cliff had made her too unhappy for too long, but how long was that? Their marriage was like a sleeping giant, though what the difference was between sleep and a coma, she didn’t like to contemplate. Her parents would cover the legal expenses.

Petra loved Cliff still, if love was the sly buzz that itched her palms on date night, while she debated whether to risk annoying him by touching his hand. Sex with Cliff had never been good because of what he did—his was an operation both flustered, yet perfunctory—but how he looked at her. Eyes wide open, like she was some mater dolorosa, come to kill him with pleasure. If that wasn’t love, it was as close as she’d get to it in this lifetime. Not like sex happened much now. Most nights Cliff said he was tired and put in ear buds. They’d both lay on their backs, and Petra liked to think of them, at least for some hours, as facing in the same direction. He used to lay a warm hand on her thigh. Now he only did so at her insistence, which hurt so much that she’d stopped asking. It was only in the company of this little thing—her naked, unloved thigh, when he was hard asleep—that she would permit herself, sometimes, to cry. 

Petra was woken from thought by the sight of two legs on either side of her wheelie chair. They stretched out from underneath the desk. She jumped up. No, she was not mistaken. There were two legs, and two feet, with dabs of hair on each toe’s knuckle. She peered under the desk. The legs were connected to a man. And judging from the sad pile of his genitals, he was either cold or scared. Or both. 

When she told Cliff, he hit pause. 

“Inside?” 

Cliff led the way back down the stairs with a sand wedge cocked like a baseball bat. The stranger was standing now, his ribbed back facing them as he peered into the junk shadow from whence he came. Petra was struck. The man’s skin looked soft and ready-to-hand. His slight buttocks moved her, and she felt a desire to wrap him in their faux-fur bedspread. 

Cliff lowered the wedge. The man turned and grimaced at them. Cliff moved closer, until he pinched the long ringlet that grew from behind the man’s ear. 

“A lovelock,” Cliff said. “This is an English haircut. Circa the 1590s.”

His face still scrunched in fear, the stranger replied in what sounded like mangled Irish. 

Cliff and Petra spent the rest of the night asking questions. How had the man got inside? The window was the only link between the basement and the outside world, and it was pokey, giving a view of the postman’s feet and the occasional cat. It was also painted shut. Was he a burglar? An asylum inmate? Petra wanted to call the police, but Cliff said that they should do some research first. Cliff gave the man a vase, a book, a pencil. On receiving scissors, the man hacked at his blanket. Cliff gave him a tablecloth. The man tore this in half, then wrapped a piece around his leg. When given a needle and thread, he sewed two legs and linked them with a gusset. 

“Ah, he knows pants,” said Cliff. 

They stayed up, Cliff buoyed by curiosity, Petra by unease. She reheated some pasta, which only she ate. Meanwhile, the man used what few teeth he had to test each material. He sheared the arms off a sweater. A length of calico he turned, through torturous rouching, into puffed-out bloomers. Sort-of joking, Cliff gave him a gym bag; the stranger cut out the bottom, zipped it around his throat, and teased it into an immense ruff. By sunrise, they were still awake. It may have been the sleep deprivation, but at dawn Petra squinted and thought she saw in the man’s silhouette a scrappy Elizabethan.

Cliff’s usual mood was glutinous-sad. After work, he lapped the couch for an hour, as if this churning might make a wormhole to a better world. But the evening after the man appeared, he came home early. Petra woke the next morning to find her studio gutted. 

“All the other rooms have carpet,” Cliff said. This was an issue, he explained, because although the stranger urinated in a bucket, he often missed. 

The urinator was sitting cross-legged on the concrete.

“Is that mattress thing stuffed with straw?” Petra asked. 

Cliff was too busy to reply. A roll of paper was spread across the pallet. At Cliff’s urging, the man put Sharpie to the paper and executed some twisted jumbles. Cliff snipped the paper roll into A4 sections, numbered them, and fingertipped them into plastic sleeves. 

Petra watched. “So, this is research?”

“When he speaks it sounds like Old Dutch,” said Cliff. “If I can get some written material, I should be able to place him.”

 “Babe, I’m starting to worry that you think that this man is a—I feel stupid even saying it.”

“What?”

“Time traveler?”

“That’s impossible,” said Cliff, with no conviction. “But riddle me this: how did he get into our house? And why does he know the fashions of the 1500s?”

“He’s an academic in your field who’s lost his mind? Look, we know nothing about this guy.”

