“Time to eat,” he announced, and turned down the hall. “Come on.”
He lit the candles, pushed my chair in to the table, and set out an incredible spread. “It’s not fancy,” he said, “but it should taste pretty good.”
The room seemed to wrap in around us as we ate and talked. We danced around the fact that we were in his home, at his table, the fact that we had, for months, been meeting up and pulling apart, each time with a little more to say, a little more ease, a little more laughter at each other’s oddities. And each time a little more frightened by what came tumbling out of our mouths, unbidden but unstoppable, like a stream.
I watched him lean his elbows on the table as he ate, fork in his left hand, knife in his right, the way men up north always ate. I watched his forelock fall over his forehead, and his habit of tossing it back like a restless horse. I watched the corners of his mouth tilt up in his crooked smile and I realized I had been watching them for so long I had come to anticipate them, had come to know just an instant before he raised his hand to lift his glass that he would do so, just an instant before he tilted back his head and stared down his nose at me that he was about to laugh, and I craved it.
Somehow I had grown used to him. And yet there was still so much I kept clutched to my chest, my things, my life, my children, my home, my secrets, my wounds. I wondered where, in the jumble of this, Frank fit. Because it was plain that he did.
He stood up and brought me a brownie with ice cream. “You want coffee?”
I watched him pour it and slide into his chair.
“Frank,” I asked, turning my mug in slow circles, “how much did you know?”
He furrowed his brow. He lifted his mug and took a swallow. “About Arnold?” he said. I nodded. “I guess this had to come up, didn’t it?” He sighed and leaned back in his chair, looking over my shoulder at the dark window. “It did, you’re right. All right. I’ll tell you, but on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want you to pay a bit of mind to what I think. Ain’t no one in the world knows what goes on inside a couple’s house, and no one should, so what I think, well, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. That’s important. I think you want to know, so out of respect to you I’m gonna tell you. But out of respect to Arnold, I want you to remember him well.”
I sat there. Finally, I said, “Thank you.”
“I knew Arnold better than I should’ve.” He shook his head slightly, as if trying to dislodge a memory from his brain. “I thought he was a good man. When we were kids, I worshiped him. I really did. He was the smartest and the fastest and the best looking, but I’ll tell you, even then. Even then he had something. Some kind of dark streak, I guess. He could get mean. For years, I thought it was because of Rose, you know.” He looked at me and I nodded. He shook his head. “Wasn’t. He loved her, but that wasn’t it. In high school was when we started drifting apart. It got so I couldn’t keep the two separate, the good and the bad of him. One night, he was drunk, he hit his girl.” Frank shook his head and pressed his finger into crumbs on the table. “That was about it for me.”
I watched the look on his face. So many memories, I thought, all stored up in this man. So many secrets and stories. I wanted to listen and I didn’t. I wanted him not to have to carry this himself, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to reach across the table and touch his face, as if that would magically lift away the things he knew. I wanted us to say it, the thing that mattered, to stop circling around the story that pushed us apart.
And yet, if we did stop, what would happen? Would we be flung together, broken by the impact of two lonely people who were fragile enough without the force of something like love?
He smiled at me. I smiled into my coffee. I liked the laugh lines by his eyes.
Frank went on. “When he left, I don’t think anyone figured him for one who’d come back. He always said he was getting the hell out of town when he graduated, and he did. Gone for a few years, but then here he was again. With you.” He smiled at me, took a swallow of coffee, and then crinkled his eyes as if something behind me would tell him what to say. It didn’t. He looked at me. “And he was still the same fellow, on the surface, I guess, but still, something had changed.”
He sat silently for a while. “He got desperate,” he said. He looked at me. “The man just got so, so sad.”
I nodded. “He did.” I pictured Arnold with his deck of cards. Shuffling them seven times for luck, for better odds.
“Do you know why?”
I sat there for a minute. “I want to say I don’t. That he was sick, somehow. But if I’m honest, I think it was because of us.” That hurt. “Because of me.”
