Loss of Innocence

by Richard North Patterson

  “Well,” he said, “do you still respect me in the morning?”

  Whitney fought back her own disorientation. “You, yes. Me, I’m not so sure about. It’s like I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, and there’s nothing to grab onto.”

  Ben studied her. “I’m real enough,” he said, then inquired matter-of-factly, “What do you take in your coffee?”

  “A splash of milk, thanks. If you have it.”

  Ben brought her the coffee in bed. She sat up, trying to cover her breasts with a sheet, then giving up. The sensuality yet domesticity of the moment felt strange, even embarrassing, but not entirely unpleasant. “You’re also beautiful this morning,” he assured her. “If that’s what you’re wondering about.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t even say what I’m thinking. There’s been too much.”

  He sat in a chair with his coffee cupped in both hands, legs stretched out in front of him. “Do you want to stay for awhile?”

  The sense of all that awaited came crashing down on her. “Truth to tell, I’d like to pull the covers over my head until everything goes away. But my parents are coming home again, and there’s a lot for me to face up to.”

  Alone, she did not need to add. His expression became guarded. “Will I see you again?”

  The question surprised her, suggesting that he might be as confused as she. “After last night? I’d hope that’s something we both want.”

  He got up, sitting beside her on the bed, then reached for her hand. “Did you think I was just killing time?”

  “I didn’t know. I still don’t, really.”

  “I’m not,” he said flatly. “Thanks to your father, all I’ve got is the next three weeks. You can decide how much of that belongs to us.”

  Three weeks from now, Whitney thought, she was to have been married. She drank the coffee in silence, not letting go of his hand, gazing out at the sunlight brightening a newly cleansed world. Asking nothing, Ben let her be, her companion in limbo—his time foreshortened, her future unfathomable, neither able to help the other. After awhile she dressed as he watched her, then gave him a chaste kiss before she went back to her empty house, showered, dressed, and drove to Dogfish Bar.

  For a long time Whitney watched the blue of the sea and sky deepen with mid-morning, unable to write a word. Her journal felt like an artifact from another life, a narrative of doubts and observations recorded by a stranger whose life was bounded by certainties—the goodness of her family, the loyalty of her best friend, her love for Peter Brooks, her own children waiting somewhere beyond her wedding day. The young woman who had upended her own world, separated from her former self by the chasm of a single weekend, had yet to write a line.

  All that seemed real to her was Benjamin Blaine—if only more real, she amended, than she did to herself. But how do you describe a void? she wondered. The touchstones of the life she had believed in until now had spawned questions she could record, then ponder, in safety. Her writing was part of all she had lost; stripped of certainties, she had nothing to doubt, or even to say. She felt empty, and achingly alone.

  Except for Ben.

  There were times she came alive with him. Alive as a sexual being; alive as a woman who discovered thoughts and feelings in his presence she might not have found on her own. It was not just when he was inside her that Ben filled her heart and mind.

  She went to find him again, pulsing with anticipation and confusion.

  He was working beside the catwalk, sitting cross-legged inside the dinghy as he replaced the frayed rope of its outboard motor. He looked up at her, his dark eyes questioning, his lean body unnaturally still. “So I came back,” she said.

  The weight of these words hung there in the silence. “For what?” he asked.

  “Whatever happens.”

  There was nothing more either wanted to say. Reaching out for her, he helped her into the dinghy. Kneeling between his outstretched legs, she looked into his face, reaching beneath his T-shirt to clasp his shoulder blades. He kissed back hungrily, both of them knowing that this was not enough. Neither seemed to care who saw them.

  Hurriedly, she peeled off her sweatshirt, bra, and jeans, as he struggled out of his clothes. They fell together to the floorboard, Ben on his back, Whitney taking him in her mouth. She felt him swell, tasting his saltiness, heard him say in a low, fierce tone, “I want all of you”—the only words she needed from him.

