“Stop, Ann,” I said, finally. “You’re getting too…”
“Close?”
“No. Strange. You’re hurting me.”
“This shouldn’t hurt. You remember it all anyhow. I’m telling you what I remember. I remember being in my bed and hearing noises from the downstairs of a house that I don’t live in anymore.”
Her eyes were bright, alert, but she didn’t seem to be using them. They shone like those lights people leave on in empty houses to fool burglars.
“I slipped out of bed and put on my robe, that blue-quilted robe, a winter robe but it was all I had. In one of Hugh’s dresser drawers there was an old hickory-handled buck knife—one of his many many boyhood souvenirs—and I thought I’d grab it in case I needed to stab someone. What a laugh. I was making no noise at all, less than a cloud, floating through the bedroom, into the hall, onto the landing of the stairs. It was more like an acid high than marijuana. I could see everything. I had the night vision of an electric cat. The ripples in the wallpaper, the scratches on the banister, everything.
“Including you, the both of you.”
“Please don’t, Ann,” I said. I could feel her dismantling my memory of that night, tilting it, enlarging it, until it was no longer mine.
“Oh stop, don’t be so damned squeamish. There’s nothing in this that’s going to hurt you. And you know there’s no one else to tell it to. Are you embarrassed? You explode like a bomb in the middle of my life and
you’re
embarrassed? I didn’t get very close, you know. I was much too surprised, and scared. I only made it halfway down the stairs and if it wasn’t for the fireplace I might not have even known you two were making love. I saw Jade’s hands on your shoulders and the tops of her knees, the way they were raised…”
I lowered my head onto the table and my arm knocked over my wineglass. Ann righted the glass and continued.
“But the thing I noticed most was your clothes. They weren’t strewn all over the place. They were nicely folded. Which meant you both knew exactly what you wanted and didn’t have to pretend to mindlessness. Oh, I was so touched by that, you have no idea. I honestly was.
“So up I went and crept back into bed. You never knew I was there. Isn’t that so?”
I raised my head. My eyes felt fifty degrees warmer than the rest of my body. I reached out for Ann’s hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry? What for?”
I shook my head. “For everything. For being at your house that night, making too much noise, making you see us. I don’t know.”
“Then listen to me, if you are. And think of me getting into bed with Hugh after seeing you and Jade downstairs. I was shaking and my mind was a tornado. I moved so close to him and God did I feel bad he hadn’t stripped down because I would have given a lot to feel his nakedness just then. I didn’t want to be alone. But you see I must have been radiating desire. Because suddenly Hugh stirred. His snoring stopped and he turned toward me and his eyes were slowly coming open. I touched his smooth, smooth face and he kissed me and when he kissed me I held my breath and I heard the floors squeaking downstairs. Hugh put his hands between my legs and that certainly finished the job of waking him up. I felt ready. For him. We’d been making love for eighteen years and we knew each other’s signals like high-wire acrobats—only we were low-wirers and we weren’t acrobats. Anyhow, I said I’d be right back and Hugh smiled because this meant I was going to put in my diaphragm. I walked across the bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom, listening for you two downstairs, and trying not to, and feeling slightly crazy and close to tears.
“And the bathroom was freezing. I was naked and shivering and those glass shelves Hugh put up looked to be bursting with the life of my family—deodorants and foot powders, shampoos, bubble bath, brushes and combs, Stimudents, a plastic frog, those hand-muscle flexers Sammy liked to squeeze when he soaked in the tub. It all looked so immense and beautiful; I stared at it with my mouth open, like a miser gawking at his gold. I
never
felt that way about the family; I wasn’t in my normal mind. My diaphragm always was on the second shelf, next to the shampoos, and there it was, as always. Encased in a maroon plastic pouch. I zipped it open, and my heart flipped out. My diaphragm was missing.
