Washington Irving was known to have never married after the tragic death of his first love, a young woman who had died at the age of seventeen. But, had he ever tasted an Andalusian night through a woman’s lips, she wondered, ever stood on the Sacromonte caressing a woman’s body under a moon-drenched sky? Had he ever loved the Alhambra for something beyond its historical and architectural significance?
Still pointing, Joy noticed her wrist glowing in the faint light.
She twisted her arm a little, remembering the arching arms of the dancer in the cave. She stared at her wrist as if in a trance, remembering the dancer’s elegant, curling fingers. Her own white skin looked oddly bare. Something was different about it. Something was missing. She kept staring at her wrist.
Her gold bracelet . . .
She tried to remember if she’d left it on the hotel’s bathroom sink. She hardly ever took the bracelet off unless she was showering.
She turned to Richard, about to ask him whether he’d noticed her wearing it earlier. She stopped herself. The bracelet had been his gift on their first anniversary.
“What is it?” he asked.
Her heart skipped. She was positive she’d been wearing it, although she couldn’t exactly recall seeing it on her wrist when they left the hotel. Then she remembered Hussein’s brief touch as they stood in the tight space of the cave watching the flamenco dancer. She tried to envision the crowded cave and dancer once more, to feel Hussein’s warmth behind her, his skin on her skin. He had touched her right wrist.
“Honey?” Richard asked again.
Maybe it was later, outside, when she had been so lost in her own sensory hunger, focused on his hands, his lips, on a moment that would never come again.
“Joy, are you okay?” Richard’s voice sounded as unfamiliar as a stranger’s.
She dropped her head and let out a deep breath. Shit! She was certain now that she’d been wearing it.
“Honey, what is it?” Richard reached out and stroked her cheek.
Shit! If Richard had just been more flexible, had just gone to Sacromonte with her from the start, none of this would have happened.
She turned away from him and tried to think. Her fingers started to tingle as she remembered the singeing heat of Hussein’s palm. Had he taken it in that sweep of his hand she’d mistaken for a caress? Her pulse had been racing, her face flaming as she’d watched the dancer. He had probably picked up on her gullibility from the start, realized he had her in his clutches the moment he saw her fascination with his Moorish ancestry—or his claim to it—and had easily reeled her in.
Her heart began to pound again at her own stupidity. Shit, shit, shit! How could she have deluded herself, even for an instant, into feeling that she and that man had anything in common, that they’d shared anything other than a passing animal attraction?
She took a deep breath, trying to swallow her shame. She’d been lucky he hadn’t forced her to do anything more. She wondered what might have happened if she had gone further than the kiss, if he would have stolen whatever he could find on her, including her wedding ring. She would never have let her guard down with a strange man in New York. No matter his age, looks, or story.
A thread of anger jerked at her again for having allowed Hussein to take advantage of her, and it included anger at him for having had the nerve to deceive her. She couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She just stood in silence, next to Richard, trying to regain her composure.
Then the feel of Hussein’s lips intruded again, bringing back Francisco’s long-ago kisses. Her cheeks began to sting all over again.
An unbidden flush of pleasure started to rise in her, bathing her in silky warmth. She shut her eyes and savored it. Despite her disappointment, she’d just allowed herself an experience she couldn’t have imagined in her day-to-day life back home.
She’d been given a gift tonight, a strange, special gift. Maybe from Washington Irving himself. She’d felt him with her tonight in some peculiar way, and he’d certainly believed in ghosts. He’d never doubted their nocturnal presence all around the Alhambra.
Her distress began to wane. Hussein had presented her with a part of Andalusia tonight, and as a result she had been awakened to a part of herself she had come to think was permanently gone. He had shown her how to give herself to those feelings of longing and passion, whether or not he knew it. Whether or not he even cared. Maybe he’d felt entitled to something in return. Her bracelet?
“Rich?” she said, anxiously turning to face him.
Richard looked at her. Something in her voice seemed to alarm him.
She forced herself to smile a little, wanting to allay his worry. She was beginning to feel lightheaded and dropped her head against his shoulder. Lucky. She’d been damned lucky tonight in being spared actual danger.
He hugged her close. “Honey, I was so worried. You just disappeared.”
“Rich,” she said again, wanting to apologize but not daring to tell him that he’d been right all along, that she should have listened to him and been more careful rather than put herself at risk.
“I love you,” was all she said, the words tumbling out of her like a confession.
Caressing her hair, he said, “I love you, too, babe. I was shaken, that’s all.”
She exhaled, knowing she’d meant what she’d just said. She also knew that there were things in life that were impossible to explain, like how her love for her husband could have been so quickly supplanted by an impulsive attraction to a man she didn’t even know, by a deep craving for something she had yet to identify.
She took his arm and together they walked in the direction of their hotel.
Belinda
RICHARD
7
He had spotted her outside the Kennedy terminal and had practically run up to her, inviting her to share his cab into Manhattan.
“I’m going to New Jersey,” she said, a half smile on her lips.
“Well, how about a drink in the city? I have to take a train to Westchester from Grand Central.”
