The Innocent Sleep

by Karen Perry

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  * * *

  He took me through unfamiliar streets. We passed strangers who barely registered us. My cheeks were burning. I was terrified we would meet someone who knew me, who knew you. He held my hand the whole time. His step was longer than mine, and I had to hurry to keep up. Just once, he turned and looked at me, and I managed the briefest of smiles.

  At that point, I still had a choice. I had not strayed so far that I couldn’t go back. The most I was guilty of was an error of judgment, a momentary weakness. My infidelity did not go beyond the holding of hands. My mind was flying on ahead, tumbling recklessly into the future, into the next few hours. I allowed myself to be led in that way, without question; I was surrendering to my desires, and to his. I was no innocent. I was not naïve. I knew well what would come next. When he led me up the stairs and into the dim shadowy space of his rooms, I was breathless with expectation. When he pushed the door shut behind him and took hold of me roughly, slamming me against the wall, and I felt the length of his body pressing urgently against mine, I knew that every word spoken, every look exchanged between us from the moment we’d first met, had been leading, inevitably, inexorably, to this.

  * * *

  There was a light on when I got home. I saw it as I reached the return and climbed the last few steps. I stopped at the door, taking one breath and then another, trying to calm myself. My hand went to my hair, and I smoothed it down, arranging it about my shoulders. I touched my neck, the place where it pulsed, where he had fixed his mouth. I touched it as though my fingers could trace the raised outline of a kiss, sweet and savage.

  I pushed open the door. The light was too bright; it hurt my eyes and I turned it off. The room was empty. I put down my bag and crossed the floor to the bedroom. You were passed out, Harry, splayed across the bed, lying over the covers. I made no attempt to move you. When I climbed into bed, you didn’t stir. There was whiskey on your breath. I looked at you through the darkness. Your animated face was at peace.

  Yes, there was guilt. It lingered, but it was not enough. I pulled my gaze away from you and turned over onto my side. I think I slept.

  * * *

  The next time, I went straight to his apartment, where he was waiting for me. As soon as we were upstairs, the door closed behind us, he grabbed my arm and spun me around, his face on mine, hungry, greedy. He peeled my T-shirt off, then slid my skirt up my thighs, pushing me back onto the bed. We did not speak. His desire was urgent and tinged with aggression; it veered toward violence. He wrapped his hand in a swatch of my hair and yanked my head back, so that my neck was arched and offered up to him, and he sank his teeth into it. It left a mark that I would have to hide later.

  The sun had moved across, leaving the room dim and shadowy. In the distance there were sounds of traffic, the angry whine of a scooter. But in that small, hot room, with its blank walls and twisted sheets, there was silence. My breath and his, entwined, labored, gasping. He reached up to cover my mouth.

  * * *

  In company, I did not look at him. I refused to catch his eye. I laughed at other people’s jokes, smiled at whoever was talking. I engaged in conversation furiously, manically. I heard my own laughter, and it sounded false. The ghost of his mouth was on my breast, sweat on my back. My conscience like an iron band tightening about my head.

  * * *

  I lost interest in my art. Blank canvases stared back at me, accusingly. The brushes felt wrong in my hand. The hours passed like slow beasts. I was bored and restless. I couldn’t see anything clearly; everything was cloudy, blurred. My faith in myself was draining away.

  * * *

  I dropped a jar of olives. The glass shattered into pieces on the tiled floor, the fruits careering off into every corner, like marbles bouncing and rolling.

  “What is with you?” you asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re not yourself.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’re distracted. And clumsy.”

  Your eyes swept over the mess on the floor.

  “Are you okay?”

  Your hand on my back was solicitous and concerned.

  “I’m fine, Harry,” I said, and moved away.

  I bent down to hide my face from you, kneeling to clean up the mess.

  * * *

  A darkening room, a hush drawing over it. I lay beneath the slow whir of the fan, my head resting on his chest, his hand in my hair, idly stroking. A brief moment of peace before I would have to rise up from those sheets and step into my clothes and go out into the dry night, leaving him behind me.

  “I want you to stay,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “I can’t.”

  His silence was bullish, irritated. His body remained still, and yet I felt the stirrings of discontent within it.

  This was a new thing. This growing need. This desire to linger afterward. I felt the pull of him. My leave-taking was draining, weakening. I felt myself breaking up into pieces, disassembling. He had brought me to this.

  “You could leave him,” he said.

  The words hung over us, pulsing in the dry heat of the bedroom.

  * * *

  How long did it go on? A couple of months? Ten weeks? Not long. Not in the grand scheme of things, in the course of a whole adult life. Why is it that we measure our love affairs in temporal terms? A marriage that lasts forty years is viewed a success. But some things that are short can be more meaningful, in some ways more lasting than those that stretch out for a lifetime.

  * * *

  An evening at home. Cozimo came to our apartment for dinner. You and he sat and discussed a forthcoming trip to Seville while I prepared the meal. Lamb stew, dumplings, my fingers covered in flour. Lately, I had been concentrating my domestic efforts in the kitchen. Some need to nourish you, build you up, fortify you for what might break between us. Again, the guilt—it presented itself in strange ways.