  Whitney sat up, arching her back. She was already wet when he slipped a probing finger inside her. His eyes smiling into hers, he moved so that she could slide down on his shaft, his hands cradling her breasts as he flicked the tips of her nipples with his fingers, sending currents of desire racing through her body which merged with the sun on her skin, the cool whisper of breeze against her face. His hips thrust upward, eyes locking hers as though he never wanted to look away. Moving with him, she forced her eyes to shut, willing herself to experience only the tightening of her body before it broke with a deep, ecstatic shudder that drew a long cry from lips tightened to suppress it. As her spasms died, she heard him call her name from the distant place she had sent him until, at last, his body went slack as hers.

  He eyes opened, blinking at the sunlight as if she had just emerged from a darkened room. Ben gently touched her face with curled fingers. “Hope no one saw us, Whitney. Bad for your reputation.”

  “What about yours?”

  “Nothing to lose. Not on this island, or anywhere else.”

  Against her will, his faintly sardonic inflection made her imagine other women—a chastening reminder of how Clarice Barkley had read him, perhaps sensing the kinship of two sexual adventurers. Then she remembered what his brother had said: People fall in line for him, women most of all. But I’ve never known a woman who Ben respected.

  Was this an adventure for him? Whitney wondered? However little she understood about herself, whatever she had chosen to precipitate, she knew that she was not that way. She lay down beside him, looking for answers, and found only an answering curiosity.

  “I can see your mind working,” he told her. “Already. It’s not very flattering.”

  Whitney found she could not question him—at least not yet. “Wasn’t what we just finished flattering enough?”

  He did not smile, instead giving her the narrow-eyed look she had begun to associate with wanting to peer inside her. Softly, he said, “I guess it’ll do.” He paused, then added in an even voice, “Actually, there is another way you can prove your love.”

  “You’re certainly demanding,” Whitney said with mock vexation. “I didn’t know there was anything left.”

  “At least one thing,” he casually responded. “I’d like to read your journal.”

  Surprised, she leaned on her elbow, looking down at him. “Why?”

  “Weeks ago, I made a guess about you. I need to know if I’m right.”

  Whitney felt herself withdraw. “It’s personal to me, Ben.”

  He smiled at this. “More personal than sex?”

  “Different. I’ve never shown it to anyone. Including Peter.”

  This caused a glint in his eyes. “I’m not ‘anyone,’” he retorted. “And I’m sure as hell not Peter. Writing is something I care about—yours, especially. You can pick any pages you like.”

  Whitney frowned, fearing, yet stimulated by, the thought of exposing herself in this way, cracking open the protective wall she had built around this hidden part of her. “It’s that important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  She felt the warmth of their lovemaking slip away, an instinctive reluctance to cross one more boundary, leaving another piece of her in someone else’s hands. Yet she cared deeply about what he thought, she suddenly realized. As strange and unsettling as this was, perhaps if he read what she had written she would feel less alone, be comprehended as more than another woman who wanted him.

  “It’s in the car,” she said simply.

  Ten

  When she returned, Ben was
leaning against the inside of the dinghy, still shirtless. He looked up at her, expectant. Whitney hesitated, then handed him the journal with two pages dog-eared. “You can read what I’ve marked,” she told him.

  He nodded, opening the journal. She stepped away, willing herself to trust him, gazing in the opposite direction so that all she saw was the endless water.

  The entry she had chosen contained her musings about Clarice, the distillation of elusive thoughts that, in some morning of intuitive disquiet, had anticipated her friend’s betrayal. She remembered its final passages almost perfectly.

  Clarice lives in compartments. Presenting one face to her parents; another to mine; still another to the men she chooses as lovers, preserving for those she does not want the image of an unattainable woman. Then there is the Clarice who goes on about her days, optimistic and spirited, an uncomplicated girl who savors the life she has been given, and accepts others for who they are. Beneath all those is my friend and confidante, filled with clear-eyed realism, a cool knowingness and practicality, who views all the other Clarices, and the audiences she conjures them for, with a clinical detachment that verges on the ruthless.

