Sarah's Window (15 page)

John slept on the sofa in his study that night and woke around four in the morning and worked for twelve hours straight. He needed to get out of the house after that, so he walked up the street and over a few blocks to Broadway and got himself something to eat at Hannah's Cafe. He wandered up and down Broadway a little, then went back home where it was cool and turned on the television and watched the evening news.

Around nine-thirty he called her. There was no answer, and so he got in his car and drove over there again. This time there was a dim light shining from her window.

He knocked on the door but there was no reply. Jack's truck was gone and he guessed she was alone. He went back down the stairs and stood out on the wet grass and called out her name. After a moment there was a shadow at the window, and she drew back a curtain and peered out.

"Sarah?"

"John!"

"May I come up?"

"Of course. Door's open. Come on in."

The living room was dark and he tripped over Ruth's shoe boxes stacked on the floor in the hallway. She heard the clatter and his confused muttering as he came up the stairs, and she laughed.

She wore a white summer dress and stood barefoot in the middle of the floor with a book in her hand. A soft, muted light came from a lamp on a nightstand beside her bed. John noticed the crib against the wall.

"Is he asleep?" he asked, keeping his voice low.

"Yes."

"Am I disturbing you?"

She did not answer right away, but dropped the book onto the nightstand and looked back up at him. "No, of course not. I was just trying to tidy up a bit."

"I came by last night."

"You did?"

"Your grandfather didn't tell you?"

"No, he didn't."

Sarah avoided his eyes and pulled up an old wicker chair for him to sit on.

"Sit down."

But he remained standing, a little more relaxed now, finally tearing his eyes away from her and turning his attention to the mural.

"You've finished."

"Not really. But I needed to move everything in. Couldn't take forever."

"It looks so different."

"Yes, it does," she said brightly.

"My God," he whispered.

"What?"

He shook his head, mouth agape. The figures were only lightly sketched and filled in with pale gouache, nothing like the vivid hues of the original, but even without all this detail she had managed to capture the spirit of the work.

"I was just playing. Really. Having fun with it."

His eyes fell back to her, and then her smile faded.

"Can I offer you something to drink?"

He hesitated. "No," he said at last. Then, "Sure. Why not?"

She laughed. "It was only a gesture."

"I understand."

At that moment he gave in, stood in the middle of the room with his head lowered and his hands on his hips.

"Sarah," he whispered. "I took marriage vows. And I take them seriously. I've broken them in the past. But I did it thoughtlessly." He lifted his eyes and met her gaze. "If I had known I would ever feel about a woman the way I feel now, I never would have married."

She crossed the room to him, and he drew her into his arms. They stood in the dim light and held each other in a tender embrace.

Nothing more was said. Slowly, his lips found her forehead and her hair, and his fingers brushed back a curl and he kissed the top of her ear. Her hands moved slowly over his body, over the rounded curve of his shoulders and down his back and around his waist. When he tried to speak she closed his lips with a kiss. Deftly, she worked her hand under his belt. He groaned softly, and she quickly unfastened his belt and opened bis trousers. He groaned again and whispered her name.

She drew him over to the bed and lifted her white skirt, raising a bare
leg,
and eased herself down on top of him.

Never had
he
experienced the kind of loss
of
self
he
felt just then; he thought he knew love, assumed he had known passion, deep in his heart had no great regard for either, until this moment. He gave himself over to her and she swept him away, obliterating all he thought
he
knew about himself.

In the dim lamplight, with the cool night breeze fluttering the curtains from time to time and the cicadas harping senselessly outdoors, they lay naked on her narrow bed and completed what had begun in heart and mind.

The pleasure they gave each other that evening was the greatest either of them had ever known, and it was given with such full hearts, and yet achieved so simply and naturally. All of John's anxieties vanished; he sensed it was not so much that he was in the hands of a greatly experienced lover, but that he was in the hands of a woman who was capable of great love. He knew it from the way her eyes sank into his when he rolled her onto her back and she grew so terribly still, as if she were listening with her entire body when he entered her, and reading his heart through his eyes.

For a long while afterward they lay wrapped in each other's arms. He kissed the sweat from between her breasts, and she raised her head and swept back her hair across the pillow. He lifted himself on one elbow so he could see her better in the dim light, and then her eyes and the way she moved told him she wanted him again. He found himself aroused, not gradually but quickly, and he laughed a little, surprised at himself, but she did not laugh. There was an urgency that overtook them then, and their bodies were wet from sweat and she gasped and closed her eyes and raised herself to him, begging him to look at her body as they made love a second time.

This time her pleasure exploded in cries she had to stifle against his shoulder. When he had finished he looked down at her face and saw tears in her eyes. He took her in his arms and cradled her against his body and kissed her and held her, and still not a word passed between them.

She awoke first, and she gently roused him. He had been sleeping deeply, more soundly than he had slept in months, and for the first few seconds he did not know where he was. Then he realized he was with Sarah, and he opened his eyes.

"You must go," she whispered. She was caressing his face with her fingers and he found her lips and kissed her deeply.

"Really," she repeated, pulling back from the kiss. "It's almost five. It'll be getting light soon. You have to go."

"When can I be with you again?"

He saw by the look in her eyes what the answer would be even before she whispered it.

"Never."

She sat up, swung her feet over the side of the bed, and sat quietly for a moment, feeling his hand caress her waist and her hips. Then she stood and he watched while she pulled her dress over her head and walked toward the bathroom.

When she came back he was dressed and leaning
over
the crib, watching Will sleep. She led him quietly down the stairs and kissed him softly goodbye, and waited while he walked barefoot down the front walk with his shoes in his hand. When the taillights disappeared from sight, she shut the front door and went back upstairs to bed.

