by Anita Shreve
He found her mouth, the whole of it, and drew her in to him with his hands at the back of her waist, so that she lost her balance, was leaning against him for support. He swayed with her weight, then together they knelt. He lost his own balance then and carried her onto the soft mulch of the forest floor. Lying that way, as if on a bed, they became aware simultaneously of what it was they were doing. He pulled his face away to look at her in the dim light, to see if there was alarm there, if he had transgressed. She returned his gaze, but she could not speak. He kissed her once more not so tentatively this time, and she felt something of his urgency, her own awkwardness. He kissed her for a long time, and there was again the fluttering in her abdomen. His hand moved along her rib cage. She thought that possibly she should move his hand away; it was what she had been taught. He touched her breast, enclosed it with his palm. The touch caught her breath; the fluttering sensation spread out from her abdomen and along her thighs like the spill of a warm liquid. He looked down at her breast, to where her nipple was hard against the cotton of her blouse. She could hear his breathing, faster now, like her own, a rhythm against her face and in her ear. He kissed the side of her face. She unfastened the top button of her blouse, then the next. He pushed aside the cotton fabric, exposing her breast to the night. He touched the skin with his fingers, delicately and gently, as if caressing something fine and fragile—a spun-glass ornament, or the face of a newborn. He kissed her again on her mouth. She could feel him shift his body, move a leg over hers. He raised his face up, looked again at her eyes. He looked at her breast, lowered his mouth, touched the skin of her breast with his lips. She felt him press against her. Her leg was between his; his between hers. The fluttering deep inside her became a pressure, an exquisite urgency. He put his mouth on her nipple, opened his mouth, and sucked her. She moaned faintly with this pleasure, whispered his name. She felt the urgency burst inside her, spread through her and along her legs. She felt the boy shudder against her, a tight helpless shuddering, her nipple still caught in his mouth. He said her name sharply, pressed his forehead hard against her breastbone.
In her fist, she still held the bracelet.
They lay on the dirt and mulch without moving for a long time, long enough for the moon to shift slightly overhead and shine down upon them through a gap in the leaves. The white fabric of her blouse was blue in the moonlight, and she could see clearly now the length of the boy, from the top of his head, where it rested on her chest, to his feet. As they lay there they could hear the voices of the others, moving up the path to the house, young silvery voices laughing in the darkness not fifty feet from them. She thought then that they ought to try to make their way back, so that they would have the voices to guide them, but she did not want to disturb the boy. When after a time he looked up at her, she saw that his eyes were wet, that he had been crying.
“It’s all right, Cal,” she said.
He covered her breast with her blouse, buttoned it for her. He lifted himself up, knelt beside her in the piney mulch. He saw her clenched fist. He opened her fingers, took the bracelet, fastened it on her wrist. She sat up, slid the bracelet along her arm.
“What we did . . .,” he said.
She touched the bracelet. “I’m all right, Cal,” she said. “It’s all right.”
“I’ve never . . .”
“I know.”
“Do you understand . . . ?”
She looked down at the bracelet, dangling from her thin wrist. “I’m not sure, but I think so,” she said.
“I’m not sorry,” he said.
“No. I know,” she said. “How could we be?”
He helped her to her feet. Together they brushed bits of bark and leaves from her back, her shorts. They would be in trouble when they returned, required to say where they had been, but that seemed unimportant, meaningless.
“We’ll just say we went for a walk, lost track of the time,” he said. “They won’t like it, but we’d probably both better have the same story.”
She nodded. He walked in front of her, held branches for her till he had found the way back to the path. They held hands as they climbed the hill, their footsteps reluctant and slow. At the main door of the house, the door that would admit them to the bright light of the hall, to the stern queries of their counselors, to their separate wings and separate beds, they paused. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, lest anyone was watching them.
“I won’t be able to say goodbye to you,” she said.
THE RAIN has stopped. The night is still. A hush envelops the house, both inside and out, and except for the occasional whine of the refrigerator or the rumble and whomp of the furnace, all is quiet. He holds in his hand a glass of warm champagne, which he poured from the dregs of a bottle on the kitchen counter. Harriet and his children are in bed. He has no clear idea what time it is; he took his watch off to scour the pots, cannot remember where he put it. He thinks it must be after two o’clock. His parents returned from midnight mass nearly an hour ago with Hadley, asleep on her feet as she stumbled to her room. Harriet has already filled the stockings, cleaned up the bits of crumpled wrapping from the adults’ presents, set out the children’s gifts under the tree. For Christmas Charles gave his wife an astonishingly tiny video camera that the salesman promised would not only be easy to use but also take brilliant movies of his children, an enterprise that now fills Charles with sadness and remorse. Harriet gave Charles two season tickets to the Red Sox, games he already knows he will never attend. In another life (what other life? he asks himself—this is his life) he’d have loved the tickets, would have taken Hadley and Jack; the tickets would have framed his summer, would have given him something to look forward to, a way to punctuate the long, hot weeks. But now he feels only a vague sense of loss, as of having misplaced one’s childhood.