He knew he was out on a limb, but he didn’t care. Something deeply missing in his life was propelling him forward into uncharted territory, and he couldn’t chance never seeing her again.
He’d met her the previous night at a London airport hotel. They’d been booked on the same flight from London to New York, which had been canceled. She was among the passengers being put up for the night at the airport Hilton. In line ahead of him to fill in the voucher at the reception desk for the complimentary room, she’d turned to face him.
“Would you have a pen on you?”
He’d retrieved it from his breast pocket, and as he handed it to her, he was immediately seized by her bright smile and the yellow-green of her eyes raging against her olive skin. He had an odd, yet distinct sense that they’d met before, or perhaps she simply reminded him of someone he once knew, but the unmistakable connection unnerved him. She handed his pen back and introduced herself: Belinda Bericini.
“Richard Amis.”
He was pleased to see her the next morning at the breakfast counter in the hotel lobby, and she’d smiled when he gave her a friendly nod. Later, on the courtesy bus back to the airport, she was sitting in the single seat behind the driver, head down as she busily checked her cell phone. He’d been booked in business class and had lost her in the throng of passengers on the plane. Until now.
In response to his invitation to buy her a drink, she tilted her head, but whether mentally checking transportation or other personal ties, he wasn’t sure. Finally, she agreed, saying she could take a later bus to Paramus.
At a Midtown bar, he learned that she was single, taught pre-school in Paramus, and was returning after a week at Oxford, where she’d attended a conference on early childhood education. She said she was passionate about teaching and couldn’t wait to start applying what she’d just learned.
They somehow got to talking about traveling, and she mentioned her other journeys—to Yeme
n, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Albania, Burma, Thailand, Pakistan, Fiji. The list went on, none of them work-related. Whenever she had a break and saved enough money, she told him, she was off to someplace new. She’d traveled all of her adult life, even more than he had as the child of a diplomat. Certainly more than he and Joy had since their marriage. He was surprised to find that her talk was piquing his own interest to travel. Most of his “exotic” trips nowadays had to do with bank business, which he didn’t relish.
Belinda talked almost casually of sailing Omani dhows like Sinbad, swimming in the diamond-clear waters off Fiji, riding elephants through jungles in Thailand. This restive nomadic quality, together with her wiry black hair and green eyes, moved him to invite her to dinner; then he didn’t want the night to end. Somehow it didn’t surprise him when, with a somewhat puzzled grin, she agreed to spend more time with him.
He couldn’t explain how his initial attraction to this woman had transformed into this dogged passion so quickly. She was certainly attractive, and probably younger than him by a decade, but it was something he’d felt in their conversations, something he’d been searching for before without even knowing it. She was fearless in an odd, haphazard way, exhibiting an infectious exuberance during their brief encounter in London and later over drinks in town.
As they spoke, he began to feel he’d always known her. They’d possibly even crossed paths on Manhattan streets any number of times. Although not one to give credence to fate, it seemed inevitable to him over drinks that he would take her into his life. Immediately.
There were countless ways to rationalize an affair, and many of them raced through his mind: the past few years of discontent with Joy after losing Stephen, the bitter arguments as he tried to help her through the depression after the loss, compounded by their work pressures and his travel. No matter how hard he had tried to reassure Joy that their future would surely include children, she couldn’t get pregnant. It was as if her body were rejecting carrying his baby, sealing itself off from him. Although he’d tried to overlook her distance, he had come to feel dejected and, on some deeper level, no longer significant in her life. It was as though he had become only a means to an end, a sperm bank. He sometimes wondered whether it would even matter to her if he simply stopped showing up at home.
Still, it was with a sliver of hope that she would refuse that he asked Belinda if she’d ever been to the Dumas Hotel, a renovated art-deco building known for its charm. The bank kept several executive rooms for out-of-town guests or its own late-night workaholics there. They’d only just met, after all, and he’d never been unfaithful to Joy. He’d never engaged much in casual sex even before he met Joy. But he’d been yearning to do this since London, and he knew this beguiling woman would become a part of his life.
8
Although Joy usually waited for him to get home to have dinner, by her own admission she enjoyed rare evenings alone to grade papers or catch up with her reading without feeling she was neglecting him.
He called her from the men’s room at the bar. “Hey, I’m back. You okay?”
“Hi, honey, I missed you. Good flight?”
He paused. “Pretty much. Anything new on your end?”
“I’m fine. Just working like a dog to turn in grades before next week.”
He paused again. “Okay, then, I’ll crash downtown. I’ve got early meetings tomorrow, and I’m bushed.”
“Sure,” she said. “I need to finish most of this tonight, anyway.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He hesitated, then added, “Love you.”
He imagined her pleased by the news that he wouldn’t be making it back for dinner, freeing her from preparing a meal for the two of them. Instead, she could stretch out on the sofa with a snack and a glass of wine and tend to her students’ papers, the purring Ophelia on her lap.
The lobby was empty when he and Belinda arrived at the Dumas, but he still gave her the room number and rode up the elevator alone, asking her to follow separately. It seemed to take her forever to finally knock on the door. When he answered, almost surprised that she’d actually come, she gave him a quizzical smile, as if asking whether she should even be here; but he pulled her against him, holding her close for several moments, then lowered her onto the bed, cradling her head as if it were porcelain.
