Under the Tent

The tent did almost nothing against the afternoon heat, and by two o'clock I could feel the sun coming straight through the canvas and settling into my shoulders like a cat that had decided to stay. Saturday at the Brookhollow Farmers Market was always the same, hay dust in the air, the smell of frying dough drifting over from the stand two rows down, and me sitting behind my folding table with a row of watercolors clipped to a wire and exactly nobody stopping to look at them.

I looked down at my hands where they rested on the table, and I did what I always do at the market, which is study them like a stranger's hands. There was a new brown spot on the left one since spring, I was almost sure of it, and the skin had gone loose and thin in a way that made me think of my mother's hands, which is not a comparison a woman enjoys making at fifty-two. Three years with Jared and he still picked up my hand at dinner sometimes and kissed the inside of my wrist, and I had never once caught him looking at those spots, or at the soft line under my chin, or anywhere else I kept a running list. Either he was a very kind man or he genuinely did not see it, and I honestly could not decide which possibility made me feel worse.

"Margot! You hiding back here on purpose?"

I looked up and there he was, forty-nine years old and grinning like a fool, dusty to the knees in his work boots with grass clippings stuck to his shin and his shirt stuck to his back. He had come straight from the Hendersons' place, three hours of mowing and hedge trimming written all over him, and he leaned on my table like he owned it, which in a way he did, since he'd built the wire display rack himself.

"You smell like a lawnmower's armpit," I said. "Sit down before you scare off my customers."

"What customers?" He pulled the folding chair around to my side anyway and dropped into it, close, his shoulder warm against mine. "Sales been okay?"

"I sold the heron one. To a woman who bargained me down ten dollars and then told me her whole divorce story, so I earned that ten dollars honestly."

Jared laughed, that big easy laugh of his, and tipped his head back against the chair, and I watched the sweat slide down the side of his throat and thought, not for the first time, that I had no idea what he was doing with me. He was a landscape man with forearms like rope and a smile that still worked on him, and I was a watercolor lady with loose knuckles, and yet here he was, every Saturday, coming to sit in my hot tent and breathe on my paintings.

Then he said the thing he always says, which is, "You should paint me sometime."

And I always say, "You always say that," and he always says, "I mean it," and usually that's the end of it. But that afternoon the heat had made me loose and maybe a little reckless, and I looked at him sitting there with his boots crossed at the ankle, and something came over me.

"Fine," I said. "Take off your boots."

He blinked at me. "What?"

"I want to do a foot study. I've been doing trees and herons and squash all summer, I need something with actual structure to it. Feet have structure. Take off your boots, Jared."

Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part people always ask me about later, and the truth is I didn't fully understand what I was asking for. I'd never really looked at his feet. Three years together and somehow his feet had stayed outside the catalog of him, the way some parts of a person just do. So when he reached down, still grinning but slower now, and started unlacing that left boot, I was expecting a joke, some wisecrack about my artistic standards.

What I got instead was ceremony.

He unlaced it all the way down, loosened the tongue with his thumb, and eased his foot out like he was opening something that mattered. Then the sock, peeled down slow over the ankle and off. He did the whole thing over again with the right boot, and the whole time he wasn't looking at me at all, he was looking down at his own hands, and I sat there with my pencil already in my fingers feeling like I had walked into a room and forgotten why.

And then his bare feet were just there, in the daylight, in my tent, and I forgot every smart thing I had ever planned to say.

They were bigger than I'd somehow expected, wide across the ball, thick through the toes, the skin tanned dark at the ankle where his socks ended and pale as unprimed paper underneath. The soles were calloused in long yellow whorls, at the heel and under the big toes, the kind of callouses you only get from standing on ground for a living, thirty years of it, and the tops were crossed with fine blue veins and a few old scars, one white line across the right instep that I had never asked about and suddenly badly wanted to. The big toes were elegant. That's the word I keep coming back to, elegant, like something a mason would have cut on purpose.

"Well?" he said, and his voice had gone quiet in a way I hadn't heard from him before. "Still want to paint them?"

"I may need them to hold still for several hours," I said, and heard my own voice come out about half its usual size.

