They stopped at a light at the entrance to Central Park South. “I think I’d like to go to your house,” Cassy said, watching Alexandra’s profile.
Alexandra turned to look at her.
A taxi behind them honked, startling Alexandra, and she put the car into gear. Cassy shifted slightly against the seat belt and continued to watch her.
They drove slowly through the park. There was flooding everywhere. Alexandra periodically glanced over at Cassy, looking vaguely worried. When they reached the East Side exit to Fifth Avenue, they stopped for the light and Alexandra turned to Cassy, hand twisting at the knob of the stick shift. “Are you all right?” she asked—in a way that said she believed Cassy clearly was not.
Cassy nodded.
They drove to Alexandra’s building, Cassy humming to the Prokofiev on the radio, eyes still on Alexandra. At Alexandra’s direction, she pressed the door opener in the glove compartment; the gates of the garage rose and Alexandra drove them in and down the concrete tunnelway. Down in the garage, Alexandra pulled around a pillar to park in her corner space. She revved the motor once and cut off the engine.
They sat there waiting for the Prokofiev piece to end, Alexandra staring straight ahead at the wall, Cassy staring at Alexandra. Cassy undid her seat belt and angled her back against her door. When the music was over, Alexandra reached for the dial. “Okay?” she asked.
Cassy only smiled.
Alexandra turned the radio off. She sat back in her seat, looked straight ahead, and swallowed. Her mouth parted to say something, but she didn’t. And then, quietly, looking down into her lap, she murmured, “I’m not sure what it is you want.”
After a moment Cassy leaned toward her, making the leather of the seat creak. Very slowly, very gently, she placed her hand under Alexandra’s chin and pulled it up toward her. “I need you, Alexandra.”
And then Cassy kissed her.
Alexandra let Cassy pass in front of her into the apartment. Cassy walked over to the wall of pictures and stood there, briefcase in hand. Holding the door open with her foot, Alexandra reached to put her purse and award on the table and then bent down in the doorway for the newspapers. She closed the door with her foot, glanced at Cassy, put the papers down on the table, glanced at Cassy again, and then turned the lock on the door.
Click.
“You can put your briefcase down there, if you’d like.”
Cassy turned away and put it down next to the wall. Straightening up, her back to Alexandra, she looked at the pictures and said, “The biggest night of your life and I made you leave.”
She heard the rustle of Alexandra’s dress as she came to stand behind her. There was a pause and then, softly, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
After a moment Cassy nodded.
“Cassy.” She felt Alexandra’s hand on her arm. “Please, look at me.” She slowly turned around. It was just Alexandra, she told herself. The same eyes, the same hair, only it was not TV. It was the gentle voice from the telephone, back in the wrappings that had unsettled Cassy from the start. Alexandra took her hands. “I don’t want to do anything that you’ll later regret.”
Cassy closed her eyes, shaking her head. “I don’t think you could.” She reopened her eyes. “Could you hold me? Please.”
She could, and Cassy held onto her, smelling a faint scent of perfume through her hair. Alexandra’s hand was moving lightly over her back, up and down, up and down, and Cassy thought, Are those her breasts against mine? They are. She wondered at how strange it was to notice it.
She heard Alexandra sigh, quietly, and then Alexandra released her, bringing her hands up to hold Cassy’s face between them. The light in her eyes was gentle. “Are you sure?” she whispered.
Cassy nodded.
Alexandra’s eyes traveled down to Cassy’s mouth then, and in a moment she brought hers over to meet it. The kiss was carefully dry, but different from the one in the car. This, Cassy felt, was a kiss hinting restraint, edging toward somewhere, turning slightly, quite sure in its intent, but not quite sure of how it was being received.
It was so like Alexandra.
Cassy was falling into it, her mind losing the chant—I am kissing Alexandra. Good Lord, I am kissing Alexandra—and she started to part her mouth, wanting to know more. But Alexandra’s mouth slid away, breezing over the side of her face to her neck, and Cassy found herself being held again, and heard being whispered, just under her ear, “I don’t want us to go too quickly.” There was a long kiss then, right there under her ear, and it registered with Cassy that she liked it.
