by Anita Shreve
All I can think about is you.
You held my shoulder in the restaurant. And then you held my hand, and I turned my head away, and you asked if it upset me, and I said no, when what I really wanted to say was, “I can’t breathe.”
And then I thought, sitting on the bench, with my daughter playing in the sandbox: This is madness. I just wrote this man a letter telling him it couldn’t happen, when all I want—all I want—is for him to make love to me.
I am walking around in a feverish state. I am not sleeping not eating.
I know it would be better for everyone if we didn’t see each other ever again.
I want you to know that I take at least equal responsibility for what happens now.
I ask myself all the time, every minute, every hour: What is this?
Siân
HIS HANDS are so wet and frozen he can barely make the phone work. He’s forgotten his glasses and cannot see the digits, taps the numbers in as if working braille. The phone is exposed, an outdoor box at the side of the Qwik Stop. He hopes no one he knows will pass by: What’s Callahan doing at a pay phone in this filthy weather, with his own house not two miles away? Needles of frozen rain sting the back of his neck. He turns his collar up, wishes he had an umbrella. The sleet drips off his nose.
“Hello?”
It is a woman’s voice; it is Siân’s. But her voice sounds tentative, as if she had not wanted to answer the phone.
“Siân?”
There is a silence. A long silence.
“This is—”
“I know who it is,” she says slowly. He hears a small sound, a tiny sound from the back of her throat. “Oh, God . . .,” she says.
“Charles will—”
“I know. I know.” Her voice is strained. He thinks she may be crying, but he can’t tell without seeing her. “I thought when I said I might not be able to do this I’d never hear from you again,” she says in a rush.
“You had to have known that I would call,” he says. “Did you get my letters yet?”
“No.”
“You’ll get them today. I just got yours.”
There is a silence at her end, though he thinks he can hear her breathing.
“Siân?”
“Yes?”
“We have to meet again. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“I want to meet you today, now.”
“I can’t—”
“No, not today. The weather is awful. Is it snowing there?”
“Freezing rain.”
“Same here. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“I don’t want to wait. I won’t wait. I have to do this.”
“I’ll try.”
“Same place?”
“All right.”
“But earlier. Can you get there by ten?”
She seems to be thinking, calculating. “Yes,” she says hesitantly. “I think so.”
“Good.” He lets out his breath. “Siân?”
“Yes?”
“I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but I want you to know, in case something happens to me and I don’t get there, that I love you.”
The silence at her end is so long, he thinks she may have hung up. He wishes he could see her face.
“And there’s something else,” he says.
“What?” Her voice is quiet.
“I don’t know how I know this on the basis of only one meeting,” he says, “but I’m sure of this. . . .”
“What?”
“I know I always have.”
He is standing at the side of his car when she drives into the parking lot. Ten past ten. The day is frosty and translucent; the storm from yesterday blew the front through, leaving in its wake a sky so blue it looks almost neon. She emerges from the car, slings her pocketbook over her shoulder, shuts the door. He watches as she crosses the parking lot to the Cadillac. They stand facing each other for an instant, and then he embraces her, folds her into him. She comes willingly, as if she, too, has been anticipating this moment for days. He can feel her trembling, and she says so: “I’m shaking,” she says, as if embarrassed. “I’m just shaking.”
He holds her at arms’ length, looks at her face, kisses her. Her mouth opens; he feels as if he is pouring himself into her.
He breaks away. “I’ve got a room,” he says.
She composes herself then. He thinks for a moment that she may protest, may not be ready for a room yet and what that implies, but she says nothing, seems to be waiting for him to lead the way. He takes her hand, walks with her across the parking lot, up the steps of the inn and into the lobby. Again she is wearing black—a black coat, black high heels—and he senses, rather than sees, the slight limp as she walks. Inside the lobby, he turns to her and says quietly, “This is the hard part, walking past the front desk. I’ve already checked us in.”
“I don’t feel guilty,” she says. “It’s all right.”
He cannot remember the last time he booked a room in a clandestine manner with a woman. Certainly not since he has been married. He has been faithful to Harriet throughout their marriage, as he imagines she has been to him. Yet it is not guilt he feels so much as awkwardness—as if he were a young man who has had little experience with women. He wonders, too, not for the first time, if it will work—if, in the throes of an emotion he can barely define, he will be able to make love to Siân Richards. He has tried, over the past several days, to envision making love to her, but he has not been able to bring these fantasies into clear focus. He can only remember them as children. He would like to say to her that the room is simply for convenience, for privacy, so that they can talk out of earshot of others, get to know each other again, but he knows that would sound disingenuous. She walks slightly ahead of him, to his right. He gives directions behind her. The room is on the top floor, on the west wing. The wing in which the boys once had their rooms. The view from the room is out to the back, to the lake. He has already been to the room, inspected it.
