by Greg Johnson
“I can’t understand what you’re telling me,” he said, frowning, as they sat in a little coffee shop near the museum. “How can you not have boyfriends back home? Surely they must queue up outside your door.”
She laughed a girlish, disbelieving laugh, the one she had not used since high school. Something about his gentle British puzzlement, the quizzical frowns he was always giving her, amused her, for matinee-idol handsome as he was, nonetheless he seemed uncertain, stymied by his boyish, romantic notions. Such as the foolish idea that she outranked him in physical beauty, which had become almost a refrain. He talked constantly of her skin, her hair; he noticed the molding of her ears, her throat, her collarbone; when they were alone, he bent to kiss each item in his catalogue of marvels, and it was her wisdom at such moments to fall silent and no longer feel tempted to laugh but instead to allow this elegant, rather eccentric man to feel whatever he wanted to feel, give what he wanted to give.
In public she ridiculed him, gently. “Yes, each man takes a ticket,” she said. “We ask them to please not clog the sidewalks.”
“No, I’m serious,” he said, fixing her with his intent, black-eyed stare. His eyes were his most striking feature: thickly lashed, so dark as to seem all pupil. At such times, he refused to laugh. After a moment she would grow uncomfortable and change the subject.
All the while, she clung fast to her sense of irony: an alternate vision of herself as Miss Abigail Sadler the veteran schoolmarm presided over their clandestine meetings, their hushed conversations, even their frantic lovemaking in that elaborately carved bed in his oversized house in Druid Hills. A month from now, she supposed, her soul would reenter Miss Sadler’s body and recall this affair with the same sense of inconsequence and wry disbelief one felt after watching an intensely romantic film. All that passion, all those emotions, had happened to someone else.
Even as she lay next to Philip caressing his sleek, well-muscled thigh, her fingers tracing the etched lines along his flat stomach and the firm curve of his breastbone, she would allow Miss Sadler a little smirk at such frank enjoyment of this man’s body, his physical near-perfection. Philip’s skin—olive-pale and unblemished, smoother and silkier than her own yet firm to the touch, undeniably male in its layered girding of muscle—brought a literal itch to the ends of her fingers, each caress inspiring another as she explored his body in a way she’d never dreamed of touching a man before. He would lie still for these appreciative caresses, his eyes closed, an artwork passively accepting the admirer’s tribute, but gradually his uncircumcised penis (a novelty she found pleasing: very pleasing) stiffened as her caresses grew bolder, franker, and at some point he would seize her hand abruptly and bring it to his lips, the signal that their lovemaking would begin in earnest. He kept his eyes closed, the lids just perceptibly fluttering, yet through all this Abby allowed Miss Sadler to hover somewhere above them, an eyebrow quirked in condescending bemusement, her ghostly, faintly mocking laughter filling the room. Abby’s enjoyment of their passion was oddly enhanced by this flouting of Miss Sadler’s arch disapproval, and by the thought of the ancient nuns from grade school who now lay smirking in their graves. She could not relinquish this ironic vision of their affair, keeping it clearly focused in her mind’s eye even as her body surrendered to the sweat and toil of a passion she’d never believed might be hers.
During the weeks between their first meeting and Christmas, they met every few days for lunch at one of the restaurants Philip favored: settling into a darkened booth at the rear of Houston’s, where he would reach across the table to stroke her hand, sometimes gently, sometimes a bit harder than she liked; or at small, out-of-the-way places in Brookhaven or Decatur, restaurants Abby had never visited before. One day she’d said, with a thoughtless laugh, “My brother and his friends wouldn’t be caught dead in here” (they were in a seafood place, a chain restaurant whose menu featured special meals for children), and though Philip gave a tic-like smile he was clearly hurt.
“Sorry if you don’t like it,” he said, snapping open his menu.
This time it was Abby who reached across the table; she gave his hand a brief squeeze.
“No, I do like it,” she said, truthfully. “It’s just that some of Thorn’s friends—like Connie, for instance—”
“Oh, of course,” Philip said shortly, “this place doesn’t have a bar.”
