The Amtrak Adirondack train paused at the edge of Canada. For two hours customs officers, with pugnacious blankness, roamed the aisles, inspecting passports and demanding to see the last fifty debit transactions of a Ugandan woman.
When the train rolled forward again, the landscape was green but stark, a thin fuzz of spring accrued on trees and fields. Soon highways roped into knots and tall buildings appeared on the horizon.
“It’s not that big,” Anne said, craning her neck to look out the window as a cityscape gathered nearby. They were moving across a bridge, stretched over a wide slate river. “It used to be very Catholic here, but they beat back the church. Families of twelve children—that kind of thing.”
There was a humping rhythm as they entered a tunnel.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Richard said, which wasn’t entirely true. Though he’d let Anne take care of the accommodation, train tickets, and registration for the conference, he had done quite a bit of research around the restaurant scene—other people cooking him food gave Richard such a sense of security—which he’d heard described as one of the best in North America. There were a number of places he planned to suggest: one establishment where, in a saucy version of surf and turf, they stuck a lobster into the mouth of a pig, another where they served oysters on an old radio.
The train lurched to a halt. Passengers sprang from their seats and retrieved their bags. Anne’s belongings were in a green leather weekender. Richard’s luggage consisted of two canvas totes, one covered in flowers, the other advertising a jam from New Hampshire.
“This place looks worse than Penn Station,” he said as they walked along the platform. The weekender swung cheerfully at Anne’s side. It occurred to Richard that he could offer to carry it, but he did nothing with this thought.
“Nothing tops Penn Station except Port Authority. At Port Authority there are actually ghosts.”
“Only four lines,” Anne said as they looked at a subway map. “That should make it easy.”
Commuters waited on their phones, having conversations in French, reading, or staring off into space. The next train wasn’t for seven minutes.
“This has been a very long day,” Anne said. “Let’s take a taxi.” The words rang beautifully in Richard’s ears.
They sped north up an avenue lined on either side by shops and restaurants, staring out the windows like children.
The apartment was on a residential street of two- and three-story brick town-house structures. On the opposite side of the street there was a soccer field. Young men with muscular legs changed direction frequently and abruptly, yelling in Spanish. Richard followed Anne up a twisting exterior staircase that led to the second floor.
The initial impression of the rental was discouraging. A dark hall led to a kitchen and Richard walked into it with the feeling that he would encounter cobwebs. The cupboards were painted an ailing green and the floor seemed to sag. In one of the upper corners, something had recently gushed down from the ceiling—there was a rough gathering of plaster, like skin that had healed badly after a vaccination.
“Welcome to the Four Seasons,” he said.
“Their rating is going down,” Anne said. “Down.”
“I second that.”
With a more focused sense of something not being right, Richard surveyed the rest of the apartment.
“Where’s the other bedroom?” he asked.
“It’s a one-bedroom,” Anne said.
“Is there a foldout?”
He glanced into the living room, but he couldn’t tell whether the grim tumuli of the sofa was equipped with the hoped-for feature.
“The bed is queen-sized.”
He paused, looking at her, his eyes affably but hesitantly wide.
“Oh, right. But I don’t want to crowd you.”
Anne had an expression of mounting disarray on her face. She was going through her bag. She stopped what she was doing and looked at him.
“Sleep in the bed,” she insisted.
Imagining the nocturnal cluster of their two bodies, he smiled tightly. “Sure. Lots of room.”
He watched her as she walked across to the counter.
“Look at this.”
It was a bottle of red wine with a pink ribbon tied around the neck, with a note from the owner of the apartment. She picked it up.
“Let’s open it,” Richard said, happy at the appearance of this tranquilizing agent.
“Right now?”
The sun was beginning to set. Wineglasses in hand, they stepped through a door off the kitchen, out onto a small deck that overlooked a disorganized garden.
“The bed isn’t bad,” Anne said. “It’s comfortable. I sat on it.”
“Great,” Richard said, smiling blandly and nodding. “An uncomfortable bed would really ruin their rating.”
He took a large sip of wine.
“I wonder if all the houses look like this one inside.”
“I wonder,” Anne said, putting the glass to her lips. “Too bad for them.”
They drank most of the bottle. By the time ten o’clock came around they were both quiet with fatigue. They took turns in the bathroom. Richard had forgotten pajamas, which for a moment had him panicked. But the wine was having a settling effect, and when he came into the bedroom, the light was already off. A slight glow from the window showed Anne lying on her back, the sheet up to her neck, staring at the ceiling.