He puts the key into the lock, opens the door, and lets her pass through. In the center of the room is an austere four-poster, the bed covered with a white duvet. The other furniture in the room—a tall dresser that conceals a television, a washstand on which there is a white porcelain bowl and pitcher, two silk-upholstered chairs—is of matching cherry, either authentically eighteenth century or intended to resemble that era. Entering the room again, he marvels at the transformation. When he was a boy here, the rooms contained two sets of bunk beds, four crates intended as storage cabinets.
Siân stands with her hands in the pockets of her coat, walks to the window to see the view. He joins her at the window, puts a hand at her shoulder, looks out with her. The sun glints harshly off the water. He makes a gesture so as to remove her coat; she lets the coat and her pocketbook slide off. She is wearing a black dress with a gray jacket. Again she has worn her hair up, twisted into a knot held with a clip.
He bends down, puts his lips to the nape of her neck. She seems to shiver. She lets her head fall slightly forward.
“You remembered,” she says, her voice barely a whisper.
“Of course I remembered,” he says.
He turns her to him, walks with her the two or three steps to the bed. She sits at its edge, he beside her.
She opens her palms. “I’m not . . .”
She looks at him, a question on her face. She opens her mouth as if to finish her sentence, but he kisses her, brings her with him onto the bed. Her mouth is open, welcoming, but he feels, too, as if at any minute she might pull away. He puts his hand under the skirt of her dress, feels the skin of her hip, her belly. Her stockings stop at the top of her thigh. He raises her skirt so that he can see her body.
She has on a short black slip, the lace falling across her abdomen. She lets him remove her underwear. He finds her then, slips one finger inside, then another. He moves his fingers back and forth slowly, savoring her. He bends toward her, his fingers still lost inside her,
and lets his mouth hover over hers. She opens her mouth slightly, as if to receive him; he can see her teeth, her tongue. He opens his mouth but does not kiss her yet. Their mouths are not an inch apart. She lifts herself slightly toward him, waiting for him. He can feel her breath on his lips. He removes his fingers from inside her, puts them to her mouth. He traces the outline of her bottom lip. She reaches for his hand, pulls his fingers toward her, into her mouth, lets him move them slowly back and forth there as he did inside her.
Quickly he unfastens his belt buckle, enters her. He raises himself up on his hands; he has to be able to see her face. She watches him, closes her legs around him. He can feel the cool smoothness of her legs on the backs of his. She watches him steadily, closes her eyes briefly, intently, only at the end. He is not far behind her, and he knows, when he comes, knows it for a certainty, that he will never want to make love to any other woman but Siân Richards again.
After a time, under him, she turns her face to the side. He raises himself up so that he can see her. She is smiling.
“What is it?” he asks, beginning to smile himself.
She shakes her head slowly. She turns back to him, gazes at him steadily, seeing him as he knows he has never been seen before—not by Harriet, not by any other woman. Her smile is full of knowledge, beyond the circumstances of just this day, just this bed.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she says.
She is sitting on the edge of the bed in her black slip. She has removed her jacket, her dress. Her hair has fallen down to one side, barely held with the clip. He is nearly naked, under the covers, propped up against the pillows. He likes watching her move in her slip.
“Do you always wear black?” he asks her.
She shrugs, crosses her legs. “I suppose so. It’s easier that way. Everything goes with everything.”
“I think I’m going to kill every man who’s ever heard you have an orgasm,” he says.
“There haven’t been many,” she says. “And in any event, if we keep this up, we’ll soon surpass our marriages.”
They have made love three or four times. He is no longer sure how to define the act of making love, or how to count the experiences, each time somehow merging into another, exciting another. They haven’t even had lunch yet.
“Well, it’s not going to take me long,” he says.
She laughs. “That’s a sweet thing to say.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s odd,” she says, “how the fourteen-year-olds really didn’t know what was happening to them, and now the forty-six-year-olds don’t really know what is happening to them either.”
“One of us is only forty-five.”
She raps him on his arm. He flinches in mock pain.
“I can’t define this,” he says. “I can only relate it to how I felt about you at fourteen.”
He sits up, lifts her hair, kisses her again at the nape of the neck. “When I do this now,” he says, “I smell a sexual odor. It’s something about my breath on your neck.” He pulls back, looks at her neck. “You have a stork bite,” he says.
“A what?”
“A stork bite. At least that’s what it looks like. A birthmark. It’s just inside your hairline.”
She touches the back of her neck. She stands up, walks to the window, looks out at the lake. He gets out of bed, stands beside her. He is wearing only his shirt, unbuttoned.
“That was very strange,” he says, “when we sat down there last week, looking out at the water.”
“What did it mean to you?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “It seemed like John the Baptist himself was going to emerge right then from the lake.”
“That’s not a very Catholic image.”
“No.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“I suppose I just wanted to jump in and be cleansed. I didn’t want to have to imagine you with anyone else.”