“Exactly!” He shook a plastic sleeve at her. “And until we do, he’s staying. He does need a bath, though.”

There was a time in their relationship when Petra would have put up more resistance, but Cliff’s improved mood had thrown her. She took the stranger upstairs. She felt wary, but he was docile as she stripped him. He began to urinate in the sink. Petra thought to stop him, but it made sense. The basin was the right height, and afterwards, he could wash his penis with warm water. She ran water into the tub and added a splash of bubble bath. If he was a time traveler, why not give him the modern marvels? The man dropped his body in with a smack and sent a wave of water rolling onto the tiles. She showed him how to work the soap into a lather. He licked a foam tract off his wrist, like a dainty cat. 

Here Petra was washing a full-grown man, and her husband didn’t even care. She often tried to pinpoint reasons for Cliff’s coldness. He’d never blamed her for his stalling on his book, although he did often mention how her parents subsidized her rent and she only had to work part-time. When he got home from work, he rarely wanted to talk. On other occasions, he complained that they never spent time together. It made no sense. Maybe Cliff’s difficulty just was. Just like one night, a man had appeared in their basement. 

When Petra looked up, the man’s eyes were resting on her. They were nice eyes. Blue. He patted her head. He put a bar of soap into his mouth and slowly gagged. Petra fished the soap from where he’d spat it into the water, then dropped her hand back into the warm wetness. 

The man had looked at her with sympathy. Perhaps he was a sensitive soul. An artist, like her. Just a moment ago he had been a soiled toy, but now he was a person. Maybe, even, a man. 

The stranger’s ejaculate separated in the water like a milky flower. His recovery time was incredible. By the time Petra had toweled him off, he was ready to ride again on the day bed. She didn’t think of Cliff maybe coming up the stairs and catching them; the touch of someone’s skin had her instantly drunk. Three-drinks-drunk and everything covered in a peach fuzz. 

This dizziness lasted for weeks. In one class, Petra forgot when Guernica was painted. She abandoned her lesson plan and announced free-drawing time. In a meeting, she found herself being repeatedly asked about time sheets. 

“Are you pregnant?” a friend asked, when she caught Petra smiling into the espresso machine. 

“No.”

“You look like you have a secret.”

Petra didn’t share: it was tastier this way. Her body had been forlorn and prematurely shelved, which was, if not a legal crime perpetrated by Cliff, then a psychological one. Now on her days off, she fucked. The man never touched her in front of Cliff. At first, he waited for her to initiate, but after a few weeks, as soon as Cliff left the house, he’d pad into the room, looking hopeful. When Petra started to kiss him, he raised his hands with a loose huff. She liked that he couldn’t talk. He stroked her entire body. Out of some twisted economy, Cliff only ever touched her breasts or vagina, but the stranger was less interested in making her orgasm so much as absorbing her through his skin. 

Now when Cliff ignored her, Petra lay on the sheets and imagined the stranger’s soft buttocks as he climaxed inside her, toothlessly handsome. After sex, the man always pressed a squiggle-covered slip into her hand. She kept the nonsense slips in a shoebox in her underwear drawer, but she could have strewn them around the bedroom for all Cliff noticed. It was a pleasure to hide these primary sources. It was a small theft of the kindness that was owing to her and in arrears.

It was not beyond a doubt that the visitor was a time traveler, made incoherent because of a regional dialect or cognitive dysfunction caused by rapid movement through spacetime, but Cliff’s gut was always right, and it told him that in his basement was piece of real-life history. Although his researches into the man’s origins had to be crammed around his teaching obligations, Cliff was thrilled to be at the tilt. No longer was he compacting sources into student edibles as his soul died but forcing Lady Truth to her knees as she cried, Sir Scholar! Have mercy!

To start, Cliff made his subject comfortable. After he’d moved Petra’s junk out of the basement, he hung up a tapestry. Fire was an animating sprite of the Elizabethan home, so he bought tapers and drilled sconces into the walls. He would have liked a dirtier burn, but the candles were petroleum based, and their flames hung high and clear. He studded oranges with cloves and slung them over the rafters. At night, the contents of the man’s chamber-pot commingled with possets of lavender and linseed. At such moments, Cliff felt the jitters he’d had when he first stepped into the Berkeley stacks and felt the whole weight of human history crushing him to delirious death. 