“It’s comfortable,” she said.
Richard removed his clothes. In the dark, his white briefs seemed to glow.
To his relief, she did not move when he got into bed beside her. He closed his eyes and resisted the urge to open them again. He worried that if he did, he would see her staring at him, and they would have to reckon with their proximity. Whenever he shifted positions, he did so with an onerous consideration. He only realized that he had fallen asleep when he woke up in the middle of the night and heard an animal skittering across the floor above his head. Without his glasses on, the room was blurry in the dark, the streetlamp beyond the window a buttery blot. The smell of cigarettes drifted in through the open window. He was aware of Anne getting up and leaving the bedroom, the flushing of a toilet, and her return.
It was morning the next time he opened his eyes; sunlight saturated the thin curtains. He got up and put his clothes on. Out in the living room he pulled the curtains aside. On the street below a woman passed by, muttering to herself and holding a shattered mirror. He opened the window. A misty spring warmth hung in the street.
He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. Anne emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of perfumed steam.
“How did you sleep?” she asked.
“Fine.”
He rubbed his eyes, his body aching in the aftermath of keeping straight and circumspect all night, of having avoided an unintentional annexation of her half of the bed.
“You’re a heavy sleeper,” she said.
“I guess so.”
If not through an open-eyed surveillance while he slept beside her, how had she arrived at that conclusion?
They had breakfast at a nearby café, and then took the subway to the McGill campus, an obstacle course of backpacked students. At the end of a paved drive there was a pillared building with a green copper roof. A red and white flag palpitated on a cupola, against a backdrop of hardening blue sky. Two shirtless guys played Frisbee on the grass.
“Bulletproof glass was invented here,” Anne said. “I read it on Wikipedia.”
“Huh.”
They went into a library, made with the thick concrete of another architectural era. A large poster board on an easel indicated the conference was being held upstairs.
They took an elevator up one floor. Beside the entrance to the conference room there was a curly-haired blond guy with a pink snub nose in a black T-shirt and jeans.
“It’s fifty dollars each for registration,” he said, with friendly authority. “Canadian.”
Anne handed the guy some cash and they walked inside. They sat down beside each other at the head of the conference table, and Richard arranged his face into an expression of scholarly vehemence. Anne had printed off a sheet for him to read from. They were introduced, and then presented in fluid counterpoint. Sections were arranged to seem extemporaneous, to give the impression of sudden insights, as though their real-time dialogue had led them out to new, previously unknown suburbs of analysis. Richard recognized three points he had made about Boccaccio in a discussion they’d had on the train. This made him feel better about his participation in the event. Anne smiled at him and nodded. Afterward the small audience clapped.
They sat dutifully through several other presentations before breaking for lunch.
“What did you think?” she said as they stood up.
“I liked that one guy’s reading of Machiavelli.”
“Counterintuitive. A peacemaker?”
Outside, the sun was high and bright. They put on their sunglasses.
“I included your points about Boccaccio and Pasolini,” she said as they walked through the campus. “I’m sure you noticed.”
“Thanks.”
Even when she was being generous she couldn’t help the inadvertent condescension, he thought. He chose not to focus on it.
“They were relevant,” she continued.
“Relevant might be a stretch, but I appreciate you including them.”
“Where should we go for lunch?”
He scrolled through a list in his head. The Ritz was just a few blocks away, and had recently been colonized by a celebrity French chef. Perhaps that was too shameless. He opted to let Anne decide and press his own agenda at dinner.
“We’ll find something.”
On the crowded sidewalk of Saint Catherine Street their moods wilted.
“Everything looks terrible,” she said.
They gave up and chose a sushi restaurant that proved disappointing, which Richard thought was a waste, as if Anne were somehow to blame.
After several more hours of presentations, they decided to look around again in the hopes of eventually finding something better for dinner. A few blocks east they went into a secondhand bookstore. They browsed, visited a coffee shop, and then descended out of curiosity into the brightly lit, air-conditioned underground corridors of the shopping district that lay beneath the downtown. Young men in gray and black singlets and bulky high-top sneakers gossiped in groups and walked hand in hand with tall young women wearing dark sunglasses. A global cast of retail workers looked on with boredom.