She puts her hand on his shoulder, slides her hand down his back.
“I think this was supposed to happen,” she says.
“Can we trust that?” he asks.
She is silent for a moment. “I think if you can’t trust this, you can’t trust the universe.”
The room, his chest, expand. He wants to open the window, call out to the waiters.
“I think we were meant to have mated,” she adds.
He smiles. He loves the word “mated.” It suggests to him something primitive, simple, animal-like, beyond thought, or before thought, like the way she has recognized his scent.
“Yes,” he says. “I believe that.”
“And I’ve never even seen your children.”
“Nor I yours.”
“We won’t ever have children together,” she says. “Well, we probably won’t have children together. What I mean is, we ought not to have children together.”
A new thought enters his mind. He is appalled that he has not been concerned about this earlier—more appalled by his next thought: While he is worried that they have made love unprotected, he wishes fervently that he could make her pregnant.
“I ought to have mentioned this sooner,” he says, “but . . .”
She shakes her head quickly. “No. I didn’t bring anything. But I’m not sure it’s an issue for me anymore.”
He is not altogether certain what she means by this, but he lets her statement go. “We have enough children,” he says.
“We’ve only known each other six days.”
“Six days and one week.”
“Six days, one week, and thirty-one years,” she says.
He folds her into him, brings her head into his shoulder. She has asked him in a letter, “What is this?” The question of meaning, he knows, might not be able to be answered. Is this relationship, he wonders, regressive or progressive? Are they each merely trying to recapture an immature childhood love? Or is this a chance—the chance of a lifetime—to have a rich, mature, sexual love with the person you were meant to be with? Odd how these very questions are implicit in the song he has found again and now likes so much. Things do come back to you as though they knew the way.
She touches the cloth of his shirt, brings it to her face, inhales deeply.
“I love the smell of you,” she says.
She has put herself together as best she can, has redone her hair, though she had no makeup with her to cover the faint mottling at her forehead. Her gray jacket is wrinkled. “Next time,” she said in the room, his heart lifting at the words, “I’ll have to bring some things with me so that I can shower, fix myself before lunch.”
They are sitting at the same banquette they had before. The room is much as it was last week, except that sheer white curtains have been drawn across the large floor-to-ceiling windows to protect the diners from the trapezoidal blocks of bright sunlight that fall at this hour across the dining room. He has had a vodka, she a glass of wine; he, oysters; she, salmon. Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly—he was hungry for the first time in weeks. He feels exhausted but exhilarated. She sits slightly turned toward him, her knee just touching his thigh. He has his hand on her leg, on the skirt of her dress. Though she is not precisely smiling, her face gives off a glow as if she were.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. He knows that she does not have an unflawed body, as he does not; and he knows that she is forty-six, not twenty-six. And yet he cannot, at this moment, conceive of another woman being more appealing to him than she.
“You’re beautiful,” she says.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever said that to me before.”
She puts her hand on his knee, touches him lightly there. “I’ve never done this,” she says. “I mean I’ve never been unfaithful.”
“Nor have I.”
“I don’t have what you would call a very bad marriage,” she says slowly, removing her hand. “But Stephen and I are not close. We don’t . . . We hardly ever . . .” She makes a gesture as if to include the experiences they have just had t
ogether in the room in the west wing.
He puts a hand up quickly. “Don’t,” he says. “I can’t. Not yet.”
She looks down at the table.
“We have to be careful,” he says.
She agrees quickly. “I don’t want your wife to be hurt.”
“No. I didn’t mean that. I mean we have to be careful with each other.”
She studies him. “I sometimes think about the next thirty-one years,” she says.
“So do I.”
“I wonder, how much time do we have left? The second half? The third third? And it’s all so serendipitous. If you hadn’t bought the Sunday paper that morning, we wouldn’t be here now.”
“Does it matter, the number of years?” he asks. He can hear the sudden heat in his voice. “Isn’t it worth it even to have one year, one month? Isn’t that just as valuable—or is it really the accumulation of hours?”
She sits silently. He knows she cannot answer this question. She reaches into her pocketbook. “I brought some pictures,” she says. “To give you an idea of the years in between. And I wanted to show you my daughter.”
He takes the small, neat pile of photographs from her hand, puts on his glasses.
“That’s me in high school,” she says, pointing to a picture of a girl in a pageboy haircut, a simple sweater and pearls. She is not wearing glasses in this picture, and he is struck by how much older than a girl she looks. She has to have been only sixteen, seventeen at best. Yet her eyes have an ageless quality—a gravity that belies her youth. “And that’s me in Senegal.” He looks at a photograph of a tall, thin, angular woman in dark glasses with a colored cloth wrapped around her breasts, forming a dress. “It’s all the women wore there,” she explains. There are other people in the photograph as well, but no men. She shows him other pictures—some of a small, pretty child with long blond hair. None of her husband.