She sighed. “Not on purpose,” she denied. “Trying to protect myself.”
“From me?” He grasped her shoulders, whether to reassure her or to demand answers, she didn’t know. His touch created a strong reaction in her own body, but she fought it.
“You were so judgmental,” she said.
“You kept a major secret from me. How did you expect me to react?”
“Which one?” she asked, wondering how much of her life story Bev had spilled, and what spin Bev had put on the facts.
In a sudden outpouring of unhappiness, she didn’t give Michael a chance to reply. She rushed on, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
“That I’m married? That’s nothing. Did Bev tell you that my son died of cancer three years ago? That after it happened, I went nuts and stole pills and behaved in a disgraceful manner? That I tried to kill myself? That I was in a mental institution not once but twice? You know what that means, don’t you? Tranquilizers and lockup, body searches, and more. Windows with bars. Because it’s the safest place to be when your world falls apart.”
The words tumbled out until she registered his shocked, pained expression. She relented. “I’m sorry.” Dredging up her past in such harsh terms was cruel to both of them. She tried to turn away. She didn’t want to face him now. She pulled out of his grasp to lean against the bottom post of the steps, half-covering her face with one hand. Her next words came out muffled. “With you, I wanted to be just Susan. Without all the miseries of my past or my present interfering. I’ll never be fresh and innocent again.”
“I want you,” he said. “Exactly who you are.”
Michael’s hands slowly closed on her upper arms. His thumbs caressed her flesh as he drew her into a gentle embrace. She leaned back against his chest.
“Your past is what makes you the woman I want,” he whispered into her ear in a low voice. “But you must tell me all about it. I’ll go nuts if I find you’ve held out on me. I have to have honesty. I need honesty.”
“Are you going to tell me why?”
“Not yet. Is it too much to ask?”
“I should go back to Ohio.”
“No,” he said. Fierce repudiation was in his voice. “Stay here with me,” his words came insistently. “You don’t realize what you mean to me.”
She couldn’t help relaxing in his embrace, but she wasn’t worthy of this man.
Michael turned her around, never losing contact with her body. How did he know that his touch was his most potent weapon? He gently nudged her chin up so she was looking at him. “Give us another chance,” he breathed softly.
She was melting. Michael’s sensual appeal short-circuited her common sense. Nothing had changed on the physical level. She wanted him, and he wanted her. If she was going to stop this relationship, this was the key moment.
She could not bring herself to do it. The worst he had done was to question her behavior and reveal that he had some hot buttons from his own past. She was the one who had overreacted, who had spent an entire week wallowing in self-pity.
“I’m so tired.” She didn’t want to argue. She wanted him to take charge. She was sick of trying to make decisions.
Michael saw her words as the concession they were. He instantly took command.
“Let’s get you fed. You’ll feel better.” He hustled her away from the apartment building. Within minutes, they were sitting in a cozy booth at a nearby restaurant, and he was explaining why he had left her last weekend. “Bev seemed very needy, and you were in a rotten mood. Blame me for being a typical man. I took the easy way out. I didn’t want to fight with you,” he said ruefully.
“I was pretty upset.”
“So was I. How could you forget to tell me you’re rooming with my oldest girlfriend?” He seemed more exasperated than hurt. “Susan, we have to talk about this.”
She hung her head, knowing he was right. As much as she didn’t want to face her messy life situation, she had made Michael part of it. He had a right to know the truth. Still, she avoided talking about her marriage. “I’m so frustrated with Bev there, watching everything I do,” she apologized. “I don’t want to tell her everything that’s going on in my life, either.”
“That wouldn’t have happened. She and I aren’t all that close.”
“Really, Mikey?”
He looked slightly embarrassed at her sarcastic use of the pet name Bev had called him. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”
“What did you and Bev talk about?”
“Not you. Bev mostly talked about how unhappy she is.” Michael frowned. “She’s desperate to convince Todd to stop cheating on her.”