Outside again, a pleasant light filtered down through the trees; Richard felt like he was in South America, though he’d never been there. They walked, enjoying that particular pleasure of being with another person and not feeling compelled to break the silence.
“Do you think you could move here, if the government ever became too extreme?” Richard asked eventually, imagining a scenario in which they didn’t return to New York but continued to live there as exiled scholars, new lives in that decrepit but cozy apartment, working on their French.
“It’s already too extreme.”
“You could have a nice life, I bet. How is your French?”
“It’s good,” she said.
“Why did I even ask?”
They walked to a grassy park pinpointed by a tall statue of a winged woman. Nearby a group of nerdish-looking young men pretended to do battle with makeshift swords.
“I think it would be invigorating to move to another country,” she said. “Abandon your past—that sort of arc.”
“Shed your identity and become a new person? Is that even possible for you?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
A PARTY WAS THROWN that night for the conference attendees. It was a motley assemblage of academic-looking types in ties, round glasses, and long, hip-hugging sweaters. When they arrived, Anne fell into conversation with one of the organizers, and Richard wandered around, listening in on knots of people. Pot smoke gray-braided the air. He entered the kitchen in search of a drink. There were bowls of guacamole along the counter, beside torn-open bags of corn chips.
The blond guy with the pink snub nose, the conference sentry, was at the sink washing dishes. Waiting to be noticed, Richard stood behind him.
“Great presentation today,” the guy said finally, looking over his shoulder.
“Oh, thanks,” Richard said. “Do you usually wash dishes at parties?”
“I’m trying to sober up. I’m supposed to drive.”
“Is there anything to drink in here?”
It had been a pleasant day, and Richard’s confidence was unfurled and plumed.
“I can make you a gin and tonic. That’s all that’s left.”
“I’ve been drinking beer, but okay.”
Splashing equal amounts of the two ingredients into the glass, the young scholar prepared the drink. Richard took a sip and almost gagged.
“That’s robust, thanks. I’m Richard.”
“Hi, Richard. I’m Jay.”
“Thanks, Jay.”
They shook hands.
“Want to have a cigarette with me on the fire escape?” Jay asked.
Richard smiled at this unexpected invitation.
“Sure.”
The level of Jay’s drunkenness became evident as he moved irregularly out the window.
“Put your foot there,” Richard said. Jay paused in a long, uncertain foot-to-foot arc, half inside and half outside the apartment. “There you go.”
Holding on to a crusty metal grating, Richard climbed out after him. He looked up at the mountain, a hump in the middle of the city. On top, an enormous crucifix glowed.
“It’s sort of flat for a mountain,” he said. “It’s very Catholic here, right?”
“I think so,” Jay said. “I’m not from here.”
“The food is good, though?”
“There’s a Scandinavian café a few blocks away. You can get codfish poutine. How does that sound?”
“Good, I guess.”
“What have you been eating?”
“Nothing spectacular,” Richard said, thinking with regret that he hadn’t yet succeeded in getting Anne to take him to any of the noteworthy restaurants in the city.
“Really?”
Richard shook his head, then leaned leftward to kiss Jay.
Jay stepped back defensively but smiled. “Can I rinse my mouth out first?”
“Sure. Whatever works.”
“Back in a second.”
Jay flopped into the kitchen and went out the door. Richard followed him inside, propping himself against the fridge, puffed up by his own intrepid moves. He awaited the trajectory of the next few moments in a state of hazy acquiescence.
The door opened again and Anne came in.
“Where did you go? I’ve been looking all over.” She squeezed his arm. “I’m having a good time. Do you need a drink?”
She had an empty glass in hand with a slice of lemon in it.
“I’m good,” he said, holding up his noxious gin and tonic. He laid his arm across her shoulders. “Meet anyone interesting?”
“Simon—who presented on Tasso. He’s charming, but kind of goofy.”
Her eyes were foggy and glimmering.
“Did you get his number?” Richard asked.
“Why would I get his number?”
“To call him.”
She removed Richard’s arm and went toward the counter.
“I’m not going to call him. Is there any more guacamole? I’ve been sent to find it.”
Jay came back into the kitchen.
“I’m ready.” He noticed Anne and smiled. “Oh, hey. Great work today.”
“Ready for what?” she said, looking back and forth between them.
“Anne is on a mission for guacamole.”
“There are more avocados over there,” Jay said, demurely using his hand to stifle a burp.