(He thinks, oddly, of the O. Henry story about the couple who buy each other presents they can no longer use, because of what they’ve sacrificed to afford the gifts. Might he have used the camera to take movies of the kids at the Red Sox games? Without the games, or any similar outings, will Harriet want to take movies at all?)
He finishes the warm champagne, sets the glass on the counter. He has had an extraordinary amount of alcohol to drink today, and yet he has not felt high or drunk or even buzzed. He has been drinking to anesthetize himself, he knows, an exhausting and futile effort. He walks through the living room, observes the classic picture: the stockings at the mantel, the presents arranged artfully under the tree. Only Anna this year believes in the miracle of a white-bearded man who visits every house in the universe with presents on this one particular night. He realizes with a pang that he doesn’t even know what is in the brightly wrapped packages. He has not bought a single gift for any of his children, a ritual that in the past used to give him pleasure. In a few hours, his kids will be awake and demanding that he and Harriet join them downstairs to see what Santa has brought. If he doesn’t go up to bed now, he’ll get no sleep at all.
The room in which he and his wife share a bed is at the front of the house. White gauze curtains cover the windows, letting in only a pale glaze of light from a streetlamp across the road. The dark shape in the bed is unmoving; he is certain she must be asleep. At dinner, Harriet was cordial but not animated. He thought she seemed preoccupied, distracted, possibly annoyed by the dinner, which, in the end, did not really work as a whole. The children barely ate anything apart from the duck. The others seemed confused by the menu, as though presented with a puzzle in which certain key pieces were missing. The crème brûlée was a hit, however, and he felt inordinately pleased with this finale—the delicate sugar crust flambéed to translucent perfection.
He removes his sweater, a clean shirt he changed into before the relatives came, his shoes and socks and slacks. In his underpants, he slips under the heavy quilt, a practiced and delicate movement that disturbs the covers as little as possible, the movements of a thief stealing into a house undetected, the movements of a man who does not w
ant to engage his wife. He knows instantly, however, that he has been heard. When he holds his breath and listens intently, he cannot hear his wife breathing, as he ought to. He turns slowly so that his back is to her, so that he might, with luck, fall asleep at once, but as he does, he feels the covers tug and pull, hears her turn in his direction. A hand is at his back, moving up to his shoulder. He turns his head, but not yet his body.
“Harriet?”
She pulls gently at his shoulder, asking him to face her, a request he cannot deny. He rolls over, his head on the pillow, and looks at her. Her face is grave, as he knows his must be to her. They examine each other in this way for what seems like minutes. She does not speak, but he knows that she will.
“Harriet, what is it?”
She says quietly in the thin artificial light, a light in which he can barely make out the expression in her eyes, “I want you to make love to me.”
He opens his mouth to protest, to say, reasonably, that it’s after two in the morning and they will have to be up at dawn, to say that he’s exhausted after all that cooking. To say that he’ll make her come, or rub her back. But he knows he cannot say any of those things, that his voice alone will give him away, will announce that he has betrayed her. Instead he draws her to him, embraces her tightly.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she says, the words muffled into his chest, and he understands instantly that she means more than just this night.
“Oh, Harriet,” he says.
And there is no help for him now. He begins to cry. He holds himself still, not breathing, so that she won’t detect his tears, holding the ache deep in his chest and in his throat, but she has known him too long, knows the context of every sigh, of this stiffening of his body. She pushes herself away, studies him. She seems alarmed now, even more alarmed than she appeared to be in the kitchen earlier.
“Charles, for God’s sake, what is it?”
He rolls onto his back, his arms out, looks up at the ceiling. The tears leak out of the corners of his eyes, trail down his checks. He knows by the tone in her voice that she will not let this go. He knows, too, that he cannot lie to her, not now.
“I have something to tell you that’s going to make you sick,” he says.
She sits up abruptly, kneels on the bed facing him. Her bare arms are white in the dim light. He winces as he sees for the first time that she has worn her black silk nightgown, a revealing nightgown with lace at the breasts, which she wears when she wants him to make love to her.
He cannot say what he has to say from a supine position. He sits up, puts on his shirt.
“Where are you going?” his wife asks quickly.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m just putting on my shirt. I’m cold.”
“What is it? What is this thing you have to tell me?”
He buttons his shirt, sits on the edge of the bed, half facing her, half turned away.
“I’m in love with another woman,” he says.
He waits for the ceiling to fall, for a tree to smash against the windowpanes. He has been imagining these words, cannot hear even his voice saying them without also hearing a crash of cymbals, the pounding of timpani. The silence then, the absolute silence of the bedroom, astounds him. He is afraid for a moment that he did not actually say the words, that he will have to repeat them, louder this time.
But he hears a sharp intake of breath, sees Harriet’s hand rise to her mouth.
“Oh my God,” she says.
“Harriet, I’m so sorry. I never meant for this to happen.” He shuts his eyes, appalled at the sound of his own voice. The words are offensively trite, each syllable a lie. Of course he meant for this to happen. He made it happen.
“I’m going to leave you,” he says, more honestly. “I’m in love, and I’m going to leave you.”