Frank smoothed the napkin on his lap. Quietly, he said, “Not my place to say it, Claire. But you’re wrong.” He looked up.
“I’d love to believe you.”
“Do. Believe me.”
I sat there. I took a sip of coffee. “You know why?”
He shook his head. “No. But I know he loved you, and the kids, like nothing else. You were what he had.”
“That’s not enough.” I sounded bitter. I hadn’t meant to.
“Well, that’s not enough, Claire,” he said angrily, as if something inside him had snapped. Suddenly we weren’t circling this, not anymore. We’d walked right into it. “Not enough for anybody, is it? I’ll tell you something.” He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “I stood there behind that bar for years, listening to that man tell me what a worthless wreck he was, drowning him in booze myself. And you know, after he’d been sitting there saying the same goddamn thing for long enough, I started to believe him. I did. I stood there, and I poured his drinks, and I watched him start to believe his own sob story, and I started to believe it myself, and I got a little goddamn tired of it. Because you know what? You know what? It’s all fine and good, you love your wife and kids. All well and good, sure. But then what the hell’re you doing drinking yourself to death in a bar in the middle of the goddamn day? Why in the hell aren’t you at work? Doing a good day’s work like a decent man? What the hell’re you doing telling the bartender how much you love your wife and kids? ’Stead of going home and telling them yourself? Or at least acting like it. Claire, I pour a lot of drinks and I listen to a lot of stories, hell, I know the kids around town, and the wives, better’n half the men who own ’em, like they’re my kids, my families, that’s my life. That’s what I do. But I’ll say one thing, and that man did not go shoot hisself because of you, no thank you. He did it because he crawled into a bottle, and I know he loved you, as well he should, but he was a selfish sonofabitch and that is the end of it.”
He straightened up. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Excuse me,” he said formally, and stood, clearing our plates, taking them to the sink and turning the tap on full blast.
I sat there with my coffee cup halfway to my mouth. I noticed it and took a sip. When he was done with the dishes, Frank slid in across from me.
“I apologize,” he said, smoothing his hair with nervous, damp hands.
“No need.”
“I let my mouth run. I’m sorry. No excuse.”
“Frank.” I looked at him and shook my head. “No need. Really.”
He smiled. “All right,” he said, and took a breath as if he’d been needing one.
The truth of what he’d said hung between us. He looked left, I looked right.
“Let’s take our coffee to the living room,” he said quietly. It was an invitation. To whatever came next.
I accepted.
I sank into the sofa and took my shoes off, looking out the window at the now thick snow. He crouched down to light the logs in the fireplace and sat down at the other end of the sofa.
“Winter’s finally here,” I said, my face turned away from his, toward the rush of flames in the stone fireplace. I listened to the crackle of dried apple wood. I did not know how to do this. I waited for him to tell me or show me. I wanted him to lean clo
se so that I could smell the salt on his neck. There were perhaps three, four feet between us. Too many, pushing against us, into the corners of the couch. And yet I would have sworn that I could feel his heat.
He watched the fire. “I love winter. Keeps you mindful of your place in the world. Keeps you still.”
I nodded.
“Ought to go for a drive. Out to the north shore, maybe.”
I looked at him. He studiously ate a mint. “I’d like that,” I said.
“All right,” he nodded. “We’ll do that.”
We. We will have to adjust our routine. I looked out the window, down the block toward Main Street. I pictured the little light above my front steps, flickering in the shadow of falling snow. My children’s beds, waiting for small bodies to warm them like tiny fires.
“Claire,” he said thoughtfully.
“What’s that?” I said, turning back.
“Your dress is beautiful.” He articulated this as if it was a new vocabulary word he was trying out.
He stirred around in the candy dish, looking for, it seemed, the green butter mints.
“It’s new,” I blurted.
“That so.”
I nodded. “Bought it today,” I said, wishing to God I’d shut up.
“Oh?”