He laughed again, softer, and turned sideways on the chair and stretched his legs out under my table, crossing one ankle over the other knee of the other leg, the right foot presented to me like a plate at dinner. And the smell came with the movement, warm and earthy and not what you'd call a perfume, leather and dust and clean sweat and grass, and I found out something about myself in that moment that I filed away without comment, which is that it did not bother me even slightly.

I bent over the sketchbook and started with the ankle bone, because you always start with the anchor point, and the pencil felt good in my hand the way it only does when the subject is real. I worked in silence for a while, the market noise going on outside the tent, somebody's kid shrieking by the cider press, the dough stand lady hollering about a batch coming hot, and my pencil making its little scratching sounds, and Jared sitting stone still for a man who I knew could not sit still to save his life.

"Your arch is higher on the left," I murmured, mostly to myself. "Did you know that?"

"Never noticed," he said, and then, after a pause, "You've got a wrinkle right between your eyebrows when you draw. Right there. It shows up the second your pencil touches paper."

I kept drawing, because my hand had decided to keep drawing whether I agreed or not, but something went through me, warm and slow. He'd been watching my face. All these Saturdays, all these dinners, he'd been watching closely enough to know where my face keeps its wrinkles.

"You're not even looking at the feet," I said. "You're watching me."

"Guilty," he said, easy as that.

His hand came down on my knee, warm and heavy, right on top of the paint-smudged denim, and I felt it through the whole length of my leg like a current finding its ground. I didn't stop drawing. I don't think I could have, my hand was committed, the pencil moving along the long tendon of his instep, but I was suddenly very aware that the paper was not the only thing in my tent being studied.

"Keep working," he said quietly. "I'm just going to sit here and watch you do it."

I kept working. My hand was steady. My everything else was not.

"Can I touch you while you work?" he asked, and his hand stayed right where it was on my knee, thumb moving once, slow, across the denim. "Just your foot. Nothing fancy. I been thinking about it since the fourth Saturday of last summer, if you want to know the truth."

I looked at him over the top of my sketchbook, and he looked back, steady, not pushing, and three years together teaches you the difference between a man waiting for an answer and a man who's already decided one. He was waiting. I put the pencil down across the page and slipped my sandal off under the table, and I set my bare foot on his thigh, and I said, "Yes. Go ahead."

His foot came up to meet mine, and I don't know how to describe what it was like, the calloused sole of his foot sliding against mine, heel to arch, warm and rough and deliberate, like he was reading me with the bottom of his foot the way I'd been reading him with my pencil. He stroked along the outside edge, up and over the ankle, back down again, and I had to close my eyes for a second, because nobody had ever touched my feet like they were worth touching. My feet have been on the ground for fifty-two years and they look like it, and here was this man with rope for forearms treating them like the subject and not the painter.

"Your arch is higher on the right," he said, tracing it. "Bet you didn't know that either."

"I'm the one who's supposed to be noticing things," I managed. "That's my whole job."

"Well, you missed your calling," he said, and kept going, slow as honey.

I got maybe two more lines down. Maybe. The pencil was moving but the drawing was happening somewhere without me, and every pass of his sole against mine went up my leg and pooled somewhere around my middle and just sat there, warming. Outside the tent the market kept on being the market, a fiddle tuning up somewhere, the heron lady long gone with her ten-dollar bargain, and in here it was just the two of us and the heat and the sound of skin on skin, soft, unhurried.

I closed the sketchbook.

He watched me do it, and his mouth did something, that thing it does, half a smile, and he reached down and took my ankle in both hands, careful, like the ankle bone I'd started my drawing with was the same one he was holding, and he lifted my foot out of his lap and brought it up to his mouth.

He kissed each toe. Slowly. Starting with the big one, which I have always thought of as my least attractive feature, and working his way across, and each one got the same attention, lips pressed soft, a breath, then the next, and by the time he got to the little one I had both hands flat on the folding table because the chair had stopped feeling like it was holding me.

"You don't have to," I said, and my voice cracked in the middle of it.

"I know," he said against my toes. "I want to."

