Small Mercies (6 page)

Tina smiles. Stephanie was right; she must have a thing for Irish guys. Or half-Irish guys. She waits for Wade to continue, to explain how his parents met, but he doesn’t say any more. She is unaccustomed to having to ask questions about the parents of the man she’s dating. Every man she ever dated, his whole life was right in front of her. In plain sight. Nothing needed to be said. It was simply known. This is another thing she likes about Wade: there are things she doesn’t know.

Wade is looking around the room, soaking it all in.

“My mother would have loved this place.”

The pizza arrives with an abrupt clatter; the waitress slings a grease-stained pizza stand in the middle of the table and drops a tray on it. She slides a container of Parmesan cheese and a container of red pepper flakes under the tray. The cheese on the pizza sizzles; the pepperoni have curled into tiny basins of oil.

“Careful, that tray is hot,” the waitress chides as she whirls away.

Tina slides a slice onto a paper plate, blows on it, and hands it to Wade.

“Give it a minute. You’ll burn the top of your mouth if you eat it now.”

He does as she says. He takes a bite of the drooping angle of the slice.

“Verdict?”

“Delicious.”

“Not good enough. Best you’ve ever had?”

“The best I ever had?”

“Yeah. Say it.”

“I’m not sure. Pepe’s in New Haven is . . .”

Tina picks up a fork, brandishes it in the direction of his eyes.

“I’ll tell you what, Tina. It’s the best damn pizza I ever had.”

* * *

After dinner, they walk slowly up a sloping street to where the car is parked. It’s misting out, a rain so fine that it doesn’t fall so much as hover. When they get into the car, they kiss until he pulls away.

“I’m not sure what that was about,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I feel like that was some kind of test.”

Tina feels embarrassed at her transparency. She stammers a soft disagreement.

“Not exactly.”

“It’s okay if it was. But you should tell me what you’re thinking, what’s bothering you.”

“I guess we should have just gone to Per Se.”

Wade brings his hand to her cheek, draws her eyes up and away from the floor of the car.

“Tina, it’s okay that we didn’t go to Per Se. I’m glad we came here. So is my wallet. But I’m not entirely sure where your head is. I’m thinking maybe we pushed this too fast too soon for you.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just that you’re very different from Bobby and that’s a good thing. I just wanted to know that you were alike in some ways too.”

“Okay, so it was a test?”

She doesn’t recognize the look on his face.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

He looks out over the dashboard. A family passes on the sidewalk, the father carrying a grease-stained white paper bag with leftover slices. Wade puts the key in the ignition, turns on the wipers.

“So, how’d I do?” he asks.

“You ate five slices of pizza.”

“So?”

“I like a man who leaves empty plates in his wake.”

Wade kisses her, a long passionate kiss intended as a prelude. His hand slides up the outside of her dress, to the base of her breast. Tina feels a flutter in her stomach. Outside the car, a few teenage boys hoot as they walk by in hoodies and jeans, oblivious to the rain. Wade leans over and honks his horn, startling the onlookers. They laugh up the street, gesticulating and hollering back at the car. Tina whispers in his ear.

“Take me home.”

He looks disappointed for a beat until she clarifies.

“Your home.”

* * *

The drive into Manhattan is agonizing. The rain picks up and the traffic slows. There’s an accident on the BQE, closing a lane. Tina has too much time to think about what’s going to happen. The flutter in her stomach turns into a pit. She calls Stephanie to check in, make sure the kids are all right. She whispers, pretends she’s in a restaurant. They’re fine, of course, and how is Per Se? Out of this world, another course just arrived, let me run. Wade raises an eyebrow when she hangs up.

“Don’t ask.”

The traffic thickens to a derby at the rise in the BQE just before the Battery Tunnel; four lanes of cars jostle, connive, and try to funnel their way down to two. During the week, tempers would flare, but Saturday night is more patient. The city is right in front of everyone, the night still impossibly young.

Wade lives in Battery Park City. Tina knows this route well: after this merge, the steady crawl under the Promenade, the right onto the Brooklyn Bridge, staying right to take the FDR downtown. Getting to the city this way is a test of nerves: get right but spend as little time as possible in the right. You have to push and probe, test the resolve of others, flirt with collisions at every second. It’s a miracle there aren’t more accidents. She hates driving in the city, but it’s more than that tonight.

