by Rosina Lippi
He wanted to go over to Ivy House on the spot and tell Angie so, but she wouldn’t thank him for that; not tonight, not ever. The things they had to work out between them were tough enough without bringing Caroline into the picture, and his position would be far stronger if he waited until he could tell her with complete certainty that the wedding was off. Which he couldn’t do until he heard from Caroline.
Rob and Kai went right back to packing, but he went straight to bed and had the best night’s sleep he could remember in weeks. He woke up thinking about work, and eager to get to it. At the English department he could barricade himself in his office, where things were neat and organized and problems were easily mastered. Rob would keep the Rose girls and Patty-Cake at bay. It was a workable plan, except, as it turned out, he was wrong to assume Caroline would be quick to get in touch.
By midmorning it was clear that she was the only person in the world who wasn’t eager to talk to him. The phone in Rob’s office rang and rang and rang, vague and far away and as hard to ignore as a buzzing mosquito. The only phone call Rob was supposed to put through was the one from Caroline, or Angie. John’s phone sat squat and silent and mocking.
At three Rob came in to stretch out on the couch and recap the highlights, which were as bad as John had feared.
“Blood in the water, scandal in the air, it’s all the same to the good folks of Ogilvie,” Rob finished.
“What a mess,” John said. “Christ, I wish she’d call, but I can’t blame her for making me sweat.”
Rob had no solutions to offer, but he did the next best thing: he took John home with him and they sat in a mess of moving boxes to eat carryout barbeque and drink beer until the sun went down.
Kai said, “You need a distraction. I suggest poker.”
John snorted a laugh. “I’ll just hand you my wallet, why don’t I. Get it over with.”
“We could call Angie and Rivera and Tony to come join us,” Kai went on blithely.
“Fresh meat,” said Rob. “My wife, the hunter.”
“It would be a way for you to see Angie,” Kai said to John. “It’s what you need, to see Angie.”
John stood up and stretched. He had a very slight beer buzz, just enough to make him relax to the point where he could see the truth of things.
“You’re right,” he said. “I do need to see Angie. I’m going to walk over there.”
They didn’t try to talk him out of it, maybe because they wanted to be alone; maybe because they really understood. John set out on the two-mile walk at a good pace. It had always been the best way to clear his head, walking through the town he loved so much. The night was full of echoing sounds, insects and water and wind. Most of the houses he passed were darkened, quiet, watchful. Here and there curtains fluttered at an open window. A radio news report rough with static came to him from a screened porch.
He crossed into campus and heard the sound of voices in a good-natured argument, and at that moment he remembered for the first time in hours that tomorrow was the Fourth of July Jubilee, which started off with a 5K run. A run he and Caroline were supposed to take part in, together.
He thought of taking another route, but the workers had seen him already. Half the Ogilvie Police Department was still here, putting the finishing touches on the security and first-aid pavilion. Spotlights made it look like a stage populated by a troupe of very tired actors.
“John!” called Louanne Porter.
“If it isn’t the chief of police,” John said. “Louanne. Bob, Mary Beth, Lee, Howard, Win.” It was bad enough running into a crowd of old friends at this moment, but he really didn’t need Win Walker telling people he had been wandering around after dark, not with Caroline gone off on a retreat and the rumors already getting started. He put Patty-Cake Walker’s voice out of his head and steadied his resolve.
“What are you up to?” Louanne asked him.
“Just getting some fresh air. You got the whole police department out here?”
“No rest for the wicked,” Louanne said. “John, you been back in town a couple weeks at least and I don’t recall seeing you down at the Hound Dog even once. Caroline got a tight hold on you, does she?”
“No tighter than you’ve got on Jimmy,” said Mary Beth dryly, and Louanne let out a squawk of laughter and swung out, halfheartedly, to smack at the woman who was both her sister-in-law and her community-relations officer.
“You’ll see him there on Thursday,” said Win Walker. He had been sitting on the ground and he stood up, pulling his cap off his head to scratch at his scalp. “The Rose girls’ men have got one hell of a bachelor party planned, is what I hear.”
John felt the smile freeze on his face, and hoped nobody took any note of the fact that he was standing there like a rabbit looking at a truck barreling toward it.
“Oh, Lord,” said Louanne. “I’ll have to put a few extra men on duty that night.”
“Alert the emergency room.”
“Call up the National Guard.”
“Y’all go ahead and have your fun,” John said, starting to back away, slowly. “We’ll see who has the biggest hangover the next day.”
Win walked toward him, looking concerned and as if he had questions he wanted to ask. “John, where you headed? You need a ride?”
John held up both palms. “Just talking a walk. See y’all tomorrow.”