Richard consumed the last metallic dregs of his drink and coughed.
“I can make you another but let’s go outside first,” Jay said. “It’s getting hard to breathe in here.”
“Why are you going outside?” Anne asked.
“To smoke.”
“Then I’ll join you,” she said.
“You smoke cigarettes?” Richard asked.
“Simon does. I’ll go get them.”
Anne left the kitchen, and Jay led Richard back out to the fire escape. When they were both standing in the open air, but in the dark, shadowed like homosexuals in a rendezvous of an earlier era, Jay smiled broadly and kissed him.
Richard interrupted their contact by putting a finger to his lips.
“Can we get to the ground from here?” he asked quietly, looking out over the railing.
“We can climb down the fire escape,” Jay whispered.
One behind the other, they descended to the sidewalk. A group of partygoers were smoking beside the front door, a wig of smoke stretched over their heads. Richard and Jay decided to split a cigarette. Halfway through the cigarette, Anne emerged from the doors behind them.
“Where did you go?” she demanded. “I looked for you on the fire escape.”
“We decided to come down here,” Richard said, making up this excuse on the spot. “We didn’t feel safe up there.”
“You didn’t hear me? I’ve been looking for you.”
“We came down here.”
She looked at Jay.
“Thank you for organizing the party.”
“I didn’t organize the party.”
She turned and began walking, a small, decisive body moving swiftly down the block.
“Where are you going?” Richard said.
She didn’t answer.
“Sorry,” he said to Jay, tossing the cigarette to the curb. Jay watched it wheel through the air and scatter sparks. “I’ve got to go.”
Richard hurried and caught up to her at the end of the block. She was quick on her feet.
“What are you doing?”
“Why are you apologizing to him? You left me all alone.”
She walked with her arms tensed by her side, like a child about to pummel someone ineffectually.
“You were talking to Simon. I thought you were talking about Tasso.”
“I didn’t want to talk to him about that.”
The street was deserted. Their argument reverberated against the reticent jowls of darkened storefronts. Richard was embarrassed.
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“I wanted to talk to you too,” he said, but even as he hurried along beside her, he was skeptical of his own pursuit.
She didn’t respond. They went in silence for another block.
“It didn’t seem so,” she said finally.
When they arrived back at the apartment, Anne went into the bedroom and closed the door. Richard stood in the kitchen, his hands hanging limp like dead fish against his thighs. He sat down at the kitchen table, opened up his laptop, and compulsively refreshed his email and some newspapers, but he didn’t absorb anything.
After a few minutes, he walked over and tapped on the door to the bedroom.
“Can I come in?”
There was no answer. He slowly pushed open the door. Anne was lying in bed in the dark, a porch light from across the yard split into sharp slats over the dune of her body. He removed his shirt and pants and got into bed beside her.
In the morning she had already left for the second day of the conference. Richard’s head pounded. He stepped out of the bedroom with a salacious feeling of disclosure at being in his underwear in the apartment of a stranger, mixed with an awareness that a hangover was being tuned in his brain and would soon play like a Bartok concerto in the nursery of a sleeping baby.
He sent Anne a text:
YOU LEFT WITHOUT ME.
There was a croissant on the table, dry and armadillo-like. He drank two glasses of water, and then got back into bed with the croissant, but he couldn’t fall asleep. In the adjacent backyard, a man watered the garden and sang to himself. Richard got up and left the room again and sat on the sofa in his underwear, surveying the grimy apartment with a sense of dissipated consternation.
An hour later, Anne texted back.
YOU WERE ASLEEP.
HOW ARE YOU? he responded immediately.
She sent an emoticon indicating a headache.
ME TOO, he wrote back. HOW DID YOU SLEEP?
NOT WELL.
ME NEITHER.
When nothing further came, he wrote again:
CAN I TAKE YOU OUT TO LUNCH?
He suggested Chinatown, because Chinatown would be cheap.
OKAY. WHEN?
They met at the edge of the neighborhood an hour later. The sun was driving and acute. Wearing dark glasses, they walked in a ponderous silence.
“I’m disappointed you didn’t come today,” she said finally.
“You could have woken me up.”
“I thought you were invested in all of this.”
“I’m hungover, that’s all. I drank a lot last night.”
“But you know how important this is to me,” she said.