Nancy Wilde was surprised to find her daughter-in-law already up, sitting in the hearth room with the morning paper spread across the coffee table and a mug of coffee in her hand.

"You're up early."

"John called," Susan said, looking up from the paper.

"I didn't hear the phone."

"He called on my cell phone."

"So early? Where is he?"

"He's home."

"In San Francisco?"

"Cottonwood Falls."

Nancy was pouring herself a glass of orange juice, and she glanced over the counter and said with a twinge of surprise, "I thought he wasn't due back until tomorrow."

"He wasn't."

"And he didn't come by here?"

"Got in too late, he said." Susan set down her coffee. "He wants me to come home."

Nancy came around the counter into the hearth room. "Have you finished with the front page?"

"Right there."

Nancy set down her juice and retrieved the paper from the floor. "If he wants you home, then you should go home." She settled into an armchair opposite Susan. "When's your mother coming back?"

"Not for a while, I think." They never spoke about Clarice's problem, and Susan had not told them her mother had gone into rehab. Susan shook her head in dismay. "I just don't think I can handle it yet."

Nancy watched without comment while her daughter-in-law rose to get herself another cup of coffee. Susan paused with the carafe in her hand, set it down, and looked at her mother-in-law. "He just doesn't understand," she said in a strained whisper.

"About the baby?"

"Yes."

"How did you leave it?"

"Unresolved."

"Then go home and resolve it."

"If I go back there I'll have to take Will back. And I'm not ready. Not physically, not emotionally."

"If your husband wants you home, then you go home. The rest, you'll work out." When Susan did not respond, she said, "He's trying to tell you something."

Susan looked up in alarm. "What do you mean?"

Nancy Wilde was not comfortable with intimacy, even among women, and when her daughter-in-law had settled back down opposite her and sat peering at her over the rim of her coffee cup with a worried frown, when Nancy finally spoke, it was with great difficulty.

"Once, before John was born," she began, and she grew very still. "Actually it was right after Nick was born—Armand started behaving strangely. I can't tell you precisely in what way, not now, although at the time I could have chronicled every little thing. The most minute details, the things he did differently for no reason whatsoever. For a while I thought it was just me. You know, postpartum stress. That kind of thing. But my instincts told me otherwise.

"Then, one weekend we had one of his doctoral students and her husband over for dinner. Armand did that very rarely. He didn't socialize with many of his students. Right then and there, that should have tipped me off. But there was some justification for it—I don't recall now what he said. Anyway, that evening, during dinner, we had a terrible blizzard. Snow just wouldn't stop. Their car got snowed in. Armand invited them to stay the night."

She removed her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes, then put them back on. When she spoke at last it was with averted eyes, and her voice was forced.

"That night your father-in-law slept with his underpants on. He has never slept with his underpants on. Even when we had family visiting, or other guests. He had never done it before that night, and never did it again. And there were other things that night that were different between us."

Susan left that morning. She packed up her bags and drove back to Cottonwood Falls in the new Range Rover she had bought to replace the Land Cruiser.

She found John working in his office. He smiled up at her, and she thought she read an eagerness in his eyes that looked a little like apprehension, and she felt a faint stab of fear.

She leaned down and kissed him on the lips.

"You're back," he said.

"Yes. You moaned loud enough."

"I'm glad," he said. "I've missed you."

"Have you had lunch?"

"No."

"Tuna sandwich sound good?"

"Sounds very good."

Around one in the afternoon she took a tuna sandwich in to his office. As usual, she quietly set down the tray and started to leave, but he turned away from his work and asked her to wait a minute, said he had something he wanted to discuss.

She sat down on the arm of the sofa.

"Yes?"

"I've given a lot of thought to all this," he said.

"You mean Will."

"Yes."

He told her he thought he could finish his paper this weekend, and then they could bring Will back home.

"This isn't a discussion, then."

"Let's just get him back. See how things go. I'll have more time now. I can help out. I'll look after him."

"And if it doesn't work out?"

"I think it will."

Then he turned away, back to his calculations. Susan felt an odd relief, as if she had been expecting something else, something much worse than this. She sensed this was not the time to contradict him, thought it perhaps best to placate him a little for now. She would find time over the next few days, draw him out, make him see how impossible it was.

She rose and placed a hand on his shoulder.

"You really want him badly, don't you?"

"Yes. I do."

She gave his shoulder a slight squeeze, a conciliatory sign, and turned to leave.

"Wait," he said. Then, rifling under a sprawl of papers, he held out a postcard to her. "This came in the mail yesterday."

She took it from him. "What is it?"

"An invitation."

She glanced at the postcard, a rather spectacular image, lightning splitting the skies over open prairie, then turned it over and read the handwritten message.

"A barbecue?"

"Memorial Day. That's this weekend."

"Who's Billy Moon?"

"Sarah Bryden's boyfriend."

"I didn't know she had a boyfriend."

"We don't have to go. I just thought..." He shrugged. He had still not looked up to meet her gaze. "She's done a lot for Will. It would be a nice gesture. To accept."

"Will she have the baby with her?"

"I'm sure she will."

Susan gave an exasperated sigh and rolled her eyes. "God, this is so uncomfortable."

"We don't have to go. Your call."

"Let me give it some thought."

Over the next few days Susan observed him closely and concluded her mother-in-law was wrong. She noticed nothing unusual about her husband's behavior. He was as he had always been: preoccupied with his work, distracted around the house, little inclined to make love.