She said it as though it had come to her as a complete surprise. Still, I needed to hear her say it.
I’d been wrong about us. We were not Huns. Just two persons who’d never found the confidence to go far enough or know where far enough was. We stopped again and kissed. I recalled my old fantasy. I wanted her naked with me, wanted to see her bare thighs straddle me and, as she’d lean toward me with all her hair in my face and me inside her, watch her pin both my arms down with her knees while she cracked my champagne glass with one hand and with the other cut me with a shard.
I could picture my blood staining the ice and the snowbanks. I liked it.
“Tomorrow can’t be our last day together,” she said.
“Yes, but after tonight, I dread what you’ll think of me.”
“Wait until we hear what you’ll say about me!”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged her shoulders once, released them, then seconds later, as an afterthought, tensed them again. She did that thing with her back again, and once again it moved me. I should have suspected something sooner. She’d been uneasy since we’d left the lake. Now, nearing our hotel, I could sense she was almost reluctant to stop walking. What made me nervous was that I wasn’t feeling nervous at all. I had started wanting her at the lake and didn’t want to lose that impulse. I liked the idea of the glass shard, and the bare knee, and of her mean, bruise-colored lips almost smiling as she made her incision with me still inside her. Would she remember you of every man I’ve known? Would she ask to Englishmuffin me and then beg me to look her in the eyes when we came together?
“The truth is, I’m a bit out of practice,” she finally said, probably sensing where my thoughts were headed. We were sitting on the same side of the bed with our clothes on. She was playing with the cuff of her shirt that was sticking out under the sleeve of her cardigan, which she gave no sign of wanting to remove.
“Out of practice how?” I asked, not sure I had seized her meaning.
She shrugged her shoulders. “We don’t sleep together. Well, we sleep together but not really—you know…”
“Nothing?”
“Well, some, but not really.”
She lifted her face and looked at me. “Sometimes I forget what people do together. Or why they even do it. Plus I’m not sure I may do it for you.”
I couldn’t help reaching out and holding her head between my hands and kissing it again and again. I wanted to hold her, and I wanted to hold her naked, I asked for nothing more. To hug her in bed, to kiss her, and kiss her again and again, until either we made love or fell asleep. She said nothing. Then, out of the blue, “I feel as tense as a virgin—and with you of all people.”
“If you’re a virgin, what am I?” I said to show I had my own reasons to feel uneasy.
“Are we so deeply wounded in our sex?” she asked, knowing I’d remember the words we’d all laughed about over dinner with Manfred and her husband and that had suddenly now acquired a darker meaning.
“I think everyone is wounded in their sex,” I said. “I can’t think of one person who isn’t.”
“Maybe. But not like me.”
I stood up and pulled the blinds wide open to get a better view of the quadrangle. The hotel staff always assumes that people want the curtains shut at night. I liked the view. To see more of it, I turned off the two bedside lights. Whiteness everywhere, and beyond the whiteness, the gray outlines of the gabled houses. There was the lake, there the quadrangle, then the slope that led to that dear old house that had become a Starbucks, there the bar where we’d almost ordered two brandies before walking out, and farther away, Van Speer Observatory, with its quiet library, which stayed open all night and whose lights still glowed tonight as they’d done years before. We had spent our last winter together in that library, heading off to the observatory minutes after dinner, and coming back long after midnight, always becoming tentative as we reached her dorm, which is why we’d slacken our steps once we crossed the quadrangle, naming the nine lampposts after the Muses.
As I looked outside at the tranquil courtyard, it occurred to me that perhaps we had turned the clock further back than we should, for we seemed more timorous and more callow with ourselves, with our bodies, than we’d been back then. Had we become virgins? Or were we like people who have died before their time and are given a second chance by some minor deity, but with so many provisos that the new life feels like a deferred death?