He’d given Abby a quick amused glance over his menu, and they broke into laughter.
She’d learned soon enough to avoid mentioning Thom and his friends, since her lover seemed jealous over the time Abby spent with them. One Saturday she’d declined to see Philip because Thom had asked her to lunch with Pace, who had a new boyfriend he wanted Abby and Thom to meet. There had been a long pause over the phone line. Then Philip released his breath, an exasperated sigh.
“Well, blood is thicker, etcetera,” he said. She waited but he said nothing more.
“How about Monday? At lunchtime?” she had asked, troubled by his sudden change of mood.
“I hope so,” Philip said. And hung up.
Nor did Philip want anyone, including her brother, to know that he and Abby had started…dating, was that the correct term? For the first few days, Abby herself had enjoyed the secret, not quite examining her own motive in sneaking off to meet Philip, even when this involved blatantly lying to Thom. Somehow she shared Philip’s inclination, at least for now, to keep their relationship to themselves. Their passion was so raw, so new; it was purely theirs. A few days ago she couldn’t have imagined lying so profusely to her brother, the one person she’d grown up trusting more than any other. Of course, she hadn’t really phoned Amber or her other high school friends. She marveled at her own daring, putting forth such a preposterous idea. What if Thom should run into Amber, by chance? How would Abby explain the lie to him? She couldn’t quite explain it to herself.
Inevitably, though, she tried. It was her job, explaining things, and not only in the classroom. Growing up, Abby had been the conduit between her brother and their parents, especially Lucille, serving habitually as the smoother of ruffled feathers, bearer of messages, interpreter and apologist. She hadn’t minded serving as peacemaker, really, for some quality of hers reassured other people (“Your company is so soothing,” Graham had told her, perhaps the only thing he’d said that had genuinely touched her) and somehow calmed their fears, softened their emotional rough edges. Back at school, lonely or bewildered students would sidle into Miss Sadler’s office for tearful conferences about family problems, romantic unhappiness, various other teenage miseries. Among her colleagues Abby was known as one who refused to play politics or be drawn into factions, treating her friends and people she disliked with equal tact and fair-mindedness. And she told herself she didn’t mind. In the argot of the times, she liked herself. She reflected that against the odds, she had grown up more or less successfully, and there was satisfaction in that.
Only at home with her mother had she come to chafe inside her role as Miss Sadler, the levelheaded schoolmarm whose ethics were as impeccable as the high-necked white blouses she often wore to teach her classes. She had grown tired of gently correcting the exaggerated stories that her mother, for no particular reason, conveyed to other people—especially family members to whom Abby found herself speaking often on the phone, putting out little fires her mother had started. Even when she and her mother were alone, she served as Lucille’s buffer of common sense, her reality principle, her foil. Not long before Abby sent him packing, poor Graham Northwood had commented on how honest and straightforward she was, and how much that attracted him. He’d encountered a number of “flighty” girls in the past, he’d said somberly, unaware that while the stolid Abigail Sadler sat there listening sympathetically another woman, the Abby he’d never known, had already taken flight.
So she shouldn’t have been surprised at the pleasurable abandon with which she hurried off, these past few days, in her rented bright-red Altima, which she drove much faster than Mis
s Sadler drove the clunky, dented Buick she’d bought straight off a used car lot in South Philly. Impulsively, she’d rented the car one day, asking Philip to drop her at the rental agency instead of taking her home. She’d grown tired of depending on other people—her brother, her lover—to get around town. Thom had been appalled when she rented the car, insisting it was a needless expense, he’d take her anywhere, anytime, but she’d laughed at him. “We aren’t an old married couple, you know,” she said. This newly discovered kernel of stubbornness, the need to preserve her own secrets, prevailed over her conscience and common sense, the twin beacons which, like dependable headlights, had guided Abby’s course through her adult life.
