Sacred Time (12 page)

“Thinking what?”

—how he'd dreamed that Elaine was getting on the El in front of him at White Plains Road while it was raining—

“Did she look back to see you?”

—and that he'd followed her, without her noticing, to the Crotona Park station and from there to her apartment—

“What is it like, her apartment?”

—with the green kitchen cabinets and the purple carpet, purple leaves on purple, and that they'd barely gotten inside before they'd made love—

“Fucked,” Leonora said. “That's not love.”

—in their wet clothes, standing against the door—

“You didn't take anything off?”

—and how he'd imagined pulling off his shirt and Elaine kissing the dimple on his shoulder and—

“You do not have a dimple on your shoulder,” she whispered, the rage harsh in her throat.

“Well, I do.”

“No, you don't.”

“I do.” Stiffly, he pointed to his right shoulder. “Here,” he said.

“I would know if you had a goddamn dimple on your goddamn shoulder.”

“Want to see?”

“Spare me.”

Because he had torn the marriage vows that were sacred to her, she questioned his faith, his relationship to his God, trying to tear what was sacred to him. Whenever he'd wrest himself from those raw and strange conversations, she'd remind him that she'd rather know than speculate. What they created between them was a greedy and nightmarish honesty. Days and hours they spent on feeding this honesty with their pain, with their satisfaction at keeping their marriage alive, until the honesty got so fat that it craved more.

“I'm crazy about your body,” James tells her.

He
is
crazy about her body. He has told her. Many times. Leonora used to think he was merely saying it the way some men believe they have to tell you they love you once their hands get inside your clothes. Not that she has a lot of experience, but she reads enough to know that, indeed, James is crazy about her body.

“You are fantastic in bed,” he tells her as he straddles her.

“I've never been with a woman who likes sex as much as you.”

For an instant she feels ashamed.
Insatiable.
She doesn't like to feel insatiable around food or sex.

But already James is pushing himself inside her. “Am I the best lover you've ever had?”

“The best,” she says, resolving that not even shame will distract her as she yields to the urgency between them.

When Victor arrived that morning to get Anthony, he was wearing a tux and carrying a Hoffman Soda carton. “Look what I got for you today.”

“I can't believe you're shlepping groceries to me on your engagement day.”

“I got you Dugan's chocolate doughnuts and a butter dish and—”

If she didn't stop him, he'd pack two cartons every day at work, one to drop off with her, the other to take home to Elaine. “Why, Victor?”

“Because we need a butter dish.”

“We?”

He glanced around the room as if making sure she hadn't moved the furniture without consulting him. It made her want to drag the couch into the bathroom, her bed into the middle of the living room. Just to unsettle him.

“Anthony…” she called.

He opened his door as though he'd been standing behind it, wearing a new suit plus the black shoes Victor had bought for him.

“Your father is ready to go.”

“I'll get him back to you early evening, if that's all right with you,” Victor said, but he waited as if hoping she'd prevent him from going through with this foolishness. The collar of his new shirt pinched his skin, pressed a ridge into his neck.

She felt a strange sense of finality, more definite than on the day he'd moved out. It made her temples ache, and she pressed her fingertips against them.

“Another migraine?” Victor asked.

“Nothing you can do.”

“Well…” He got this nervous little grin on his face, the grin she'd found charming when she'd first met him.

“Don't even think about it.”

“Well now…” He ruffled their son's hair.

But Anthony jerked his head aside. He usually was edgy before Victor picked him up, angry after he was back home.

“What have you told the boy about me?” Victor had asked her. “He's content when he's with me, and I can't understand why he's so aloof between visits, why he refuses to talk to me on the phone.”

“Don't blame me,” Leonora had said. “He makes his own observations.”

One afternoon last month, when she'd taken the bus to retrieve Anthony from Victor's tiny apartment off Westchester Square, she'd found them sitting on the sunny front stoop, Victor's arms loosely around Anthony, who sat with his back to him. Victor's left palm lay against Anthony's chest, and she wished that they both would harbor that touch, Victor's palm against their Anthony's chest just like this, and that they would turn to that memory whenever they'd miss one another.

“Well now…” Victor said again, moving one hand across his jaw as if searching for his lost beard. “Anthony, the two of us better be off.”

As Leonora bent to kiss her son's cheek, it gave her some measure of satisfaction that he did not shrink from
her
touch, and that Victor noticed. “Have a real good day with your dad,” she told him as if it were a regular visit, as if she were not worried about him. At least her father-in-law had promised her that he'd sit with Anthony. And there'd be others in the family, including Belinda.

She listened to their steps in the hallway, on the stairs, until she could no longer hear them. Eyes closed, she rubbed her temples. Orgasms were the best remedy for migraines, but James was still at work, and she didn't feel like masturbating. She was restless. Searched for something to occupy her till he arrived so that she wouldn't think of Victor with Elaine. She turned on the radio, filed her nails, flipped through copies of
Look
and
Good Housekeeping,
and when she came across instructions for decorative centerpieces, she chose to make the most ludicrous one, an edible basket.

At Russ' on 183rd she bought the vegetables she needed, then got Pall Malls at the candy store. As she crossed the street, the old tailor in Koss' window looked up from his sewing machine. At the Hebrew National Deli, she waited in line for pastrami on rye and a bottle of Dr. Brown's cream soda, which she drank while working at her kitchen table, weaving strands of dough into a basket. But she didn't feel like eating the sandwich because she was filling up on dough. Like Anthony, she preferred raw dough over anything baked, liked how it swelled inside her like light, adapting itself to her shape without making her feel heavy.

While the basket was in the oven, she got out her rolling pin to flatten red and yellow peppers, and then pressed flower shapes from them with cookie cutters. She carved radish roses, fashioned stems from asparagus, leaves from peapods. Her ferns were scallions and celery, cut into long strips, and she was arranging those around the flowers inside the warm basket when James rang the bell. She took one last look at her creation and was stunned into disbelief. Nothing was what it seemed: her braided basket was not rattan but bread, and her flowers were not flowers but vegetables. Altogether, her centerpiece looked exactly as it had in the magazine: false.

As she strokes the insides of James' thighs, he curves himself toward her. She is amazed that she is capable of having sex without love. Amazed and a little smug. An added benefit is that, with all these orgasms, she's hardly had any migraines.

He touches her left eyebrow with his ring finger. “How did you get this?”

“I was born with it.”

“Looks almost like lightning struck you here.”

“Lightning…” She smiles. Sees herself
standing still beneath a tree as it is split by lightning. While she stays intact—the one change her eyebrow. Like the signature of lightning. Daughter of lightning. Lightning herself. Fast and hot and powerful.
As a girl she used to turn the left side of her face away from her mother's camera to hide this eyebrow that was almost entirely white except for a few dark hairs where it began. But Victor loved what he called the light side of her face, and she came to love it, too. The picture she framed of their wedding is the one with her face turned fully toward the camera, her eyebrow as white as her gown.

As James traces her eyebrow with one thumb, it moves her that he, too, appreciates that uniqueness in her. Even though he is so young. Maybe all along he's been more mature than she thought.

But he destroys that illusion. “Have you ever thought of dyeing it black like your other eyebrow?”

“I don't want to dye it black.”

“Don't get so mad. I mean, you paint your fingernails. And you wear lipstick. And—”

“That eyebrow defines me.”

“Sure it does. It's only that—”

“What?” She sits up. Reaches for the wineglass.

“Never mind.”

“It's only that—what?”

“That you'd be a real knockout if you dyed that eyebrow.”