by Anne Calhoun
Do you know how seduction feels? We were discreet, even though I would sit next to him, studying, and feel the heat from his leg next to mine spread through my entire body until I was slick and hot with longing. When we met in hallways, in lobbies, in foyers of conference centers, in these transitional spaces, I did all the things the song says. I stood too close. I looked too long. I lost my umbrella when it was raining so I could walk with him, I timed my exits and entrances so I was always in his line of sight. The more he gave me, for we were well beyond kissing but not quite to sex, the more I wanted him. Mum wanted him, too. I knew it, and I seduced him. I took the thing she wanted most, right from under her nose. He began to touch me in front of her. Elbows. They’re not erotic. They’re a gateway drug to the body, a chance for fingers to slip down the underside of a forearm and brush a palm. Or the small of a back, very proper, very gentleman-like, very much the price of admission to my hip or my shoulder.
In Tokyo, Mum sent me to see gardens and Buddhist temples. Andrew volunteered to keep me company, cheer me out of my teenage sulk. As we walked we wove together then broke apart through pagodas and along garden paths, the spring heat and sunshine collecting in my hair, my skin. Every look felt fraught with significance, every shared moment imbued with a meaning and weight that belied the lightness inside me, like the lotus flowers blooming on the surface of dark green ponds, their long stems and roots anchoring them in a primordial dark. I felt like I was floating, until he looked at me, smiled, touched one long finger to a placard or pointed out a break in the view that seemed like a rip in the fabric of reality. Desire pulsed crazily in my palms, the soles of my feet. I could feel the sunshine on my lips, imagined his mouth replacing it, hotter, heavier, as full of promise. To break the spell I stood in front of him, reveled in the raw sexual heat eddying from him, a combination of body heat and desire.
We were standing on a bridge over a pond, and when he was ready to go, he put his hand on my hip. It was not an innocuous touch, the touch of an older-brother figure to a girl, but a lover’s invitation. Not my shoulder, or my upper arm, but my hip. I remember the heat in his eyes when I looked up at him through my eyelashes, the way his eyes changed, the way his lips parted, the way he looked at me. It was a split second of awareness, but I knew he was mine, and he knew it, too. I drew him in and held him just by a look, a kiss, a touch. Now I would have him.
We went back to the hotel, to his room, and when the time came I was so eager, so ready to have him inside me. The first stroke was absolutely electric. I came. Twice. Not many girls do, during their first time, or so I’m told, but I . . . I absolutely loved it.
After that I had both the build and the release. I’d beg off an event with a headache or a paper to write for Mum (she read and reviewed the papers I wrote as thoroughly as she’d question any of her tutorial students) and he’d come back once Mum was settled into the conference to “work on the research.” We discussed philosophers and bourgeois attitudes and the tedious conventional cultural mores we were flaunting. We grew reckless, incautious, until the day Mum came back to the room unexpectedly and saw Andrew splayed back on the couch, me on my knees in front of him.
Mum booked me on the next plane to London.
I hadn’t thought about any of this until I opened Andrew’s gift at Mum’s party. I didn’t write it down, you see. I wrote long letters to Nan, and in the writing it became real. This interlude in my life went unwritten, until now, because even as I was seducing the man my mother wanted for her lover, I knew it was wrong.
You wanted to know where our end began. This is where it began, if it is possible to trace such things to an event, but it is not an event. It is who I am, but this doesn’t stop me from wanting what I cannot have. There is a price that comes with this. I pay it. I’m sorry I asked you to pay it, too.
But I’m also not sorry. I wanted you. The moment I saw you I wanted you in the way I want things that are not mine to hold. I was blinded by the way you gather sunlight, carry it with you, store it up for dark days. When you said you loved me, I forgot who and what I am, what I can and cannot have.
I’m sorry.
Tilda
While he read she floated in the sensation of feeling nothing at all, noting absence as a presence. It lasted for some indeterminate length of time, traffic noise rising in regular pulses from the street below, the same all over the world. She closed her eyes, dropped into it. It was over. She had nothing more to hide. She would close the deal, then go to Cornwall for a week and look after Nan herself while Daniel moved out. Penny could handle the day-to-day of West Village Stationery. Tilda could drowse in the sun and heal right alongside Nan, ground herself in the only place in the world that felt like home.
She opened her eyes, saw him in her peripheral vision, his solemn profile. The light from Louise’s living room picked out the silver in his hair, the dusting of gold on the backs of his hands. In that moment, the space of a couple of heartbeats, no more, she loved him so passionately her throat closed. She loved him.
Then he turned to look at her, the movement slow, as if it cost him more than he could bear to pay. She recognized the look on his face. Wrecked. Ruined, even. She’d made that real. The consequences were written, black ink on white stationery, on Daniel’s skin.
She held out her hand for the letter.
He gave it to her, but gripped her wrist when she took it. “Now we’re going to talk.”
– TWENTY-THREE –
Solstice
He saw it all in her eyes, the flash of love for him, the memory of where she was and what she’d written, the shame, then the shuttering as she put on the face she wore for the world. Flash, flash, flash, flash, gone, in the blink of her eyes. Four beats of his heart, slower than normal because he was an endurance runner. Two seconds, total. Four slow pulses, for her, because his heart would always and only beat for her.
