Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  He did slowly and with some embarrassment as she sat watching him, for his excitement was visible. ‘Don’t be shy,’ she said, and he lay back with his hands folded under his head as she leant forward and slowly worked his shorts off, leaving him exposed in full, erect glory.

  She reached and held him there with one hand, then looked at him with a sly, lascivious smile, and he smiled weakly back. Then she swung her calf, curved and richly tanned, over him and sat on top, still holding him with one hand. She arched her back and he looked at her breasts, which were round and full but somehow unusual, and then he realized they were as tanned as the rest of her. He watched as she lowered herself carefully, her lips set with determination, and suddenly he was inside her. She said oh oh in a small voice that seemed to come involuntarily from somewhere deep inside, and he felt her warm and wet and clenching as she contracted her muscles around him.

  He climaxed almost at once and shuddered as she continued to move up and down, milking him. ‘Sorry,’ he said, finding it hard to look at her.

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ she said, lifting a forefinger like a teacher. ‘That’s just the beginning.’

  What have I done? he asked himself, then looking up was struck by how pretty she was, the face of someone in the movies almost, easily the prettiest girl in her high school class.

  To his surprise she stayed the night. Each time after they made love, he expected her to get up, put on her thin dress and head for the door, but there was never any indication she was planning to leave. Once he even asked, ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘Go?’ She looked taken aback. ‘Why?’ she asked, laughing. ‘Are you expecting another masseuse in the morning?’

  At some point his housemates came back, making a beer-soaked racket of their own, but Sophie had closed his door by then, and they were left undisturbed. They dozed intermittently until finally in the very small hours they both fell soundly asleep, and he woke up to find it snowing outside and Sophie Jansen draped all over him.

  And though it was morning she still didn’t go. With Cassie, making love had always been in the strict, carnal sense so simple; whenever he had tentatively suggested even the slightest experimentation, she would say, ‘Okay. I guess.’ Then from Michael: ‘We don’t have to. I was just wondering.’ And Cassie would smile: ‘It’s just I like so much what we do already I can’t see it being better any other way.’

  But this woman seemed so focused on the physical pleasure of it all: as she did this, or then did that (and some of it was utterly, astonishingly new to Michael), she would sometimes pause and ask him how it felt, or was it better this way, or nicer that. But it had nothing to do with emotions. How could it, with a woman he’d met the night before?

  ‘Breakfast,’ she announced late in the morning, and made him share a shower, then took him out to the International House of Pancakes in her zippy Saab convertible.

  ‘You like to eat,’ she declared as she watched him down waffles, bacon, sausage, and two eggs over easy. He blushed slightly. ‘I like that,’ she said, lighting a cigarette as he finished his orange juice. He had eaten non-stop, with the adolescent greed of his younger brother, but it wasn’t hunger that drove him so much as not knowing what to say to this woman.

  For he felt guilt like flu. He hadn’t called Cassie yet and dreaded doing so. How could he let her down like this? Why had he succumbed so easily? He looked across at Sophie, tough and confident, and felt to his great dismay the same hunger stirring that she had tapped all night. How can you? He asked himself.

  She drove him back to his house and asked him to come see her in her apartment that evening. When he stuttered something about the homework he had, she took a piece of paper and a pen from the glove compartment. Scribbling furiously, she handed the paper to him. ‘That’s my address,’ she said. ‘It’s an easy walk. If you change your mind I’ll be there tonight. I’m not going anywhere.’

  Entering the house, he found his standing with his housemates had changed, literally overnight. Someone must have seen him leave with Sophie that morning, for now there was an air of excitement among them, one of them suppressing a giggle, Sam the poli-sci major looking at him wide-eyed. He had a feeling they would be paying him more attention in future.

  He called Cassie just before supper, feeling nervous about how he would sound on the phone. He had prepared himself for questions about what he’d been doing and why he hadn’t called. But she didn’t ask them, and sounded preoccupied, almost flat and uninterested in what he had to tell her. Her father was worse, she said, and now had an oxygen cylinder in his room.

