The Perfect Letter (2 page)

For a moment she panted in frustration. Why had he stopped? Of course she wanted him—she had initiated it, hadn't she? She took a breath and said, “Don't stop now, for God's sake.”

He led her by the hand to the bedroom, where they got undressed and slid under the covers, Leigh's cool white sheets. He moved toward her, his hands and mouth moving expertly over her body, her skin tightening under his hands, her back arching to meet him. He was a practiced, considerate, skilled lover, and two years together had taught him how to please her. Yet she lay looking at the ceiling, at the reflection of the lamplight against the white paint, thinking there was something mechanical about the way he was touching her just at that moment, something maybe too familiar—first a, then b, then c, a pattern that had repeated itself for two years.

Maybe it was time to shake things up a bit.

He was positioning himself over her, raising her hips to meet his, when impulsively she sat up, pushing him off her by the shoulders, and then—a mischievous grin coming over her face—pushed him back down on the bed. She reached into her nightstand, took out a silk scarf, wrapped it around his wrists, and tied him to the bed with it. The surprise on his face was palpable. “Wait,” he said. “What are you doing? Leigh—”

She teased her mouth over his chest, around his belly button, downward, downward. She could feel her own excitement building.
I should have done this a long time ago,
she thought, but Joseph was saying, “Stop, stop, Leigh, wait,
stop!”

He was sitting up, undoing the knot in the scarf. Frowning. She sat back, prepared to ask him what was wrong, what she'd done, but she could already sense his confusion and knew that the wall had gone back up between them.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I thought it would be fun. That is, I thought we could try something different.”

“I didn't know you wanted to try anything different. I thought you were happy with our sex life the way it's always been.” He was frowning.

“I am. I mean, it's always good—”

“It's
good
? That's a ringing endorsement.”

“I mean satisfying. It's always been satisfying. But what's wrong with something new?”

“I wish you'd talked with me about it first, that's all.”

She sat back on the bed and covered her breasts with the sheet. “I thought it would be nice to, you know, be spontaneous.”

“I don't mind spontaneous, but I wish you'd let me know what you're thinking.”

Leigh stifled a laugh. She didn't think he'd enjoy her pointing out the contradiction of what he'd just said.

“So you don't like me taking charge?” she asked. “Turning the tables a bit?”

“I don't know. I never thought about it before. I was maybe a little taken off guard.”

“Can we forget about it?” Leigh said. “Come here. Let's just do what you were wanting to do.”

“Maybe not tonight,” he said, standing up and pulling his clothes on. “I'm tired. I think I should go.”

She felt the irritation rise to her throat again. This was what he always did when he was upset or uncomfortable: he'd disengage, detach. Whenever Leigh wanted to talk about something that made him uncomfortable, he'd simply disappear. And that was the one thing she couldn't bear.
If you love me,
she wanted to say,
you'd stay.

“Don't leave, Joseph. Please. We said we were going to talk.”

He sat on the bed with his back to her and put on his socks, his shoes. “I think it's best we both get our heads on straight, don't you?” he said, not waiting for an answer.

No,
she was thinking.
No, I don't want to get my head on straight. No, I don't think it's best.
But she knew him well enough now to know he was done talking about it, and that any further attempts on her part would be met with silence.

He came over and kissed the top of her hair tenderly, and Leigh tried to think of something that would get him to stay. There was nothing—her mind was a black hole.

“You get some sleep,” he said, and then he was gone.

The next morning, despite her protestations that he should stay in bed, that her flight was at an ungodly hour—really, I can take a cab, it's okay—Joseph got up early to drive her to the airport. It was something he liked to do whenever she traveled for work: picking up coffee for the two of them, chatting in the car in the early-morning sun, kissing each other good-bye at the curb like an old married couple. She thought it reassured him, somehow—that it convinced him she'd always come back.

He met her at the door, helped her carry her bags downstairs, then drove east over the Queensboro Bridge following a delivery truck with a bad muffler, the rising sun in their eyes, the noise drowning out any possibility of conversation.