He should have headed home right then. He stood for a moment in the dark trying to do just that, but then he thought of Angie, and a sense of purpose came over him. Every nerve in his body jangled, his fingers buzzing with adrenaline, and he had to laugh at himself. He was being drawn across town like a sixteen-year-old boy with an itch.
It’s not about sex, he told himself. And then: It’s not just about sex.
Because he couldn’t deny that he was going to talk to Angie, but he wanted her, too. He had been wanting her for weeks, and there was no more sense in pretending he didn’t. At least he wouldn’t need to make excuses to her; she would be more comfortable with what drove him through town in the middle of the night than he was himself.
Angie’s approach to sex had taken some getting used to that summer; her ability to ask for what she wanted, her preference for plain words. She cringed at making love and told him in all seriousness that she preferred the Anglo-Saxon alternative. Fucking was a strong, healthy word that didn’t pretend to be anything but what it was.
This conversation had happened in bed, the first night they spent together. They were lying exhausted in a pool of heat and sweat under the overtaxed air conditioner in the window of her bedroom on Eighth Street.
He said, “Tell me again, what’s wrong with ‘making love’?”
Lying on her stomach, her hair floating across her back, she had turned her head to look at him. “It’s coy. It’s insipid. It’s euphemistic, and it complicates something that doesn’t need to be complicated. Do you like the term, really?”
He had to admit he didn’t. “What about ‘having sex,’ then?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Grammatically suspect, and definitely not the thing to say when you’re inside somebody. At least not when you’re inside of me.”
It had taken all his self-control to hold on to the conversation, but he managed. “Hasn’t ‘fucking’ been co-opted,” he asked her, “by just about anybody who ever stubbed a toe or got cut off in traffic?”
“Not by me,” she said. “It’s far too powerful a word to waste on casual cursing.” She ran a finger up his thigh. “Have I hit a sore spot? Stumbled on a slumbering inner prude?”
He caught her wandering hand and leaned forward to kiss her mouth, her impossible mouth, her swollen mouth. She liked to kiss as much as she liked fucking.
“Maybe so,” he said. “You know any exorcism rites?”
In the first weeks they had had many conversations about words, the ones she liked and didn’t like, the different associations he had for “tit” and “boob,” “cock” and “dick.” Mostly these talks led
them to bed, or to an abruptly cleared table or to a chair—she had a particular affection for fucking face-to-face sitting up—or on one memorable occasion, to the stairs outside his apartment door. She was the most sexually curious person he had ever run into, exhausting, intriguing. Other women had discovery fantasies, rape fantasies, multiple-partner fantasies, but Angie liked the sound of his voice and plain talk.
At first he considered himself fortunate to have found a woman he liked in bed and out of it who wasn’t in a hurry to talk love, commitment, what was going to happen next week, next year, forever and ever. Angie knew he was leaving Manhattan at the end of August, but if she ever thought about the fact that the office she was setting up in Hoboken with Rivera was within easy driving distance of Princeton, she never raised the topic, and really, what more could a man ask for? A smart, funny, sexually curious, challenging, attractive woman who was capable of living in the moment. She was eight years younger than he was and ten years younger than the last woman he had dated for any period of time, but in some things—in most things—she seemed older.
It was midsummer before he realized that the very words he would have withheld had she been looking for them were pushing themselves more and more often into the front of his mind. That tingling of nerves in the solar plexus, the flush of blood when he came around a corner and saw Angie—such extreme reactions were outside of his experience, and unsettling.
John called his brother to confess. He said, I’m in love with a woman who doesn’t want to talk about love.
Reverse psychology, Rob had said. I can’t believe you fell for that one.
The only response to that was a weak laugh; he couldn’t even work up any hurt pride, much less anger. He was too busy, suddenly, wondering where he fit into Angie’s view of the world. For once John was the one with the questions, and he could appreciate the irony, if not the discomfort.
The very evening he first talked to his brother about Angie, she showed up at his door with take-out Korean food. He tossed the bag onto the table and drew her into the bedroom and onto the bed. If he was going to be outmaneuvered he might as well enjoy it. Surrender with grace and dignity; hand over the keys to the castle. So he said the words: I’m falling in love with you. It was surprisingly easy, even liberating, but her response was nowhere near anything he had imagined.
He remembered her turning and stretching beneath him, the weight of her, the heat, the way she caught her breath and let it go. The smile at the corner of her mouth, banished before it could blossom. She flexed around him, and he gasped, too.
Good, she had said solemnly. Good.
Thinking it over later, he had laughed out loud, in relief and acceptance. The next day on the phone Rob said, You’ve met your match.
As he walked across campus in the humid dark, all these memories came rushing back, bright and clear and detailed. As if the five years they had spent apart had never happened; as if that weekend on Long Island had been nothing but a very vivid, very unpleasant dream. He remembered his grandfather at the head of the table staring at Angie, bristling with displeasure. Heart failure had turned his lips and fingernails as blue as her hair.