When Alexandra let go of her, she felt oddly unbalanced. Alexandra seemed to know this, for as she led Cassy away by the hand, she whispered cautions. “There’s a molding here... The counter, on the right... The door...
The bedroom was softly lit by an upward cast of citylight through the windows. Alexandra took Cassy over to one and stood there with her, arm around her waist. Across the East River were the thousands and thousands and thousands of lights that made up the nighttime galaxy of Queens.
They stood there for a long while, until Cassy let her head fall on Alexandra’s shoulder. “I’m not—” she started to say. She hesitated, swallowing. “Alexandra, I’m not very—” She closed her eyes, unable to follow it through. Alexandra turned toward Cassy and slid her other arm around her waist. Cassy opened her eyes and saw that she was waiting for her to finish. “I don’t want to disappoint you,” she said.
“Oh, Cassy,” Alexandra sighed, pulling her close. “Cassy, Cassy—” Cassy felt her hair against her face, and she felt Alexandra pull her close, and then closer still. “No, no,” Alexandra whispered. “You cannot disappoint me. I’m very, very happy. Right now. Just like this.” She pulled back slightly to look at Cassy. She kissed her gently on the cheek and then took her hand. “Come over here,” she said, leading her over to the bed. “Let’s just sit down for a moment. Here.”
Cassy sat down and Alexandra sat down beside her, taking both of her hands into her own. “I want you to listen to me carefully.” She lowered her head slightly. “Cassy?”
Cassy raised her head to meet Alexandra’s eyes.
“I want to make love to you. Very much. But I don’t want to scare you, and I don’t want to do anything that doesn’t feel good to you.” She paused, and then brought one hand up to the side of Cassy’s face. “There’s no agenda here. There’s no performance. I only want you to feel how much I care for you, and how much I want to give you pleasure.”
Cassy nodded, wondering where, exactly, her breath had gone.
Alexandra was touching her hair now. “You don’t have to do anything but trust me.” Her voice, in its whisper, was not quite even. Her hand was on the clip in Cassy’s hair, and her other hand came up to help undo it. “I want you to tell me when you don’t like what I’m doing.” The clip was out and Cassy’s hair fell. Alexandra put the clip down on the bed and then gently ran her hands through Cassy’s hair. “If you can’t say it, just touch my hand and I’ll know.” She let out a quiet sigh, and her hands came down to rest on Cassy’s shoulders. “All right?”
Cassy closed her eyes. “Promise not to laugh?”
A gentle kiss was Alexandra’s response.
“Could I borrow a nightgown?”
“Of course,” Alexandra murmured, kissing her briefly again. She led Cassy over to her dresser, left to turn on the bathroom light and came back. She opened a drawer. “Black, white, blue or gray? Whatever you’d like.”
Cassy touched the silk things she was offering. She looked up. “Whatever you’d like.”
Alexandra smiled, eyes lingering. “Blue,” she finally said, handing it to her and gesturing to the bathroom. As Cassy walked through the doorway, Alexandra said, “Cassy?” She turned. “And what would you like?”
Cassy smiled and felt like crying suddenly. But she didn’t. She just said, “Black, I think,” and closed the door.
Under the glare of the bathroom light, Cassy
squinted into the mirror and thought about what Michael used to say in college when the bar was closing and the terrible white lights would come on: “Hey, look, Cass—everybody’s Chinese!”
She almost laughed out loud. This simply couldn’t be real, she thought. None of this. Not her life, not Alexandra, not Michael’s illness
Michael’s illness. As she got out of her dress, she wondered if that was why she was here. Because she knew, finally knew, that her husband—that Michael was lost to her in his illness.
“I felt like every wife and husband in there was talking about Michael,” she had said to Sam after a visit to the group. “It’s the disease,” Sam had said. “The symptoms of the disease are almost always the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“Either everyone in the group is married to someone with the same disease, Cassy, or all of their spouses have exactly the same personality. Which do you think it is?”
It was true. Michael’s personality had changed—rather, it had slowly slipped away in recent years. The rages, the insecurities, the craziness—the affairs—she had almost forgotten that he had not always been like this. But then she had not always been like this, either.
Did this count, cheating on him while he was ill? Was she cheating on him? Did a woman count? What would Michael think if he knew?