When something was important to her, did that mean everyone else’s life had to flatten out and disappear? Did everyone have to be good? Was he not allowed to get drunk and sleep in if something was important to Anne?
They chose a restaurant at random. When they sat down, she sighed heavily.
“We’re both in fantastic moods, aren’t we?”
Richard scanned the menu. The curtain over the window jerked limply.
“We’ll feel better when we eat something,” he said, not looking up.
“You didn’t miss much this morning,” she said. “Anyway.”
“I’m sure you asked some devastating questions.”
“Maybe,” she said.
She described an example of the mediocre command of the literature she’d detected in one of the conference participants.
“Mostly I couldn’t be bothered though.”
“Probably better for them.”
Soon they were plopping greasy pieces of duck into their mouths. For dessert they had bubble tea. Richard paid the bill. With the exchange rate significantly in favor of the American dollar, it was negligible. They strolled through the neighborhood, going from store to store. Anne spotted a pair of satin slippers. Richard bought them for her. Then he bought himself a key chain attached to a small pagoda. She saw an embroidered fan she liked and he bought that for her too.
At the Old Port they bought iced coffees and walked down to the river.
“I feel like I could drink an endless cup of coffee right now,” he said. “I feel like I have a hole in my stomach.”
“Me too. Thank God we don’t have to make small talk.”
“Thank God.”
He laughed and looked at her, and wanted to squeeze her.
They linked arms, walking in a zigzag pattern out of the Old Port and through a neighborhood of seedy commercial strips. They were dazed to be somewhere uncharted, anonymous claimants to the block along with the actual residents of the city.
They passed into a gay area of the city, indicated by a series of pillars in rainbow colors above the entrance to the subway station and signs for “Le Village.” Richard noted to himself the same hoary retail that he had seen elsewhere: a store that specialized in crochet; a shawarma place; a French bookstore; a travel agency whose door was plastered with rhapsodic descriptions of the Danube. Men in singlets and shorts made prolonged eye contact with him as they passed. It was a silent pleasure—a pleasure he did not voice—to have his attractiveness endorsed and acknowledged on the streets of a new city.
Anne pointed to a store window.
“You would look good in that sailor shirt.”
“Too many middle-aged women wear them.”
“You think?”
“I’m always afraid I’m going to run into a rich seventy-two-year-old woman on her way to the golf course who is dressed exactly like me.”
“Unlikely.”
“You never know. When I’m a middle-aged woman, I’ll dress like a middle-aged woman,” he joked.
She squeezed his arm. Another man went past, gawking boldly. She pulled at the hem of her shirt, fanning herself.
“I didn’t realize it would be so hot here.”
“It’s not the Arctic,” he said.
“I didn’t think it was.”
“Do you want to go back to the apartment?”
“Not yet.”
“What should we do?”
Anne thought for a moment.
“Let’s go swimming,” she said.
“Where are we going to do that?”
Richard thought of the lazy-Saturday proposal, an offer he had never taken her up on.
“I was reading about a pool in one of the guidebooks. It looked beautiful. It’s not far,” she said, already heading toward the subway.
“What do we do about swimsuits?”
“I’ll buy us some there.”
They went for several stops, found their way to the pool and an adjoining shop that sold athletic gear. Richard picked out a pair of boxy shorts.
“We’re in another country,” Anne said, lifting a red Speedo off the rack.
Richard shook his head.
“But it’s my treat.”
“I don’t know,” he said, taking the swimsuit in hand.
“Abandon your past.”
It was a ludicrous proposal, but oddly enough he liked the idea of being voluptuous and exposed in the suit while Anne watched.
Without waiting for an answer, Anne took the swimsuit and went to the cashier.
At the pool, Richard emerged from the changing room feeling like the protagonist of a public-service self-esteem campaign.
He held a towel over his crotch and kept his eyes on the ground. Anne was in an athletic black one-piece. They went to a corner of the pool deck and spread out their belongings.
“We have to put sunscreen on. I’ll put some on you first.”
Richard lay down on his stomach. Casting his head into shadow, she knelt beside him. He felt a cold squirt on his back, her hands moving in concentric circles, ranging up and down his back, the length of his legs. She worked the lotion between his toes and over the soles of his feet, her touch supple but direct. For a moment Richard thought—what luck it was, to be one of the organisms that is taken care of and not devoured.
He got up and she lay down on her front. He smoothed the sunscreen into her shoulders, then around into the scoop of her back, gliding down her legs, greasy and bright, to her feet. Her body trembled.
