by Otto Penzler
And after that he was lost, lost.
Traffic was light, and Pete was restless; he reached the diner almost an hour early. It was late June and insufferably hot already—that stupid sweltering Indiana heat Pete had been swearing he’d leave someday, and never had. Out to the west of the interstate a spring thunderstorm was piling itself up; the insides of the clouds glowed greenly. He bought a Star from a box outside the diner and sat at a booth and read it twice through, drinking free refills of coffee. He turned to the wedding announcements. One of his photos was pictured: this was of Amy Prosper and Jacob “Jake” Giddens, of Beech Grove. Amy was smiling like a lunatic—she’d wept throughout the photos, and in this one, shrunk to black-and-white, she looked a little demented. You couldn’t see it in the picture, but Jake, stoic and mulleted, was propping her up. After they’d posed for him, Pete had started drinking from the open bar, way more than he should have. That the candids came out all right was a small miracle.
Five minutes before Rachel was due to arrive, he bought breath mints from the diner’s counter and then ducked into the bathroom to wipe the shine off his forehead.
Outside, the storm had broken; rain fell in sheets across the interstate, and a couple of times he watched hail drum on the hoods of the cars in the lot. Fifteen minutes after the hour she pulled into the lot, in a small white sports car. He watched her back in and out of her parking space, trying to get aligned. He chewed up one of his breath mints and watched her progress toward the doors.
Then she was inside, smiling at him and waving and trying to fold her umbrella all at once. Her smile was as he remembered it: there’d always been an element of surrender in it, a dropping of pretension that made him feel, at the same time, unique and intrusive, as though she smiled like this only for him—and yet was hurt by him, too, in a way only he could hurt her.
She was dressed in a long denim skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, black high-heeled boots. Her hair was a little shorter than he remembered, a little more stylish, with highlights and flipped-up ends, but it was the same beautiful, cheerleader’s honey blond. She wore no makeup, never had. Yet she was different somehow—and when he was close enough to her to speak, he saw what it was: her skin, always pale, was now too white, as though drained. Pete saw evidence of his own aging, his own troubles, every time he faced the mirror. But this was the first time he’d ever seen the years taking Rachel down with him—this seemed to him a little obscene.
Rachel threw her arms around him, hugging him fiercely, and as always he was unprepared for the physicality of her, for her leap from his imagination into the reality of her skin, for the scent of her perfume—she always used too much, she had a horror about her own sweat—for the way she always seemed to realize she was embracing him too strongly and then suddenly pulled back, looking embarrassed, leaving only a chaotic pulse in his groin as evidence he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. He led her to the booth, and they sat.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. “You look great.”
Ordinarily she would have complimented him, too. Instead, she reached for his hand. “Peter,” she said. “Pete, I’m so sorry about Maya. How awful. I can’t believe it.” Rachel’s face had a way of amplifying any pronouncement; she gazed at him with a dictionary-definition expression of sorrow. “Are you okay?”
He couldn’t lie to her. “It’s been rough,” he said.
Already they’d fallen into their old habits: they stared at each other, Rachel looking down at her coffee only occasionally and with confusion, Pete catching himself scrabbling for his own cup without tearing his eyes away. He felt the brush of her boots against his calf under the table. He’d told her once, back in college, that he thought she might have her own gravity; his hands seemed to want to float up and touch hers, his head wanted to incline to hers. He could feel every inch between their fingers, wrapped around their separate mugs of coffee.
“Do you want to—to talk about it?” Rachel asked him. Her eyes, he saw, were bloodshot, her eyelids swollen.
He didn’t. But he told her, anyway.
He and Maya had grown distant. She spent time with her friends, he with his. At home she read on the couch, and he messed around in the darkroom. She wanted to move to Boston, and he wanted to go to California, and since they couldn’t compromise, they ended up staying put, hating Indianapolis, and then hating each other keeping them stuck. Little things—Pete’s belly, her spending habits—grew into big things. And then—he still didn’t know exactly when it happened—she met another man. Some guy she worked with at SysTech. Pete had seen him once, well after they were separated; he’d been checking out at the grocery and saw Maya leave the cleaners next door and get into the guy’s car, parked at the curb. He looked slight, had glasses and hair that was rumpled and spiky—the way the hip kids liked, these days. Maya laughed and kissed him. It stung. If the other man had been some beefy weight lifter type, one of those dangerous bar studs Maya’d spent her single life chasing, Pete could have chalked everything up to sex. But this was a nerd: a skinny programmer who might have spent some time complimenting her and making her laugh. It might just be love.
Rachel listened to the story with her hand over her mouth. “Oh, Pete,” she said.
He sipped his coffee and said, “I guess I knew we were in trouble, but I never figured she was the type to cheat on me. You know? I thought she was stronger than that. Like if she was that unhappy, she’d just come out and tell me.”
One moment Rachel stared at him saucer-eyed, and the next she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob.
“Rach?”
She shook her head and fumbled at the napkin dispenser. Their waitress looked over at them; Pete did his best to ignore her. He took out a handful of napkins and pressed them into Rachel’s cold hand. This wasn’t just Rachel’s typical overkill. He was touched by her tears—touched that, even after all this time, she could still care so much for his happiness. His own throat closed, a little.