Perhaps there was something deeper than mere stubbornness. One day, driving down Ponce de Leon Avenue toward one of her lunches with Philip, swift and easy as a serpent’s whisper a single word glided into her hearing. Payback. She’d allowed herself no particular resentment toward her brother during their estrangement yet at once she felt a shimmer of assent even as Miss Sadler dismissed the notion with a curt shake of her head. But yes. Payback. Her palms sweating, Abby stopped for a red light at Highland Avenue, peering around at the other cars with the furtive quickness of a criminal who feared she might be recognized. No one glanced her way. She sat flexing her fingers on the wheel until she heard a horn’s toot and, imagining Thorn’s grinning face, glanced fearfully into the rearview mirror. Of course, the driver was a stranger, his impatient hand raised sideways. The light had flashed green.
Each day she sped along in her new-smelling red car, her pulse racing as she followed her lover’s carefully dictated directions to this or that restaurant. Instinctively, she refused to come directly to his house, just as she’d ignored his complaint that he should pick her up, that she needn’t drive at all. She liked the feeling of autonomy and daring, hurrying to meet her lover. She slid into her seat across from him with the awareness that no one on earth knew where she was at that moment, or with whom. She kept telling herself that she would tell Thom, in a few days; she expected a fair amount of ribbing but she hoped he would approve. He and Philip were friendly acquaintances, after all, weren’t they? There was no logical reason not to tell him. What disturbed her was Philip’s suspicion, his jealousy; and the impression he gave, once or twice, that he could read her thoughts.
“You haven’t told anyone, have you?” he said in a level, grim voice.
On that day, they’d bought a deli lunch and were sitting in the open-air courtyard at Ansley Mall. After a cool, cloudy morning the day had turned brilliantly sunny, almost unpleasantly warm for mid-December. It had been Abby’s idea to meet here, and it had taken some persuading. At first, she hadn’t recognized her lover where he’d been sitting by himself with a cup of Caribou’s coffee, pawing through a newspaper. Whereas normally Philip favored dark, dressy clothes—shirts of black silk or thick cotton, perfectly creased dark slacks, an expensive-looking charcoal overcoat that might have been cashmere—today he’d surprised her by wearing sneakers and blue jeans, and a rumpled white oxford-cloth shirt under a nylon windbreaker. Seeing him, Abby had thought immediately they were clothes her brother might wear, making Philip look younger than his age; he might have passed for a college student.
Thom had said he’d be showing houses to some out-of-town clients all day in the Gwinnett County suburbs, but what if he should appear unexpectedly, hurrying down the sidewalk in his long, loping strides? The Ansley area was his stomping ground, after all; she’d felt a bit reckless, insisting that Philip meet her here. After they’d bought their food and found a table, Philip rushed through the meal, keeping his head lowered, muttering that he felt “on display” among the ceaseless stream of shoppers out strolling in this unseasonable weather. When she put down her half-eaten sandwich and said wearily, “All right, then, let’s go,” he stood at once. They dropped their leftovers in a trash barrel and joined the other shoppers crisscrossing the sunlit mall.
That’s when he’d asked his question, apropos of nothing. And it was true: she’d been thinking exactly that.
“Have you?” Philip repeated. “Have you told anyone?”
“No,” she said slowly, deliberately not glancing at Philip. She didn’t want to see the expression on his face, that bereft unhappy look. Whenever Philip became jealous or momentarily displeased, his eyes would narrow, retreating beneath the unbroken dark line of his brow. His lips tightened, stubbornly; the handsome olive gloss of his skin vanished, mirage-like, leaving his face a mottled, ashen gray. “No, but in fact I was planning… I was thinking of having you over, next week. Thom is planning a get-together on Christmas Eve, and I thought—”
“As I mentioned before, I don’t celebrate Christmas,” Philip said shortly. He spat the words out one side of his mouth. His gait had quickened so that Abby struggled to keep up with him. Though they’d been headed toward Pier One—she needed to get something to send her Aunt Millicent—Philip passed by the entrance and headed for the parking lot.
He paused at the curb. “Maybe you could shop for your aunt later—would you mind?”