They will drive and not see what should be there. She will not look so she doesn’t see what isn’t there, what should be there. They will drive around Ground Zero, trace a little semicircle around Bobby’s grave. They will both try not to think about what is not in front of them. The tension in her body vibrates up and out of her, into the car, pulsing in the air.

The car has passed the crest of the hill; Wade needs to get over one more lane, needs a Good Samaritan or someone texting or a stalled car.

She can’t do this.

“Wade, please . . .”

A guy in a busted Taurus slows down, lets a space open between his car and the bus in front of him, waves them in.

“Wade, I think I need to go home.”

“What?”

A van with Chinese lettering on its side accelerates on their left, then abruptly veers in front of them, an insane dash across two lanes into the waiting space. Wade hits the brakes. Tina slides forward, but Wade reaches one hand over and corrals her in place. A few horns honk. The offending van is absorbed, part of the stream of traffic. The space closes.

“Oh, fuck this,” Wade says, and then steers the car left, away from the throng, toward the empty toll booths for the Battery Tunnel. With his right hand, he searches the center console for an E-ZPass. He winks at Tina.

“I think we can spring for the toll. The bread at Per Se would have cost as much.”

Tina pushes a long breath out. The car pauses at the booth and then glides down to the mouth of the tunnel.

“What were you saying?” he asks.

“Nothing,” Tina says. “Never mind.”

The car shoots into the tunnel, a blur of white tiles.

* * *

It’s bad before it’s good. They have to stop twice because Tina is overwhelmed and doesn’t think she can do it. When they’re naked together for the first time, she recoils from Wade’s touch and turns away from him. She cries because despite it all—the years and the loneliness and the mourning, how she felt in the car earlier and what she wants to do now, the breeziness fueled by a few pitchers of beer, the knowledge that she’s waited and been faithful, not just to Bobby but to his memory, been respectful and decent beyond what others expected, beyond what others did, that she’s been a widow worthy of a hero because that’s what Bobby is, will always be, despite the fact that she loves,
actually
loves, the man she’s lying next to, and he loves her, she knows that too, even though she’s not sure why, despite the fact that she’s entitled to this, that she’s earned this—despite all of that, she still feels shame, still feels this is a betrayal.

Wade is patient and kind and does nothing wrong. After a few minutes, he reaches for her naked back, leans to whisper something soothing in her ear, and she hears a shrill pantomime of her normal voice snap in the air.

“Don’t touch me.”

Tina feels the warmth of his body retreat, hears his breath, still patient, on the other side of the bed. The tears swell into body-wracking sobs. She pulls her knees up to her breasts. Whenever she closes her eyes, a different image of Bobby appears: playing basketball as a teenager, at the bar of the Leaf ordering a round, holding Alyssa in the hospital, in his gear at the firehouse. She opens her eyes, focuses her gaze on a spot on the wall. She tries to banish all memories from her mind. Before she can be with Wade, she has to be alone, has to be without Bobby.

Leave me alone, she thinks, for a little while.

She releases her legs, straightens them. She thinks of nothing but the physical reality of the moment: the slight chill in the room, the softness of the pillow, the fabric of the bedsheet draped on her nipples, a strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth, the scratchy soreness of her eyes from all the crying.

This is a physical act, she tells herself, nothing more. Like going to the bathroom or eating.

No, it’s not, she thinks. That is ridiculous beyond words. It is something more, has to be, or else you would have done it a lot sooner. You waited for a reason, Tina. You waited for the right person and you’re lying in bed with him.

She thinks of Wade: the tensile rope of his runner’s thighs, his spare chest with ribbons of thin hair, the surprising thickness of his penis, a pleasant contrast from his leanness everywhere else. An impulse to compare Wade and Bobby, to line their naked bodies beside each other in her mind’s eye and catalog the differences, arises; she has a vision of Stephanie asking scandalous questions of comparison. She fights these thoughts off. She will not do that here. Everywhere else but not here.

She thinks of Wade again: the smell of him, his way. She visualizes their kissing episode in the car earlier, his hand finding the curve of her ass through the dress, the moistness between her legs as he fondled her. She feels the moistness returning. She reaches her hand backward across the bed, searching for his groin. He slides over to accommodate her reach. His erection has dwindled, but it responds to her trembling fingers.