“Rach, it’s okay,” he said. “We’re better off this way.”
She shook her head.
“You okay? What is it?”
She said something so softly he could barely believe he’d heard her words at all. She glanced at him, blue irises swimming in pink. Her face then was as lost and pitiful as anything he’d ever seen.
“I can’t hear you,” he said.
She looked around the restaurant, then pulled a notepad from her purse. She scribbled on it quickly and slid it across the table to him.
He read the sentence there twice, then sat back and let shock slide over him. He felt almost as though he’d traveled back in time—as though it was Maya now sitting across from him, staring him right in the eye and saying, once again, Yeah, it’s true. You caught me, and I’m not sorry.
Rachel had written, in her wide looping script: I cheated on Allen, and I’m in a lot of trouble.
He’d asked Rachel once, and only once, as they lay together in her bed: Why me?
This was two months after they’d met, a few weeks after he’d first spent the night on her couch. Since then they’d been inseparable. They talked daily, on the phone, over coffee, sitting with their knees brushing on Rachel’s couch. (Unlike Pete, always maneuvering past his slovenly roommates, Rachel had an apartment to herself, kept so clean he was often afraid to touch anything.) He’d flipped with her through ten different photo albums full of pictures of smiling, blond Allen, listening as Rachel either narrated reverently (Look at him, he just radiates love; or He’s known since he was a boy that he wanted to be a pastor, like he’s got a mission; or I fell in love with him when I was a little girl—I knew, I just knew, it was God’s hand) or wept over him (He forgot my birthday; or He’s going on a prayer retreat in Florida instead of coming to visit—and he told me I shouldn’t be sad about God’s will; or He told me we can’t touch for a while, because… because we feel too much lust—and when she said this, her voice lowered to a willowy rasp; her cheeks burned). All her pictur
e albums were decorated with lacy hearts cut from doilies; she’d written “Allen” on each of the covers, in elaborate calligraphy. Pete looked into her bedroom once: her bed was barely visible underneath a creepy mass of arranged teddy bears. Gifts from Allen, she told him. Pete couldn’t help wondering if she spent a lot of time kissing the one that sat on her pillow.
But despite Allen’s constant presence in their talks, Pete came to understand—as much as he tried to deny it—that Rachel was attracted to him. That this attraction might very well be growing. He knew this was trouble, tried to blame it on his own wishful thinking—of which there was a lot—but he wasn’t an idiot, either. Rachel stared at him, right into his eyes—and not just when they talked (though that was dizzying enough). Sometimes, when they were studying together, he felt her eyes on him and looked up to see her steady, liquid gaze, her slightly parted lips, her flush of embarrassment at being caught. She complimented him constantly—he’d told her, once, how ugly he thought he was, and she’d made it a mission to demonstrate to him he was wrong. She hugged him whenever she could, and kissed him on the cheek whenever they said good-bye (the first of those nearly left him deaf and blind). When they walked, she’d often grab his hand and pull him along by it. Once, on the bus, she tipped her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. The back of her hand rested alongside his thigh; he was sure his quickened breath, his juddering heartbeat, would wake her, but it didn’t.
It wasn’t just him. Others noticed, too; people in the music program had begun looking at him with a mixture of awe and pity. Daniel the violinist stared at him darkly.
But then Rachel would say something like, I told Allen all about our trip to the park. He’s so happy God gave me such a close friend. And what the fuck was he supposed to do with that?
God, like Allen, was never far from Rachel’s conversation. Pete had told her from the get-go that he wasn’t religious and wasn’t likely to change. This troubled her, he knew. She told him she prayed for him; he told her she could if she wanted to, but that it wasn’t going to make a difference. Every Saturday she asked him if he wanted to go to church with her the next morning, and he told her no thanks. This was all very civil, and he hated to say no to her—especially since when he did, her avid stares would turn inward, turn troubled—but he wasn’t going to lie to her, either. With her, in fact, he found himself being scrupulously truthful, thoughtful, about everything they discussed. It was as his friend had told him: Rachel was pure good. If he lied in front of her, he sometimes thought, she’d be burned by his corruption.
Eventually he composed a theory: Rachel liked him fine, and maybe was attracted to him, but not in the ways he wanted. She was naive about flirtation, that was obvious. Whether she knew it or not, she was probably trying to make Allen jealous, but she wasn’t trying to use Pete—the thought was laughable. She might think she was going to save him, and he’d keep an eye on that. But he told himself to enjoy the time with her; she was a good person, and maybe a better friend than he’d ever had. And if the price for that friendship was that he’d have to stumble out of her apartment stammering and half-erect—well, that was what masturbation was for.
Yet when Pete’s girlfriend broke things off—I think, she told him, we’d better just make it official. And don’t think you can crawl back when she’s done with you, okay?—he wasn’t sorry, either, no matter how hard Rachel cried for him.