He dares to look at her now, at the shock on her face. He, too, is stunned by his words, by the baldness of them, by their incontrovertibility. He cannot take them back, should not take them back. He does not want to hurt his wife, but he has to make her understand that this is not casual.
“What are you saying? Who is she?”
“She isn’t anyone you know. She lives very far from here.”
“Then how do you know her?”
“I met her thirty-one years ago. We spent a week together at camp when we were fourteen, thirty-one years ago.”
“You spent one week together thirty-one years ago and you love her?” she asks incredulously. “Or have you known her all along?”
“No. No. No. I just remet her a few weeks ago.”
“A few weeks ago?” He hears the bewilderment in his wife’s voice, knows how truly mad this must sound.
“Have you slept with her?”
It is, of course, the question, the one he has anticipated, dreaded. He hesitates. He will not lie. “Yes,” he says.
He hears the moan, the single note of pure pain in his wife’s voice.
“How many times?” she asks bravely.
“Not many,” he says. “Four times.”
“Four times?” she asks incredulously. “You’ve been with her four times? When? When were you with her?”
“Harriet, does it matter when?”
“I trusted you,” she says, loudly now. He cannot ask her not to shout, not to wake up the children. It is her right. He realizes with horror that of course he should not have done this now, not on Christmas Eve, not when the children are in the house, not when they will wake up soon, anticipating the stockings and the presents, and will find what instead—a mother devastated? Harriet slips off the bed, stands up. She shivers in her nightgown. He, too, stands up, reaches for her bathrobe on a hook at the back of the door, hands it to her. She bats it away to the floor.
“I love her,” he says, as if to explain. “I always have loved her. We were lovers, even as children, all those years ago.”
“And what about me? I thought you loved me.”
“I do,” he says, “but it’s different.”
“What’s different?”
“It’s just different.” He hears the evasiveness in his own voice, but he knows he will never tell his wife that it’s different because he never really loved her, because he believes that he and Siân were meant to be mates. This is the worst heresy, not something that Harriet ever needs to know.
“Is she married?”
“Yes.”
“And does she have children?”
“Yes. She has one, a girl. She had a boy, but he died when he was nine.”
“And you’re going to be a father to someone else’s child?” This last is said in a high-pitched wail, as though this, more than any other betrayal, hurts most. She flails out at him with her fists held together, like a tennis player grasping a racket for a tough backhand shot. She hits him in the rib cage. He holds his arms aloft, does not stop her. She hits him again, and then again. She whacks him a fourth time, then whirls around, sobbing.
“How could you?” she cries.
He cannot tell her why. The why is clear and not clear, as simple as animals mating, or as complicated as a physics problem—a labyrinthine equation of time and distance.
She falls back onto the bed, puts her hands over her face. He cannot tell whether or not she is crying; he thinks she may still be too stunned for tears. He reaches down on the floor for his pants, puts them on, buckles the belt. Hearing the clink of metal on metal, Harriet takes her hands away from her face, watches him dress himself.
“Where are you going?” she asks quietly from the bed.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I can’t stay here now. Not tonight.”
“But the children. It’s Christmas tomorrow.”
The realization seems to strike her even as she announces the import of the morning to her husband. She twists her head and moans again, a terrible, plaintive sound that he has never heard before from his wife, not even when she was in labor with Hadley, the worst of them. Harriet throws an arm across her face, covering her
eyes.
Charles looks at his wife on the bed, at the black silk nightgown on the white sheet, at his wife’s breasts, small and flat under the open lace. It is conceivably the last time he will ever see his wife’s body. No, he thinks again: It is positively the last time he will ever see her body. A body that he has made love to thousands of times. A body that carried and bore and nursed his three children.
“I’ll come back,” he says. “Before the kids are up. I’ll spend the night, or what’s left of it, someplace, maybe a motel, and then I’ll come back to be with them when they open their presents. We’ll tell them together, tomorrow night or the next day.”
She lies still on the bed, her face shielded. He thinks she will not speak, that she acquiesces with her silence, as bewildered on this foreign territory as he is. But then she sits up sharply, facing him. Her mouth is tight, a thin line of anger. There are vertical lines above her upper lip that he has never seen before.
“Don’t you dare to come back here,” she says evenly. “Don’t you come back here ever. You want your things, you can send someone else for them. Or I’ll put them out on the street. This is my house now, and you are not to come here again.” She turns her head away, puts a hand protectively across her stomach—an unconscious gesture she used to make when she was pregnant.
“But, Harriet, the house . . .”
As soon as he has said the words, he knows he has made an unforgivable mistake. She twists quickly around, poised for more pain. He can see it on her face, in the fear in her eyes. It was her mentioning the house that caused him foolishly to blurt out the one thing he has not intended to tell her yet, certainly not on this night. His mind leaps, somersaults. He tries desperately to think of how to extricate himself.
“What?” she says anxiously. “What?”
“Harriet . . .”
“What?” she cries. She turns, springs off the bed. She faces him, her arms locked across her chest. “What?” she cries again, defiantly.