Cliff studied the man’s writing. Certain recurrent shapes—a bent circle, a wavy line—ached with communicative intent. One shape looked like eth, but eths had disappeared by the end of the Middle English period. Elsewhere, there were successions of shaking styluses that could have been any number of letters. Cliff moved on to other tests. The man liked cotton and felted wool, but not silk or organdy. When given a codpiece, he didn’t know what to do, even when Cliff slotted it into his own briefs to demonstrate. That meant he post-dated the 1570s. When offered a variety of hats, the man opted for a flat cap, which meant that he was affiliated with apprentices, but he didn’t respond to any of the guild blazons. Nor did he react to a map of London, a crucifix, a cross-staff, a picture of a fish. The man sang in his nonsense language but couldn’t play more than a few wonky notes on a recorder. When given an old testament primer, he stroked the noses of the animals with one dumb forefinger. 

Two months passed in these studies. It was hard to endure the long hours at work when the man could at any moment be performing some fascinating ritual that, for lack of observation, might be lost forever (again). Petra babysat— “Give him a crayon and he’s happy”—until Cliff got home, but she couldn’t be relied on to take accurate notes. 

Frustrated, Cliff tried a fresh approach. He let the man wander the house. The man wasn’t even interested in the appliances that Cliff had thought would frighten him, like the microwave or TV. What he really liked was to garden. Given planters, the man arranged them into a knot garden in the back lawn. He grew herbs and combined them with boiled onion and vinegar into acrid salads. He dried rushes and spread them over the floor, giving the basement a smell half-way between paper and pinecone. At nights, he carved the banister of the basement staircase into a trompe-l’oeil of a vine-wrapped trellis. He cut his own hair and made shoes like leather tumors. He carded wool but couldn’t spin it. He thatched a roof that didn’t keep water out. He did many things, but none of them well. Cliff’s maddening conclusion: the man was omnicompetent and impossible to place. 

Lunch was bread, cheese, eggs, radishes, and a fruit salad without New World oddities like bananas or melons. Since Bastiaan had arrived, Petra had periodized their food without complaint, although she ground vitamins into the sauces to prevent scurvy. Today was her first act of provocation: she served them a tomato salad. 

Bastiaan bit into a slice of tomato, then spat it out.

“Looks like Bastiaan doesn’t like it,” Cliff said. “Maybe that’s because in his time tomatoes were an undiscovered fruit, cultivated only in the Andes?” 

Petra had named the man Sebastian, even though sebastos derived from the Greek, meaning venerable, and the man looked all of thirty. Plus, if the man lived in Britain, it was unlikely that he was Catholic, or if he was, that he’d advertise it. Cliff had pointed this out, but Petra had persisted in her total wrongness, until the stranger only answered to that name. Cliff’s only comfort was in calling him Bastiaan, which was, at least, from the Low Dutch.

  Cliff tried to be reasonable. In a moderate tone, he asked his wife how he was meant to do his research when he was being undermined in his own home. 

“Your research? You mean your dress-ups?”

Petra was referring to the jerkin that Cliff had taken to wearing around the house to make Bastiaan feel welcome and in which he was currently attired.

“Costuming is standard immersion history practice,” he said. 

Petra, on the other hand, had been dressing as inappropriately as possible. Today, she wore a sequined dress and a pair of fuck-me books. Maybe the outfits were a reproach because they hadn’t been having sex lately. The past few months had been somewhat fallow. This had nothing to do with Petra, and more to do with himself and the circumstance, and well, maybe to do with her always hovering. Cliff had started to fantasize about them living in separate houses and visiting each other on weekends. It was the ritual that he hated, especially date nights. He still noticed her attractiveness, but it no longer made the little dragon inside him stand up and unfurl its wings. When they’d first married, they stayed up and talked, or he’d grade while she painted, stopping to read aloud the most egregious sentences. Now Petra never asked what he was working on. 

“And as for this,” Cliff prodded the slices of salty anachronism, “The more Bastiaan is exposed to our way of life, the less authentic an imprint he’ll be. You don’t dig up an amphora and throw it in the dishwasher.”

“He’s a person, not a vase.”

In a violation of the mores of Elizabethan dining, Petra took her trencher off the table and replaced it with her sketch pad. She started to draw. When she turned a page squarely into the fruit salad, Cliff lost control. 

“Do you have to do that here?” 

“Somebody took away my studio.”

Cliff had nothing to say to that. She left the room and Bastiaan gave a moan. He was always following her. Probably because she fed him. Sure enough, a minute later, Bastiaan disappeared. 