What am I doing? he thought, and almost stopped himself. All the people splayed around the pool, with their glistening skins and dark sunglasses, were sure to think that he and Anne were a couple, if they cared to think anything about them, or maybe some of them noted his swimsuit and thought differently. Why did that matter? He could get a raging sense of claustrophobia when a woman, one of his female friends, was affectionate with him in public, when he felt he was being blocked off from some more authentic kind of attention. It was almost a political sense of indignation and entrapment, like someone deprived of an education. They were shutting him off from his potential. But why was it more authentic? Was it more authentic?
“I think that’s good,” she said.
Their arms brushing together, he lay down again, eyes closed. At the edge of his perception a baffling conversation, accented French spoken too quickly, spun in place like a whirlpool, alluring and incomprehensible. The sun anointed his back and he felt dazed. They lay there for some time. Finally Anne got up and stepped into the pool. Richard watched her go and then stood up himself, starkly vertical. From the water she watched him, her attention indiscreet, the water heaving leniently around her waist.
He stepped into the water and submerged himself. The cool of it mitigated a headache that was beginning to knot at the back of his head. He went forward under the water, surfaced, and floated away from her. The swimsuit breaking the surface, he drifted on his back. Their movements felt free and arbitrary, but also immaculate, as if choreographed from above. She breast-stroked in a curve around him.
When their eyes met, she splashed him with water.
A line of athletic young men, in a mirage-like procession, their rippling silhouettes crammed into swimsuits even smaller than Richard’s, passed by en route to the competition pool. Richard turned onto his stomach and watched. Anne looked over, and they both gawked.
RICHARD CONTINUED TO FLOAT in his odd mood. After returning to the apartment in a taxi, a shower, and another taxi to the restaurant, he felt vacant and serene, rinsed of worry and initiative by the long day in the sun. The menu at the restaurant Anne chose for dinner was like the preamble of a serial killer experimenting with animals before making the leap to humans. One dish consisted of a pig with a fork driven through its skull. Richard opted for a pig’s foot stuffed with foie gras. Anne ordered the magret de canard.
Anne’s dish arrived in a can. The waiter turned it upside down and the glistening food slid out and fell in a wobbly tower onto her plate. It made Richard think of dog food.
“Do you think we got sunstroke?” he said, cutting into the foot. “I feel out of it.”
“I’m okay.”
“I should drink more water.”
He took another sip of wine.
“Want to try this?” Anne said.
“Sure.”
He leaned forward and bit the tendered meat from her fork. Outside, the occasional car rolled past on the cobblestoned pedestrian street, like a tank in the warfare of the evening.
“You looked great today,” she said, smiling. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so?”
“That’s delicious. No, it’s fine,” he said. “I mean, whatever.”
There was something intolerable about her saying so—unbearable in its candor and exposure. For a moment they ate with concentration, the artfully displayed food steadily decimated.
“You looked great too,” he said. “Is that okay to say?”
She did look great—it was that end-of-the-summer-day disheveled blooming sheen, her hair extra springy and curly, the tanned scoop of her exposed chest.
“I haven’t reached a definitive conclusion.”
“Well, let me know when you figure it out.”
Richard looked for his water glass, but it was still empty.
“I bet you killed it at the conference today,” he said, feeling himself slip into a new gear of intimacy. “I bet you annihilated everyone.”
“Do you have to put it that way?”
“You like a more peaceful rhetoric?”
He felt as though they were on a stage somewhere.
“Maybe I don’t. I bet I did kill it, with my questions. I guess I’m the . . . annihilator.”
She snorted.
“That’s your new nickname.”
“I know I’m strong,” she said, more seriously now. “I’m stronger than my family. I’m stronger than my father. I’ve always had to be.”
“You’re stronger than me.”
“I don’t know. We’re strong in different ways.”
She poured more wine into his glass, and then into her own.
“I’m not strong,” he said.
“Why should strength be the measure of anything?” she said.
It wasn’t exactly the response he was looking for.
“Right,” he said.
She laughed—her normally serious, erudite face curled under a childish steam of emotion. With the napkin she wiped her eyes. He wasn’t exactly sure what she was laughing about.
“There’s some enormous basilica here that looks like an Italian futurist temple,” she said. “I want to see it.”
“Let’s go.”