  When he hung up he felt as irritated as he did guilty. He had an engineering quiz the following day, and he went through his notes for two hours until he realized he was fully prepared – nothing was difficult when you wanted to understand it. It was only ten o’clock and he decided to take a walk. As he went round the block he thought about Cassie, the grey quality to her voice on the phone, and he thought about how they made love – decorously almost, gently and lovingly, and with the adroitness of the young they would usually climax simultaneously, then collapse in a drowsy contentment – and as he thought of this he was also beset by images of Sophie from the night before, the sheer voluptuousness of her, her sassy badinage, the complete immersion in the sensuous. And he walked right past his house as he finished his circuit and found himself ten minutes later in the studio apartment where Sophie lived, an enormous room with a kitchen in one corner and a new television in the other. Five minutes after this he was in her oversized brass bed with his clothes off while she gave him a full body massage followed by what, years later, the cards posted in the newsagent’s windows in the poorer end of Ealing described as ‘personal services’.

  He knew it was wrong, and what bothered him from the start was not so much the act of infidelity but the dishonesty. He told himself that if he and Cassie had been sleeping together more regularly, Sophie would never have happened. He couldn’t tell Cassie about Sophie because it would hurt her, which was partly true, but he also knew he didn’t want to risk losing Cassie, for he saw his future with her, missed her, wanted her with him. Yet he wanted – as a grown man occasionally, inexplicably succumbs when passing a Dairy Queen – the ice-cream too: the smooth vanilla and light mocha concoction called Sophie.

  And with Sophie, he didn’t have to lie. The third time he went to her apartment, late on a weeknight when he came back from the library, she got up after they had made love and put on a blue kimono, then poured them tall glasses of lemonade, and came and sat down on the end of the bed. ‘So,’ she said, as he sipped his drink, ‘what’s your girlfriend’s name?’

  She was smiling as she spoke but there was no banter to her tone. He thought of lying but said simply, ‘Cassie Gilbert.’

  ‘Cassie?’ she said. ‘That’s a pretty name. Tell me about her.’

  So he did, not elaborating very much, but giving the bare facts – her inability (or unwillingness) to leave Stillriver, her pious prick of a father.

  ‘Is she pretty?’ He nodded and she added, ‘Beautiful?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘I think so. In a kind of graceful way.’

  ‘Instead of in a sexy way, you mean,’ she said, theatrically cupping her breasts in her hands. He laughed, and she said, ‘You do sleep together, don’t you?’

  Not much these days, he wanted to say, but it sounded too corny. He nodded.

  ‘Do you love her?’

  He didn’t wait to answer. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked at him questioningly, and he said, ‘I was invited.’

  This made her laugh. She stood up and took off her kimono, and he looked at her golden-coloured skin and found himself becoming aroused. ‘Interrogation’s over,’ she said. ‘I’m coming to bed.’

  If it had remained only about sex he might have managed to stop seeing her, and for the first week sex and sex alone was what she seemed to want from
him. He felt guilty after each time they made love: ‘Post-coital tristesse,’ Sophie said lightly once, when she saw his hangdog look as he lay spent beside her on the big brass bed. But it was ephemeral regret, for the simple reasons that he liked Sophie from the start, and because physically he couldn’t seem to get enough of her. He found the smallest things incredibly exciting: the way she put her hair up in a ponytail twist right before she came to bed, the transformation she underwent each morning as she lovingly applied eyeliner, and the way in which her lips, thin and pursed when she listened, suddenly exploded captivatingly when she opened her mouth to talk or laugh.