But he knew, now. He had learned to read between Tilda’s straight lines and elegant angles. He knew what she’d left out.
In ink the same color as blood, he mentally drafted a new list.
Tilda’s Formative Experiences with Love and Belonging
Abandoned by father at birth
Left by mother at two
Reclaimed by mother at eight then left at boarding school
Seduced by a predator at seventeen and
Sent away by her mother for being seduced
Handle one fucked-up crisis at a time. Start with Andrew.
He was going kill Andrew.
The urge to shove a couple of changes of clothes into an overnight bag then get on the next flight to London, find Andrew at whatever library or archives he was currently living in, and beat him to a pulp spread through his brain like blood from a bullet wound. Fury bubbled inside him, hot and acidic, unfamiliar because he didn’t often get angry, but when he remembered how Andrew had sat across from him at dinner, smiling, inquisitive, wishing them both well, all the while knowing what he knew . . . The presumption, the sheer fucking intimacy of that gift. A reminder of everything they’d done together, everything Andrew thought she still pined for, remembered in her secret heart of hearts, that formative experience that tainted her entire life.
Focus on Tilda. He’d seen it before, in children uprooted again and again by circumstances beyond their control. With addicts for parents, in households characterized by violence and abuse, and without a caring or stable presence to ground them, they slowly lost touch with who they were and where they came from. Their stories. So they made them up, parents who loved them but couldn’t come claim them, a home life that matched the other kids’, a future that included a family.
Tilda’s story had been close enough to the truth to fool him. She told no lies, showed no visible wounds. She did what everyone else thought was difficult, and made it look easy in the process. She just left out great gaping swaths of what had happened to her, and he,
who prided himself on seeing what everyone else missed, had swallowed the story whole. Even after the trip to England. She looked better than fine, burned brighter than a supernova, was taking names and making things happen all over the goddamn world, and he’d been fooled. A fool with charts and lists and spreadsheets, sure, but a fool to his very bones.
That didn’t change how he felt about her.
He’d deal with that later.
At seventeen the line between seduction and statutory rape was a very, very fine one, and currently vibrating like piano wire. She was technically old enough to consent, acted like she knew who she was and what she wanted, but his heart ached for that Tilda, adrift in the world, aching for connection, seeking it out wherever she could. To learn that the people who should have known better counted her need for basic human connection as cheap entertainment for the terminal boredom of a book tour . . .
He’d kill Andrew, do the time, and chalk it up as a good deed.
But there was nothing to be gained by going to London and beating the ever-loving fuck out of an academic whose worst wound was probably repetitive motion injuries, then getting arrested for assault, and everything to lose, starting with Tilda. He’d heard one thing loud and clear in that letter: Tilda thought who she was made people abandon her. If he took off for England to engage in an uncharacteristic chest-beating display of alpha male showboating, he’d prove that again. Tilda could take care of herself. If she thought about it for ten minutes, she could come up with a dozen different ways to extract her pound of flesh from Andrew.
But she didn’t waste time on revenge, or efforts to ingratiate herself with people who rejected her. She’d made herself absolutely unforgettable. Every time Andrew walked into an airport, opened a magazine, got a letter, he’d think of Tilda, and what he didn’t have.
She sat beside him, as pale as the moon, thin like blades were thin, gleaming and deadly. She looked exhausted, pale, insubstantial, soulless. She should sleep for hours, days, but her body clock was so dysfunctional he wondered if she’d ever sleep regularly again. Emotion writhed inside him like a basket of colorful, poisonous snakes: love, lust, fury, hatred, shame, white-hot heat of revenge, all induced by the woman he loved. He’d foolishly thought love was enough. It was time to face the reality that maybe it wasn’t.
Cases were ephemeral without motivation. “That’s why Colin set you off at the gallery opening. He sounds like Andrew.”
“It was the confidential, conspiratorial tone. Andrew used to talk to Mum about me the same way.” She cleared her throat. “Mum saw it as Andrew and her against me. He used to laugh about it behind her back,” she said.
Jesus, and there were layers of animosity in that flat assessment, because Tilda’s mother was seventeen when she had Tilda, so thirty-four when her twenty-five-year-old research assistant started sleeping with her seventeen-year-old daughter. He could just see it, the teenage version of a toddler pulling on her mother’s dress, Mum . . . Mum . . . Mum . . . Mum . . . then knocking over the vase full of flowers or coloring on the wall. In a way, Tilda was still doing that, but this time with West Village Stationery and Quality Group, a global scream for her mother to look at her, see her, really acknowledge her. He gave her points, though, for being true to herself. She could have followed her mother into academia, surrendered her soul to the utmost, when every victory would have been hollow and every failure gritty with ash, and likely not gotten much more in return. Instead, she’d prove she was worth the attention she garnered.
“Why did she invite him to the dinner party?”
“Andrew is very well connected, and Mum’s too savvy to cut ties entirely when someone might prove useful in the future. They work in the same field.” Her voice trailed off. “I think they had a relationship for a brief time after I went to university. For all I know, they’re actually friends.”