And then—as Rachel had always done—she surprised him. Allen went on his prayer retreat, and Rachel spent that entire week clingier, needier, than she’d been before. Pete spent every night keeping her company. That Friday they saw a movie, a thriller. And halfway through, during a particularly brutal murder, Rachel took his hand. This wasn’t unusual—she didn’t like scares or blood. But when the scene was done, she laced her fingers through his and held tight until the movie was over. He ceased to care what was happening on-screen; he could see her fingers in his mind while he stroked them, as though they were under a spotlight. When the credits rolled, she squeezed his fingers; they stared at each other until the theater cleared. Pete told himself to relax. To be realistic. Rachel smiled and dropped her eyes. They walked slowly back to her apartment, still holding hands; with every other step their hips bumped together.
In her living room she said, “I’ll make coffee, if you want to hang out for a bit?” He thought he heard a tremor in her voice and understood that he could no longer credit anything to his imagination. Rachel Beauleaux was making him a nightcap. He wondered if she’d ever made coffee at midnight for Daniel the violinist.
Pete sat in the living room and took deep breaths. He looked at the framed picture on her coffee table: Rachel and Allen hand in hand on the shore of a lake, feeding two swans: two Precious Moments babies in grown-up clothes. With a start he realized ten minutes had passed. He called Rachel; she didn’t answer.
In the kitchen he found her standing next to the coffeemaker, as though frozen, a pot of water in her hand. The fluorescent ring buzzed overhead. “You okay?” he asked, his voice catching on its way out.
Rachel’s eyes brimmed over.
He did what, by then, had become common: he walked to her and embraced her. She put her arms around his neck. He felt her body soften, curve to his. His mouth was touching the lobe of her ear.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he said.
“I don’t know why God gave you to me,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Pete couldn’t have controlled himself then, even if he’d tried. He put his hands on either side of her face and turned her mouth to his, and they kissed. She didn’t hesitate.
He’d spent hours imagining what Rachel’s kiss might be like—and, he found, he’d never come close. This wasn’t chaste, this wasn’t a little-girl kiss; no. Rachel opened her mouth wide and sighed and flicked her tongue against his; she put her fingers into his hair and pressed her breasts, her hips, against him. He’d had sex before that wasn’t as good as that first minute in her arms.
They spent an hour kissing in her bed—teddy bears pushed quickly and roughly to the floor, legs tangled, Pete’s cock so stiff in his jeans he thought it might be in danger of cracking. Rachel was aware of it, too; she rubbed slowly against him. He took a breath and pressed his hand to her breast and was shocked when Rachel unbuttoned her blouse and arched her dark, stiff nipple into his mouth and moaned, “Oh, Pete”—but even as she said this, he heard her tone change; he felt her pull away, return to herself.
They lay side by side, his hand on her stomach. She pulled a blanket over her chest.
“Rach—”
“I love Allen,” she whispered.
He listened to Rachel breathe. She stared straight up into the webs of darkness in the room’s upper corners and, he supposed, asked her questions of God.
He felt strange: calm, assured.
“Rachel,” he said, “I’m not afraid to tell you this. Not anymore. I love you. I’ve loved you since I met you.”
She nodded, sniffling. Say it back, he thought, but she didn’t.
“I’m afraid to move,” she said. “Like anything I do will be wrong.”
He understood that, he supposed.
“If you want me to leave,” he said, “I will. But just answer something for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Why me?”
She didn’t speak. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t know how to say it. He felt a hole open in him—but then Rachel turned to him and put her palm against his cheek and poured her gaze into him, sweet with sympathy and understanding and—there was no other word for it—love.
She touched his lips and kissed the spot she’d touched. Then she put her face against his chest and said, “I don’t know what to do. But I know I don’t want you to leave.”
And he hadn’t. Not then, and—not really—never since.
After Pete read Rachel’s note, she said, “We can’t talk here.” So they sprinted through the rain and sat in Rachel’s car. I
n no time at all the windows fogged over. Rain beat heavily on the roof and windshield and trickled in warm slug trails from Pete’s scalp down his chest and back. He listened as Rachel told him what she could.
“It was awful,” she said. Her hands were in her lap, but they kept twisting at each other, or drifting up to touch the steering wheel before falling back. Her perfume, in the close confines of the car, was strong enough to blur his vision.
“I can’t believe this,” Pete said, which was the truth.
“I can’t, either,” she said, tearing open a travel pack of Kleenex from her purse.
He didn’t know what to ask. No. He knew a hundred things to ask: What did he say? Why him? Was it like us?
He settled on “Who is he?”
Rachel shook her head. “He’s… he’s younger. A lot.”
“How young?”
She looked out her window. “Twenty.”
Twenty! The knife jabbing in Pete’s gut took another quarter turn.
“How—how’d you meet him?”
Rachel shook her head; her lips quivered. Pete took a deep breath and then reached to her, put a hand on her shoulder, and she leaned her forehead against her window. He looked at the dash. A cassette protruded tonguelike from the slot above the ashtray; its case was in the cup holder beneath: If Jesus Is Always There, Why Can’t I Feel His Arms?
Rachel’s shoulder quaked beneath his hand.