“I think you should come and take a look,” I said. She came next to me by the window. Then, staring out at the moonlit expanse of the snow-decked landscape, she repeated the word: “amazing, amazing, amazing,” not just because the view was breathtaking, but because in that glowing Ethan Frome world nothing had changed in more than one hundred years, the way neither she nor I had really changed since we were here last. “Hold me,” she said, “just hold me.” I wrapped my arms around her. We stood stationary this way, until she put her arm around my waist. And as I held her closer to me, I wanted to feel her skin, and without thinking I began to unbutton my shirt. She did not help me, nor did she seem eager to unbutton her shirt. All she said was “I’ve always loved the way you smell.” I removed my shirt and was about to help her undress. “Just help me forget I’m nervous,” she said. “Look at this, I’m shaking all over.” She asked me to switch off the light in the bathroom, the small night-light as well. When I asked her about birth control, she told me she’d had an operation less than two years earlier and couldn’t have more children. She hadn’t breathed a word of it to me. She could have died and I would never have known. I began making love to her thinking of the child we were never going to have together. She didn’t ask me to look at her, didn’t ask me to stay with her, yet she held my face almost as though she were desperately trying to believe we were actually making love together, waiting for our eyes to lock before she could let herself go and shed habits acquired with someone else. “I’m awkward, I know,” she said. “I need a moment, my love.”
We were not sleepy afterward. We almost laughed when we realized that neither had completely undressed. While taking some of her clothes off to see her naked by the window, I had felt I wasn’t undressing a woman but a child who was reluctant to go to bed but wasn’t putting up a fight because she’d been promised one more story. “It’s been so long since a man took off my clothes,” she said.
“And it’s been ages since I touched a woman.”
“When was the last time?” she asked as she stood up, then went to the bathroom and came out tying her bathrobe.
“Claire, I think.”
“Claire who never says anything?” she exclaimed, totally bewildered. “But why Claire?”
“It just happened.”
I sat down naked on the undone bed, picked up my sweater from the floor, and slipped it back on. She was already sitting cross-legged on the bed. I did the same. I loved that we were talking like this, partly naked.
“So let me ask you this,” she said, as though she were still deliberating the question and hadn’t quite formulated the words. It thrilled me, because something in the way she said So let me ask you this warned me that she had read the answer long, long before putting the question to me. Part of me felt arousal course through my body. How I loved this. She wanted the truth from me, and the truth came with arousal.
“Maybe that drink at the bar wouldn’t have been such a bad idea,” I said.
“Try el minibar.”
I stood up and headed for the minibar, where I found exactly what I was looking for.
“The shag carpeting is,” I said as soon as I hopped back in bed, “questionable.”
“You don’t say.”
“I’m sure there are things buried underfoot—nail clippings, crusts of all species.”
We both grimaced as soon as we spotted each nested plastic cup sealed in its own antiseptic plastic bag, meant to make up for the scuzzy red carpeting. I emptied a brandy nip in each glass, then tried to clink our so
ft, wobbly plastic glasses.
“Why didn’t you make love to me that night? The night after we came back from Van Speer and fell asleep on the sofa.”
I knew it.
“Was there someone else? Not attracted? Not in love?” she asked.
“Wrong,” I said. “It was always you. And God knows I was attracted. The things I told you when I was alone in my bed at night but didn’t have the guts to tell you in person, and the number of times I got hard just thinking of being naked with you—you’ve no idea. But I had become so nervous, so tentative, that the closer we drew together, the more difficult it was to confide anything. But the truth is,” and here I stopped a second, “there was something.”
She gave me a quizzical look. “Something?”
So she wasn’t going to let it slide or make it easy for me.
“My body had two agendas. You were the first. But on the very evening I came back to Van Speer after you’d shut your door on me, I discovered the second. It was outside the men’s bathroom in the stacks of Van Speer. Everyone knew what went on there at night. I’d been trying to disown what I wanted for so long that still today I can’t recognize it without first going through motions of disowning it. Manfred has learned to live with this, but I don’t envy him. I wanted to know once and for all before turning to you, but I couldn’t turn to you because I couldn’t know about me.”