“Did Nan know?”
“I doubt it. I didn’t tell her. That was the only time in my life I slacked off sending her letters. I can’t see Mum telling her, either. It’s too embarrassing.”
So the only person Tilda would trust to love her despite this didn’t know what she’d done. Fury flamed, turned on the only available outlet. “You said you lost your virginity to an older boy.”
“Twenty-five is older.”
“Boy, Tilda, means underage. Not a PhD candidate who’s working for your mother.”
She glared at him, her features sharp enough to cut, pale enough to freeze. The ledge trapped them in stillness, poised over space and yet completely constrained. And that, in a nutshell, was exactly what Tilda had learned about her sexuality: don’t try to connect it to anything or anyone else, because that connection would burn her. “Would it be easier for you to frame me as a victim in all of this? It would give you a target, an outlet for your anger, a reason for me to be the way that I am. A better reason. A more palatable reason. You would have an explanation and I would have something to get over, a problem to solve. But that’s not what happened. I loved it. It was inappropriate and hot and wrong and dirty and powerful.”
Maybe that was true, for another woman without Tilda’s disconnected, jarring childhood. Lots of people lost their virginity to adults who should know better, and went on about their lives with hardly a scar. Tilda had internalized the rejection. Only a blind man wouldn’t see the dynamic between Tilda and her mother. Only a blind man wouldn’t know what he was doing, what it meant to both of them. Andrew was many things, but not blind.
“He was an adult. He knew better. He should have said no.”
“Americans are so rigid about sex,” she started.
“That what he said?”
A rare blush tinted Tilda’s cheeks, caught out repeating the bourgeois patter of the entitled, overeducated predator. “I was seventeen, Daniel. Do not make the mistake of thinking I was less sexual at seventeen than I am now. The boy, with the garage, my first kiss, he was sixteen.”
His head whipped up. “You were twelve. You said you were twelve.”
“And tall for my age. Mature. I liked it.”
“Is that why you came to New York?” he asked, staring into the distance.
“Unbeknownst to Mum, I’d applied to NYU and been offered a full scholarship. I took it.”
Cut her ties, in other words. He couldn’t blame her, all she was doing was what she saw done, but the price she paid was a future with anyone. Walking away got you free, but at a price, and like any habit, it got easier every time you did it. Her whole family missed key points about what it means to be a family, in relationships, rituals and routines and connective tissue. Like going to funerals.
He started where he could. “Tilda. There is a difference between I’ve made a mistake and I am a mistake, or I’ve done a bad thing and I am a bad thing. There is a difference between guilt and shame. You are guilty of trying to get your mother’s attention in a wildly inappropriate way, but you do not need to carry around the burden of shame for the rest of your life.”
“All the self-help, I’m-ok-you’re-ok talk is such crap,” she said. “There is a reason why churches require penance. You’re Catholic. You know this.”
“No priest in the world would make you do penance for this.”
“No one raped me. No one held me down, assaulted me, hit me, or threatened me with a knife to my throat.”
No. They withheld attention until she was so deprived, so desperate for it she would do anything, even the most fucked-up, wrong thing possible to get it. His throat worked as he swallowed rocks of rage.
“We can go back to the way things were, casual encounters. This will die off eventually.”
“That’s what you want? Sex without love. You want what Andrew taught you? What your mother taught you you were worth?”
Her eyes were as opaque as rain. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Asking for a date was just a prettier way of asking to go to
bed with me.”
“That’s the card I sent you. That’s not the first card I wrote.”
She stared at him.
“You still haven’t seen the first draft. Unless you’ve been in my box in the armoire.”
“Of course not. That’s an invasion of privacy.”
He laughed. He actually laughed, because he could not fucking believe the words coming out of her mouth. He scraped his palms over his head. “Look at the card, or ask me to show it to you, if we’re still at the point where good conduct matters.”
Silence. He let it stretch, until it became clear she wasn’t going to answer him. They’d taught her, however inadvertently, to be ashamed of her need for love, and to doubt the motivations and tenacity of anyone who needed her in return. They’d taught her that the only thing she deserved was sex, not love. They’d taught her everyone belonged on her list except her.
“Why me, Tilda?”
She stared off into the distance toward the east, where the sun would rise. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me. I thought that perhaps that meant I wouldn’t hurt you. I was wrong.”
“I need time to process this,” he said, then swung his legs back over the ledge. “Just . . . give me some time.”
“Daniel.”
He turned back to face her.
“I’m on the eight a.m. flight to London. If you’re going to leave, would you please be gone when I get back?”
He couldn’t help himself. He flinched, then just shook his head, turned, and left her sitting where it all began.
– TWENTY-FOUR –
Solstice +1
Tilda leaned back against the seat of the cab and wrapped her arms around her stomach. So that was it. She’d told him, and even though she said if you’re going to leave me, she knew he would. No impulse decisions, no boiling emotions, just calm practicalities and a foolproof strategy for dealing with his emotions. He would go for a run, and when he came back, he would understand, and when he understood, he would leave.