He caressed her neck, the thick coils of her hair. She reached up to unbutton his shirt as if she’d done this countless times before, her hand then continuing downward and unbuckling his belt. Before he knew it, they were naked, her body against his, warm and yielding.
As his other world faded, Richard was engulfed by an emotional calm he hadn’t felt in a long while. Nothing else mattered but the soft hills of her breasts beneath him, her nipples the color of cocoa, her dark pubic triangle that beckoned. When he entered her, he was suddenly on another planet and in another lifetime. Still, he wasn’t prepared for the ease with which he could deceive Joy or the sheer delight and tranquility he felt in this stranger’s arms.
Afterwards, however, he was racked by violent, and embarrassing, hysterical sobs that seemed to come out of relief more than anything else. He cried and muttered incoherently, yet Belinda offered no sign at all of resentment that their stolen moment together had been hijacked by whatever was bothering him. Perhaps she understood that it was only with her, a stranger, that he could let it all out.
When she asked what was wrong, he told her all of it, how when Joy first became pregnant he’d never been able to feel enough of what she’d wanted him to, nor identify with that new part of him she was carrying inside of her. Even when they’d seen the head and tiny curled body on the sonogram, the technician eagerly pointing out a foot, toes, an elbow, he couldn’t yet care for this fetus in the same way he did for Joy.
He told Belinda of that moment in the delivery room, after the emergency rush to the hospital when Joy went into labor three months early and her moans had made him hate himself and even the unborn infant for putting her through that. He told her of his astonishment at what happened when the child burst into their lives.
It wasn’t until he’d actually laid eyes on their son, he told her, that he’d felt his love for his wife transform, divide, and burrow one-half into the tiny body of the baby. He couldn’t help retaining that image in the delivery room during the C-section when Stephen was wrested from Joy’s belly by the doctor’s bloody hands. It was only then that he felt the sweat that had accumulated above his sterile mask, nervous sweat that burned his eyes but that he hadn’t noticed for the two hours of Joy’s intense labor.
He told her how through the blurring sweat he saw, or thought he saw, something clearly move from Joy to the infant, some vague apparition. The sight of that shadow-like energy was inexplicably clear, as if his love for his wife had split in two, one half attaching itself to the little body in the doctor’s hands. It was so astonishing that he had momentarily forgotten about Joy, despite her cries of despair at the shocking news of the stillbirth. He told Belinda that his own cries soon echoed Joy’s.
Even when they’d both taken turns holding the small, perfectly formed corpse, he’d been stunned, marveling at this new love for the tiny, slippery being that was no longer. To this day, he said, he wasn’t certain whether he had been hallucinating when he saw that shadow. He was also not sure he’d ever fully absorbed the magnitude of their loss in that awful moment. It had been nearly two years ago.
He told Belinda that for weeks and months afterward, he had spent each day waiting for its end, the minutes inching by at the office until he could leave. Once home, he would drop onto the sofa and mindlessly watch television to escape the reality he didn’t want to face. He told her how he had tried to soothe Joy, to make their dinner, or to take her out. Sometimes she would join him on the sofa, silently curling up beside him as they watched other lives pass by on the screen. Nothing with children; only news, reality shows, or detective dramas. But, most of the time, she would remain at the dining room table with the enviable
distraction of papers to grade. Finally, they’d get into bed where he would drift into a battered sleep, eased only by a double scotch.
It was as if their son had taken to his tiny grave all the strength Richard had left. On a good day, Richard said, his feelings were completely snuffed out, and he couldn’t resurrect emotions much at all, even for Joy, who must have been even more devastated than he. On the occasions when he rallied and tried to comfort her, his attempts came out clumsy and deficient. It was as if they had both been run over by a truck and left to writhe in agony on opposite sides of the road, unable even to crawl to each other for help. His entire viewpoint seemed to shift from then on, he told Belinda. The world was a far more perilous and unpredictable place.
As the months passed, he told her, Joy seemed less and less interested in anything but her work at Hunter. Her students’ needs and wellbeing became increasingly important to her, and Richard assumed that the pain of the loss of the baby was somewhat lessened by her tending to them. Similarly, her desire to have sex seemed to have totally vanished. His tender advances and hints were mostly met with stony indifference, as if it were as unthinkable as boarding a spaceship to Mars. She definitely avoided arousing him, even slipping into her closet to undress, insisting that it was warmer between the hanging clothes.
He knew he was as much to blame as Joy for the dribbling away of their sex life. Even when he did approach her, he did so tentatively because he felt he was supposed to, and not with the passion he’d previously felt. But at least he approached her, he said. At least he had tried. Something organic between the two of them just didn’t jibe the way it used to, something he’d been unable to put his finger on, something she must have needed that he couldn’t give her. That, he told Belinda, and the loss of their unborn child, struck and rattled like a loose rock in his own chest at unexpected moments.
A Marriage in Four Seasons Page 7