He found the power cord and plugged it in. When the light came on she covered her eyes.
“Half glass,” Samantha said, “and half air. Half man and half neutered angel of self-righteous anger.”
Ethan turned and stepped back into the kitchenette. He filled a tumbler with ice and the tumbler was shaking. Ice clinking up against the crystal. After a moment he reached into the cabinet and retrieved a bottle of rye—at least Samantha had left him that. He poured it and raised it to his lips. It tasted much better than mead. He turned out the light.
“I’m taking a shower,” he said.
“Splish-splash,” Samantha mumbled from the couch.
IN THE SHOWER’S SCALDING HEAT, with the steam rising like mist off a brackish river, with the drink puddling in his hand, in the shower he thought: she has a point, I have not honored my obligations. After her night with Rodney he had promised himself he would trust her, he would believe her story with all its demented logic. Suspicion, he told himself again and again, is a failure of compassion. But there was no staying it, suspicion and jealousy, a seething, growing panic. Samantha, he felt certain, was slipping from him.
When she’d work late, or go out for cocktails, or attend any of her firm’s thousand functions, he’d find himself stalking the apartment or walking the streets or calling her on his phone, listening to it ring and ring into static and electric distance and a world of woeful possibility.
Rodney behind her, wrapping her black hair in his fist, Samantha laughing and bracing herself, putting one hand against the cold metal headboard. Sweat rising on her lower back.
Samantha dancing for Jack and Rodney, turning a weird belly dance, doing a wicked little striptease. Layer after layer falling away to their clapping, their roving, sweating eyes.
He would walk into the night, he would imagine following her to her bar and waiting in the rain, in the streetlamp’s chemical glow; he would pull her to him when she returned and smell her, smell her neck and her hair and taste him, Rodney, as he tasted her.
He was not a jealous man. He believed this because he had never been jealous before. But now with Samantha, with the drinking and disappearing and the gathering coldness, he felt a narrowing, animal panic. As before, the banality of his fantasies shamed him—their irritating power dynamics, the whole pseudo-sadism of them. Who are you? he thought.
But now, after that night, her frank derision, her night with Rodney, he could not imagine her without trysts and he could not imagine her trysts any other way. Samantha would not go for the generic adulteries: quiet dinners, nights of candlelit passion, quick kisses in the lee of a darkened building, the taxi waiting in the street.
He knelt down in the shower, pulled his knees to his chest, and let the water break over his head and his back. He had made the decision already: if his choice was between loving or rejecting her, he would have to love her. But the rot of his fantasies frightened him—why could he not imagine Samantha in a romantic context?
When he got out of the shower she was sitting at her desk by their bed. The bottles in the living room were put away. She was working on the computer.
“These last few months I’ve been very jealous,” he said.
“No shit?”
She didn’t turn from the computer, but kept typing.
“I’m sorry for that,” he said. “You deserve better than that.”
He crossed the room and put his hand on her shoulder, reached up and touched her ear.
“It’s been so hard, after that party and with all the drinking. I didn’t know how I was supposed to respond.”
She stared, still, at the computer.
“But it will be different now.”
Samantha stood and touched his face and he closed his eyes and felt her lips come to his, felt her mouth and tongue against his and tasted the dry residue of her strange martini.
When he opened his eyes he saw that hers had never closed.
“Gosh, that’s real sporting of you, fella,” she said. “I just hope Rodney feels the same way.”
HE SETS UP HIS LIGHTS AND CAMERA after the last patron leaves the museum. Mallory stands at the carved gothic fireplace between two of the unicorn panels.
“He’s a poor thing, the unicorn,” she says. “Don’t you think?”
“Sure. Entrapped. Lured by a virgin. Happens every time.”
“In medieval iconography the unicorn represents both Christ and marriage,” she says.
Ethan examines the maiden in the tapestry, her red dress, her slit-eyed, sideways glance. Mallory is in her after-work clothes. Torn jeans, a black frilly t-shirt, a large silver pendant around her neck, crystal bauble earrings. Ethan looks back to the tapestry. Her steps echo away, down the hall.
“We are entrapped in marriage by virgins?” he calls to her.
“You got it.”
“That hasn’t been my experience.”
LATER, SHE’S LOOKING THROUGH a portfolio he brought her. It’s years old, from his first gallery days. He hears her close the folder, open another bottle of mead. He hears her cross the floor. But for his lights, it’s dark in the gallery, vaulted and long-shadowed. She touches his hand and he turns away from the lights toward her where her hair is up but her strange long bangs hang down her face.
She says, “These are beautiful.”
She says, “I’d like to imagine the impulse that created these. The prima causa.”
She touches his face, she leaves her fingers there.
It’s his turn now. He says, “Whatever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely.”
“Sidney.”
“Well, shit. Is there anything you do not know?”
She moves against him and he’s looking away from her again, at the lit tapestry, the blue madness in the eyes of the men, the unicorn’s vain pulse toward desire.
“You’re trembling,” she says.
When he speaks, his voice is louder than hers, too loud. It echoes in the stone cloister. A voice out of a well.
