Acts of Love (31 page)

Sandy's face fell slightly with disappointment.

“Sorry,” he said.

She smiled, shrugged.

For a moment, there was only their breath.

He was two inches away; the musky odor of his dank corduroy slacks and leather shoes filled their nostrils. Who moved, who reached first? It seemed, later, important. She reached over, brushed a wet strand of hair from his forehead. He reached over, his hand crawling behind the curtain of her hair to her neck. Or did neither of them move first, fall first? Neither could, later, place the blame, take the blame. They only fell into each other, into and into each other, and down, fusion without precursor. He said her name once, a groan, a complaint, a calling.

It did not feel like a beginning, but a culmination, or, rather, it felt like both at once. Their naked bodies on the hard linoleum floor, grappling. Bone and flesh and tongue. Here, here.

She could hear somewhere her own moans, open-mouthed, desperate. She had never moaned like that before.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked and stopped for a moment, propped himself up on his elbows, looked down into her glassy face.

“No.” She clutched him harder, closer, farther in, and he went, his eyes shut, mouth, chest, gut open.

Afterward, they did not say a word. Not one word. They lay on the floor watching the water drip from his coat into a small puddle a foot away, while they slowly disentangled themselves from each other, mutely peeling away leg, arm, chest.

“Did you hear that?” Sandy lifted her head suddenly.

“What?”

“Ssshhh.” She glanced toward the kitchen door, permanently locked. There was only stillness. “Never mind. I thought I heard something.”

“I didn't hear anything.” He kneeled, his back to her, then rose and dressed without turning around, facing her. She lay staring at the far wall, the white-and-yellow paper beginning to unglue in the corner. She only stood and followed him when he removed his coat from the wooden hanger, slid into it, and started to walk from the room.

He put his hand on the front-door knob and began to turn it. She could not look up, could only look at his hand, curved, callused. He took a deep breath, then exhaled. His hand released the knob. Turning to her, he angled his forefinger under her chin, raised her face slowly until her eyes met his, watery and dark. He bit his lip; she shook her head; they looked away from each other. He quickly turned the knob and slid through the door.

As soon as she heard his car door slam shut, she ran to the bathroom and threw up, the sour rush of vomit filling her throat again and again. When she was completely emptied, she brushed her teeth and rinsed her face with cold water.

But she did not wash off his semen, warm and sticky and fishy, as it oozed slowly down her thighs and dried.

 

T
HEY DID NOT CALL EACH OTHER
, though they easily could have, his office to hers. What was there to say, after all? Apology, regret, accusation, excuses, guilt, desire?

Despite herself—never and never and never again—Sandy found herself in the following days plotting ways to run into him. She told herself it was so that she could say it to him, Never again. Show him. She went to the bar where they had met after work. She drove by the site of a house Waring and Freeman was building, though it was miles out of her way.

She did not go to Ann's house. Could not. Even for her usual drop-by's. How could she?

She stayed in her own silent house, alone, hugging her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth through the night, repeating, chanting, intoning the litany, never and never and never again.

 

H
E DID NOT PRETEND
to have a pretext the next time. No book to return, no cup of sugar to borrow. It was late, almost ten o'clock, as if he had come, given in, only after an evening's long struggle with resistance.

There was only this. He took her face in his hands. Stared into her eyes. “You realize,” he said, “that I'm going to have to hate you afterward.”

She nodded. She knew just what he meant.

They sank onto the couch. The act of climbing the stairs, going to the bed, seemed too premeditated, as if that domestication would sully them even further, with its false intimations of stability, of rightful belonging. Their bodies flayed and ground against each other, the need itself violent, predatory. It was as if because they had already crossed the worst taboo, all the other, lesser ones were inconsequential—put this here, touch me there, harder, faster, more. There were no rules, no laws. Shame would only come later, afterward, alone, a ravenous, malignant shame that burned all that came within its reach. She bit his shoulder, tasted his blood, actually tasted his blood in her mouth, but he did not complain. He knew just what she meant.

Her head was resting on his arm, sprawled across the couch. Their legs were intertwined, adhered to each other. He fingered a damp curl of hair at her temple. Eventually they would have to talk, but what language could they find? Not the playful banter of lovers, imagining romantic outings, vacations, escapades—wouldn't it be lovely if…?—those dreamy visions that give even the most unlikely couples the sweet, ephemeral taste of a future. They could not revert to their previous patter of sarcasm and abuse—it rang hollow without an audience, without Ann. Nor the complaints of illicit lovers—my wife just doesn't understand me.

He twirled the curl round and round his forefinger. “The thing about us is,” he said, “we're too similar.”

She tightened. She did not think of herself as similar to him at all. “In what way?”

“We've both spent our entire lives trying to prove that we don't need anyone.”

“I haven't done any such thing,” she protested.

He smiled. “Sure you have. Hell, you've even tried to prove you don't need a home.”

“As opposed to Ann, who's spent her whole life trying to prove she has one?”

“I will not discuss Ann with you,” he said harshly, standing up so abruptly that her head snapped back painfully against the arm of the couch.

 

W
HOSE BETRAYAL WAS WORSE
? The sister's or the husband's? She sat up in the glare of her bathroom, picking a sore on her arm. She dug at the skin with her nails until the blood rose in globules from the surface, the skin itself peeling away in ragged layers, and then she dug more, widening and deepening the crater, looking for a different pain.

