A Small Indiscretion (19 page)

I did not ask him what the truth was, but he told me anyway.

“The truth is I can think of nothing but you. I can see nothing inside my mind but your face. It makes me happy, you see. To think of you.”

He was not looking at me but up at the ceiling. He was lying very still, and I was lying still, too, because he had trapped me beneath the sheets and I could not move.

“On the other hand,” he said, “I do think, I’ve thought for some time, that Louise’s unhappiness, her lack of fortitude, has worn off on Daisy. She’s allowed Daisy to think of herself as a young person requiring special considerations. In a way we’ve both allowed Daisy to think that.”

“I would imagine that’s natural,” I said, “when you’re raising an only child.”

“But I never wanted to raise an only child, you see,” he said. “I wanted a large family. Louise didn’t. Or she thought she did, initially, but after Daisy was born, she changed her mind. She misunderstood life’s possibilities. And I did, too, but now I don’t. Now I know what I want, and what I want, in my heart of hearts, is to start a family with you.”

He looked at me significantly. I heard Patrick through the wall, rising, walking about the room, opening the shutter and saying something to Louise, something that made her laugh.

“Louise isn’t jealous, exactly. She’s furious. She thinks I’m ridiculous. She doesn’t understand what’s between us.”

I didn’t ask what
he
thought was between us. That was clear enough. I could have put an end to the whole thing right then. I could have been frank, and delivered him out of his predicament. But I didn’t, and I might not have been able to persuade him that I didn’t love him, just as I could not persuade myself that Patrick did not love me.

Malcolm stood up and walked to the window. It had been open a crack, and the shutter had blown wide. He closed the window. Then he closed the shutter and stood looking down at me beneath the sheets.

He was so large, standing there; I wanted his largeness to make
him invulnerable, but it didn’t. His bulk, the weight of his bones, the strength of his fingers—all this gave him no protection. It made me think of my father at the intervention. The bewilderment on his face. The great stillness and sadness of his body.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was. “I’m sorry about the whole thing.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “It’s a gift. A great gift to feel this way.”

I reached my hand toward him. I meant nothing by it, but of course he took meaning from it. He pressed his lips to my hand. He bent over me and kissed my forehead, and then my lips. His lips on mine felt too light, too tender, too tentative, and the kiss brought back the abject failure between us the night after the races. I tried to turn my face away from him, but he surprised me. He took my chin in his hand and kissed me harder. He pulled away and looked me in the eye, then he kissed me again—quite persuasively—and I was moved, in the nether regions, in spite of myself.

He got in under the covers in his pajamas. I did not look at him. I did not touch him. I did not do anything at all. He put his hand beneath my sweater. Louise let out a sharp laugh in the room next door. I heard a door open and close. Malcolm began to kiss me more intensely. Then there were footsteps, and the sound of the elevator opening and closing, then only the sound of the storm.

There was a flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. The hammering rain. The sheets, I remember, were white satin. His hands moved over my body. He undressed me, then undressed himself. He rolled over on top of me, and I could feel him; I could feel there would be no failure this time. I told him I was not on the pill. He said it would be all right. He said I did not have to worry. What, exactly, did he mean by that, and what did I take him to mean? Or was I simply, by that point, beyond bringing myself to care?

I became a great internal shrug. All my organs gave way to the
path of least resistance. I felt myself dislocating, but the dislocation did not have the expected result. Instead of removing me, it made me more present, more available, more pliable, more attuned. He entered me, feeling more certain inside me than Patrick had, and at some point, the universe tilted, and an unaccountable shift occurred. Something like abandonment overtook me. It was like the curtain that dropped when I was drinking, but even more absolute in its obliteration of worry and pain, its obliteration of everything. I gave myself over to the whims of my own body. I ceased to be who I had been, and I was swept up, out of shame and into pleasure, up and over the precipice for the very first time. Malcolm had achieved, on the first try, what Patrick never had. Or else I achieved it myself, by simply not caring, and by letting desire rule the day.

Is desire the right word? It was more like hunger, rumbling in a specific location inside my body, a location that couldn’t be silenced until it was sated.

“I love you,” he said afterward. “I love you more than you can possibly imagine.”

He was still touching me, but too delicately, now that it was over. He ran the tips of his fingers along my arm—so lightly it was as if he were afraid he would leave a scar—and it was all I could do not to swat his hand away. He was breathing very heavily, and I had an urge to put my own hand over his mouth to make the sound stop.

Shame was reinstated. What was it that shamed me? It was my tacit consent. It was the success of the thing, followed by the return of my distaste. I had received something I had not asked for. I had taken it on a whim. And because I’d taken it, I was at liberty to throw it away. I had not cared, and so I had come. I had been set down on the earth, and so I was loved.

W
EDNESDAY MORNING
. Hump Day. Appropriate enough.

I walk the dogs. Then I stand in the driveway, surveying the street. Easter has come and gone, but spring appears to be in retreat. The sky is a bland white. There is no sign of the sun. It’s going to be one of those middling days that could grow warm or stay quite cold, making it hard to decide what to wear.

I take the dogs inside. The weather doesn’t matter unless I plan to venture out again, and there is really no need. The girls are still in Wisconsin with your father. The store is closed. You are nowhere I can find you. And there is plenty to do, here, inside the past.

M
ALCOLM AND
I found Patrick and Louise downstairs at the café, eating breakfast. I had showered, but I still felt they might see or smell or sense the residue of sex, and I kept my coat tightened around me. We could not take a cruise on the Seine, it was decided, because of the storm. We sat in the café and drank coffee and ate croissants. Louise dipped a sugar cube in her espresso and sucked it between her lips. I was terrified to sit next to her. I felt myself to be toxic and dangerous, but also disposable. And yet she gave no outward signs
of rudeness or discontent. If anything, she was more polite than she had been the day before.