“It’s that I don’t see myself like this. I don’t see myself as someone who would do this.”
“Oh,” she says, and he knows she’s pouting because her lips are on his neck. “Love is lecherous and false and sure to entrap.”
“That’s not Sidney,” he says, and turns again, away from the tapestry, to look at her. She smiles and pushes her bangs out of her face, her glasses back on her nose. Her bauble earrings catch and throw light. He closes his eyes, he opens them.
He thinks of her, as he does, as a photograph. Freeze this moment, take and store it. The rainbow of crystal-cast light splayed across her jaw, some of her hair. Her eyes widened in want, her lips pressed together and then opening toward paused speech. Take it and hold it, let it live in you and grant you what succor you may need. In a life suddenly short of sweetness, this is sweetness enough.
And then she’s closing what small space remains between them and those thoughts prove forfeit in the echo of their breath in the room, their breath and the buzz of his lights and everything falling beyond the moment, its simple grace, into now and now—still lives—he hopes that will need no accounting.
And later, in her loft, she is not as assertive as Samantha is, she looks for him to take the lead, to take some kind of responsibility for what’s happening, which he does not want to do, but does anyway. He pushes the stray strands of her hair away from her face and kisses the skin of her throat below her ear. He removes her glasses for her. She needs guidance, she needs encouragement, her earrings get in the way. There are the things he notices: the chips in the shitty plywood headboard, the book—Pilgrim’s Progress—on her bedside table, the sound of the train rattling by. Out of habit he bites her collarbone as he does with Samantha, as Samantha makes him do, and she recoils under his teeth. She’s watching him when she comes, staring down at him, trying to keep her eyes open, staring at him with clenched lips and a furrowed brow as if he’s about to tell her something very important, something whispered,
something she doesn’t want to miss.
“MALLORY,” HE SAYS in the night, in the new night, their first, darkening, night. “Mallory, Mallory.”
She rolls against him, he feels the heat of her, her warm hands. She kisses his throat, he thinks she is smiling in the dark.
“Is that your real name?” he asks.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I just thought…”
“That medievalists couldn’t have a name like Mallory?”
“Sure,” he says. “It’s like something out of a dream, a perfect resonance.”
He touches her face, traces the shadow of her shoulder with his fingertips. Ambulances pass in the street. For a moment the red throw of their flashes strobes the apartment, the futon on the floor, the tossed detritus of their clothes, the bony jut of her hip.
“Symmetry in all things,” she says.
IT’S HAPPENING TO HIM AGAIN, as it did over a year ago: he wakes in the night and when he wakes he does not know Samantha. He forgets her in the pitch dark that peels open to the shadowed room. Once, he shook to a crone’s face, withered and shrunken, a husk of bark. He sat up and it was gone, not even her face at all, just the back of her head, her black hair, spread out and blurring against the dark pillow. He leans down to her, he pulls her to him and her body shifts against his in habit or dream. He smells her hair—something he often did in their first months together—and he does not recognize the smell. The last three nights she’s showered before she’s gone to bed, which is not like her. He thinks he knows what that means. He wraps his arms around her, he places his lips against the back of her neck. “We have time,” he whispers. Holding her like this, he feels somehow obscene, like a man intruding upon a life in which he has no part. He kisses her again and wants to throttle her or shake her awake or weep. All our accounts, he thinks, are coming due. A man must make a choice while there’s still a choice to make, but he has no idea what it might be.
AFTER HIS LAST DAY at the Cloisters they’re lying on Mallory’s couch with the lights off watching The Seventh Seal.
“A Swedish knight plays chess against Death in an apocalyptic landscape,” she tells him. “It’ll be right up your alley.”
“Am I that melancholy?”
“Nothing a good dose of leeches couldn’t cure.”
She reclines between his legs with her head on his collarbone. Her hair smells like cigarettes though she told him she quit smoking three years ago. He wonders whether she’s started again or whether she never stopped. He likes that the answer doesn’t matter to him. On screen, a pageant jester dances for a Swedish maiden. She smiles and turns away, but he takes her hand, he sings some more. She follows him into the forest. When Ethan finds himself rubbing the side of Mallory’s face with his knuckles the way he used to caress Samantha’s, he stops, he touches her lips and settles his hand at his side. There’s some feeble, pulsing heat opening in his throat that he cannot ignore. Outside, a driver leans hard on his horn. The train rumbles by underground. Across town, Samantha will be arriving home soon, if tonight she’s coming home at all.
“God,” he says. “It’s so Scandinavian.”
The scene has shifted now. A retinue of flagellants invades the carnival. They moan and chant, they whip themselves. The smoke from rocking censers fills the screen. Ethan drums on her shoulder with his right hand, worries the woven blanket with his left.
“I mean it’s terminal,” he says. “We all know what’s going to happen, don’t we?”
She rocks her head back toward his chin but does not turn her eyes from the screen. “Why ruin it for yourself?” she says. “He’s playing chess. He can still win.”
“No,” he says, “of course he can’t.”
The light from the television flickers and moves over her face. He sees her bite her bottom lip. As quickly as they came, the flagellants have disappeared.