 

S
HE DID NOT CALL HIM
, never actually stated “Come over,” or “Don't.” Though she started to, started to say both, numerous times.

She ceded the power of decision, of movement, to him.

She could only wait in her house for his appearance, or his absence, wanting both, dreading both. She listened to every creak, every splatter in the street—him? Listened as the night deepened and he did not come and there was only the restless knocking of her own fingers in rhythm with her relief and disappointment and loathing. Never and never and never again.

 

F
OR NINE DAYS
, nights, nothing.

She began to think that it was over, gone. That she could make it disappear, vanish even from the past.

 

O
N
S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
, she parked behind Bradley's Pub downtown and wandered down Main Street, inventing errands for herself, needs that could be satisfied by purchases. She went to Frederick's Pharmacy and bought eighteen dollars' worth of magazines, with plans of listing those she might like to write for, move for, relocate for. She went to the bookstore and bought an audiotape that promised to teach conversational Italian in less than six hours. She stood for a long while staring at four long-haired, snowy kittens in the pet-shop window. Once, in college, she had taken a tiny black kitten from the pound, Mingus, who slept nestled against her knees and woke her each morning by licking her eyes. But Mingus had run away after only a month. The boy she was seeing at the time had shrugged knowingly. “You're not the type that's able to hang on to things like pets,” he had said. She was mortified to realize now that she was crying, right there on the street. She blotted her eyes with her coat sleeve, picked up her packages, and hurried away.

She was heading back to her car when she saw Ted coming out of the hardware store, a large green snow shovel in his hand. She ducked, but he had already seen her, begun to follow her. She quickened her pace. She felt him behind her as she slipped through an alleyway at the side of the pub leading to the parking lot.

“Sandy.”

She turned, froze with her back against the side of the building, let him approach, reach her.

He stood an inch away, resting the end of the shovel on the ground. The whiteness of their breath in the cold swirled between them, met, disintegrated.

“What do you want from me?” she moaned.

He broke into a laugh, a dry and harsh laugh that cracked in two and fell. “Nothing,” he said emptily.

She did not move for a moment. At last, she turned away, began to maneuver around him, when he suddenly grabbed her arm, pulled her to him, pulled her mouth to his, heated and cavernous. He reared back, pushed her away.

“Go home,” he muttered, and turned back down the alleyway.

 

A
NN CALLED
S
ANDY
at the
Chronicle
on Monday morning. “Where have you been, stranger? How come you haven't come over lately? The girls were hoping you'd be by this weekend.”

“I'm sorry, I've been really busy.”

“Too busy for lunch? I miss you.”

“Okay.”

They sat across from each other at a small round table in the rear of the Ginger Box with bowls of lentil soup and muffins. The white vase of miniature pink carnations was pushed to the side, along with the butter dish they both scrupulously avoided.

“Good Lord, what happened to your arm?” Ann asked as Sandy reached for her water.

“Nothing. I burned myself. You know me, I always was a lousy cook.” She smiled dismissively. “What about you? Are you okay?” She looked at Ann, wan, distracted, and was terrified what she might answer. She feared, too, her own demeanor, feared that Ann would see that she was lip-synching, would see it in her eyes, the betrayal. The water sloshed in her glass.

But Ann just sighed. “Sometimes I really envy you.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because you're alone.”

“I thought that was something to be pitied in this society. Do you know how much money publishers make on books telling women how to avoid being alone?”

Ann took a spoonful of lentil soup and let it drip back into the bowl. It looked like mud. “I don't even know what it's like. Maybe you were right all those years ago when you told me I got married too young.”

Sandy looked away, at the register up front, the door, her napkin. “What are you saying, Ann?”

“I don't know what I'm saying.” She looked directly at Sandy. “I hate it when he comes into the room I'm in,” she said in a low, hoarse whisper. “I hate the way he breathes, sleeps. The only time I'm sure I love him anymore is when I'm physically worried about him. If he's very late, or if I hear of an accident on the radio. And then, all of a sudden, I want him again, can't imagine my life without him.” She took a bite of her muffin. “Christ, I just wish I knew what I wanted. How have you always been so certain?”

“Is that what you think?”

“Well, at least you've always known what you haven't wanted.”

“What's that?”

“What I have.” Ann pushed away her plate. “Do you think Estelle ever had doubts?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.” She looked up, her face softening into a semi-smile. “Maybe it's just me,” she said. “Something I'm going through. Something that will pass. You know what he did this weekend? He made me a flower out of cherry wood and birch. A perfect daisy with one petal left. She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me…” Ann cocked her head, her eyes filmy, unreadable. “We owe each other something,” she said quietly. “I'm just not sure what.”

Sandy looked at Ann's head, bent with memory. “I have to get back to work,” she said abruptly, and began rummaging through her large bag for her wallet.

 

N
EVER AND NEVER
and never again.

 

S
HE SAT ON THE FLOOR
, hunched in the dark of the upstairs guest room.

She heard him ring the front bell for the third, the fourth time.

Then pound, slapping the door with the palm of his hand. “Sandy!”

Of course, he would have seen her car in the driveway, known she was home despite the fact that there was no light anywhere within.