Her headache was gone. She was enjoying herself in spite of the weather. She always loved to be in Paris, she announced, especially at Christmas. She was so looking forward to dinner at La Tour d’Argent. She suggested we skip the Louvre, which could be overwhelming, in favor of the Musée d’Orsay.

We took a taxi in the steady rain. There were more Monets. There were Renoirs and Van Goghs. There was more standing and looking and, on my part, failing to be moved. I stood at a window and watched the rain fall and the river rise and the bare trees sway violently in the wind, and I longed to be outside experiencing the day.

“Next stop, Trocadéro,” Louise said. “I must find one or two more things for Daisy for Christmas.”

While Louise shopped, Patrick and Malcolm and I walked across the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. We bought tickets and stood in line, but Malcolm said he was feeling a little dizzy and would wait below while we rode up. At the top, Patrick and I could see almost nothing because of the rain. We rode back down again and collected Malcolm and returned to Trocadéro. Patrick joined Louise in a shop. Malcolm and I waited outside. When Patrick emerged, he handed me a small shopping bag. Inside was a parcel wrapped in tissue paper. I pulled off the tissues and lifted out a wool scarf, pale gray with a faint green geometric pattern.

“A scarf of moonlight and whispers,” Patrick said.

“Moonlight and whispers?”

“It’s from a poem,” he replied, opening his umbrella dramatically into the wind. “Can’t remember the rest, I’m afraid.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”

Louise eyed Patrick curiously. “How sweet,” she said.

“She lost her scarf on the ferry,” Patrick replied.

I wrapped the scarf around my shoulders.

Patrick reached over and rearranged it. “More like this,” he said.

“Very nice,” Malcolm said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Bit of a stiff neck. Must have slept at a bad angle on the pillow.”

Where had he slept, and with whom? It was the first time I’d wondered. And what did he think of Patrick, whom I was supposed to have met only once before, giving me a gift? There is no way to know. No way, now, to reconstruct the probabilities of Malcolm’s brain, or his heart.

Louise gave Malcolm her shopping bags to carry. “Look at that, now,” Malcolm said. “There’s a bit of sun fighting out.”

“We’d better get over to Montmartre before the rain starts up again,” Louise said. “We can take a taxi and walk to the top.”

“Or we could take a taxi the other way around,” Malcolm said. “The back way. Right to the church. Save the walk up the steps.”

“That’s a good idea,” Louise said.

“I’d like to walk up the steps,” I said. “If nobody minds.”

I had read about the journey in the guidebook—the more than three hundred steps to the top, and the graffiti on some of the buildings that flanked the stairs. It was something I thought Patrick might want to photograph.

We found a taxi. We walked up the steps. Patrick took pictures. I stayed beside him, wearing my scarf of moonlight and whispers. Malcolm and Louise lagged. Halfway up I turned back to see that Malcolm was no longer climbing the stairs but standing beside Louise, leaning his hip against the railing. Patrick and I descended again, to join them. Malcolm’s face was pale as he put his hands to the back of his head. “I’ll just sit down here a minute,” he said. “It’s my head.”

It was not like Malcolm to make a fuss. Not like him to feel unwell.

Louise sat down next to him. She took his hands in hers.

“I’ll stay with him,” Louise said to Patrick and me. “You two go on. We’ll be up in a minute.”

I did not hesitate. I did not worry about how Malcolm was feeling. Patrick and I climbed the stairs together. He linked his arm in mine. At the top of the stairs he leaned over and took my chin in his hand and kissed me deeply. We reached the church, gray and immense against the massing clouds. We walked around inside. We looked at the stained glass. He kissed me again.

Outside, a clearing of blue was visible between the clouds. The day was fading, and a thin geometry of colored light lay over the city. In front of the church, a girl was tapping a tambourine against her hip and singing.

Patrick took a picture of her, then we moved closer.

“My God,” he said suddenly, “it’s Mary McShane. Her brother was with me at school.”

He walked right over to her. There was a blue velvet hat at her feet, filled with coins and bills into which Patrick dropped a ten-franc note. When she finished her song, they embraced. A young man sat on the ground beside her. A guitar lay dormant in his lap, and in his hands was an emaciated gray rat. He let the rat run along the back of his neck, over his shoulder and along his arm.

Louise was suddenly beside me. “That rat turns my stomach,” she said.

“Is Malcolm all right?” I asked her.

“He’s just there, by the church, resting. He’s got a terrible headache,” she said. “Which isn’t like him. We’re going to have to go back to the penthouse. We’ll take a cab. We could all probably use a little lie-down before dinner anyway.”

“Patrick’s bumped into someone he knows from home,” I said.

He was standing with the girl, Mary McShane, talking and laughing. He saw Louise and walked toward us and the girl began to sing another song.

“We’re going to need to head back now,” Louise said. “Malcolm’s not well.”

“I’ll catch up to you, why don’t I?” Patrick said offhandedly. “I’ll be back in time to change for dinner.”

“I might need your help, though,” Louise said, “with Malcolm.”

Something rose in Patrick’s face. I saw it, and recognized it—an arc of resistance stretching toward an outright refusal. He would not allow himself to be reined in by her any more than by me. I’ll admit that it pleased me to see him refuse her. He might have come along out of deference to Malcolm, who had stood to join us now, but he did not, he would not, once Louise had pressed him to.

“I’ll be all right,” Malcolm said. “Let him stay and talk to his friend.”

“Suit yourself,” Louise said to Patrick.

“I may as well stay for a bit, too,” I said, “since the weather’s finally cooperating.”