After the fiasco at the launch party and the second one in the bedroom, Leigh had been up all night, trying to think of something to say. But then the truck with the bad muffler moved over a lane, and the air cleared a little. Joseph was the first to speak. “I hope you know, my offer still stands,” he was saying. “About getting married, I mean. If what you really need is more time, take it. I'm not in a rush. It's just . . . I always thought maybe you didn't want to move in together because we weren't married. That maybe you were old-fashioned that way, and if I proposed, you'd know I was serious about you.”

She reached over and took his hand, rubbing her palm against his, soft and cool. “I know you're serious,” she said. “And I'm thinking about it. Really. I'm not saying no.” She took a breath. “Maybe I need some time to think it over. You know, clear my head. It's a big decision, Joseph—I don't want to rush into anything. That wouldn't be fair to either of us.”

“Maybe.” He went silent, concentrating on the early-morning traffic. She watched him put his hands back on the steering wheel—ten and two—but they weren't strangling it, not exactly. By the time they pulled up to the curb at LaGuardia, he seemed to have lightened somewhat. Perhaps he finally believed her when she said she was thinking about it, she just needed a bit more time.

He put the car in park, turning to her while the traffic around them surged, the business travelers and families with small children, the security forces eyeing everyone with suspicion. “I'm going to miss you,” he said. “A week suddenly feels like a long time.”

“I'll miss you, too. I'll see you a week from tomorrow.” She was seized with a sudden fear that when she came back, he might not be here. That, too, was something she was afraid of. “You're still going to pick me up?”

“Yes, of course I'm picking you up.” He said it like it hurt him that she would even think otherwise. Then he got out and walked around
to the trunk to help her with her bags. He was so much taller than she was, naturally thin and elegant looking in a very New York, masculine kind of way. Bits of pollen stuck to his lashes and his close-cropped dark hair, the soft gray wool of the expensive sweater she'd bought him at Christmas. “Take this week to think. Maybe go see some old friends, let your hair down, figure some things out. Maybe it will do us both some good.”

“I will.” Leigh kissed his smooth cheek, wrapped her arms around his neck, and said, “Thank you.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” she whispered, and meant it. She knew he'd never hurt her; she knew he'd always look out for her. She knew he would always be the same kind, careful, considerate man he was. She knew he could give her the one thing she'd always wanted: a family of her own. She pictured Christmases in Vermont, summers at the beach. Joseph in swim trunks, swinging a six-year-old daughter up on his high shoulders. She knew that, with him, she would never be afraid.

“Stay out of trouble,” he said. He brushed her hands with his fingers, then walked back around the car and got in.

When he pulled away, she blew out a deep breath and picked up her bags. Maybe going home for a week would really do her some good. Give her time to sort out how she really felt about Joseph, New York. Her future, all of it. She could say good-bye to Texas, to her past, once and for all.

When they were first dating, first learning about each other's history, Joseph had somehow gotten the impression that Leigh's family was a broken, dysfunctional thing with some kind of dark secret at the center of it. There had to be a reason she hadn't gone back to Texas all those years. She'd tried to tell him nothing could be further from the truth, that she'd had a happy childhood, more or less. Sure, her mother had died when Leigh was ten, leaving her to be raised by
her grandfather, but what girl wouldn't love to live on her grandfather's horse ranch, learning to ride, to race, reading in the hayloft on cool afternoons? Her grandfather had been good to her, spoiled her even. She'd been crazy about the old man, and though certainly she'd missed her mother, she had nothing to complain about, not really.

Her grandfather had been a true Texan, one who believed in hard work and self-determination. The fact that Eugene Merrill also happened to be the biggest Thoroughbred breeder this side of Kentucky just meant that anything Leigh had wanted, she got: a car when she was sixteen, yearly trips to the Kentucky Derby, even her own foal, a white colt named Blizzard, for her tenth birthday. It was privilege, just a different kind of privilege from the citified version Joseph had grown up with. Not better or worse. Different.