Now was not the time to allow Matthew Grant out of his grave. John didn’t want to have to deal with that rasping, wavering voice, so he thought of Angie, not as she had been that disastrous Long Island weekend, but as she was Saturday night in the fluorescent glare of the emergency room lights, the smile she had given him, sweet and sorrowful and hopeful all at once.
He looked up to find himself in front of Ivy House. There was a light on in the parlor, which might mean she was sleepless and worried or maybe she was in there watching sci-fi with Rivera, the two of them stretched out on the floor discussing camera angles and lighting and dialogue.
But it was Tony Russo who answered his quiet knock; Tony with his trademark cynical smile, his eyes a little glassy. There was rockabilly coming over the speakers and the smell of grass in the air.
“Hey,” Tony said. “Here for Angie?”
That woke John out of his trance. Tony and everyone else in Ogilvie outside his own immediate family thought of him as a man about to get married—a man as good as married, to a woman who happened to be out of town. And here he was looking for Angie.
“I’ll go get her up,” Tony said, not waiting for an answer. “Unless you want to go up yourself: it’s at the top of the stairs.” One brow lifted, curious but not too; willing to live and let live.
“I’ll wait here.”
She woke because someone was sitting on her bed. In the near total dark of the bedroom she sat up, her heart beating so loud in her own ears that she felt dizzy.
“What?” she said. “Who?” But she knew already. That particular combination of tobacco and pot, coffee and licorice could only be Tony.
“I hope you didn’t wake me up to do a taste test.” Tony had been experimenting with mint julep recipes, and often required the opinions of his housemates. “What time is it?”
“Just past midnight. John’s downstairs.”
She couldn’t make out his expression in the dark, and his tone was unremarkable.
“I said, John’s downstairs.”
“I heard you. Give me a second.” Her pulse was racing and her throat felt swollen and rough. The room was cool but a fine sweat broke out all over her body.
Tony said, “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m not sure about anything,” Angie said, throwing back the sheet. “Except that I have to go down there.”
“Well, this is ironic,” Tony said. “After all the trouble I’ve caused on shoots because I couldn’t keep my pants zipped, I’m about to tell you to remember why we’re here.”
“ ‘Ironic’ is one word,” Angie said, pulling on a pair of sweat pants. “ ‘Bullshit’ is another. I know why we’re here, Tony. I’ve never lost sight of that and I never will.”
“Yeah, but. If you break up the wedding of the season, how’s that going to play down at the Piggly Wiggly?”
She could stand here in the dark and argue with Tony, Angie realized, or she could go down and find out from John if there was anything to be fighting about in the first place. In the two days since that kiss in the emergency room she had pretty much convinced herself that it was all her imagination; John was avoiding her because he was embarrassed and didn’t know how to tell her he had been drunk and couldn’t be held accountable for outrageous promises. Now she had to go downstairs and let him tell her that. Or she could refuse, simply send a message down: get lost.
A third possibility occurred to her, fantastic but oddly appealing: she could jump into the van and drive down the road to Orlando and see what minimum-wage jobs were hers for the asking at Disney World.
“You already blew the Piggly Wiggly when you dumped DeeDee,” Angie said, and left him there sitting in the dark on her bed.
John spent the few minutes it took Angie to come downstairs speaking firmly to himself, going over the best way to handle things. Then she came in, smelling of sleep, her shape rounded in the old blue T-shirt he had tried so hard to put out of his mind. The battle for reason, for self-denial and patience, was lost at that moment.
Angie stood breathing deeply, her hands twitching at her sides. She noticed how sweet the air was here; it always took her by surprise, jasmine and honeysuckle, like sugar on the tongue. The branches of the old oak that overhung the porch brushed over its roof with the breeze. She heard the low hum of the kitchen light, crickets and tree frogs and the beat of her own heart.
She heard those things, but she saw John. She went up to him and touched him, lightly, on the shoulder.
He turned toward her gracefully, quickly, and put an arm around her waist to pull her up against him, half lifting her off her feet.
“Hey,” she said, putting the flats of her hands on his back. “Hey. I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
He rubbed his cheek against her hair and drew in a deep breath. “I couldn’t stay away. I mea
nt to, but I couldn’t.”
She stepped back and caught his hand. “Come sit down.” With a small tug she pulled him toward the couch and the oblong of yellowish light put out by the single lamp at its far end. She tried to read his expression and saw nothing good there. Angie’s throat constricted but she forced the words up and out.
“John,” she said. She dropped his hand and curled herself in the corner of the couch, feet tucked up, arms tight around her knees. “Just tell me, okay? Don’t drag it out, that won’t make it any easier.”