Where or When (13 page)

“Charles will do.”

She sits up quickly, her mouth in a sudden, wide smile. Her eyes are wet.

She looks at him. Her eyes dart from his eyes to his mouth to the top of his hair, as if examining him for the first time. Back to his eyes. She seems to be trying to find him. To read him.

He knows he will not be hard to read, that it must all be there on his face.

He puts his hand at the side of her chin, holds her face steady and kisses her.

Her mouth is soft and large. He can feel her give. A loosening along her spine. He puts his arms around her, pulls her toward him, and she comes, so that her face is against his shoulder, inside his coat.

She inhales deeply into his shirt. “I can smell you,” she says with evident surprise. “I remember how you smell.”

He kisses the top of her hair. She puts her mouth against the weave of his shirt. She slides her fingers through a gap between the buttons of his shirt, touches the skin there. He wishes she would unbutton his shirt, thinks if she doesn't, he might do it for her. Instead she takes hold of his tie and loops it twice so that it is wound around her hand.

“You're fond of my tie?” he asks.

She laughs lightly.

He puts his hands inside her coat, inside her suit jacket, holding her rib cage, the warmth of her through the silk of her blouse. He kisses her again, finds the inside of her mouth, and feels lost and light-headed, as if he were spinning.

She makes a small sound.

He puts a hand on her chin, tilts her face more sharply toward his. He kisses her again. She slips her face slightly to the side, finds his fingers. She kisses one finger, then another. He slides a finger inside her mouth. She closes her lips around it, holds it, then lets him withdraw it. He does it again, explores her tongue. Then again, and again.

He withdraws his finger. He slides his hand to her breast, feels the breast through the cloth. He unfastens the top button of her blouse, pushes the fabric of her bra aside. He kisses her nipple, licks it with his tongue, astonishing himself with the boldness of this gesture.

She breaks away, as if they had been tussling like schoolboys.

It has not been a minute since he first kissed her. How did they get to this point so quickly?

Her face is flushed, her mouth reddened. Her hair, at one side, has begun to come loose. There is a faint mottling at her throat and on her forehead. Her blouse is open, exposing the top of her left breast.

“Is this a sacrilege?” she asks.

He takes a breath. The question is light, from someone who no longer believes in sacrilege.

“Absolutely not,” he says, matching her apostatic tone. “In fact,” he adds, going her one better, although he really believes this now, “I think God is going to be pretty annoyed if after bringing us together again—finally, after all these years—we don't do something about it.”

She smiles, but she withdraws. He watches as she fastens the top button of her blouse, tucks her hair up under an invisible pin.

“It's so odd that I remembered how you smell,” she says. She leans toward him, breathes his chest through his shirt, but before he can seize her, she has moved away. “I love your shirt,” she says, laughing. She sits up straight.

He cannot move.

She looks at him, but in her eyes she seems to withdraw even further. She frowns slightly.

“I think I've been frozen,” she says, looking away.

She stands up, gathers her coat around her.

He stands up with her, flustered, wanting to keep her there, to tell her that surely now she is becoming unfrozen, but he cannot find the right words, does not want to have misunderstood her. He remembers the empty bottle, the glasses.

He follows her along the path, up across the lawn, and toward the parking lot. He tosses the bottle and the glasses into a bin.

“We haven't eaten,” he says, catching up to her.

“I couldn't. Not now.”

“No.”

“In any event, I have to get home.”

He nods.

“You picked a lunch and not a dinner because you had to go home to your wife?”

He doesn't lie. “Yes,” he says. “And also I thought it would be easier for you.”

They reach her car. She stands at the door, looking in her pocketbook for the keys, a casual gesture, as if she were a client, and he, out of politeness, were walking her to her car. When what he feels is a longing and a regret so achingly deep, he wants to bend over.

When she finds her keys, she turns so that she is facing him. She opens her mouth as if to say goodbye, as if she had so quickly forgotten what they have just done down by the lake.

“I might not be able to do this,” she says.

 

 

 

 

Thursday night, 9:40
P.M.

 

Dear Siân,

I want to pick up the phone. I want my hand held. I want to call you and lie all night with the phone receiver next to me and know that we have an open connection.

I won't call.

I watched you drive out of the parking lot this afternoon, and I felt desolate.

These letters are so volatile now, I do worry about sending them to you. What happened today was not innocent. I would like to say to you that it felt innocent, but I know that's not true.

I want to make love to you and have it stop time.

If I call the literary supplement and tell them you kissed a man who drives a Cadillac, your reputation will be ruined.

 

Charles

 

Friday, 2
A.M.