Alone now, Cliff glared at the tomato salad. Petra had left her sketch book on the table and he started to flip through the pages. She was talented, he had to give her that. Even her tossed-off sketches captured some of Bastiaan’s character. Cliff remembered how she’d been back in art school. All Sturm und Drang, with painted nails and a safety pin through her nose. When he first saw her, she was outside a party, smoking. He’d stopped in his tracks, in what he later joked was an act of Petra-fication. After that, he drove to her studio so often that he almost lost his scholarship. Those nights were was worth it, though. They drank wine and he’d try to close the gap between himself and where she stood working her scalpel over a wood block with insectile speed. He knew that if he spun out art history anecdotes for long enough, that he would somehow become her boyfriend. 

One night, she’d slipped and sunk her blade deep into her thumb. There was blood everywhere. She refused to go to the hospital until he promised to smuggle the cube in under his shirt, so that she could keep working on it. That was the Petra he’d fallen for: exact and exacting, hell-bent on an excellence that only she could see. She was Galizia Fede Gallici, or Hypatia. A beauty brightened by genius, careless like only the rich could be. That was the woman he used to go to art shows with, every guy in the room wanting her (and she knew it, dripped wit with the certainty of it). He relished their faces when they saw him (milquetoast in poorish clothes, shoulders curved like a protractor) because—right?—his brains were sexy. Or so Petra had made him believe.  

Cliff turned back through the pages. One picture kept showing up between Petra’s sketches. It was a childish drawing in crayon. By Bastiaan, no doubt. At first, Cliff thought it was a pizza oven. There were three blobs inside a semi-circle and a wonky diamond below them. Then it looked like a chalice balancing on a mountain. Finally, he saw it. The blobs were rocks in a crucible, and beneath them, a licking flame. 

It took a hundred bricks to make a flame-resistant shelf on which to set the tin sheet. Cliff worried how Bastiaan would take an electric furnace, being used to a fire-and-bellows type operation, but the excitement of finally determining what he was—A forger? Smith? Caster? Alchemist?—was enough to propel Cliff through the particulars, like finding the right temperature and a crucible thick enough to smelt iron. He bought tongs, an anvil, a hammer, a cooling bay, and two antique aprons from eBay for several hundred dollars. He put the aprons on his card so that Petra wouldn’t notice. After softening the leather with oil of oranges, just looking at the aprons made him feel period-specific. 

The day of the casting was hot, and Cliff was glad for the live oak that shaded half the yard. Mrs. Veela soon spotted them through the latticework gate. 

“What are you boys up to?” She called anyone under fifty a boy. 

“My nephew and I are casting swords. For a historical reenactment.”

“How wonderful.” Her husband had collected model trains, before he passed away. “You should come see them sometime.”

Toy trains were silly, but it was nice to see a woman supporting her husband’s passion. Petra used to accompany Cliff to Renaissance fairs, but at the last one they went to—upstate, two years ago?—she’d made a joke about nerds in leather. She disappeared whenever Cliff and Bastiaan did their field work. Where was she at this moment, for instance? Reading, probably. She had four days off a week. Cliff knew it was unfair, but when he came home from work and saw her relaxed and making him dinner, he was sometimes crushed with resentment. She had the freedom to pursue her art, and she hardly painted at all. 

The furnace ticked with baking heat. Cliff loaded a crucible with ingots and added a capful of oxidizing powder. The hot air scorched his face as he opened the door. After ten minutes, he pulled the tin out and with a stick, scraped off the skin of slag. When the metal had cooled in the mold, Cliff knocked it out with a hammer. In the scorched sand lay a cup like a lamb’s heart. 

Cliff indicated to Bastiaan that it was his turn. 

Bastiaan spat into his sand as he packed it into the can. He plied out wads with a stylus and scraped them across a paper towel. It looked like he’d done this before. When Cliff poured in the metal, it welled over Bastiaan’s mold in a perfect circle. Cliff upended the mold. In the sand sat an egg-cup chased with acanthus leaves: a perfect duplicate of the injection-mold cups that they used for breakfast every morning. 

Bastiaan picked it up. “Peter,” he said.  

“You mean Petra?”

They found Petra reading on the living room couch. Bastiaan bowed and proffered her the cup. He recited what sounded like English sentences broken into pieces, smelted, and cast into new mellifluence. So much nonsense noise. 

“Well?” asked Cliff.

