“Maybe we should go there. For a holiday.”
“To Greece?” Eliza lifted her head off the pillow.
“Sure. It’s time we went on a family holiday abroad. There’s a mathematics conference in Athens in June. Not this summer, next. That would give us time to save.”
“June weddings.”
“Kiki could survive without you for two or three weeks.”
“Two, tops.”
“Come on, three. We haven’t taken a real holiday in years. We both need a break. And the boys are old enough now. It doesn’t have to be a Cuban all-inclusive anymore.”
And it couldn’t be his parents’ cottage now they had sold it. She felt a rush of impatience. “You know, we would be able to take more holidays if your brother helped foot your parents’ bills. They lost their retirement money, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to lose ours.”
He didn’t respond. This argument between them was already ancient history.
“How can she spend two thousand dollars every month on non-essential items? Bed, Bath and Beyond? The Linen Closet? Does she really need new bath towels and sheets? I saw the most recent Visa bill.”
“It wasn’t two thousand.”
“Eighteen hundred. Same difference.”
“I will talk to them.”
“No. Talk to her. And to Martin. You always talk to your dad, but he isn’t the one who’s spending the money.”
Andrew sighed heavily and reached over to his bedside table to pick up his book.
She instantly regretted being so aggressive; he’d made a lovely suggestion and she had responded bitchily. She was doing that more often than usual. Snapping. Being rude to him. Allowing small arguments to become bad blood between them, when before, pre-Shar, they would have been moments of passing discord. She was ashamed of trying to make Andrew into some kind of enemy when he remained her dearest, most reliable friend. This little spat was her fault: she had changed the subject because talking about Thalia felt too dangerous.
But he’d recognized the feint in the conversation, because he looked up from his book and asked, “Was she beautiful?”
“Why are you so curious about this now?”
“I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “It’s in the air, I guess.”
He does know, she thought. Somehow, he knows. Jake got his telepathic tendencies from his father, not from her. Eliza tried to be light. “Of course she was beautiful. Auburn hair. Green eyes. Not what you have in mind, really, when you think Greek.”
“Green eyes,” he said, admiringly. “What kind of auburn?”
Eliza laughed. “I can dig out a photo if you want. Actually, you’ve seen the album. I’ve shown you pictures of that summer.”
“Really? I don’t remember. What colour is auburn?”
“Light brown. And reddish.” She tried to remember herself. Did she really know, anymore, what Thalia had looked like? What she remembered, more than her hair, was her skin, sun-dark and smooth, almost hairless. “And coppery blonde, from the sun and the sea. Long hair, but she usually wore it in a ponytail. She was taller than me. And bigger. Broad-shouldered. The first time I saw her I thought she was a man.”
“What was she doing?”
“Riding a white horse on a road above the sea.”
“Get out of here!”
“Honey, I’ve told you this whole story, I’m sure of it.”
“Riding a white horse? I don’t think you told me that. How could I have forgotten?”
“The sun was behind her. I couldn’t see her face. I just saw this big, handsome man riding toward me. Like something out of a cowboy movie. You don’t see many women riding horses on Lesvos.”
“And what, she just scooped you up and took you to her hideout in the hills and ravished you?”
Eliza laughed. “Is that how your fantasy goes? I didn’t even talk to her, that first time. Though I fell in love with her right there.” She cocked her head to the side, reconsidering. “Not love. Lust.”
“Thinking she was a man.”
“Just—presuming she was. She looked like a man. Later I saw her again, with the same horse, but she was on the roadside near the beach, where tourists used to walk. She had two other horses, too, a little bay and an island horse, dappled grey. And a couple of donkeys. She used to take people on rides in the countryside. She was saddling the horses that second time. And I thought, Ah, it’s him. Closer up, I saw that ‘he’ was a woman. I was flummoxed. And…well, thrilled. I had to meet her.” Eliza sighed nostalgically. “I wasn’t the only one. She slept with a lot of straight women. She kind of liked that, the seduction of the dumb heterosexual. She said as long as they would go down on her by the third date, she’d give them the full treatment.”
“The full treatment?”
“Lots of fucking and free horseback riding.”
Andrew laughed. “You said you worked so hard in the restaurant that summer, learning how to cook! Sure. Now I know why you stayed there so long!” Eliza swatted him. He laughed more. “How were her breasts?”
“You have been watching porn!”
“Mmm. It’s been too long since we’ve…you know. Like six weeks?” He put down his book again.
“Darling! You’ve been counting.” She was flattered and disturbed; he usually had no idea when they’d last had sex. “Maybe we should remedy that situation.”
Andrew pulled the blankets away from his body as he turned toward her. His voice fell to a whisper. “Tell me a story about Thalia. What did she used to do to you?”
Eliza crawled on top of him. “Oh, my!” she said; under his boxers, he had a fully committed hard-on. She began to whisper to him about the beautiful Greek woman in her little stone house in the hills. Inevitably, though, Thalia morphed into Shar, in her big bed in the apartment off Queen Street.
“At first she was sitting back on her knees, massaging her breasts. A little smaller than mine. She used to wrap them for riding, that’s partly why she looked like a guy.”