  She must have liked him too, for soon they were meeting outside the bedroom, and doing things together that had no sexual component. She was certainly rich – or her father was, and was generous to her – and she paid for everything: meals in restaurants, the wine they drank, tickets, even gas (though not when he was driving home to Stillriver – ‘That’s one you’ll have to pay for yourself’). When he tried to contribute she wouldn’t allow it, and if he protested, she said firmly, ‘Don’t go all macho on me. If I couldn’t afford it I’d let you know, don’t worry.’

  Most of her friends were seniors, but they saw them rarely – when they did, he felt treated with a mild amusement that he supposed preferable to hostility. She spent a lot of time at his house, for her friendship with his housemates was unaffected; the only change was now they talked to Michael as well. Usually, however, he and Sophie slept in the privacy of her apartment.

  She loved paintings and took him to museums in Detroit; she loved music and took him to concerts – once in the same week they saw a visiting orchestra, a chamber concert, and Jackson Browne. ‘And which did you like best?’ she asked slyly.

  He paused. ‘The chamber music.’

  She looked at him with saucy disbelief. ‘Really?’ He blushed slightly and Sophie said, ‘I love Jackson Browne.’

  ‘Me too,’ he admitted, and after that was determined always to tell her what he truly thought. For she never patronized him – that is what he especially liked about her – and if he said something truly stupid would tell him so. He learned about many things by being with her: some were useful, like understanding the menu in a French restaurant; some just interesting (he had never seen a copy of Architectural Digest); some just plain fun (he had never eaten croissants or tuna steak or scallops before).

  He called Cassie only slightly less frequently, and tried to make his life sound as uneventful as hers. Her news seemed so limited, confined to the square mile around her that was the town. In the past, he had known there was some bigger world outside he wanted to explore; now that he had seen some of it, it cast Stillriver in a dimmer light. The news he had he didn’t feel able to relate, since so much of his activities now were with Sophie. Yet strangely, when he was out with Sophie, he often wished Cassie were there, too. It was not some bizarre fantasy of a ménage à trois – it had nothing to do with sex. He was doing so many new things – visiting galleries, eating curry for the first time – and he wanted to share his new life. So he could not help mentioning during one of their phone conversations that he had gone to a Jackson Browne concert.

  ‘Really?’ she asked excitedly. ‘Wasn’t it expensive?’

  ‘A friend had an extra ticket,’ he lied.

  ‘That’s a good friend,’ she said quietly, and for the very first time he wondered if she perhaps intuited more than he had thought.

  When Donny came down from Central one weekend, Sophie agreed to make herself scarce, but when Michael came home to greet his friend he found him talking and laughing with his housemates and . . . Sophie.

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said later. ‘I had to see if he was really like you described him.’

  ‘And is he?’ he asked, trying to remember what stories he had told her about his friend. Fishing exploits, drunken carousing on the beach, what else? Presumably they all seemed completely small town to her.

  ‘He is and then some,’ she said. ‘That,’ she added, ‘is one Main Street guy. You think you’re a hick, but you’re not like that at all.’

  ‘He’s my best friend,’ he protested.

  ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ she said, looking at him coolly, ‘telling me how much you want to see the world but then getting defensive about your roots.’

  And Donny had said, ‘I like your friends. That girl Sophie, she’s a humdinger.’ He looked at Michael with a mock-avuncular eye. ‘I think maybe I won’t mention her to Nancy. Who knows who she might tell?’

  Michael told Cassie he was going for the weekend to Indiana with friends, and she was encouraging. ‘The Hoooo-sier state,’ she said with a giggle.

  He and Sophie flew in the Piper Cub of a Michigan alumnus, who had spent the week being entertained by development officers of the university and was now flying back to Indianapolis. A friend of Sophie’s father, he had a hired pilot and drank four Bloody Marys while they bobbed up and down in a late-winter sky.

  The first night they went to a hockey game in a vast arena, where they sat in a box with Sophie’s parents and two other couples, eating tournedos and chocolate cake in a private room during the intervals. Sophie’s father, Herb, was a short and stocky man, who wore an immense college graduation ring and a Rolex Oyster on his wrist. His wife was expensively dressed, formally polite to Michael, and remote – not only with him, but with Sophie and her father as well.