It was like they’d handed her a chocolate bar. Petra turned the cup this way and that. She was pleased, but not overly. Nothing was ever good enough for her. Not her own work, not any gift. Cliff had once taken leather classes to make her a purse. It had taken weeks to emboss it with chrysanthemums, and she’d never used it, preferring chunky purses from Macy’s with space for her cards. 

Petra smiled and set it down. “I guess now we have five of these.”

Just as suddenly as Petra’s desire for Bastiaan had swum into life, it died. Petra watched Cliff’s Corolla leave the driveway one morning. After the usual pause, she heard Bastiaan’s tread. His hands gathered up her breasts from behind.

“Jewelries,” he said. 

Petra was pleased he’d learned a new word. Cliff would hate that his subject had been culturally imprinted. Bastiaan brushed her nipples, and Petra waited for her body to respond. She looked at the empty drive and thought how Cliff would be on the interstate by now, listening to a podcast. Her body slackened. Her desire had left with the Corolla. 

From then on, having sex with Bastiaan was a chore. Petra didn’t like the way she could direct him towards even the most uncomfortable places—the counter, the floor, Cliff’s book-covered desk—and he yielded, sucking at her with the stupidity of a large mammal. It got to the point where Petra could only get off on the idea of Cliff finding them. When Cliff was in his study, Petra would lower her pants and she’d rut Bastiaan in the hall, dread-wishing to be discovered. Her guilt combined like cannonade with the sound of Cliff’s feet two rooms over, one room over, so close she could hear him breathe through the parted doors, but he never came in. She stopped showering afterwards, leaving Bastiaan’s remnants to drip into her panties.

At nights, she examined Cliff’s face with an attention that would have annoyed him had he been awake. She should draw him like that. A teacher in art school used to say that her paintings were overdone, the first vision botched by too many retractions and thickenings. He’d called one of her watercolors “a monument to the pitfalls of unguided industry.” That was her relationship with Cliff, alright. Over and done. But her hand still itched to make it right.

When Petra couldn’t sleep, she’d go into Cliff’s study and read whatever was on his desk. Lately that had been histories of smithing and jewelry production. The last book had been on the advent of tooth gearing. Tonight, it was The History of Quakerism. She formed an image of how the book was placed, so that she could put it back exactly.

She missed Cliff. When he wasn’t depressed, he was a remarkable talker. He’d hold forth on the development of ice-cream from Yak’s milk or of egg tempera as a paint base. His brain was like a factoid glue trap, and he loved to share the spoils. But it was his listening that she truly loved. He’d focus intently, absorbent eyes unblinking, then shoot back one question to perfectly unfold her. Before she’d met Cliff, she’d thought that all conversation was combative, but with him it was to be clutched and collated with gentle persistence. 

A tap on wood woke her. Bastiaan stood in the doorway. Strange that she hadn’t heard the stairs creak as he came up. His silhouette sickened her. His hangdog eyes sickened her. The way he fiddled with something in his jacket sickened her. Just the fact of her was enough to make him glad. It was repulsive, she knew. This was the way that, after she’d spent a night cajoling Cliff into a good mood, she must have looked to him.

Bastiaan waited to be dismissed. When he wasn’t, he produced a small mirror. It was a girandole, with an ornate frame that rolled in and out in what Petra supposed was foliage, but which reminded her of waves. She’d been rejecting his advances whenever Cliff wasn’t around, and in response, his gifts had become more beautiful. Now that the presents no longer fit in the shoebox, she tossed them into the cupboard behind the detergents.

Bastiaan coiled her hair into one long strand and wound it into a knot at the top of her head, nesting the mirror inside. He kissed her neck. 

“Don’t.” 

Bastiaan kneaded her fingertips until she extracted them. He left. The basement door clicked shut behind him. 

The book on Quakerism lay stranded in a hard disk of light. Bastiaan discovering her was close to a different fantasy that Petra had been harboring. What she hoped was that one night, Cliff would wake to find her gone. Alarmed, he’d get up. She’d ignore his whispers down the stairs, and, bleary from sleep, he would search for her. Just as he was getting worried, he would see the study light. He’d come in to find her bent over his book and realize that there was a whole part of his wife he’d never known. She was still a fascinating fact, waiting to be discovered.