He would love it, she thought, working to clear the mascara from under her eyes. He had even said in recent years, more than once, that he would like to watch Cassy with a woman. “Damn you, Michael,” she would say, close to tears, throwing herself out of bed.
It was only now, right now, in fact, that it occurred to her that Michael might not have said it to torture her about her increasing sexual problems. Sexual problems. God, could it have been true that their sex life together had once been a given? That desire had run as free and easily between them as the work they had shared?
So just whose fault had his affairs been, anyway? His? Hers? The bottle’s? It was an interesting question.
And now here she was in a strange bathroom, supposedly getting ready to go to bed with a woman.
She sighed, leaning on the sink, looking at herself in the mirror. Forty-one years were looking back at her. Whose line was that? Michael’s? Henry’s? WST’s? And that one? And that one, and that one—
She lowered her head, wondering at how she had supposed she could actually go through with this. It was ridiculous. A twenty-eight-year-old girl from Kansas, sitting out there, waiting for Cassy to come in and make love with her? Cassy, who had felt almost nothing for—good Lord, how long had it been?
Long. It had been a long time.
Well She couldn’t hide in here forever. She looked down at her slip. And then she pulled it over her head. As if on a dare, she stripped down to her naked self and then—then went back to the mirror. Is there anything here anyone could want? she demanded of the mirror. It looked at her face, at her hair, at her shoulders and, finally, at her breasts. And then she stepped back from the sink and looked down at her stomach, at her legs and at her feet. And then she went back to the mirror.
I don’t know.
She looked at her dress, stockings and underwear lying over the lid of the john. This was really rather funny. She really had gone crazy this time. There was a quiet knock. “Would you like a glass of wine or something?” Alexandra asked through the door.
Wine? Cassy clapped a hand over her eyes. Leave it to Alexandra to be out there reading her mind, offering something to get her through this. “No, thank you,” she said. And then, after a moment, “Alexandra?”
“Yes?”
“If I’m not out of here in five minutes, I think you might have to come in and get me.” There was a low rush of laughter. Cassy smiled in recognition. It was Alexandra’s late night telephone laugh. But had it sounded like this before?
She slid the nightgown over her head, loving how it felt against her, and—after seeing what it did for her eyes, for her breasts—she made the declaration that yes, she was completely crazy, and so all of this was perfectly fine because no one could hold her responsible when it was so clear she was so crazy. She reached for the brush on one of the shelves and bent over to brush her hair out. Throwing her head back and looking into the mirror, she thought, yes, there might be something here someone could want.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust and to see that Alexandra was not in the bedroom. There was one small candle lit, on the windowsill. The bed was turned down. It was not scary.
“Hi.” Alexandra was in the doorway, holding a glass and a bottle of Perrier.
Cassy felt something stir in her chest. Alexandra looked so innocently, devastatingly lovely. Innocent were her eyes, her gentle smile from across the room, but devastating was the trick of her hair and the body curving under black. Could this be Alexandra as well? Could everything Alexandra had given her these weeks be an extension of this body? There was nothing frightening about this thought. About this woman across the room. She was familiar, very familiar. It was only Alexandra.
“You are so very beautiful,” Alexandra said, putting the things down on the night table.
Cassy lowered her eyes and walked over to the bed. “I wanted—” she started to say, sitting down on the edge. She took a breath and turned to look at Alexandra. “I wanted to say how beautiful you are.”
Alexandra watched her for a moment and then eased down onto the other side of the bed. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. Cassy nodded, lowering her head, breath picking up.
“Do you think you can let me hold you?” Alexandra murmured, sliding slowly across the bed. She stopped just next to Cassy, leaning over to look at Cassy’s face. She touched her arm, a light, trailing movement that told Cassy she wanted her to move. “Here,” she whispered, helping to guide Cassy, “just lie back against the pillows.” Cassy did, and Alexandra reached over to pull her legs up as well. “There,” she announced, sitting over her, resting her weight on one arm.
