by Karen Brown
Inside the house, brushing past our mother’s perfume, past her lipsticked mouth, I went upstairs to my room to discover Del’s clothes packed in a suitcase. Leanne and Sarah were away at school. They would find out later that Del was gone, and to them it wouldn’t really matter. It would be a relief to know they wouldn’t see her walking past the park where they hung out with their friends on their school breaks, wouldn’t have to hear our mother try each evening to urge Del out of her dirty clothes, to wash her face and hands. They wouldn’t wake in the night and find her sitting in their rooms, or wandering up and down the stairs. We had gotten used to these things, but it would be just as easy to become used to something else.
Our mother called me downstairs. I stood in the upstairs landing, and she begged me to come down. “You’ll have to convince her to go to the hospital,” she said.
I thought of her walking the neighborhood streets like one of the dead. I thought of David Pinney. I told Del I would ride with her to the Institute. That she wouldn’t stay long, and that when she came home we’d go to the beach, and take the gold bedspread to lie on in the sand. We’d spread on Bain de Soleil, and our lives would continue on much as they’d always been. I couldn’t know that too much time would pass for this to ever happen. I opened my father’s car door and she got in. Only the neighbors watching through their bay windows with their evening cocktails would have seen this—a father and two daughters going out late one afternoon to the drugstore, or for ice cream. In the doorway to the house my mother had turned away.
When I got home that night my mother was in the living room in the dark, with my grandmother across from her on the brocade couch. The regulator clock’s pendulum echoed. My mother still had on her lipstick, and her coat, tightly cinched. When I came in, she pushed herself from the chair and took off the coat. She went into the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher and put the dishes away. She climbed the back kitchen stairs, slowly, and shut the door of her bedroom. She’d remove her makeup with a special lotion and rub cream into her hands. She wouldn’t cry until she crawled into the big bed and covered her head with the woolen blanket. I had hated my mother then for loving Del more and for expecting me to be the stronger one.
Now, I watched Del pick the chocolate off her éclair with her fingers and eat each small piece, and thought of my mother, who’d called yesterday and left a long message imploring me yet again to talk Del into returning to Ashley Manor. “Maybe she seems to be doing well,” my mother said. “But just remember what used to go on. Do you want that responsibility?”
It wouldn’t be too difficult to convince our parents that supporting Del here was a better alternative to the manor. Del’s adventure the night of the party at Anne’s gave me a small twinge of apprehension. But Del was taking me up on my promise that day in the car, and she knew I wouldn’t refuse her.
“Maybe you can sign up for classes in January,” I said.
Hopeful and happy, Del bit into her éclair and licked her fingers.
11
William Bell came to my apartment on a Friday night in mid-November. I watched for him from my window, through the branches of the elm. Del had moved into the professor’s apartment, and the light from her window downstairs shone out onto the snow. Though I’d spoken to Geoff about the heat, the house remained cold. I had a fireplace in my apartment, and Del had one in hers, but Geoff had stated emphatically that we were not allowed to use them. I pictured hibernating bats with singed wings filling the winter sky above the house. We put large, lighted, pillard candles in the grates, and these gave, at least, an illusion of warmth.
The cold was bitter, different from New England’s. Outside the city the wind spilled across the sweeping, open land dotted with abandoned farm machinery and old houses buckling in on themselves. You wouldn’t think such houses were habitable, but once in a while there would be a tacked-up sheet in the doorway, or plastic nailed over the windows, and the trace of smoke from a chimney. William wasn’t from anywhere else. He was born in Tompkins County, and except for the time he spent in Buffalo, acquiring his degree, he’d lived here all his life—most recently in the house on Cascadilla Street, where he’d rented an apartment and had held the gathering the night I met him. His father, who’d died two years before, had sold and repaired lawn mowers in a shop behind their rented house in Milton, and before that he was a famed attorney with a drinking problem. They had an enclosed front porch with an air hockey game, and gnome statuary on the front lawn that William, an only child, believed came alive at night. His mother had been gone since he was four years old, but before she died she grew apples and sold them from a small roadside stand, Macoun and Winesap and Cortland, and William had made change from a small metal tin. I supposed, from these aspects of his life told to me over the telephone at night, I knew everything about him. “Mon pauvre orphelin,” I said to Del.