Petra had allowed Cliff to lace her into a blue kirtle with a slashed front and a yellow underskirt. Her breast was flattened by her corset, and the rest covered by a smock. A braid peeped from beneath her haircloth. Her shoes were the latchet type of the period. She’d agreed to be the Lady of May, to make apple pastries and pickled pork, to play quoits and kick around a balloon ball. But enough was enough, she told Cliff. She gave a half-hearted dance around the May Pole, faffing her hands up and down, before collapsing on a stool. 

“But May Day without the Morris dance is like—a sword without a stone.”

“So better, actually.” Petra tried to throw her haircloth, but it caught the air and fluttered onto the grass.  

Until then, the three of them had been having a successful, albeit small, May Day. The party had fulfilled its mission of cheering up Bastiaan, who had been mopey of late. Bastiaan had striped the pole and slung ribbons from its apex, raked straw over the lawn, and entwined bowers of hawthorn branches with marigolds until they looked like living hedges with the insides scooped out. Tonight, he’d drunk a barrel of mead the size of a hog, sweetening each cup with sugar. He’d even sung in what sounded like English, although Cliff might have imagined it, being in the cups himself. 

Cliff pleaded with Petra. “Come on, hon.”

“No.”

“Fine. I’ll dance it by myself.”   

Cliff had spent ages on the hobby horse. It was hard to fashion a horse head from papier-mâché, let alone a wire-cage posterior. Each leg needed a bell that sounded a different pitch. He’d decked out the body with plumes and braveries, and the mane was strong and fuzzy. This wouldn’t be a true Morris dance—not without the dragon or Robin Hood—but at least the horse was right. 

Cliff switched on a drum and tambor recording. He ambled around the pole, noting the reduced traction of his buskins on straw. The tambor began to beat. Cliff careened. Pranced. Ambled. Frisked. Did the jog trot. The Canterbury Pace. He raced in an imaginary joust. He jumped in the air as high as he could, to great jangling. He lost himself in the manly pleasure of the dance.

Petra turned to watch. 

“The King of Revels needs his Lady of May,” Cliff said and tossed his horse head. 

She gave him a look. And then—unbelievably—she smiled. She stood up and weaved around the pole. She fanned out her skirts, bowed, and began a canary. Bastiaan joined in. The hay exploded in little puffs around their feet and filled the dusk with wisps of glowing particulate. Cliff whinnied and charged them with his paper lance, lifting at the last moment. Petra wasn’t a dancer, but there was a defiant energy to her movements that resembled competence. Incredible. He’d only taught her the moves yesterday, but she was giving it her all, and in a kirtle no less, and soon Bastiaan was lifting her off the ground and she was crisscrossing her legs and whooping with her arms and laughing. It was the woman who Cliff loved, striking out of the woman he now lived with. He wanted to have her body in the straw, to hitch up her skirt and bury his face in her. He imagined her begging him to stop, but he wouldn’t, not until he’d made her happy. Was she wearing panties under all that?

It was hot inside the horse. To sit on a bale with a horse butt was impossible, and the straps cut into his shoulders. Come to think of it, he might even look ridiculous. Was this May Day ridiculous? With a groan, he folded, sending the horse over his head to crumple on the ground.

Later that night, Cliff and Petra did a mazy unhistorical waltz and sank into one of the bowers. Bastiaan lay by the fence a few yards away, retching. There had been something off about him tonight, as sparky as he’d been. He’d attacked the mead with desperate energy. 

“Peter,” Bastiaan moaned.

Petra tended to him, until his retching stopped. She came back to the bower. “He’s got a tummy upset.”

Cliff touched a braid that had come loose from her haircloth. She looked good with her breasts flattened. It emphasized her slim neck. 

“I was proud of you tonight.”

“I make a comely wench.”

Cliff laughed. He ran his tongue between her salty fingers, and only when he had licked the underside of both hands, did he move up her arm. Her body was leaner than he remembered, but he would re-learn its clefts and shadows. He wrapped a hand around the flange of her hip. For a second, he thought she would resist. Then she sighed, and he pushed her onto the straw. 

When Cliff found the tokens in the laundry cupboard, he thought they were part of an animal nest. Then he saw the shine of an egg-cup. Amidst some paper scraps were an embroidered kerchief, two scored gloves, a pillow stuffed with rose petals, a snapped coin, a squirrel pelt ensconcing a dozen buttons, and a gimmel ring designed to hook with another. Cliff pressed his hands along the underside of Bastiaan’s pallet, until he found a change in its consistency. Inside, wrapped in one of Petra’s shirts, he found the ring’s shining partner. 