  After the game they returned to the Jansen residence, a vast brick ranch house, and Michael sat up with Sophie and her father for a nightcap, then made his excuses and went to bed. Since he didn’t have a clue where Sophie slept, he lay there, hoping she would come to him, then woke up as the sun rose over the swimming pool outside his room.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Sophie at breakfast. ‘I stayed up talking with Daddy.’

  When her father joined them it was clear he had already been up for hours. His wife brought him a plate with eggs, bacon and toast. ‘Sophie says you’re majoring in engineering,’ he said, pouring himself coffee. ‘Any particular kind?’

  ‘Civil engineering. I like bridges.’

  Herb looked interested in Michael for the first time. ‘Is that what you want to do then, design bridges?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think you want to design bridges. Better make up your mind.’ He started carving up his eggs with his fork, dipping a piece of toast into the yolk. ‘We build bridges, you know,’ he said, his eyes on his plate. ‘All over the Midwest. You want a summer job to see what it’s like, you let me know.’

  Sophie looked at Michael and said, ‘He’s got a job already, Daddy. He works in a drugstore.’

  Herb looked up from his eggs for a moment. ‘I don’t get it,’ he announced. ‘You want to be an engineer, or a soda jerk?’ He shrugged and resumed eating. That was the last time during the weekend that he paid any attention to Michael.

  ‘He liked you,’ Sophie said. They were driving back in a rental car on Sunday afternoon, though they planned to stop for the night at a motel outside Elkhart. On Saturday night Sophie had again sat up with ‘Daddy’, so Michael was looking forward to stopping.

  ‘He might have, until you said I was working in the drugstore this summer. I think I was supposed to jump at his offer.’

  ‘Relax. My father wants people to jump at everything he says. You’ll get used to him.’

  When they got back to Ann Arbor the next day, there was a message on his door telling him to call Cassie. When he phoned she sounded subdued.

  ‘I thought you were coming back yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘I know, but we decided to stay an extra day.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you’d call.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t feel I could call long distance on someone else’s phone.’

  There was a long silence. ‘What’s wrong, Cassie?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, but her voice was faint.

  ‘Is your father all r
ight?’

  ‘He’s the same,’ she said, and he could barely hear her. Then suddenly she asked, ‘Who’s Sophie?’

  He hesitated before replying, then rushed his response. ‘One of the friends I went down with. Why?’

  Her voice went faint again. ‘Just wondering,’ she said. ‘When I called, whoever answered the phone said you’d gone to Indiana with Sophie.’

  Thanks, guys. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but she wasn’t the only one there,’ and thus for the first time told an active lie, rather than one of omission.

  ‘Are you coming up this weekend?’

  Sophie had asked him to a party some other senior was giving on Saturday night, so he hesitated. ‘Sure,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll come up Friday night.’

  It unravelled more quickly than he wanted or expected. The parson was asleep and they sat at the kitchen table while he explained his frustrations, how it was hard coming back so often, how he felt he wasn’t doing justice to his coursework – he even talked a little about his new passion for engineering – and how maybe they would both profit from a break.

  ‘You’re saying you want a break? You mean from me?’

  ‘Not you, Cassie,’ he said, already manipulating in his head the words to come. ‘Just from the routine, this coming and going. It would be different if you could come down to me sometimes.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that.’ She picked up her coffee mug with both hands and stared at it.

  ‘Of course I do. I just meant there wouldn’t be this strain.’

  ‘I don’t feel any strain,’ she said. ‘I look forward to the weekends, you must know that.’

  ‘Shoot, half the time I’m here you’re busy doing something else. If it isn’t your father, it’s choir practice, or basketball.’

  ‘I have to keep busy,’ said Cassie, looking hurt. ‘This break, how long do you mean it to be?’