“She cried the entire first two days she was here.” Susan smiled faintly. “We knew she was recovering when she started yelling at Todd on the phone.”
She sighed. The comfortable surroundings, and some food, and mostly, being with Michael, were making her feel better.
“Are you still angry at me?” she asked.
Michael’s eyes glowed and he seemed to sigh in relief. Then he smiled and shook his head. “No. How about you?”
“Nope.” She couldn’t blame Michael for last week. It had been her fault, helped on by Bev, but still her lies and her pretenses.
She felt emotionally spent. She couldn’t spill about her marriage right now. Or the other elements in her life that impacted on her situation this summer. “I can’t talk any more about my life and my story tonight. I’m sorry.”
Michael gave her a long, deliberate look, obviously registering how ragged she was emotionally. A restaurant with the tables set close together was hardly the right place for the kind of talk they needed to have. Not that she was eager to tell her life story. If she could, she’d put it off indefinitely.
He suggested they see a classic movie at a theater. “Then we can go back to my place and relax.”
“Smooth, Michael.” She felt her first real smile of the weekend rearranging her face. Suddenly her world was all right again. “I’ll see a movie, but it’s too soon for the rest. This weekend proved we don’t know each other yet.”
Michael hid his disappointment well. He smiled. “That’s what I like about you. You make me work for it.”
“Chalk it up to my cautious Midwestern ways.”
“Fine for now, but I’m serving notice that I intend to wear down your resistance.” He smiled dangerously.
***
After the movie, Susan begged off a nightcap, but Michael still insisted on seeing her home in a cab. This time, he embraced her as they sat in the dark back seat blocked off from the driver by a plastic shield. Michael wrapped her in his strong arms and kissed her deeply, possessively. They arrived at her address and she practically fell out of the cab.
“Why did you do that?” she said, gasping. “Now I can barely walk. You have literally kissed me silly.”
“Anytime, darling. Don’t forget what we have.” He stood on the sidewalk beside the waiting cab as she climbed the steps on rubbery legs. At the top, she turned back. He was watching her. He saluted. With a feeble wave, she went inside.
***
It was getting late, and Bev wondered where everybody was. Susan had left early, as usual. She still wasn’t back from her boring tourist stuff. Susan was still angry at her for behaving like a pig Friday night and playing up her age. Susan was a lot older than Mikey, and a married woman. Mikey had been hurt plenty by that bitch he’d married. Bev wasn’t going to sit idly by and let him fall for Susan without knowing the truth about her.
Maybe Susan was staying with Rona tonight? Rona’s apartment was a tiny pigsty. There wasn’t space for even one person, let alone a guest. What was wrong with Rona? Over the years, her place had gotten more and more crowded with useless clutter. Each time she visited Rona she was stunned anew. Rona needed professional help. Not that she would go for it. That was the trouble with being so smart. She wouldn’t trust anyone to be smarter than her about anything.
Rona ha
dn’t been smart about Edward Thorsen twenty-five years ago. What a disaster that could have been for Rona’s career. Bev had been her assistant then. Although Rona had been super discreet, Bev found out about the affair. She even knew about Rona’s pregnancy, although she had never been able to coax Rona to admit it, or explain what happened to the baby. She was no fool. When Rona, the slimmest of women, suddenly was wearing her blouses outside her waistband, Bev guessed. There had been some episodes of sudden upchucking, too. Once the semester ended, Rona left town for the entire summer.
She came back to the university thin again, but looking suspiciously tired. Just like Bev’s cousin Sophie who had to go away to “stay with an aunt” one year during high school. Sophie’s baby had been adopted out, and Bev assumed that’s what Rona had done with hers.