When he swells solid in her grip, she turns and straddles him, pushing down on his chest with her free hand. Her other hand is still holding his cock, fully erect now, and she lowers herself onto it. She stops, her body clenching as it adjusts to a distantly familiar sensation; the pain lessens in spasms. When he’s fully inside her, she starts to ride him. He reaches around the middle of her stomach, his fingers nearly touching across the small of her back. The physical dynamics are awkward—he is tall and she is short and this is their first go—but they settle into a pleasurable rhythm. Tina’s tears return involuntarily and Wade stops moving when he notices. He starts to say something, but she kisses him, urges him on, takes control of their fucking, because she wants this, she needs this, needs to feel alive again, to sweat and to thrust and to fuck, to feel him throbbing inside of her, to cry and to scream and to come.

And she does. She has a ferocious orgasm that sends shudders up and down her body. The intensity of it sends her nails digging into the wiry muscle of his biceps, drives her teeth together in a jarring gnash. She remembers to breathe and the feeling expands and she puts everything into it and lets go. It crests and slowly descends; she feels like she’s floating backward through a door toward humanity.

Her orgasm surprises Wade too, who comes in response, his fingers tensing as they slide down and grip the cheeks of her ass. She feels his stiffening spurt and slithery retreat; even after he’s gone soft, their groins are still joined in sticky, wet congress. Tina feels an urge to hike her sex up to his face and grind her groin over his mouth, to have his hands on her ass as she careens toward another orgasm. She doesn’t want to stop, doesn’t want to start thinking again.

“Jesus Christ,” Wade says, breathlessly. “Holy shit.”

She feels the world returning.

“Holy shit,” he says again, reaching a hand up for her tears.

Her crying becomes a wet giggle. She leans down and kisses him, then lays her head down on his chest. The room has a fecund stink, the smell of sex. Tina yawns, suddenly exhausted.

“Tired?” he asks, half jokingly.

“Long day,” she says and then, through a hazy euphoria, she remembers how it started, with her telling Gail and the heartrending look on Gail’s face. Then Bobby is back in her head and Stephanie is asking her questions in the bathroom and Alyssa is frowning at her smoking and Bobby Jr. needs something. So before the whole crew can get properly started and ruin this moment, she tucks herself under Wade’s arm, closes her eyes, and falls asleep.

* * *

Tina wakes with a shiver. She feels Wade’s body coiled behind her. They fell asleep in a loose spoon, his hand is still draped over her shoulder. She’s still naked and the thin bedsheet isn’t much cover. She lifts his arm gently, slides out of bed, and retrieves her underwear off the floor. As she’s putting them on, she spots the shirt he was wearing earlier, draped over an easy chair in the corner. She slips it on, like she’s seen in movies but never actually done herself. Bobby almost never wore dress shirts. The shirt is comically long on her, like a nightgown; the hem sits below her knees. She closes a few buttons and pads into the kitchen.

He has the fridge of a wealthy bachelor: a six-pack of Stella, a bottle of half-empty white wine with a French label, a few hunks of cheese in the crisper, and a white bag holding restaurant leftovers. She wants cold pasta, a handful of rigatoni with gravy. Maybe a sliver of chicken parm and some almost-stale bread. She closes the fridge.

It was pretty damn good. One romp has awakened a hunger almost ten years in the making. Part of her wants to go back to bed, wake Wade, and do it again, but another part wants to be alone for a bit, to enjoy this nothingness, this leap between two lives.

She looks around the apartment. She didn’t get the grand tour earlier. It’s modern, a little austere. Lots of clean lines and sharp edges. She doesn’t want to be nosy, but she has a restless energy that defies the hour. She walks through the living room to the second bedroom. She opens the door and flicks on a light.

The room is a mess; cardboard boxes lie scattered on the floor. A desk sits under a window that looks out onto Jersey. A sliding glass door next to it leads to a terrace. The white wall across from Tina holds three swaths of paint: robin’s egg blue, a deep yellow, and a barely there gray. The room is stuck in a transitive state; it sits heavy with the weight of unfulfilled expectations.