So, Bastiaan had been courting his wife.  Cliff couldn’t be sure they’d had sex. Petra might have accepted the tokens without a thought. But there was her withdrawal lately, the outfits. How often had he walked in to find Petra alone with Bastiaan, her eyes too bright and a twist in the air? Certainly, Bastiaan was in love with Petra. And why not? She was lovely, he thought dispassionately. He went through Petra’s desk and found the separation papers. They were dated from six months earlier. He closed the drawer.

That afternoon, Cliff watched the two lovers. A sliver of the study window looked onto the lawn, where the pair were refreshing the knot garden. To keep up Bastiaan’s spirits, Cliff had asked Petra to garden with him. Bastiaan had been allowed to polish off the (significant) amount of ale left after May Day. That had him drunk for the past week, which might have been a bad idea. He was certainly drunk now. Petra grabbed a stem and shook until the roots were a snaky puff of beige. She held the plant in place while Bastiaan poured down a stream of potting mix. He swayed and spewed soil on her back. She brushed it off with irritation. Her gloves were red and filthy.

Cliff had left the papers in the drawer downstairs, but he’d taken the presents to his study. He thought about confronting Petra with them, but each time he unpacked them from his desk, he put them back. Their marriage was in a bad way, and acknowledgment might be the death blow. Once you said a thing out loud, it existed. But maybe he just thought that because he wanted to stay silent. It was his fault. Marriage was a two-way street, and he’d blocked off his side. How badly had he neglected Pet to have driven her to—what? And even worse, not noticed? These thoughts occurred to him mechanically. His dominant emotion was irritation at how inconvenient a separation would be, but every so often this indifference, which horrified him, was lanced with pain. 

He turned the gifts this way and that, as if they might tell him what to do. He let them sit on his desk, hoping that Petra would look in and see him there, contemplating the evidence of her infidelity. She didn’t. She frowned and pushed loam around the base of the plants with her gloves. She smacked dirt onto her cut-offs. 

These were not the movements of a woman newly in love. Petra loved him, not Bastiaan, but her too-muchness was repellant. Cliff had fallen for a Petra who was looking beyond him. What joy then, to be able to recall her to himself. Could he recall her now? Cliff watched Bastiaan pull a tender leaf from her hair. 

Weeks later, while they were picking through the suburbs in search of the escaped Bastiaan, Cliff asked Petra if she’d been sneaking into his office to read his books. 

“What’s yours is mine.”

“I’m not attacking you,” he said. “I think it’s neat.”

Petra turned herself out of the car and started to scan the park. This is where they usually found Bastiaan, under a bush or tree. He liked the far rise behind the tennis courts, but it was too dark to make out from here. 

Since May Day, Bastiaan’s behavior had declined. First, Petra had found the beer fridge emptied, and when she’d checked the clutch of crusty liquors they never used, they were drained. Then Bastiaan took to wandering. He walked into neighbors’ houses and went through their cupboards. Mrs. Veela had found him in her kitchen with her sherry. 

“I almost called the police, but I figured I would call you first. Given that your nephew’s a little. . .” Mrs. Veela tapped her temple. 

To ward off break-ins, Cliff started buying Bastiaan cases of light beer. He said that Elizabethans lived off ale anyway. 

“Don’t put a gloss on alcoholism,” Petra said. 

For Petra, the only upshot of the drinking was that Bastiaan had stopped trying to have sex with her. The rest was awful. Bastiaan started drinking in the morning, and at around five he took off. They dressed him in normal clothes, but he still attracted attention. If Petra was home, she’d follow at a distance. If he did something bad, but harmless—pissing in a garden, say—she let it happen. Other times she had to intervene. On days when she wasn’t there to track him, the catch-and-release was exhausting. Often it took them hours to find him. He might be on the next street or in the next suburb. They’d finally get him in the basement, knowing that in the morning he’d plead until they let him out and the cycle began again. Other times they drove around the whole night searching, only to return in the morning to find him on the doorstep, eager for more beer. Worse than this was the fear that he’d be arrested. When he was returned to them by an elderly couple who’d nearly hit him on the highway, they realized that he could speak enough English to direct people to their house. That was enough to scare Petra into turning down next term’s classes to be his permanent minder.

Even Cliff had got fed up with Bastiaan. It might have been because he now spoke English and was infected by the present, or because he was always too drunk to play. Petra didn’t think it was because he’d found out about them. Cliff said that if Bastiaan was caught by the police, they should pay dumb.