She said nothing. But before she could ask again, I decided to take it a step further. “He was a chemistry student. A freshman. We met, or rather we bumped into each other, in the stacks upstairs. I was beyond aroused that night, especially after kissing you for so long. Part of me wanted to head back to our table as though hoping to find you still there so that we might close our books together and replay the walk to your dorm. But I also knew what I was after: I wanted warmth, I wanted it quick, and I wanted it clear, strong, and dirty. He and I didn’t have to say a single word, barely a glance, we just fell into it, almost by accident, but not by accident, and in the unlit sections of the stacks our bodies lurched and leaned into each other. Before we knew it, our hands had already started undoing each other’s belts. There was no shame, no guilt, it happened so fast that nothing felt easier or more natural. Unlike us, no hesitation, no deferrals, no thinking. All he asked afterward was ‘I’ll see you again?’ I nodded but naturally forswore the whole thing as soon as I left the stacks. I wanted you even more after him than I did earlier that evening. I wanted to tell you what I’d done but I also felt restored somehow, almost purged, vindicated. I was even happy. After Christmas he was back in the stacks and so was I. You and I had made up by then and were working feverishly on our translation. Eventually, I’d say that I was going upstairs to the bathroom. Knowing you were waiting for me downstairs stirred something rakish and new in me. But I knew that sleeping with you, the way you slept with so many, would resolve nothing about me or about us—and the last thing I wanted was to wake up in the same bed with you, staring at the same question I wished to bury every night in the stacks. I also knew that if things stayed unresolved between us, I could claim I was still trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted. I was like an ellipse, with two competing foci but no center. In the words of the poet, my heart was in the east with you, but my body was out west.”
Silence.
“Now you know,” I finally said.
“Now I know what? That you liked men? Everyone knew.”
I had expected her to snap back with something like “Nice work! All the weeks and months that I had your heart, your cock was someone else’s.” But she was more perceptive and, in the end, more forbearing.
“I was your front. That’s all.”
“No, not a front. Nothing made me happier than coming downstairs to find you waiting to walk back to your dorm, and nothing was worse than your placing a hasty goodbye peck on my cheek and shutting the door behind you because I had yet again failed to stick my foot in.”
But I was still cloaking the truth. And I knew she knew it and was candid enough to dismiss my piece of sophistry before it could harden into yet another subterfuge. Yes, in those days, Chloe was my screen, my alibi, and thinking of her and being with her was a sure way of keeping the pilot light of desire kindled all day before it caught fire later every night in the stacks. If I did not think of him during the day and preferred to keep a lid on Van Speer, it was not to deny what I craved but to starve before feasting. She kept things in check. On the one night she was unable to come with me to Van Speer, I’d not only rushed upstairs to meet my freshman by the stacks but less than an hour later raced back up again to the same corner by the men’s room where I found someone else, and it didn’t matter who.
But perhaps the screen woman was herself less of a front than I’d allowed myself to believe. I could have been using him as a cover, and not the other way around. With him I was making minor and easier admissions about myself to avoid facing the state of a relationship that seemed to be so rudderless and slumping down a gorge. He didn’t blunt my desire for her but stoked it and made me want her even more. All he did, though, was dull the urgency.
But that reasoning perhaps was as much a mask as the others. In the end, and without ever admitting it to myself, I’d grown to love serving two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.
I did not say anything more.
“Did you think of him when we stopped by Van Speer tonight?”
She had to ask.
“Yes,” I said.
“Would you have gone upstairs to take a look if I weren’t with you?”
“Probably. But then, had I come with him tonight and walked about Van Speer, I would have thought of you, taken out the big Greek lexicon, and sat at our desk for a while.”
Then I told her: “I like telling you the truth. It arouses me. The body never lies.”
“I can see.”
I had thought it was the memory of those nights at Van Speer that was exciting me now. But, no, it was avowal—and the unspoken tinge of indecency in every avowal—that thrilled and stirred me and made me hard again.