Del flopped down onto my couch, folded up for William’s visit. “Poor orphan? And what are you? His new mother figure?”
“We’re friends.” I rummaged through my bureau drawers for an outfit, holding one sweater, then another up to myself in the mirror. “I like him.”
“What do you like?” Del said.
I knew his interest in me was what made him special, and it embarrassed me to be so needy. I spread a red lamb’s-wool sweater on the couch.
“It’s not Christmas,” Del said, and I balled the sweater and stuffed it back in the drawer.
“Don’t be the one who loves more,” she said, softly. “Remember Mr. Parmenter.”
“I don’t think that’s a good comparison,” I said.
Since Mary Rae, nothing out of the ordinary had appeared in gloomy Ithaca.
The town’s dark pall, its strange, shifting cloud patterns, and the fluttery lake-effect snow that went on for days seemed to create a no-astral season. Nothing could materialize in such weather.
I told Del not to worry about me.
“Such an innocent, Martha Mary.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
So far, we hadn’t discussed David Pinney, or that summer, and I wondered if, like Gene Tierney, she’d received too many shock treatments. Had that summer been entirely erased? Had her act for Detective Thomson not been an act at all? This would be the best scenario, and I decided not to press her for whatever slip of memory remained.
The night William came over, Mary Rae was absent from her spot beneath the elm, and I was grateful. He walked down the sidewalk and stepped onto the porch, and I found myself rushing down the stairwell to meet him at the door, tugging him by the arm in from the cold.
“Come here, you,” I said.
His cheeks held the flush I’d noted at Anne’s, and he wore the wide-brimmed beaver-skin hat. We stood on the old, worn Persian rug in what had once been the vestibule, the walls papered in brown, with tiny pink roses. The woodwork was brown, too, mahogany glowing in the weak yellow overhead light. There was a coatrack and an umbrella stand and a small, rickety antique table. The whole downstairs smelled of Del’s incense, and I knew my urgency was prompted by a fear of her emerging from her apartment and saying something that would put a damper on all my plans.
William looked around, somewhat sheepishly, and removed his hat with one hand, grabbing it at the crown and revealing a mass of coppery curls. “Nice place,” he said.
“Your hat is different.” I should have said something else.
He looked at it in his hand. “Well,” he said. “I guess it is different. It was my father’s hat.”
Del called him “Indiana Jones.”
He hung his hat on the coatrack, and I worried that he knew Del had made fun of him. He was someone alone in the world, without family or ties. I didn’t wait to kiss him. It felt natural to ease the sadness about his mouth with mine. His lips clung and trembled, kissing me back. His hands were cautious, suspended midair alongside my hips. I took his hand.
“Up here,” I said. I pulled him up the stairs. His face was bright, his chest heavi
ng under his coat.
Upstairs in my apartment, by the wavering fireplace candlelight, we kissed some more, and I undressed for him, a somewhat awkward striptease that I performed without any prompting. I’d assumed this was what he wanted from me—we’d talked around sex every night on the phone, and I’d decided to give up my hold on my virginity.
“You’ll have to tell me how it is,” Del had said before she left that afternoon. She’d smiled at me, though I sensed something hollow and distracted in her teasing.
I suppose my behavior was spurred in part by what I’d seen in movies, and what I’d imagined Del had done in the Firebird guy’s car, or in the woods with Rory, her back against dead leaves and fern, or with the myriad other men she’d had sex with, mostly in cars, she’d said, which were preferable to the woods, though she loved the woods. I understood that the cars in the ravine had been the best of both things. I’d expected that the offering of my body, stripped of its clothes, would be enticement enough. Yet William stood by, his face marked with surprise. I took his hands and placed them on my waist. He slid his palms up and down my body and felt the raised bumps on my skin.