  I’ve always felt close to her, able to say anything without being seen too harshly. But which one of all the people who know Clarice is indispensable to her, the person she feels so bound to by a love and loyalty she could not do without? Before this summer, I would have said it was me; more often than not, I still think that. But at stray but strangely lucid moments, I wonder if there’s anyone at all.

  Those moments come more often now. I’ve begun to think there is something about Clarice that is unknowable, perhaps even to herself. It’s always been easy to imagine her finding a happy life. But she could also have a lonely one, forever distant from herself and others, deepening the loneliness of those around her.

  She heard Ben climb up out of the boat, standing beside her on the mooring before he placed the journal in her hand. “You certainly nailed her,” he remarked. “Is that what you wanted me to see?”

  Whitney did not look at him. “That’s not what mattered to me most.”

  He fell silent until she faced him and, when she did, his eyes held a new intensity. “You can write, Whitney—and you can see things. That was the bet I’d made with myself. Whatever else you do, don’t let that go.”

  Whitney felt a surge of relief, swiftly overwhelmed by self-doubt that washed away his words as though written in sand. “It feels like I have nothing left to say.”

  Ben’s voice became sharp and almost angry. “Because of a rift with your parents and their presumptive Mr. Right? Give me a break, Whitney—or better yet, give yourself one. Your talent didn’t come from them, and it will surface on the page again, bet on it. One of my professors once told me, ‘writers write. To them, its like breathing—what they’re meant to do.’”

  He was speaking to himself, she realized—and about himself. But he was also speaking to her. Amidst his own frustration, his fear of what the future held, Ben was trying to give her something.

  Her parents were due to arrive, Whitney thought again. But she did not go home.

  That evening they sat by the mooring, snacking on cheese and crackers and drinking a bottle of Chianti. Afterwards she lay back in his arms, watching with him as the sunset spread orange-gold across the water.

  “This is my favorite time of day,” he told her. “The sun casting a glow on the ocean and, on a perfect evening, backlighting a thin layer of clouds. This island gives us that rarest of things—a western exposure on the Atlantic, so you can see the sun rising from the water in the morning, and slipping into it at night. Since I was a kid, I’ve sat on the promontory behind the Barkleys, watching sunsets just like this.”

  He spoke with reverence, so close to tenderness that it surprised her. She realized how little she knew about him yet, how fraught and fleeting the days would be until he left. She felt suspended in time, somewhere between a past that had evanesced and a future that lay beyond the horizon of her imaginings. Being with him felt at once ephemeral and intensely real; for a moment she wished, fancifully, that she could stop the setting of the sun and stay cocooned with him in this no longer finite moment. Feeling him kiss the nape of her neck, Whitney closed her eyes.

  “Marry me,” she heard him say.

  Whitney froze, wondering if her thoughts had drawn this from him, even as the reasoning part of her replayed his tone. In a muffled voice, she responded, “Did I hear you correctly?”

  “Yes,” he answered calmly. “I asked you to marry me.”

  She put down her wine glass, turning so that she could see him. Ben regarded her with a seriousness so deep that Whitney had trouble speaking. “The wine is lovely,” she said, “and so is the sunset.”

  His face darkened. “Don’t condescend to me, Whitney. I can’t stand that.”

  Quickly, she touched his cheek. “I didn’t mean to. I’m just so startled. Forty-eight hours ago, more or less, I was engaged to someone else.”

  “Believe me, I’m well aware of that.”

  She looked into his face, struggling to understand him. “When did you start thinking about this?”

  He considered the question gravely. “When, deep in my subconscious, did I imagine being with you? Some moment when we were on the water, I guess—well before I kissed you, or even thought that we were possible. But marrying you? When I closed your journal, I knew that something had changed.” His voice filled with quiet urgency. “For the first time in your life, Whitney, you’re free. I’m the person you were born to be with.”