“Stay with me, and don’t let go,” she said.
* * *
OUTSIDE IT HAD begun snowing, and I thought of Ethan Frome again and of the suicidal ride that left the two lovers permanently damaged because neither had the courage to pick up and leave the suffocating rural town of Starkfield. It made me think of us. Would we have the courage to change anything? Did we have it back then? Did we have it now? Had being runaways for two puny weekdays put us in the camp of the brave? Or had our love been punctuated by so many regrets that we couldn’t conceive of life without them? We had never taken things to the next step. We didn’t even know what the next step was.
Snow. As ever the silent snow. It hems you in, lifts your spirit, and as you soar awhile it lets you down for being the meaningless ashen powder that it is. Was this a fantasy, then? A man and a woman dying to be snowbound so they wouldn’t have to plan for tomorrow?
“You still haven’t answered my question,” she said. “So why didn’t you make love to me that night?”
She wasn’t going to let this slide.
“Because I was scared of you. Because I wanted to make love to you but feared you wanted it slam-dunk. Because I wanted you forever, and I knew you’d laugh if I told you. You and I were both quick and easy with men, and quick and easy was the last thing I wanted with you. So I waited. Then I got used to waiting. Eventually, waiting was more real than what we had.”
“Are you happy, though?” she asked.
“Yes, very.”
“Same here. The wine of life?” she asked, already poised for irony.
“The moonshine of life. Well…”
“Exactly!” she said, as though dismissing my feeble attempt to embellish our lovemaking.
And then she said something I would never have expected: “I think you’ll go back to Manfred. It’s what you want. It’s who you are.”
“You really think so?”<
br />
“I think so. But with you, who’s to know? For all we’ve done tonight and all we’ve ever felt, I know one thing: you want me, and I know you love me, as I love you, but I don’t think you ever craved me in your gut. You want something from me, but you don’t know what it is. Perhaps all I am is an idea with a body. There was always something missing. Your hell—and it’s mine too—is that even when you’re with Manfred, you’ll want to be with me again. You and I don’t love the way others do—we run on empty.” She touched my face, my forehead. “I could tell you to be happy that you have him, but it won’t help. I could tell you to be happy we’ve got two days, but that won’t help either. You’re alone, as I’m alone, and the cruelest thing is that finding each other and saying let us be alone together won’t solve a thing.”
I loved her more than ever now.
“How do you know me so well?”
“Because you and I are one and the same person. Everything I said about you is true about me. In a month from now, but not now, we’ll wake up and realize that this here was the wine of life.”
We looked out at the quadrangle and the sliding hill, and at the scatter of lampposts standing in their gleaming pools of light on the snow. “Thalia, Urania, Melpomene,” she said as we smiled at ourselves, happy that the saltire pattern of the quad had not forgotten the imprint of our old footsteps here. I liked holding her.
“What else are you thinking?” she asked.
“I was thinking that Ole Brit probably stood by a window like this at a hotel in Oxford after leaving his two sons in their hotel room and stared out alone at the old spires and the medieval quadrangle, trying to understand the tricks that time plays. He had once been in love with a young shoemaker in Oxford but had never had the courage to follow up on the hints and passes the shoemaker kept making. He’d been going to the shop for months, ordering pair after pair of shoes and getting all worked up when the cobbler touched his ankle with his bare hands or, as happened once, held his toes. But the whole thing didn’t go anywhere—though it never went away either. It just sat there, no past, no future, like a glass of wine filled to the rim but never drunk from. In his view it was like a bad debt that keeps accruing interest and that you realize one day you’ll never repay because it’s eaten up all your life savings, so that when you turn your face to the wall to gather all the pieces on your last half hour on planet Earth you’ll find neither closure nor redemption, for the pieces will have been scattered long, long before they scatter your ashes. I don’t want to end up like the old gentleman from Peru who comes back to realize he’s led the wrong life all these years.”