Rona was sadder and harder that next year, more determined than ever to make her mark. Bev had admired Rona’s grit, but that was more proof the life of an academic wasn’t for her. Especially the uphill struggle against all those pigs in the department. She used to coax the middle-aged departmental secretary, who toadied to all the men and hated Rona for being uppity, to give her information about the department’s inner workings. Then she passed it all on to Rona. That old bitch of a secretary never realized that Bev was a sympathizer with firebrand feminist Rona. Bev pulled the same snow job on Rona’s jealous, devious colleagues, too. Mostly it worked, because all she had to do was bat her eyelashes and push out her chest, and lots of them lost track of their thought patterns.
She had been a knockout then. Todd got himself a good deal when he married her. She’d worked hard all these years to give Todd exactly what he expected in an ambitious surgeon’s wife. He repaid her by screwing every skirt he could flip up. Bastard.
She was at her wits’ end. If Todd didn’t break soon and promise he’d mend his ways and ask her to please come home, she would be forced to complain to Uncle Sol. She hated to use that weapon. She’d been keeping him as her emergency backup in case Todd wanted to run off with one of the bimbos he shtupped. If she used the threat of Uncle Sol now, the future of her marriage would be less secure.
Here it was late Sunday night, and where the hell was Susan? The fireworks had to be over by now. She hadn’t returned, and her cell phone was on her nightstand. Michael wasn’t answering his phone. Rona was hopeless. Even Louis had left only a curt message saying he was busy but would call back another time.
***
Edward said heavily, “This is all wrong. What are we doing?” They were lying in his bed. Rona had just gotten her breath back.
“Having sex,” she said flatly. Although it had been making love. No matter how many times she told herself she wouldn’t feel anything, with Edward she was all feelings. Every single time they’d seen each other, they had ended up tearing each other’s clothes off. She simply couldn’t hold out against her desire to consume him.
“No, it can’t just be sex.” Edward put his arms around her, clasping her close. “My feelings for you have never altered. Never.”
“I have to leave now.” Oh, why was she such a coward?
“Don’t go. We never talk. We need to talk.”
“Do we?” she asked in a challenging tone of voice. “Everything important was said twenty-five years ago.”
He sighed. “I suppose you’re right. So many times, I lay awake and imagined what it would have been like if our baby had lived. If I had found the courage to let my ambition and my marriage go.”
“You didn’t.” She said it in a hard tone, to hide how much he had hurt her.
“I’ll never forgive myself. Never.”
The depth of his pain suddenly began to bother her. She was supposed to enjoy this. Instead, she felt his pain.
Edward continued his self-flagellation. “I killed our child.” His voice was choked with grief.
She couldn’t stand it anymore. “No, you didn’t.”
“You’re not to blame for the abortion. It was I who demanded you do it. I bear the moral responsibility,” Edward insisted.
“It’s not all about you, dammit,” she said in an irritated voice. “Quit feeling so damn guilty. I never had the abortion.”
“What did you say?” Edward was stunned. He grasped her arms almost desperately.
“I did not kill our child.” She repeated herself.
Edward’s face took on an expression of sheer joy. He clasped her in a tight embrace. His body trembled, and then he began to sob. “Oh, thank God. Thank God!”
She was a pig. She’d let him suffer all these years. She could have told him. She should have told him. She tightened her arms around him.
After a while, Edward got ahold of himself. He raised his head and asked, confused. “But…you never talk of a child. What happened? Did you have a miscarriage?”
She rushed to explain. She couldn’t bear if it he broke down again. “I carried the baby full term and gave birth to a healthy daughter. Whom I adopted out.”
His eyes widened. “A daughter? Oh, God is good. A daughter.” He took some time absorbing the information. It seemed as if he even said a silent prayer. A minute later he was back to questions.
“She would be twenty-four now. Where is she? Do you know who adopted her? Is she happy? Healthy? Tell me all you know.”
“I know everything.” She laid a calming hand on the bare shoulder of this man she couldn’t keep out of her life. “It was an open adoption. My friend Susan raised our daughter. We named her Nancy. She grew up in Ohio, graduated from Stanford, and got her MBA. Last year, she got married. She and her husband Matt live in Chicago.”