“He’ll tell them he lives with us,” said Petra.

“And we act like we’ve never seen the guy.” 

Tonight, Cliff and Petra got lucky and found Bastiaan by the men’s toilet. As they hoisted him up, Petra was hit by a sour breath reek. 

“You know, I’m allowed to be interested in history too,” she said. 

“I’m just surprised. What have you liked?”

She didn’t respond, because they had the semi-unconscious Bastiaan at the car and faced the challenge of slotting him into the backseat. She opened the far door, crawled across the seats (boots on upholstery, it was all ruined anyway) and pulled him in. They put on the child-lock and stopped to savor their victory. The sky was swept with termites in flight, like pieces of shivering ash.

“I liked the incunables,” she said, at length. 

Cliff nodded, excited. “Incunables are rare, but only by definition. I have a great documentary on them. Want to watch it?”

Constantly recapturing Bastiaan brought Petra and Cliff closer. They resumed their old routine of making out for five minutes, her blowing him for five, and then him fucking her from behind until she came, and he could feel okay about ejaculating. Economical. But it was enough.

“We have to do something,” Petra said one night, into Cliff’s chest meat. “He just appeared. Can’t we disappear him, too?”

“I’m a historian, not a time travel scientist.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“I’m a historian, not a murderer.” 

“What the hell!” She saw that he was joking. “I mean, send him away.”

“The moral thing to do would be to break his habit, but it’s not like we can send him to AA.”

“If we stop feeding him, he might run away.”

“He might.” Cliff paused. “This must be hard for you.”

“Meaning?”

“You know.” He drew her head back onto his chest. 

So, he knew. He was giving her the option to disclose. She had fucked another man, and he forgave her. He wouldn’t even mention it, if she didn’t want. Which was just as infuriating as it was remarkable. Later, she would realize that this was the moment when they might have pushed through to something real. She could have told him how she was always walking on egg-shells or how she wished, just once, he’d take her face in his hands to kiss her. But his skin was warm on her ear. She loved his thick chest and solid lungs. She loved the mound of fat above his groin. Maybe they were entering one of their good periods again. She went to sleep.

They couldn’t have done it except together. Bastiaan sat bleary-eyed in the backseat and dropped each clinker into the footwell. They had got him a six-pack of pale ale. Small batch. A parting gift. 

Their timing was perfect. It was a forty-minute drive and by the time the car pulled into the piney clearing, Bastiaan was on the last bottle. He didn’t even wait until the car had squeaked to a stop on the needles to jump out and piss. 

Cliff got out of the car and Petra swapped to the driver’s side.

“Bastiaan,” Cliff said. He shook a large Steiner. 

Meanwhile, Petra executed a five-point turn and inched the car up the road. She waited, foot on the accelerator. What she saw in the rear-view mirror reminded her of that first night in the basement, when Cliff had approached Bastiaan and pinched his lovelock. She watched as Cliff moved towards Bastiaan with the Steiner and held it out. Bastiaan looked at the bottle, looked back at Cliff. Trusted him. Took the bottle.  

Cliff turned and ran to the car. He tore the door open. 

“Go, go, go!” 

The tires spun, and they lurched forward. Gravel plinked in the tire wells. They were going too fast, but a human could run at 15 miles an hour. Maybe faster, with drunk-strength. When they were a few hundred yards away, Petra slowed. In the rear-view, she saw Bastiaan’s silhouette. He had drawn the bottle into his chest with both hands, like it was his heart, bursting. 

“Do you think he’ll be okay?” 

Cliff held forth. He had determined Bastiaan’s occupation at long last: a travelling artisan. While walking from city to city, he would have learned to forage. He would have dug up roots and cooked a pottage over a fire. Read the stars. He would be fine in nature for a few days. Eventually, he would wander up to the main road and join the homeless community. 

“He’ll fit right in,” Cliff said, then started to catalog the region’s edible plants.

Ah yes, thought Petra, relaxing to the sound of Cliff’s voice. Who cared, anyway. They were going home. They’d light candles, drink wine, and Cliff would tell her about the next chapter of the book he’d never write. She felt drunk with half-hearted expectation. She wanted the drive to last forever, so that cuddling would always lie ahead. While moving they could pretend that history wouldn’t repeat itself, because the moment you’d been anticipating, when it landed at your doorstep, was never quite right. There was something new inside, a stranger to the heart.  

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