He drew his tongue up the sole of my right foot, one long line from heel to toe, and I made a noise I'm not going to repeat here, and he did it again, and the calluses on his hands were rough against my ankle and his mouth was soft and the whole contradiction of it had my heart hammering out somewhere around the dough stand. He worked the left foot after the right, same ceremony, and when he finally lowered my leg I felt like something had been unwrapped and admired and I hadn't been unwrapped and admired in a very long time.

Then he took my foot and pressed it flat against the front of his jeans, and he was hard, hard enough that I felt it through the denim, and he didn't grind or push, he just held it there, letting me feel the shape of him against my arch, and looked at me like he was asking a question with no words in it.

"Oh," I said. "Well."

"Yeah," he said. "Well."

I pressed my foot against him, just once, and his breath went out of him in a long slow stream, and I thought, three years, and I have never once done this for this man, and he has been carrying this around all this time, wanting it, afraid maybe to say it out loud to a woman who paints flowers.

"Jared," I said. "Take me behind this tent."

There's a strip of grass back there between the tent and the fence, hidden from the lane by canvas and a wall of stacked crates, and he laid his shirt down on the grass for me before he laid me down on it, which is the kind of thing that does not get said enough about landscapers. The canvas was hot above us and the grass was warm and dry below and the afternoon light came through the fabric in a soft yellow wash, and he knelt over me and I reached up and pulled him down by the collar of that sweat-stuck shirt.

"I want your foot," I said, and I listened to myself say it and did not blush, which surprised me more than anything else that afternoon. "In my mouth. Is that okay?"

He made a sound, low in his chest, and shifted his weight, and brought his right foot up along my side, careful of his knee, careful of my ribs, and I took his big toe in my mouth. He tasted like leather, dust, sweat, and grass, the same smell from before but close now, real, and the calloused skin was strange and wonderful against my tongue. I worked my way across his toes, the white scar on his instep right there under my fingers, and above me he had his head tipped back and his eyes shut and his hips moving small against my thigh, and I had never in my life felt more like a painting that someone actually wanted to look at.

"You're beautiful," he said, eyes still closed, voice wrecked. "You know that? Right now, under this tent, you're the most beautiful thing in this whole market."

"You can't see me, your eyes are closed."

"I don't need to see you," he said. "I know exactly what you look like."

We got his jeans down and he reached into the pocket of his folded pants for a condom, because even three years in, even though we'd had the testing conversation the second year, old habits, and honestly I love that about him, and then he was inside me, slow, both of his hands wrapped around my ankles and lifting my feet up against his chest so I was folded nearly in half, and every thrust pressed my soles flat against his sternum, against the hammer of his heartbeat, and it was the strangest and best angle of my whole fifty-two years and I told him so, twice, the second time not in words.

He kept going until I was gripping fistfuls of the grass and saying his name into the hot canvas, and then a little longer, and then he finished with his forehead dropped down against mine, breathing hard, and I felt him shudder all the way down through his feet into mine.

After, we stayed there in the grass until the fiddle outside found its key and started up a tune, and he turned onto his side and pulled my feet into his lap and held them, one hand on each, like they were the whole reason he'd come to the market today, which maybe they were.

"You want to know something?" he said, running his thumb along my arch, then reaching up for my hand and turning it over, the brown spot that showed up since spring, the knuckles that are starting to look, if I'm honest, a little like my mother's. "These are the most beautiful part of you. These feet. These hands. Everything you've worked with."

"They're fifty-two years old," I said.

"They're fifty-two years of you," he said. "I've been looking at them three years and I haven't run out yet."

And I believed him. That's the part I keep turning over, sitting here writing this, I just believed him, plain as that, the way you believe weather coming through a window. He said it and something in me that had been braced for years just let go.

We packed up the tent together while the fiddle played. He broke down the wire rack he'd built me and folded the table and I stacked the paintings in their crate, and my feet were bare in the grass the whole time because I couldn't find a good enough reason to put the sandals back on. He carried the crate to my car one-handed. His boots hung off two of his fingers.

"Next Saturday," he said, not a question.

"Next Saturday," I said. "Bring the feet."

He grinned and drove off toward the Hendersons' to return the mower, and I sat in the driver's seat for a minute with the crate of paintings warm against my passenger seat and my soles still gritty with grass, and then I started the car and went home.