“I wasn’t confused over this, at least for not longer than a moment. I remembered hearing Jade going to the bathroom earlier and I realized that she’d gone and taken my diaphragm. Before you came along and relations got a little strained between me and Jade, we used to talk about how alike our bodies were and I suppose she figured what was good enough for me would hold the fort for her. And you, Jewish-radical-rock-and-roll-pot- head, you didn’t even have the brains or the cunning to carry a Trojan in your wallet. God, David, even Sammy was carrying a rubber around, and he was eleven. Look, I was proud of you, even if you were too stupid to plan. At least you were both too steady to risk her getting knocked up. Good for them! I thought, like a ruddy camp counselor. Yet I had to wince. Quite a world of difference separated my battle-weary cervix from Jade’s. It must have hurt like hell and done her no good at all. I mean it was obscene, hilarious, but mostly it was pathetic. I zippered up my little case and then I felt a flash of resentment: how dare she assume I wouldn’t be using my birth control! I ran the water over my hands, dried my hands, and I was trembling with the cold and the damp and from everything I was feeling. I made my way back to bed, wondering what I’d tell Hugh.
“If I’d told him the diaphragm was missing, he would have wanted to know why, and then there was every chance of him thundering down the stairs and doing something about it. And maybe that would have been the best thing. Don’t think I don’t often wonder. If I’d let Hugh in on what I knew about you two, I mean right from the beginning, then maybe everything would have been different. Maybe he would have chased you out of the house. Maybe he could have organized his feelings better when you slowly started moving in with us. He wouldn’t have had to wait until it was too late to take control and then suddenly become a father figure and ban you from our house. Then, it was too late, but that night if I’d told him—who knows what would have changed? But all I thought about was the preciousness of what I’d seen, the two of you holding each other in the corny glow of the fireplace. I wanted that memory and I wanted it to myself. I didn’t want Hugh charging down the stairs. I wanted Hugh to make love to me.
“Which is what he did. We made love and I risked getting pregnant, just as you and Jade made love without any useful protection. What a night of risks! How the souls of the unborn must have hovered over that old house, waiting for the act of inception.”
“I wish she
had
gotten pregnant that night,” I said and then, surprised by the sound of my own voice and surprised at what I’d said, I let out a sob and covered my eyes. The room was moving, not with drunken abandon but slowly, as if the room really
was
moving, through space and time, as all things of course do but which only mad people see.
“I’m sure you do,” said Ann. “But that’s your story and this is mine. It changed everything, that night, everything I believed about making love and Hugh. Because it was never complete, you know. I never ever came and mostly I never got close. Only when I masturbated, but never with Hugh. And of course I blamed him—blamed men, not just Hugh, but the boys I slept with before him and when he was away making the world safe for democracy, all of them, and myself too, but Hugh, mostly I blamed Hugh. For being too small, too fast, too eager, too gentle, too selfish. What difference does it make? I didn’t even try. But that night, I was on fire. And the image of the two of you downstairs burned behind my eyes. Oh God, I was pornographic, moving beneath Hugh and knowing that beneath the two of us were the two of you. I knew I was going to make it and I’d never be able to blame Hugh again because he was perfect. He wasn’t doing anything different; I don’t even know if he was fully awake, but he was perfect. There was no hurry. I knew I was going to come. My legs were turning to water and stone at the same time. For the first time in my life, I was truly indiscreet.”
Abruptly, Ann was silent. She finished the little bit of wine that was left in her glass and then took mine, but it was empty. She looked exhausted. A slight film of perspiration made the powder on her face look porous. For all the fineness of her features, the straightness of her posture, and the persistent delicacy of her gestures, she looked like an abandoned middle-aged woman in a dark warm bar, known by the bartenders and the waiters, short on cash, lonely, garrulous, and letting go.
“There’s a simple law,” she said, leaning forward on one elbow and tossing her napkin onto the table. “Whenever you tell the truth, you’re also confessing. No confession, no truth.”
The waiter had probably been watching us, waiting for a drop in Ann’s intensity. He was at our table now, clearing the dishes and making a point out of checking if any wine had been left at the bottom of either bottle.
“Coffee, dessert?” he said. He was looking at me.
“What time is it, Carlo?” Ann said.
His hands were filled with our dishes but he turned his wrist so Ann could read his watch.
“Oh. Ten to ten. I’ve stood up my date.” She looked worried, even a little scared, but then she said: “Good for me! I haven’t stood anyone up since I was sixteen years old!”