Cassy lay there, waiting for what was next, but also half hoping for the nerve to look at Alexandra’s breasts. She was curious, having them there in the bottom of her vision, and, besides, she thought it might be nice if she didn’t appear to be totally indifferent. But she didn’t get the nerve or the niceness to do so. Alexandra brought her hand up to push Cassy’s hair away from her face and then gently stroked her cheek. It was sweet and Cassy smiled slightly and turned her head to kiss Alexandra’s hand.
She was down next to Cassy in a moment, easing Cassy onto her side and sliding an arm underneath her. Then Alexandra lay on her back, pulled Cassy over snugly against her, and with her free hand brought Cassy’s head down between her shoulder and neck and held it there. “Let’s just lie here for a while,” she murmured.
All Cassy could see was Alexandra’s arm. She hesitated, but then reached up to the arm and followed it back to the hand that was in her hair. The hand took Cassy’s, and Cassy brought them both down to rest on Alexandra’s stomach.
There. Now she could see. The smooth skin of Alexandra’s neck and chest—was that a freckle? Perhaps. And then, lower, under the black silk, were her breasts, easing slightly to either side. And there, in the slight shallow of her stomach, were their hands. One young, one not so young. Her eyes moved back up to her chest and Cassy squinted slightly, timing the rhythm of Alexandra’s breath against her own. She blinked. She blinked again. And then, timid but determined, Cassy slid the side of her face down. To listen.
Alexandra’s heart was pounding.
Cassy’s mouth parted and she raised herself up on her elbow to look at her. Alexandra was looking vaguely frightened—or something—and Cassy smiled, touching her cheek. Alexandra took her hand and pressed it against her mouth. And then she pushed Cassy’s hand away, reached for the back of her neck, and pulled her down.
Alexandra wanted her. Cassy had no doubts about that now. Alexandra’s mouth was searching hers, maneuvering for the best way, careful not to hurry, but careful not to
let her go. And then Alexandra had her on her back and was touching the side of her neck, the kiss going on and on, and then Alexandra’s mouth hesitated, and Cassy opened her own slightly, wondering if maybe now—
Yes. She felt Alexandra’s cautious descent into her mouth. It was Alexandra, yes, and Cassy welcomed her, wondering at her, at them, at what was happening in this marvelously slow experiment. And then Alexandra began easing back, and then her mouth was gone, and Cassy felt it just under her ear, working gently, slowly, down her neck. It felt wonderful and she made a sound to let her know it. It went on for quite some time, with Alexandra’s mouth becoming more adventurous, and then the same slow assault that had been made on Cassy’s mouth was being made just under her ear, and Cassy could feel the effects starting to travel.
“You are glorious,” Alexandra whispered, working slowly down Cassy’s neck, and then over, turning Cassy’s head slightly to start up the other side. Alexandra’s mouth, on this side, was still quiet, but quite there, growing more insistent. And then there was a low roar in Cassy’s ear, and there was damp warmth spreading rapidly through it, in it, over it and Cassy’s body started to tense and Alexandra’s hand was down there, doing something with her nightgown. Drawing it up, yes, that was it, and then she felt Alexandra’s knee suggesting something and Cassy sighed, thinking, Marvelous idea, and she turned slightly, parting her legs, and she felt Alexandra’s leg slide smoothly in to its thigh.
Yes, Cassy thought, bearing down slightly, marvelous idea.
Alexandra came sweeping back across her face. There was no hesitation from her mouth now. She was after her—Cassy could feel it—and the deeper she went into Cassy’s mouth, the harder Cassy bore down on her thigh. And then there was a sound inside of Cassy’s mouth—but it was not hers—and she felt Alexandra lurch slightly against her, down below, and Cassy’s mind started to get lost, running from her mouth to down there to Alexandra to
Alexandra’s hand brushed over her breast twice and then lightly settled there, pausing, as she retreated from Cassy’s mouth and slid down into her neck again. Cassy felt her hand starting to move, slowly, over and over and around her breast and then, casually, it seemed, slipping under the silk to cover it. Cassy was hanging onto her now, feeling the hand growing stronger on her breast, feeling herself being pulled apart inside, and then suddenly Alexandra’s hand was gone—but she was only taking down the straps of the nightgown—but Cassy wished like hell she would hurry it up and she heard herself whispering, “Please, I want you at my breasts.”
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