  I could hear your voices; I half-listened to the conversation, my attention drifting between the rooms, until my interest was snagged by a name.

  “Garrick gave it to me,” Cozimo said.

  I heard you let out a whistle of appreciation.

  “Jameson 1780,” you said. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

  “If you say so. I never developed much of a taste for whiskey. But I have never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, either, so…”

  His low voice, a dry chuckle.

  “So what was the occasion for the gift?”

  “He was clearing out his things. Giving away anything he didn’t want to take with him.”

  I stopped what I was doing. I stood dead still, my whole being straining toward this conversation.

  “He’s left?”

  “Yes. I understand he took the boat last night.”

  “Do you know where he’s gone?”

  “He didn’t say. Home, perhaps.”

  “Wherever that is.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Do you think he will come back?”

  I ached to hear the reply, but there was none. Not a verbal one, anyway. A shake of the head, perhaps, or a shrug of the shoulders.

  “Well, that’s just like him, isn’t it?” you said, a sneer in your voice. “The mystery man. Disappearing without a trace.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what was his deal, Cozimo, hmm?”

  “I really could not say. But I think … I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I think there is a woman involved.”

  “Really?” You perked up, interested now.

  In the kitchen, my legs began to tremble.

  “Who? Someone here?”

  “No. Well, I’m sure he’s had his little trysts here. Who hasn’t? No, I mean back home, wherever home is for him. I always had the impression that he had someone waiting for him.”

  A noise escaped from me. A
cry of anguish, of betrayal. It was involuntary, and I put my hand to my mouth to stifle it.

  “Let me get some glasses,” Cozimo said.

  I turned away as he stepped behind me. I busied myself chopping onions so that he wouldn’t see my distress, my shaking hands.

  He fumbled in a cupboard, searching for glasses. I couldn’t look at him. There was an ache in my stomach. I wanted to bend over and cry out. I heard the clink of glasses on the countertop, the unscrewing of a bottle. His hand was on my shoulder.

  “An aperitif, my dear?”

  I looked at it, the gleam of light through the honey-colored whiskey, the sweet, musky smell of it in my nostrils, and a wave of nausea surged up from deep inside me. I barely made it to the sink before I threw up.

  * * *

  The pain was physical, acute. A wound that had split open. The days stretched out endlessly. I was at turns furious, then weepy, then panicked. The sight of food turned my stomach. I was exhausted all the time. I called in sick to work and spent hours wrapped in the blankets, lying facedown on our bed. I was too tired, too wrung out, to cry anymore.

  You worried. You sat on the edge of the bed, testing my brow for a fever.

  “We should get a doctor.”

  “What for?” I asked. “It’s just a flu or something.”

  “You should eat something.”

  “Later, maybe.”

  “Some tea and toast, at least.”

  “Please, Harry, I just need to rest.”

  What I wanted was to be left alone in a darkened room to wallow. I was depressed, brokenhearted. A doctor couldn’t do anything about that.

  You looked down at me, worry lines furrowing your brow.

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  As soon as you said it, I knew it was true.

  “Are you?” you repeated, eyebrows raised.

  I drew myself up onto my elbows, stared at the pillow, furiously calculating dates.

  Your hand was on my back. I turned to look at you, a slow smile starting on your face.

  “Robin?” you asked softly. “Could you be?”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “Fuck!” you exclaimed, running your hands through your hair. You couldn’t chase the grin from your face.

  “Harry…”

  “How late are you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you are late?”

  “Yes, I think so.”—Although, in truth, I had never been this late before.

  You were up off the bed, reaching for your wallet on the floor.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Getting a test.”

  “No, wait…”

  I watched you checking for cash, then stuffing the wallet in your back pocket. It was all happening way too fast. My mind was a tangle of questions; it teemed with worries, and possible explanations.

  “Best to just find out, eh?”

  You leaned down and kissed me—a long, lingering kiss. I felt your lips full and hard against my mouth, your hand holding the back of my head, fingers in my hair. When you drew away, you looked deep into my eyes, and I got a glimpse of all the love and hope that lay within you. I wanted you to leave quickly, before the bitter pang of guilt came over me. I waited to hear the door slam, then sank my head into the pillow.

  * * *

  It was love. Pure, untainted, and frighteningly powerful. I looked upon his small, triangular, catlike face, his curled fingers, the soft silky hair of his head, and I couldn’t believe my luck. He was so utterly perfect. Throughout my pregnancy, guilt had hovered close to me, a hangover of my Catholic upbringing. I couldn’t forget what I had done. As the baby grew within me, so did my conviction that there would be something wrong with him or her. An underlying illness or some deformity. Punishment for my terrible deceit.

  The moment when I might have told you came and went. You fell in love with my pregnancy so fast, fixated upon the child growing in my womb. That the child might not be yours never entered your head. I found it unbearable, at times, the naked love you felt for this unborn baby, your raw excitement at the prospect of becoming a father. For a man who had lived his whole life endeavoring to be free of the shackles of ordinary commitments, you showed no signs of panic at the impending responsibilities, but, rather, embraced it wholeheartedly. The prospect enlivened and inspired you.