Eliza pulled off his shorts; his cock sprang to attention. She slid her hand up and down. Andrew murmured dreamily, “An Amazon.”
Eliza’s gut lurched. “Well, once she unwrapped herself, she had lovely breasts. Two small handfuls.” Still on top of him, holding herself up on her knees, she slowly pulled off her T-shirt. “One day, she sat at the end of my bed, massaging them, making her nipples hard.” Eliza took her nipples in her fingers, and moved back to the tops of Andrew’s thighs, so she could touch him easily. She licked the palm of her hand and stroked him. “She had a gorgeous muscular body. Beautiful skin. She took her breast in her hand and bent over me and started to rub her nipple on my clit. It was one of the most erotic things I’ve ever experienced in my life. I’d never put those two body parts together. She switched sides, sliding back and forth until her whole chest was wet from my pussy. She rubbed me like this.” Eliza took her right breast in her hand, leaned over Andrew, and rubbed her nipple over and around the head of his cock. She rose up on her knees as she slowly squeezed out the silky, clear fluid, nature’s thoughtful lubricant; it came in two glistening dewdrops, one after the other. She licked it up, swirled her tongue around the head. They both watched his penis in her hand, shining from her licks. She got on top of him, squatted, rubbed him against her clitoris. “She reached up to my breasts and started massaging them, squeezing the nipples while still pushing her breast against my cunt.” Andrew took the cue and reached up to massage Eliza’s breasts; she stopped talking.
“Keep talking,” he said. A sharp groan escaped him because Eliza suddenly sat on his cock, swallowed him down, then rose up again and returned to rubbing the head with her clitoris. They watched his penis slide into her. He put his thumb against her clitoris; she moved against it, then repositioned his hand to get the spot just right, and kept going. “Keep talking,” he said, until she couldn’t.
A while later, he whispered, “I want you to come.” As much as he could feel the orgasm increasing the
strength of her thrusts, he saw it rising in her face, almost like pain; he loved how her face changed. Seeing that alteration released the knot of his own lust. He had to hold back, which was difficult when she was on top and so horny. He felt his cock get harder and gripped his stomach muscles, trying to resist the intensity of the pleasure, its inevitable end. If he waited, her orgasm pulled him into his own. That was the wonderful Moebius strip of their best sex, of any good sex, he supposed, like Eliza feeling in her own breasts what Thalia felt; his body spiralled into her body, turned back into his own body, spiralled into hers, leapt through him extravagantly, literally, ecstatically out of him. They turned and turned in the air, on the bed, the rest of the room gone, the world disappeared. She was still coming when he came with a yell, so unexpected and unlike him that the noise startled them both. Aftershocks surged through their bodies, that shuddering, aching pleasure. The curtains beyond the bed reappeared; the walls re-formed around them.
Then Eliza started to cry.
33
Not Henry
STILL ON TOP OF HIM, SHE THRUST HER FACE INTO THE pillow so she could make some noise. Her crying pushed his penis out of her body. He quelled the instinctive desire to leap up and go wash himself off. It should be, he knew, a universal rule for men to never leave a woman who is having a post-coital cry. She was not typically an after-sex weeper, yet she was sobbing now, so hard that he felt not only confused but worried. He couldn’t figure out where she had gone.
And then he did. She moved off him, curled over on her side, away from him, and continued crying. He lay beside her, the length of his hot body pressed against the cooler side of hers, his hand on her jutting hip. He couldn’t help himself from admiring the dip of her waist, the muscles tightening and releasing in her back, over her rib cage, following the jagged loop of her breath. They were similar, he thought, distractedly, distracting himself from his own realization, distancing himself with the interesting idea of the similarity between orgasm and crying. First there must be tension, physical and emotional, then the contractions rise, culminate, release. The throat, the vaginal canal: they looked extraordinarily similar when viewed through a scope. Where had he seen the scans compared? A biology class? An article in a science magazine? He kept his hand on her back, agitated by this burst of grief, or whatever it was, but showing nothing. He wanted to be calm for her.
She cried and cried. He waited until she was done. She released her head from its hiding place in the pillow, but turned her face away from him, which confirmed his suspicion. “You still long for her, don’t you?”
“Can you give me a Kleenex, please?”
He whisked one out of the box on the bedside table and handed it to her. She blew her nose, noisily. She rolled over on her back, eyes shut. He knew his dogged patience was a gift here. Waiting was part of mathematics, attending the problem silently, approaching the work repeatedly, from different angles. A mathematician had to be interested in the problem. He had to love the problem. “Is that it? You’re still thinking of Thalia. Right?”
“I’m remembering…what happened after.”
“So what happened?”
“When the horse threw me. The way we were attacked by those stupid village guys.”
“What? You told me that some kids on motorcycles scared the horses.”
“I never told you the whole story. They followed us on their motorcycles. Three of them. In a little valley close to an old monastery. Thalia and I were going there for a picnic. That seemed to make them angry. They wouldn’t pass us, so we turned up a little donkey track, off the main road. They followed us into a field. They were yelling at Thalia, taunting her. They started driving in a circle around us, getting closer and closer, laughing. I couldn’t understand everything they said, but it was nasty. It was…We backed ourselves up against a fence, trying to slow the horses down, and to see the road, if anyone was coming. But the whole place was deserted. When my horse started rearing up, they yelled harder. They loved it.”