  She felt a momentary frisson, as if someone had just read her palm and forecast the path of her life. “How can you know that?”

  Taking both hands in his, he answered with the patience of a man forced to explain the obvious to a woman blinded by its seeming novelty. “Because you’ve broken with them. Would you have done that if we’d never met?”

  Mind clouded, Whitney searched her heart for an honest answer. “Maybe not,” she managed to say amidst the chaos of her thoughts. But this only deepened her confusion between Ben as catalyst and as cause—how could she, the creation of her family, have become the creation of someone else she had met two months before? Desperately, she explained, “So many things have happened so quickly. I can’t tell you why they did, or where you and I fit in.”

  “I can,” he said with certitude. “You’re Mrs. Me. You and I nourish each other. When I came here, I was dead inside. I’m not anymore. I feel this fierce will to live, to seize the future I’ve always wanted. You’re part of that now.”

  She felt the pressure of reality, a stab of guilt that rightly belonged to her father. “But you’re leaving. In three weeks you’ll be gone.”

  “We know who caused that,” he replied with an edge in his voice. “So let him have what he deserves—a marriage to me, without his fingerprints all over it.” His tone evened out again. “Your parents will come around. What choice do they have—exiling their own daughter is too embarrassing. But if they do, to hell with them. I’ve done without my parents just fine. My only regret is not getting rid of them sooner.” He took her face in his hands, willing her to act. “We can make our own life, Whitney.”

  “But how can we if you’re gone?”

  “People do,” he said flatly. “If we’re married, maybe we could even get me back to Yale.”

  From the sea of print in his induction papers she remembered the instruction: “If married, bring proof of your marriage.” Shaken, she asked, “What difference would that make?”

  “It might lower my draft priority. All I need is to postpone my induction. From there I can put up a real fight.” His eyes bore into hers. “I get what you must be thinking, with Peter always looking for an out. But what’s been happening since the day we met has nothing to do with the draft—once you were free, it was only a matter of time until we decided on each other. But your father cut our time short, so I have to ask you now or risk losing you forever.”
He clasped her hands again. “Whatever we do, I’ll probably have to go away. But if marriage gives us back what your father stole from me, call it poetic justice.”

  There must be truth in this, Whitney thought. They had grown toward each other oblivious to her father’s maneuverings, both believing she would be married to Peter, rendering impossible the calculation that had dictated her wedding date. But knowing too late how callously her father had changed Ben’s life, what was her obligation, and to whom? She leaned her face against his chest, feeling and hearing the strong, steady beat of his heat. “You’ve asked me to marry you,” she told him, “without ever having said you love me.”

  Softly, Ben laughed. “When was I supposed to fit that in? When you were engaged to Peter? All it took was a kiss to send you screaming into the night. Long ago I learned not to love people who can only hurt you. But okay.” Cradling her chin, he said, “I love you, Whitney Dane. I guess that’s why I asked you to be my wife.”

  Whitney could not help but smile at this, then saw that he was waiting for her answer. She tried to find the words that would please him, yet be true to the muddle of an honest mind. “I love what I know about you,” she said at last. “I feel things with you that I never felt with Peter, pieces of myself falling into place. But I can’t know what I’ll know in a year—about you, or me.”

  Ben’s lips compressed. “You can guess. Okay, neither one of us would have chosen how things are. But look how far we’ve come, so quickly.” He stopped himself, smiling a little. “Anyhow, you don’t need to answer this minute. I count nineteen days before I disappear.”

  Whether meant to be sad or simply ironic, she was grateful for this reprieve. In hours or days, it might all become clearer—perhaps then she could see a life with him. But there was so much to absorb, including things she could never tell him, that part of her felt leaden.

  “My parents still exist,” she finally said. “I’m sure they’re home by now, and I have to see them.”