“Well,” I said, feeling very short of breath, “Donna bought it for me. It was a present. I bought her a ring she liked. It was only paste, but she liked it so much.”
“You stay in town?”
“Staples,” I breathed, then set my coffee down on a coaster and stood up. “We had lunch at Betty’s,” I called, going out of the room. “Excuse me,” I said, and hurried up the stairs. I opened a door, thinking it was the bathroom, and gasped to find myself staring into his bedroom. I shut the door. Then opened it again. I peered in. Antique dresser, four-poster bed, tightly made. Bed stand, piled with books, an old cedar chest that contained God knows what and was stacked feet high with old magazines.
I took one long step in and stood still. I lifted my hand, hesitated, and then lay it on the bed, lightly, the way you touch the forehead of a sleeping child.
The hush of snow stilled the room into a kind of sleep.
I reached for a green flannel shirt that hung from the four-poster. I raised it to my face. Old Spice and his smell.
I wanted to know what his pillow would feel like under my head. Whether he slept with his mouth open, whether he slept on his back or his side. I wanted details, I wanted to know the precise place where he would rest his hand in the curve of my waist while he slept. I wanted to watch him sleep. I wanted to guard him while he slept, be the body that he reached for in his dreams. I wanted to be the thing he knew, the thing as close as breath.
He sat downstairs, waiting for me. I could feel the pull of him from here.
I breathed in his shirt for a while, then hung it back on the post. I smoothed my hand over a pillow, and shut the door on my way out.
I washed my hands for a very long time. My cheeks were splotched with red. I decided I couldn’t stay up there all night and went back downstairs.
“So,” I said, rounding the corner. I sat down.
“Claire.”
“So she’s leaving him.”
He started laughing. I picked up my coffee cup, which was empty, and looked around the room. “It’s not very funny,” I said.
“No, of course it’s not,” he said. “You are.”
“I am not.”
“All right, then.” He kept laughing. I turned to give him a piece of my mind.
He leaned over and took my head in his hands and found my mouth and kissed me. Then he pulled back.
It was much too brief. I couldn’t remember what it felt like. I needed him to do it again so I could be sure he had done it in the first place. I realized I was sitting there staring over his shoulder with my mouth open. I looked at him. His eyes were brown, like chocolate.
He went over to a stand in the corner on which sat the decanters of booze. He poured two tiny, crystal glasses full, and set one down in front of me. He looked around the room.
I picked up my drink. “You’re trying to get me drunk,” I said, filling air, killing time, wishing he’d do it again.
“Doing no such thing,” he said, firmly. He set his drink on the table. “Here,” he said, and tucked his hands under himself on the seat. “I’ll be a gentleman. Keep my hands to myself.”
I looked at him. Morbidly serious, he gazed back.
“Scout’s honor. Come here.” He tipped his head. “C’mere. Just once.”
I laughed. I took a breath and leaned toward him. I pulled back. “I can’t.”
“Sure you can,” he said, getting desperate. “You just did it, a minute ago.”
“Surprise attack.”
“Okay, so this time you’ve got fair warning.” After a moment, he added thoughtfully, “Though you’re a ways away. You might want to get closer.”
“Frank,” I warned.
“I’m just saying. What if you tip over? Trying to get here from there?”
I laughed, set my drink down, braced myself, and came face-to-face with his mouth. I found myself studying his lips. The dark opening behind them. His soft breath on the side of my face.
“Claire,” he whispered, and when he said my name, the tip of his tongue touched the whites of his teeth.
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
Curious, I did.
And then we kissed like people starved. Clumsy, unfamiliar, young. He bit my lower lip. I leaned closer, and then I crawled across the couch. I wanted to climb into his mouth, all give. I fumbled for his hands. I wanted him to hold me. Hard. I wanted his hands on me. I felt his mouth smile under mine, and he kept his hands where they were. “No,” he mumbled into my mouth. “I promised.”
“Never mind.”