“No, of course not.” She’d assumed that when they got into Philip’s black Jaguar they’d return to his house, his upstairs bedroom with its tall evergreen-shaded windows—so far, that was how they concluded each of their afternoons together. Each day, she relished the muted excitement of their drive back to that old, ramshackle house on Clifton Road. She loved the twists and turns along Clifton—a classic example of Atlanta’s nonsensical street patterns—almost as if the road, as they snaked along, mimicked her unpredictable, swiftly changing emotions since the night she met Philip. But now she’d annoyed him and she imagined, for the first time, how bereft she might feel if her lover, angry and disgusted, decided not to drive her there. That would mean their intense but peculiar affair was over. Her pulse raced, thinking this. Some wayward, unnamed emotion caught in her throat, fluttering.
She said: “I don’t have to tell him right now. If you’d rather I didn’t.”
They’d reached the car, and instead of getting inside Philip leaned against the driver’s door, pulling her close. He bent down, nuzzled one side of her face.
“I want everything to be just ours, at least for a while,” he whispered. “Let’s keep it this way another week or two, all right? Until after the holidays, maybe. Then we can—” He’d paused, perhaps remembering that Abby would return to Philadelphia just after New Year’s. “But not now,” he said.
Her answer was simple: “All right. That’s fine.”
She told herself they’d been thinking along parallel lines, and that she might feel jealous in his position. If he had a sister, for instance, with whom he lived and to whom he seemed close, confiding, she’d worry that the sister might judge her—might find her not good enough, as Abby supposed she might consider Thorn’s new friend Chip, once she met him, not good enough for her irreplaceable Thom.
Yes, she understood her lover’s need for privacy, his near paranoia; she told herself she understood.
So they got into the car and returned to Philip’s where he made love to her with a silent, almost grim efficiency, to which her body responded helplessly, wave after wave of shuddering pleasure, a new one beginning even before the previous one had ended. His skill astonished her: there was none of the sweaty groping she’d endured with the handful of men she’d dated in her twenties, or more recently with Graham Northwood, who fumbled his way through elaborate precautions (in addition to donning two condoms, made of two different materials, he daubed himself with various gels and lubricants, which had the benefit at least of masking her own dryness) before venturing into their three or four minutes of actual intercourse, which often ended with a husky-voiced “Oof—sorry, I couldn’t hold back” muttered into her hair.
Philip was practiced and confident and graceful. She scarcely noticed when his hand slipped away quietly to extract the tiny packet from the top drawer of his bedside table, then with the same hand—distracting he
r with the other—unwrapping and donning the condom and entering her in one seamless, luxurious shifting of their limbs. After just a few of his deft slow lunges, she was coming the first time, her bent legs tensed with expectation against his smoothly muscled hips. He whispered something into her hair, he released his warm breath in another of his deep lovely moans against her throat, and already another hot shuddering wave had formed as the core of her being opened to him, halved by him, welcoming his quicker, faster lunges as he, too, neared climax, and by the time he came she was there again, for the third time—or was it the fifth. Afterward he lay quiet, as always, not simply rolling off like other men she had known but lingering with his parted lips against her breast that was flushed and a little sore from the friction of his skin against hers. He said nothing for several long minutes but kept his cheek pressed along her pale, cooling flesh. Then they rose silently and dressed, interrupting the procedure every few moments for a brief, wordless hug as he pulled her against him, decisively, then released her. In her dazed abandon she finished dressing, and he delivered her back to her car, and she drove home in her usual erotic befuddlement, aware that she’d angered him earlier that afternoon, a tiny lifetime ago, but not quite certain what the problem had been—or not quite caring.
It occurred to Abby that despite her few earlier affairs and her several months of dry, antiseptic couplings with Graham Northwood, she’d remained a virgin until she met Philip. The question kept pestering her awareness: Is this love? And one day she understood, suddenly but without regret, that Miss Sadler had abandoned her watch from that cleared-out mental space Abby had preserved so carefully in the first days of their affair. Abigail Sadler with her high-necked blouse and her arched, ironic brow—she was gone.