“And then?”
“I went flying. Landed on the stone fence, started screaming. Lucky I fell on my shoulder, not my head. Or my back. I was screaming because it was excruciating but also because I was scared to death.” She covered her hands with her face, rubbed her wet eyes. “I was afraid of what they would do to her. To us.”
“But they left.”
“Thalia told them she was going to report them to the police and they would be charged with assaulting a tourist. They roared off, laughing.”
“And you rode back to the village.”
“There was no other way to get there.”
“Then you left the island.”
“Soon after, yes. I left the island. And I left Thalia.”
“Are you…regretting that? All these years later?” Both of them could hear the genuine puzzlement in his voice, and something else, too: hurt or fear.
“I—no. No. But she was so wrecked. She loved me. But I couldn’t do it.”
“I’ve never heard you talk about it like this. Has the whole thing with Sophie reminded you? You were so upset about Janet’s reaction.” She was silent. Andrew felt the insistent pressure of unspoken words in the air. “Is there something else?”
Eliza stared up at the ceiling for another full inhalation. Exhalation. She said, “I’m very attracted to that woman from the pool.”
“Oh. The tall one. Who shaved her legs that time.”
“Yes.”
To clarify how well he remembered, he added, “The one who bent over.” He thought, Do I want to know the details? Aloud: “I don’t want to know the details.”
But he did. He shared with Eliza a meaningful attention to detail. It was a predilection that united them. They both examined and figured out the puzzle: Eliza with her business, Andrew with mathematics. It was a physical experience for him, as though he could feel the electric charges in his cerebral cortex, those microscopic synapses snapping together, making a map of sense. He followed the line of Eliza’s crazed busy-ness into the boys’ regressive behaviours—more bickering and crying, essentially—straight into his own gut, the discomfort he felt at the distance between them, as though, when they spoke to one another, it was muffled, underwater.
The path was made suddenly clear, not through the numbers he loved for their deceptive absolutism but through words, which defined humans as humans. And—he carried on resolutely with the formulation—enabled us to lie. Humans were the only species capable of lying, right? All her extra time at work.
I’m very attracted to that woman from the pool. It made perfect sense.
Farther north—at night the sound came clearly through the open window—a freight train went by, beating steadily over steel ties, rattling its low, industrial music down the warm streets. Both of them thought of Jake, who loved the toy trains and wooden tracks that Marcus hadn’t been interested in.
“I wonder if obsession is genetic,” Eliza said.
“Are you obsessed by her?”
She heard the anger in his voice.
“I was thinking of Jake’s little trains. And that railway crossing that he loves us to drive through. You know, just off Dupont Street. I hope he doesn’t grow up to be a trainspotter.” She had not planned her confession. But somehow the sex, conjuring up Thalia, Janet finding out about Sophie: it was all right here. An invisible woman lived with her. With all of them. It was not Shar. Eliza was the invisible woman. That is what lying does, she realized. It erases you.
She turned toward him and put her hand on his side, which he allowed. She felt the span of ribs there, beneath his cooling skin; the guilt squeezed, viselike, on her throat.
Andrew said, “It makes sense, these past few months. That afternoon, when Kiki called me. I knew she was upset about something else, too. After she hung up, I stood there with the phone in my hand, wondering what was going on. Does she know?”
“No. I haven’t told anyone. Maybe she suspects.”
He glared at the ceiling.
/>
“Andrew, I’m sorry. I—yes. We’ve…”
“You’ve slept with her. You should be able to say it. Just say it.”
“Yeah, I’ve slept with her.”
“How many times?”
It was past the point of keeping track. “Many times. I’m sorry.”
Sorry. What a joke, he thought. He was conscious of wanting to feel furious at her, and sorry almost opened the gates. The dangerous flood was somewhere on the other side of that useless word. She had lied to him. Months of deception. Time stolen from him, from the boys. From her own work. “When did it start?”
“Mid-January. No, February.”
“Four months of lying. Impressive.” He swore quietly. “Do you want to separate?”
“No.” It was too small, the sound. She raised her voice. “No. That has never even crossed my mind. I love you. But…But I…I was feeling desperate for more physical contact. The first time I met her, there was an immediate attraction. I woke up. I haven’t felt this way for so long.”
He clenched his jaw. Unclenched. He would not swear. He was not going to swear. “How can you be so fucking selfish? I can’t believe this. Do you think you’re still a single thirty-year-old fucking boys at the restaurant? Life is more than sex.”
“This is not the same as that. And there’s no need to bring up the past. I was single then and I had lovers. So what? Life does involve sex. But you’re not that interested anymore.”
“Fuck off!” He yanked the sheet over himself and sat up. “As if I never touch you! Was what we just did so awful? We’ve had this conversation a thousand times. We have two small kids. I have a back injury. What am I supposed to do?”
“Why don’t you just admit it? Sex is not as important to you as it is to me.”
The Change Room Page 25