Joseph knew all this, but still he had a thing for introducing Leigh to his friends and family as an orphan, one of the few habits of his that really irritated her, because when other people learned about the Thoroughbreds, the ranch, the colt, they always felt lied to, even tricked. Even Joseph's family had, for a while, been under the impression that Leigh had been passed from home to home like a human carpetbag, and when she had to disabuse them of that notion she was met with nothing less than shock. “Who gets a horse for their birthday?” said Joseph's sister, Bennett, one Sunday during Leigh's getting-to-know-you period with Joseph's family when the two of them were having brunch alone. “It sounds like such a cliché. Like Caroline Kennedy on the White House lawn.”

Leigh had taken a sip of her mimosa and given her boyfriend's sister a crooked smile. “It wasn't like that. Blizzard was one more head on a farm with three or four dozen horses. I think my grandfather figured if he pretended one of them belonged to me, I'd show some interest in learning the business.”

“Did you?”

“For a little while maybe, but I guess I'm more of a bookworm at heart. Instead of training Blizzard, I spent all my afternoons reading Marguerite Henry novels. My grandfather was less than thrilled.”

Bennett laughed. “Still, I always thought you were one of those Dickens characters. You know, ‘Please, miss, may I have some more?' And here you were some high-class belle the whole time. You probably even had a coming-out.”

Leigh actually laughed that time. “Not exactly. My grandfather wasn't the debutante sort. More the mucking-stalls sort.”

Bennett, an aristocratic-looking brunette who was as outgoing as her brother was reserved, gave a toss of her hair and attacked her Cobb salad. “So did all the horses race?”

“No. Some were breeding stock. That's where the real money is—breeding. My grandfather was the best breeder on the Colorado. He did pretty well for himself, enough to buy four hundred acres in Texas Hill Country, outside of Austin. A big white house with a columned front porch. You know, the whole Southern-charm thing.”

Bennett was shaking her head. “That was
not
the impression Joseph gave us at Christmas. He said you grew up on a farm in Texas, but he made it sound like a two-room shack surrounded by cactus and rattlesnakes. Scratching your way out of the desert and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to get into Harvard, all grit and determination.”

Leigh grimaced. It was the kind of remark that would have made her grandfather furious if he'd been alive to hear it. He had little patience for what he used to call “Eastern piffle” about Texas in general and horsemen in particular. “It would make a better story, maybe, if we were poor. But my granddad was the biggest breeder of Thoroughbreds in the country at one time. One of his top horses sold for fifteen million.”

“Fifteen million
dollars
? For a single horse?”

“A stallion, yes. His stud fee was half a million a pop. Two of his foals won the Derby, and another took the Preakness.”

Bennett nearly dropped her drink. “Joseph certainly never told us
that
. Clearly he has the wrong idea about your family history.”

Leigh cut herself a bite of eggs Benedict. “I've told him all this before, but I think he likes the reactions he gets when he lets people think I lived in deprivation. I think he finds it all terribly exotic.”

“It's the way we grew up,” said Bennett. “Our mother thought anyplace that wasn't Manhattan must be a third-world backwater. Don't take it personally.”

“I don't. Since in all other ways your brother is a perfect gentleman, I have to assume this is a minor character flaw. I can live with it. I've known men with worse, believe me.”

“So,” said Bennett, “you've never been back to Texas, in all this time?”

“My grandfather died my freshman year of college, and though he left me some money, he willed the property and the horse business to my uncle and his family, who moved into the place not long after the funeral to keep things running. I always got along with my uncle Sonny and aunt Becky and my cousins, but I never wanted to be an imposition, show up like I thought I owned the place. I send Christmas cards and call on birthdays, that kind of thing, but with my grandfather gone, it was always easier to stay in Boston over the school breaks. I wasn't dying to go back anyway.”