“I can’t warm you up,” he said.
So I pulled off the cushions and unfolded the bed, and we climbed in under the blanket and the crocheted afghan. William kept his clothing on until I asked him whether he was going to take things off, and he reluctantly, it seemed, removed his shirt and his pants and tossed them aside. His belt buckle clanked to the floor. He told me he’d brought me a poem, and he reached down to retrieve it from his pants pocket. He had copied it out from an old college anthology onto a sheet of paper, he said. The paper rustled, and my heart contracted from the sweetness of his motives. When he read his voice was the same soft hum I had grown used to over the phone. What I caught of the poem were a few images—a nest fallen into the mud, a rabbit’s bones, an empty house—and I suspected he thought the poem would resonate with my artist’s sensibilities, though I couldn’t explain it was less the abandoned landscape than the presence of the dead that inspired me. After he finished, he carefully folded the paper. The words hovered, ghostly and solemn in the dim room. He asked me did I like it, and then why I thought it was good, and other things, until I found myself watching his mouth, craving it, even.
“Am I talking too much?” He shifted to his side and placed his head in his hand.
“Maybe,” I said.
I had thought he wanted me. But when I touched him he took my hands away, like a correcting parent. I was resigned to kissing him, and even that he interrupted with a story about his motorcycle, a Triumph he was eager to ride again in the spring.
“This is different,” he said.
I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me.
“Than what?” I felt awkward then for having taken off my clothes. He must have seen this on my face.
“Than I expected,” he said. “Not that it isn’t wonderful.”
Under the blankets his hands moved, barely skimming the surface of me. He talked about the two spaniels his neighbor had at his house, and the way they came when you were sitting in a chair and settled their heads under your hands. His father had had a brown retriever that would lie in the dust of the garage floor while he worked on the mowers. Some people, William said, are happier working with their hands. Gradually, his eyes closed and he fell asleep, and I was left wondering about his discussion of dogs and their flanks.
My bed was lumpy with springs, and I had a certain angle in which I slept. But with William taking up the space, and my body burning from his fingertips, I could not sleep. Was this how Sister had sometimes felt? She’d entered the abbey at twenty-six, maybe worried she’d be an old maid—that she’d never find anyone but God to love her. I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself alone in a chaste bed, consumed with desire for something ineffable and bodiless, but lying beside William I knew you could not separate the two—body and desire. The elm cast shadows on my white plaster wall, and its branches, sheathed in ice, clicked together like bones. Beyond this sound was the silence of the snow. Was poor Mary Rae still waiting out there in the cold?
That first night with William, I envied Geoff. I tried to breathe in and out, regularly, to feign sleep. I considered slipping out of the apartment, down the stairs to Del’s. But she would press me for details, and I didn’t want to confess that nothing had happened. After a while, I slid from the bed and went across the room to peer out the window. Mary Rae’s frozen hair framed her face, her eyes luminous. “What do you want from me?” I wanted to ask.
William and I were each similarly connected to our art, and though William was more taciturn about his work, I felt some tie to his approach that I couldn’t explain. He’d said that, like me, he still shot film. He liked the way film captured light. He liked the old lenses. We’d talked for a long time on the phone about our cameras and our preferences. I enjoyed making prints—I didn’t tell him why—and I thrilled to see the figure I’d photographed appear, though others saw only the light and some sort of golden glow that seemed to tremble in the location of my subject.
