8

IF VIRGINIA SUSPECTED NOTHING, WE MIGHT SAY that Jane suspected everything: every ring from the telephone, every suggestion of a foot tread at her doorstep, every thing present or absent under the sun that might be a sign—and what, in love, is not?

Surely that is going too far: to say, scarcely sixteen hours after they first parted as lovers, that Jane and Edward love one another, are in love. If Jane were to seek the guidance of a professional (such as herself, in fact) the therapist/counselor would likely attempt to help her see that what she feels today is at best infatuation (albeit without exactly using that word), perhaps even pure sexual desire—lust (without, needless to say, using that word either)—which, mind you, under the circumstances is a perfectly normal, natural, and healthy response to her recent experience.

But Jane would not be having any of that. Assuming she had told anyone. Which she has not and will not (not even Frances) for the foreseeable future. Because this is hers, and she is damned if she is going to share it, parcel it out, pass it around like a bowl of Triscuits. And that is why she is going to call it love if she calls it anything at all; which she is not going to do at this point, for just now she is keeping it even from herself. She is not saying anything about it to herself, not in words. She is keeping it entirely in her heart, and there it sits, spinning.

Edward, too, is thinking along these lines, when he is not thinking the other thing: the one that struck him over his pork chop; that he is trying to make two different objects occupy the same space, and will come to grief for it.

Edward has stopped work early—he could not sell an ice cube to an Arab in his present state of mind—and is driving up the hill at three-thirty to tell Jane this very thing. Or some other thing he has yet to determine. It will amount to “This is wrong and we have to stop,” but first he is going to make love to her, one last time. He is hard already, in the car.

“You came,” Jane says as she opens the door.

“I said I would. As soon as I could.” Edward elbows the door shut and seizes Jane by the hips, pulling them together at the waist. He lowers his face into her hair, just above her neck by her ear, as though he is taking shelter there; as though bullies or demons have been chasing him, and he has evaded them only by slipping quickly through her door and bolting it fast.

Their lovemaking is not as hasty as the day before, but still pointed, purposeful. There is something akin to a backlog in their relation—the love they had not made on the day they met in the Medical Arts Building, and all the days thereafter until yesterday. Then, the following week, the lovemaking (and surely that was the right word, for if they did not love one another at the start, they did by the end) becomes aimless, which is to say truly loving; propelled not by desire but by its own internal gravity, its being, its own forward unmoved motion. They do things neither had ever done before or scarcely even thought of, things undreamt in the mind of Harold Robbins himself, as Frances would have said, had she known, which she does not.

Edward does not speak to Jane of the matters that are weighing on him that day or on succeeding days. That is not to say they did not make themselves felt. Every time Edward leaves—more or less five days a week, around five-fifteen—she knows she is only borrowing him from Virginia, from the woman he belongs to. Yet what they have, what they make, is to Jane’s mind so much better than nothing or even the best of what she has had before that she does not begrudge this. The woman she was born to be—a woman like her mother at the start of her life—would not countenance this so easily; would probably find Jane a pathetic figure, sad and disreputable, living on the table scraps of another woman’s life.

Jane knows who she is (she is the beggar maid) but she is not disgraced, but graced; gifted, because with nothing left, not even her only son, she has Edward Byrne for ninety minutes at a time, as long as he will come, as long as heaven allows; and it seems to her that they are their very own heaven, that this is what they make when they make love, so it might well last forever.

So it is, when Edward does leave, she is content. She straightens the living room and the bed. She takes their glasses and their ashtrays to the kitchen and washes them, and as she does so, she sings a song of Bernstein’s: We’re neither pure nor wise nor good/We’ll do the best we know/We’ll build our house, and chop our wood/And make our garden grow.