We walked back to her apartment on the chance that her friend was waiting. When we were beneath the awning in front of her building, Ann said, “I’ll faint if he’s still here,” but I couldn’t tell if that would mean joy, surprise, or disappointment. As for me, my own preferences lay buried beneath fatigue and a familiar, yet exhausting, self-envy: the boy who had lived through the evening Ann had described at Pete’s Tavern still reigned within me, but, increasingly, he was
not
me. While I still believed the self who had made love to Jade that night was my best self, it also existed as a kind of younger brother whose exploits, whose flights of ecstasy I was condemned to admire with a kind of brittle, helpless awe.
“Well, he’s not in the lobby,” Ann said. She was walking with a very faint wobble. Every once in a while she touched my arm, as if to right her balance, but there was a shyness in those touches that made each of them noticeable. There was no doorman in sight. Ann opened the door and glanced once over her shoulder. It disturbed me that the habits of caution were now second nature to her. I’d always thought of her as being so safe.
I was feeling lopsided from the wine as well. In the elevator—we stood very far apart—I said, “When we first started smoking grass we never would drink and we put down people who did.”
“That’s when we were Puritans,” Ann said.
“We were Puritans?” I asked.
“Now we’ll do anything to get through a night. You know, I don’t know
why
I’m going up to my apartment. There’s no chance that my friend’s going to be awaiting my return. He’s not the type—that’s the kind of thing
you’d
do.” The elevator stopped; the doors hesitated before sliding open. “We should be out somewhere listening to music,” Ann said.
The hallway was empty, silent. I was a little disappointed her friend wasn’t waiting in front of her door—I would have liked to see him. But my principal emotion was relief. I wouldn’t be sent back to the Hotel McAlpin right away.
“I suppose I should call him,” Ann said, as she let us in. We walked to the front of the apartment and I sat on the sofa while Ann opened her telephone book to find her friend’s number. The sight of that book and knowing that Jade’s number was in it agitated me, but by now I’d been agitated for so long and in so many different ways I was scarcely able to notice it. “One ring,” said Ann, tilting the phone an inch from her ear so I could hear the ringing as a distant purr. “Two rings. Three rings. And…” she hung up the phone. “Free.” She reached into a kitchen cabinet and brought down a pint bottle of tequila and two of those thick, narrow orange-juice glasses you see in old- fashioned diners. “The cleanest of all alcohols,” she said, placing bottle and glasses onto the table. She sat in one of the director’s chairs. “And the most psychedelic. From whiskey comes dreams, from tequila comes visions. It’s liquid hashish.” She poured a modest, reverential amount into both glasses, picked up hers and left mine on the table.
We drank quite a bit of her tequila. Each time she poured some, Ann screwed the cap back onto the bottle, giving it a good hard twist as if she were going to be storing it away for months. I didn’t know if this gesture reflected her material caution or if it was a self-teasing game played by someone with a drinking problem. We also smoked a joint of Ann’s grass—specially grown for her in Vermont by Keith, using top-grade Colombian seeds—and I suppose if she’d had LSD or mescaline on hand we would have taken that, too. It was eleven in the night and the more familiar we became with each other the more solemn and mysterious our connection felt.
“Are you still a fledgling astronomer?” Ann asked me.
“I guess not. I’m just in college, finally. I studied a little astronomy when I was in the hospital but there was a limit how much I could get on my own. It’s complicated.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Sometimes I think I’ll still be an astronomer. But mostly I don’t think about the future.”
“Jade used to be so enchanted with you and your astronomy. She really did believe that you were going to name a star after her. I, on the other hand, didn’t believe in it for a minute. I thought you were taking her to the Planetarium just to have a place to feel her up and not pay for a movie ticket.”
I felt something touch my arm. I looked down but it was just the nerves ticking at the surface of my skin. When I looked back at Ann, her eyes were hazy and a high, warm color was in her face.
We were silent, totally, almost unendurably silent.
Ann poured two more drinks. She smiled and said, “I knew you’d sit in that chair.”
“How?”
She sipped from her glass. “Because you knew I’d sit on the sofa and you don’t think it would be safe to sit next to me.”