  I never heard from Garrick. I couldn’t understand how he could go and not say good-bye. He had disappeared like a wisp of smoke in the wind. The pain lingered, then lessened, and when I looked at my newborn son, I saw him there. It was unmistakable. His appearance only confirmed what I had already guessed. I had been careless for months before anything started with Garrick. Careless, and yet nothing had happened. All the occasions of our lovemaking—yours and mine, Harry—had never produced a child. And then the month of my affair, a month where you and I hardly seemed to touch each other, let alone make love, those precious weeks when I gave myself wholeheartedly to my lover, that was the time I conceived. It could not be a coincidence. When I looked at Dillon’s face, I knew as much. That chin dimple, those wide, staring eyes. His features were soft, but they held the promise of sharpness in the future, when all the baby fat had fallen away. I saw it so clearly, but to my surprise and relief, no one else identified the likeness. Least of all you.

  “He’s like his mother,” you said proudly whenever someone peered inquisitively into the bassinet.

  He had Garrick’s coloring, which was also mine. In time, people remarked that he was like me, with a trace of you about his mouth, a theory I was all too willing to go along with. Even you proclaimed to see it. Funny, how the mind plays these little tricks.

  Dillon. He was my consolation. And I felt I could not have wished for anything better, or more perfect. I could not have loved anyone more. I thanked the gods and my lucky stars for the escape I had had, for letting me get away with it, and being rewarded with my beautiful child. What I didn’t know was that my punishment lay in wait for me, that it would come for me when I least expected it.

  * * *

  On a warm breezy afternoon in the spring of 2003, I walked onto the terrace of a beachside café and saw him there. He was sitting with Cozimo, Elena, and Blanca, half reclining, his shades pushed back off his forehead—as if he had never left. I stopped behind a chair. My heart gave out a single deadened thump, and then I recovered.

  “Hey,” he said, rising out of his chair.

  “Hello again,” I said. “Please don’t get up.”

  Cozimo had leaned forward, arms outstretched, beckoning to Dillon, who dropped my hand and tottered toward his favored uncle, smiling as he was swept up into the old guy’s arms and plonked firmly in his lap. The others were making a fuss over him as they always did, and I was grateful for the distraction. It allowed me time to get over my shock, to pull myself together.

  His eyes were on me, and I looked up to meet them in a challenging way. I was deeply unsettled, my anger at his leaving flaring up suddenly, bringing a dull pain from the past. His eyes flickered briefly toward the boy, then back to me.

  “So, you’re back then?” I said brightly, casually.

  “For a little while.”

  I nodded sagely. I couldn’t think of what to say. For business or pleasure? Are you traveling alone or in company? Any question I might ask, no matter how innocent, could betray a neediness on my part, an old desire. So I said nothing to him. Instead, I took a seat next to Elena. She was only too happy to share with me the latest crisis in her love life. We became absorbed in this half-whispered conversation. I couldn’t look at him, and yet I was aware of him all the time, aware of that lean, angular frame slouching in his chair, aware of those deep-set, light-colored eyes fixed on the ocean. Occasionally, he made a remark or offered an opinion, always in that slow drawl of his. Calmness emanated from him, or was it boredom? I envied his coolness, his nonchalance, his customary reserve, while inside I churned with emotion.

  More than t
wo years had passed since last I had seen him, since we had sat in such close proximity to each other, and when I thought of the intimacy that had once existed between us, replaced now by this cold and awkward distance, I felt overwhelmed.

  Dillon was restless. He had abandoned Cozimo and was looking for some way to escape. He whined when corralled back to the group, and I took this opportunity to leave.

  “He needs some exercise,” I explained.

  “Do you want me to take him?” Elena asked.

  “No, no. That’s okay. I’ll bring him down to the beach.”

  We went, the two of us, hand in hand. He jabbered away in his own language to me and to the stuffed bear he took everywhere. I could barely answer him, could barely listen, so consumed was I by what had just happened.

  It was cooler by the sea. We kicked off our shoes and felt the sand warm between our toes. The wind whipped our hair about our faces, and I pulled a strand of it from my mouth. His hair was long, too long for a boy, but I couldn’t bear to cut it yet, the springy golden locks that curled about his neck. He played at gathering shells, putting them in his shoes and mine, then spilling them out and starting afresh. I sat in the sand and watched him. He chattered as he played, a curious babble with intonations he mimicked from my own speech, peppered with the occasional word I recognized: Mama, Dada, Didi—the name he’d given himself.

  A shadow fell across us. I knew who it was before I looked up. I had known all along that he would follow us down here, that he would seek me out.

  “Is it okay if I sit here?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  He sat next to me but not too close, as if sensing my wariness.

  “He’s cute,” he said, nodding toward Dillon.

  I didn’t answer. I stayed within the walls of injured silence.

  Dillon regarded him strangely, giving him that guarded look he treated all strangers to. And then he decided to trust this man, for he came forward and offered him Ted, his best buddy, the toy he had had since birth.