“Did you grow up with religion?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“You didn’t go to church?”
“Once in a while,” Richard said. “My parents are like, orbiting Unitarians. They’re out there . . . I don’t even know if they believe in God. I think they believe in St. Anselm’s proof for the existence of God.”
“It’s abstract.”
“No, the opposite. It’s more, like, clambakes and picnics, that kind of thing. The best part is, the church has this yellow Jeep Cherokee with ‘Love’ painted on the door with a rainbow underneath it. Whenever I visit they want me to ride in it but I always say no. I think they drive it as penance for any awkwardness when I came out.”
His whole body shrank. For a moment, he couldn’t raise his head from the plate. It was the first time he had stated this outright in her presence, shifted the information from the liquid realm of unvoiced context to hard syllabic life. He looked up slowly. Anne was gazing into her wine with a mild but inscrutable expression.
“And my father likes the singing,” he said, by way of conclusion, choosing to leap, almost coughing out the words.
Anne nodded, though it might have been in agreement with one of her own thoughts.
“I envy religious people,” she said, her previous tone unchanged. She was still looking into her glass. She took another sip.
“When they’re not killing each other,” Richard said, deciding to move along in the conversation with her.
“Even when they are killing each other,” she said quickly and brightly, now looking up at him with a smile.
He smiled back.
“You’re enjoying that wine,” he said, his voice excitable. He felt quite drunk now.
“Yes I am,” she said, cheerfully. “And so are you.”
She seemed not to want to pursue the topic. He would follow her lead. He decided to keep drinking the wine, and to encourage her to drink too.
The sliced-up ruins and smears of their plates were taken away. For dessert Anne had lemon meringue pie, and Richard something called milkshake XXX. Then the waiter brought digestifs, followed by espresso. Anne paid and they left the restaurant.
“Let’s get another drink,” Richard said when they were standing on the street.
“Good idea,” Anne said. They started walking. “We’re going to feel terrible tomorrow,” she said breezily.
“I brought aspirin,” Richard said, extending his arm and taking her hand, and then winding them down the street toward a bar that was attractively disgorging people onto the sidewalk.
Along the block of iron staircases that plunged gently from stone facades, the innards of the restaurants were exposed. They went into a wine bar and huddled together on a banquette, squished in with others.
“That shirt,” Richard said, nodding with endorsement as he brought the glass to his wine-stained lips. “It looks great on you. You should wear it more often.”
“You like it?”
She looked down at the shirt.
“It’s a nice cut.”
“A low cut,” he said.
“It is.”
Anne laughed. They had to scream into each other’s ears to be heard, and they kept brushing their lips against each other’s cheeks and ears.
When they left the wine bar, they made their way to the curb in search of a cab. Richard steadied himself against a tree.
“Can you flag down cabs here?”
“I can,” Anne said, theatrically stepping out onto the street. She stuck an arm into the air and, like magic, a taxi stopped.
Air poured in through the open windows of the speeding cab. Anne nuzzled against him, her nose in the crook of his neck, while the radio blared in French. They giggled and whispered to each other.
“I love the accent here,” she said.
“I can’t make it out.”
When they arrived and climbed up the stairs, their drunk legs heavy on the wooden slats, Anne pushed Richard from behind, her hand cupping one of his butt cheeks.
“Be careful,” she said.
“You be careful,” he said, laughing. “I might fall on you.”
“I’m heavy.”
Suddenly, they were unpeeling their clothes, toppling into the bedroom. They got into bed and Anne struggled up onto Richard’s chest, her groin like a frame above his torso. She kissed him on the mouth, a kiss that was more expert and adroit than he’d expected. A bolt of current surged through his lower body. They were both sweating and the room was stifling. Then his hand was sliding inside her pants, and she reached to unbutton his fly, once again with a confidence and competence that surprised him, and took out his cock. Like a group of dancers clumped in a hot, loud room, searching for space, his thoughts lurched from stasis to glee and back again. He thought of an article he’d read about cows getting squeezed before they are slaughtered, that it calms them and preserves the meat. Increasingly unskillful and enthusiastic, they burrowed toward each other. As her mouth moved down his body, each thought seemed shadowed by a barometer that measured its strangeness, importance, and intensity. But the barometer kept offering up disparate readings, flares of frenzied energy and inertial dips.
He seemed to be moving and then he was still; he was floating and he was falling; he was trapped and he was free.