 

Siân,

I have picked up the phone and put it down fifteen times. I want to call you to tell you to meet me later today back at The Ridge. I want to hand deliver this letter.

You said you might not be able to do this. I want to persuade you that there is nothing more important in life that we have to do now.

I can't sleep. I've been up reading. I dug out one of my old philosophy books and came upon a passage. It's by the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, and it's about sexuality. “Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa,” he writes, “so that it is impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual' or ‘non-sexual.' There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself.” He also says that no one is saved and no one is totally lost.

I found that last bit reassuring.

I think that I have been somewhat frozen too, but I don't fully understand why.

Your face is as familiar to me as my own.

Just think—it could have been worse: We might have met each other again at sixty-five, not forty-five.

 

Charles

 

Friday, 5
A.M.

 

Dear Siân,

I am still in my suit. I may never take this shirt off. I am going to frame my tie. I look like hell. I've been listening to “Where or When” all night. About half an hour ago, my wife came down to my study and asked me if I was sick.

You and I have lost thirty-one years. I cannot bear to lose another day.

My study is in ruins. I haven't been able to find your last book of poetry, and I've turned the place upside down looking for it. Now that I've met you—again—I want to read each of the poems—again. I want to know everything there is to know about you.

This house is fucking freezing. I pay $600 a month for heat, and I have to sit here in my overcoat.

I want to kiss your other breast.

I want to believe that this thing that we are doing would have happened—it was just a question of time. My timing in this could not have been worse, and it could not have been better. To meet the woman you were meant to be with is timing that cannot be argued with.

 

Charles

 

 

Friday, 11
A.M.

 

Dear Siân,

I still cannot sleep. I haven't eaten since Wednesday night. I've been drinking Coors Light since I got home from The Ridge, but it hasn't made a dent. I know I should try to lie down, but I have to tell you one more story before I mail these letters off.

I went to the bookstore to buy another copy of your book of poems. The first copy, I discovered earlier this morning, is on my wife's dresser. I went in to change my shirt, and it was sitting there like a radioactive isotope. Why she should have chosen that book out of all the books in my study to read I have no idea, but I certainly can't touch it or ask her for it back.

I went to the front desk at the bookstore, and a man and a woman were behind it. I asked the man to find the book for me. The man started to enter the name into the computer, and I said, “I know you have it, or had it, because I bought a copy here several months ago.” Then the woman said, “Yeah, it's got a picture of some blond all over the back cover.” I said, “Yes, I guess that's the way they market books these days.” Then she said back to me, “Yeah, even the academic stuff, they make the women take their blouses off.”

I said to her, “She's pretty embarrassed about it herself.”

“You know her?” the woman asked.

“She was my girlfriend when I was fourteen,” I said.

 

Charles

 

 

 

 

H
E HAS ALWAYS LIKED
watching volleyball: the movements of the players, the high leaps to block shots, a dozen arms in the air at once, the smash at the net. They are late, Hadley is already on the court, and the gym is half filled with parents and siblings who have rushed an early dinner. He spots Hadley at once in her blue T-shirt and white shorts, her ponytail whipping behind her as she rises straight off the ground. Charles follows his wife and two other children to the side of the gym where there are bleachers. He has not wanted, for Hadley's sake, to miss this game, but as he quickly scans the crowd he wishes he could disappear. Whalen is there, and Costa. Charles has twenty-seven messages on his machine just from this day alone that he hasn't returned—though he knows already whom they are from. Whalen from the bank, who will probably nab him tonight. GMAC pressing him for a payment on the Cadillac. The telephone company. Optima. His Citibank Visa. MasterCard. He is fairly certain that Harriet doesn't know yet just how bad their (his) financial situation is, an intuition that is borne out when his wife waves at Eddie and Barbara Whalen, sitting downcourt. Charles lifts Anna onto his lap and in doing so catches Muriel Carney's eye. Tom is in the hospital. Has been there since Thanksgiving.

The gym is large, part of a building that was once the town's high school and has now passed on to the middle school. The girls at the center of the blond wooden floor look small and innocent, children still, though they mimic, as Jack does when he plays baseball, the movements of the older athletes they have seen on television or at high school games. Odd, Charles thinks, how many of his peers have girls Hadley's age. Whalen, Costa, Carney. Lidell's Sarah is there too. He cannot make out who is winning, asks the woman beside him for the score. Hadley's team is down two. He can see that his daughter, at the net, is sweating slightly. She is among the tallest of the players on her team, though, he knows, she doesn't have all her growth yet; he guesses she will be close to five ten before she is seventeen.