“I promised.” He caught my throat with his teeth, gently, just the right muscle, and I twisted my head. He kissed my throat, my collarbone, I crawled onto his lap, he kissed his way back up to my ear.
“I’ll stop,” I threatened.
“No you won’t.”
“Arrogant!”
He wrapped his hands around my waist and laid me down on the couch, brought his hands to the side of my face, reached up to turn off the lamp above my head so there wasn’t a glare in my eyes. Then he kissed me for a very long time.
At a certain point, I caught his wrist in my hand and smiled into his mouth.
I had forgotten about the sad, mysterious end of a kiss—how both mouths know, somehow, to soften and pull apart. That delicate sphere of warm breath passed back and forth before speech edges in.
“Time to go,” I whispered.
He rested his forehead on mine for a second, then sat up. I straightened myself and looked at his face, shadowed in the dark living room.
“Thank you,” I said. “For dinner.”
He switched on the lamp and grinned at his feet. “Sure,” he said. He smoothed his hair.
“I’m sorry I have to go,” I said. “I told the kids I’d tuck them in by midnight.”
“You’ll be early. How’re they with all this?”
I looked at my hands, trying to decide how to answer him. “What is this?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“No. I want a word.” I laughed. “Esau would have a word.” I stood and went to stand in front of the fire. I smoothed down my skirt. “This is something, isn’t it?” I asked, my back turned to him.
Carefully, he said, “It is for me.”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
“Is it for you?” he asked. My silence filled the room. I should turn around, I thought. I need to turn around and face him when I say this, whatever I’m going to say.
I turned. “I want to say no.”
“Then say no.” For the first time, I heard an edge of bitterness to his voice. It stung.
“They’re upset,” I burst out, turning to face him. “The ki
ds. They’re upset. They’re scared.”
“I bet they are.”
We studied each other.
“So am I,” I said. I felt myself pleading with him for something. He gazed steadily back at me, giving nothing away, fixing nothing. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to kiss him again. I wanted him to drag me upstairs to bed and be done with it.
“Want a drink?” he asked, going past me to the decanters. I watched him pour two.
“Frank, I can’t do this.” It just came out. There it was. It was true the instant I said it, and it was a lie, and I didn’t care, I just wanted the waiting to be done.
He showed no response. Just handed me my drink and walked past me again to the couch. He sat down. “Why’s that?” he asked.
I looked around the room. “Because it’s too soon.”
“For who? You?”
“It’s just too soon.”
“Is it too soon for you?”
“I guess it is,” I said.
He nodded and drank. “Yep. Well, that’s bullshit.”
That knocked me back. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.” He glared at me and shot his drink down his throat. I tried a different approach.
“The kids—”
“Ain’t about the kids. This is about you.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“You gonna let me get a word in edgewise?”
“Kids are all right, Claire. Me, I’m all right. Ain’t comfortable, but I’m all right. I can do this. That leaves you.”
“Yes it does. And I can’t do this.”
“Tell me why, and I’ll leave it alone.”
“I don’t have to tell you why.”
He set his glass down on the table and put his hands behind his head, peering down his nose at me. “You come over, spend an evening in my home, spend time with me”—his mouth opened as if he had no words to describe what had happened, and he gestured, baffled, at the couch—“so as not to tell me why?” He leaned forward, looking straight at me. “You expect to finally, finally let me near you, near enough to taste you”—I turned away, he was doing this on purpose—“near enough to hold you like I’ve been dying to for all this time, and then you say, ‘Can’t do this,’ and expect me to just show you the damn door? Are you out of your mind? I don’t want to show you the door. I want you to stay here. I want it more than anything.” He stood up and walked over to where I stood. I turned away from him and we went in a slow circle, his mouth near my ear, just behind me, chasing me with his words. “I want you in my life, Claire. I want you in the morning and at night and I want to hear your voice and watch you raise your kids, goddammit, Claire, I want you in my life! I want you to let go of whatever goddamn thing you carry around with you that keeps you all closed off from me because I want to get inside there!”