I sat by the window and pressed my face against the glass. After all of our talking on the phone, I didn’t know this man in my bed at all. Perhaps he didn’t want me pliable, eager to have him. Maybe he wanted me to play hard to get, to dole out pieces of myself—a mouth, a breast, a hip. Maybe he wanted me to object, to refuse him so he could force me. His sleeping, slack expression revealed nothing, and I felt a small, pitiable stone of fear. What was his interest in me? I wanted to wake him and demand an answer. But I carefully slipped back beneath the blankets. When I finally slept it was near morning, and I awoke to find him watching me in the gray light. We were like sentries who had traded places.
“Here we are,” I said, a little too cheery.
His cheeks flushed. His breath came out in a white cloud. The candles in the fireplace had burned down to flat saucers of wax. He sat upright, his bare chest exposed, and my grandmother’s crocheted afghan swaddling his waist, multicolored and gaudy.
“What time do you think it is?” he said.
“Do you need to leave?” I asked.
He ran his hands through his hair. “Do you think,” he said, “I might be someone you could actually have feelings for?”
“Well.” I sensed his staying or leaving was dependent on my answer, but I didn’t know what to say. Del had cautioned me against revealing any true feelings, of having any feelings at all. I knew experience had taught her this—but I also knew Del didn’t want a man’s love and wouldn’t have known how to return it if any had offered it. A boy had flowers delivered to our house once—a dozen roses. My heart had sunk when I answered the door, when Del pulled out the card with the boy’s sloppy handwriting. Later, when I’d asked her what she did with them, she said she’d taken them to the cemetery and put them on David Pinney’s grave. Back then, before the Institute, these were the kinds of things she said to me. “I like to get your goat, Martha,” she’d said.
I had thought William and I wanted the same thing—that neither of us needed any real declarations of feelings, that what we felt could remain unspoken. I considered pulling him down under the blankets and warming him up, but even that seemed like coveting his body.
“You look cold.”
His chest rose, pale against the afghan. “That’s your answer?” he said. I felt like one of his students, bullied to provide a better response. But he didn’t make a move to get up and leave. I felt sorry for him then. He was a nice man who thought we might have a normal relationship, and I’d tarnished it by not having the courage to voice my feelings. There was nothing I could do, honestly, that would change the situation. I didn’t dare attempt to touch him, for fear he would recoil from me.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said. I rolled away from him, to the metal edge of the bed. Geoff would be waking with his Saturday morning routine—toast, black coffee in a china cup, listening through the wall with buttery crumbs on hi
s fingers. I thought of Del, her ear pressed to the other side of my door. William heaved himself out of bed. He was tall, and his body unfolded, a sound of cracking joints and rustling sheets. He found his clothes, and the fabric slipped over his arms and legs. Finally, he put on his shoes, big boots that clomped on the wood floor. I rolled over and he was standing by the bed.
“Ask me not to go,” he said.
“Tell me you want to stay,” I told him.
“Tell me to kiss you,” he said.
“Do you want to kiss me?” I was confused.
“I want to kiss you more than anyone I have ever met,” he said, but he made no move toward the bed.
He went out the door and thumped down the stairs. I didn’t get up and lock the door behind him. I lay there for a long time before sleep overtook me, wondering whether or not to believe him.
12
When I awoke it was early afternoon. Weak sunlight marked the end of the bed. And William was there, sitting in the duck-carved armchair. He was watching television without the sound, and the station wasn’t tuned in well. He ate from a carton I recognized from the Korean place in Collegetown. Beside him on the floor was a camera—an old Leica, his favorite, I would learn. I was suddenly afraid of him, coming into my apartment without asking, and I feigned sleep, my heart thudding beneath the blankets. In my Romantic Poetry class we’d read Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Madeline awakening in the poem to Porphyro’s lute. Then I remembered William’s work—the sleep studies—and I wondered, crazily, if he’d photographed me and captured my astral body rising up to mingle with those on the astral plane.
As if he could sense that I was awake, he smiled at me, wide and happy, and that quickly his presence seemed perfectly normal. I hadn’t seen him smile like that before, and I thought we were embarking on this adventure in which each day would be marked by the new things we learned about each other.