“This is a miracle, a miracle.” Edward said. His fine features were transformed with joy.
“You did grieve for our child,” she said in open wonder.
“Yes, I did. You can’t know how many times I struggled with the knowledge that she never had a life, and it was my fault. That her eternal soul was damned to limbo.”
Edward’s eyes rested on Rona passionately. “I also grieved for what she represented. The love that you and I found and shared for so brief a time. The love that I had turned my back on.” There was conviction in his voice.
She thrilled at hearing him say those words. He could never say them too often. Still she shied away from admitting that her own feelings were equally strong. Or that she bore plenty of guilt herself.
Their painful breakup had all been Edward’s fault, but she had been wrong to have an affair with a married man. Either she believed in the sanctity of marriage or she didn’t. Either every woman was her sister, the feminist creed, or every woman was her rival, the pre-feminist attitude that she had always and vocally despised. She couldn’t have it both ways. It would have cost her dearly to have been found out all those years ago. Her enemies would have delighted in mocking what they would have correctly labeled a lack of integrity. She would have been pilloried. Maybe she would have deserved it. She was glad she never had to suffer it.
She could not kill their baby merely to protect herself. All these years of lies had taken a toll on her. For the first time in a long time, she felt a sense of a weight lifting off her. A weight she hadn’t consciously admitted to in many years.
Edward finally thought to ask, “How did you manage it? You continued on with your career without a pause.”
“Of course I did. My career meant everything to me once you were gone. I was extremely lucky. I never showed much. I managed to work through the rest of the school year without anyone guessing. I didn’t teach for the summer. I hid out with Susan and eventually had our baby.”
“It was that simple,” he said, and shook his head.
“Not exactly,” she contradicted him. “It was a hard decision to make. I don’t object to abortion as such. But this was our baby, Edward, the child made from our love. I couldn’t kill that child.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Edward asked in a low voice. He hastened to reassure her, “I would not have interfered in any way. But it would
have been a kindness.”
She was glad to sidestep the integrity issues and concentrate on the mundane. “I wasn’t feeling generous toward you then. Probably because you were back with your wife, and because you told me to have an abortion. You were serious about it, don’t forget. I know you’re sorry now, but then, you wanted it.”
He bowed his head. “That’s true, I am ashamed to say.”
They were still sitting naked on the bed. Like everything else in his apartment, it was massive, a four-poster made of dark wood. Even the sheets were a deep brown, which contrasted with their skin when they made love there. She felt especially naked atop them. She liked how intimate it felt to be naked on the sheets with Edward. She had to have him again. She began to kiss him, short, nibbling kisses meant to arouse him.
He would not be distracted. He gently kissed her lips, then rose from the bed and threw on a silk bathrobe, bringing another one to her.
“You’re distracting me, beloved, and I still have so many questions.”
She pouted, knowing she’d prefer not to answer them. Knowing it was always her way to deflect talk with sex. When she didn’t move to cover herself, Edward gently enfolded her in the second robe, embracing her as he did so. She felt the heat of his body and sank into it.
“Please, tell me again. I’m finding it hard to believe,” he entreated.
She sighed. Maybe she still had a yearning for revenge. Else why was she so reluctant to give him what he wanted? If he hadn’t brought up the subject of their baby, she might have left him tonight without telling him.
“You don’t have to feel guilty anymore. I gave our baby girl to my best friend to raise as her own. She and her husband thought they couldn’t have any children, so they adopted ours.”
“She had a happy childhood?” he asked anxiously.
“The best. They aren’t wealthy like you, but they’ve always been pretty comfortable. She wanted for nothing. Except maybe a pony when she was seven.” She felt herself start to choke up as she saw the beautiful curve of Edward’s relieved smile.
The rest poured out. “They love her like their own, and they made me her godmother. She knows I am her birth mother. She knows you are her birth father. I have seen her regularly through the years. She’s a happy young woman.”
Summer in the City Page 20