She turns and sits up. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes.
“We can turn off the movie if you want,” she says. “We can drink beers or make love or play Pick Up Stix. I don’t care.”
He raises his hands in a gesture meant maybe to communicate frustration or accommodation or confusion, but can’t bring any of them off. He lowers his hands.
“The movie’s fine. It’s great and inevitable,” he says.
She’s fully facing him now with the television forming a halo about her head. Lights pass in the street. It’s begun to rain and the rain against glass sounds closer than he’d like—just beyond the warmth of her body, the length of the couch and the space between the couch and the wall, the window and the rest of the world. Her voice when she speaks is so much different than Samantha’s. He can hear her trying to keep control—a measured, logical Midwestern tone.
“Is there something I’m supposed to understand from this over-determined response?”
“I can’t see how this continues without consequence,” he says.
She nods at the screen, she says, “This world nys but a thurgfare of wo, and we been pilgrymes passynge to and fro. Deeth is an ende of every worldly soore.”
“Let me be clear,” he says. “I feel that I’m about to leave a pretty serious wake.”
He watches as her expression changes, as she cocks her head to the side and opens her mouth ever so slightly, runs her tongue over her teeth. It’s the same expression she has when she’s bent over a book, working on her dissertation, coming to a conclusion.
“Right,” she says. “Now you’re worried about the damage you might cause. Look around you. You think it’s not too late? You think you’re not already covered in broken glass?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I see. You meant in your life, in your wife’s life? I suppose what I want I was never going to have?”
He looks at her, the way she holds her composure, tilts her chin up at him, refuses to blink, does everything she can not to cry. He appreciates this. He could not stand up and leave if she were crying. At some place remote from himself he realizes that what he wants is to not be able to see that he’s hurt her. He had felt beautiful to her, he had felt what he took for possibility. As if to be seen anew could make him so. How many times, he wonders, had he condemned Samantha for feeling much the same way, for failing to live, as she should, in the world she’d built? But he cannot ravage Samantha with his leaving. For someone he is married to, he knows very little about her, but knows that the world’s touch on her has not been light. Mallory will be fine. He tells himself this. At some level she must feel that whatever price she haggled her heart down to was far too high. He stands and she’s still there on the couch looking up at him.
“Is there no grace,” she whispers, “is there no remedye?”
“Chaucer,” Ethan says, and pulls her to him. He kisses the top of her head like someone boarding a train.
“That’s right,” she says from under his arms, a wet, muffled voice. “You nailed it.”
LATER HE WILL RETELL IT to himself a hundred times, a thousand. He will look for impulses and causes. He will say, this is why I did what I did.
He doesn’t know where to start.
On Key West, maybe. That first sodden night. Samantha pulling him to her, working her hand into his underwear. Him saying you won’t feel anything, and her moaning it off—that doesn’t matter—and then moving hard against him, her body sluggish with drink, sweating rum, and her unclosing eyes so empty of attraction but full of need.
Or the night at the party, her night with Rodney, or his time at the Cloisters or right then sitting at the kitchen table that morning when she looked over her cereal and said, “What are you thinking?”
This is how it happened, then, when it did. He fell asleep on the couch waiting for her to come home. In the morning he stepped into their room where she was sleeping. He opened the window.
She called his name from the bed and then looked at him for the first time that morning and said it again, his name,
like she was trying to fit it to what she saw and could not.
“It’s the middle of December,” she said.
He cleared the bedside table of the vodka and the vermouth. She must have continued drinking on her own after she came home.
“We needed some fresh air,” he said, and meant it in every possible way. It was amazing, he realized in retrospect, how spiteful his voice sounded: some latent anger waking with him into morning. So maybe it was then, at that moment, that he decided to hurt her.
“You’re a sanctimonious prick, Ethan,” she said, and her voice was wet.
He closed the window but opened the shutters. Outside, the harsh glare of sun on passing windshields. Music playing in the street. A new fresh day out there beyond the boozy reek of the room.
“Coffee’s ready,” he said.
“Don’t pour those out,” Samantha said, and covered her wet eyes with the covers like a shroud.
WHEN HE HEARD the shower come on he began to sip his coffee; when he heard it turn off he poured two bowls of cereal and cut up some bananas. He stood at the balcony window. Outside, blue clouds drifted across the sun. Down in the street, fifteen floors below, the noodle vendor assembled his cart. What he wanted now was to meet her as she got out of the shower, to hold her and wander together out into morning. As if to step into a new life were as easy as her taking the day off and getting brunch together on the Lower East Side.
“It’s going to snow,” Ethan said to the closed door. “Don’t forget your boots.”
When she came out she was dressed for work and her hair was up and he could see the warm water from her hair slicking on her neck like sweat. He touched her arm.
“How are you feeling?” he said.
“Why were you sleeping on the couch last night?”
“I was waiting for you to get home. I was worried. Some women would find that a considerate gesture.”
“Next time, I’ll remember to punch in,” she said.
They sat and ate and he stared at her across the table while cars revved and blew their horns and pigeons cooed and flushed and settled on the sill.
Horse Latitudes Page 26