Paul had been cast as the lead in Boston College’s freshman production of Angel Street. He had been an average student in high school, disdaining math and science in favor of literature and poetry and the endless melodrama of his own imagination. He’d also been president of the drama club, and he had a natural talent for which he was awarded a scholarship to B.C. His family would not have been able to afford to send him to a good school any other way, although his father’s Philadelphia fireworks business had done well during Paul’s high school years, and his mother had tucked away nearly every cent she’d earned as a maid. Still, there were six Macelli children—Paul and his five sisters—and they were all bright, all ambitious. They would all want to go to school.
His was the first role to be cast in Angel Street. He could tell, as Harry Saunders watched him read for the part of Jack Manningham, that no one else would have to bother reading. So he sat, relaxed and relieved, next to Harry in the front row of the auditorium, while other anxious freshmen read for their parts.
Annie Chase auditioned for the part of the flirtatious maid on a whim. She’d come with a girlfriend and had agreed to try out in order to give her friend courage. She skittered up the stairs when it was her turn, and her hair seemed to fill the stage. Harry, who’d been slouching in his seat, leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees.
“Go ahead, please,” he said, and she read a line or two in a throaty voice before she began to laugh. It was a giggle, really, a sound only Annie Chase could make, and its rippling, ringing tone was a surprise given the huskiness of her voice. Everyone in the theater turned to look at her, their own faces slowly breaking into grins. Paul smiled himself. He glanced at Harry, who was nearly laughing.
“Do you want to try that again, Miss Chase?”
“Sure.” She read again, this time making it nearly to the end of her soliloquy before the giggles got her, and although she seemed like a young girl clearly out of control, and although the reading itself had not been anything outstanding, Paul was not surprised when Harry cast her in the role. Neither was he displeased.
“She’ll grab the audience,” Harry said, speaking to Paul as though he were a colleague. “She’ll grab them and she won’t let go. We just have to get her—and that hair—under a little bit of control without taking the life out of her.”
Harry needn’t have worried about that. It was impossible to sap the life out of Annie Chase. She sparkled, she bubbled, she drew people to her like a minstrel on a busy street.
He fell in love on that stage at Boston College. Annie came late to rehearsals and no one seemed to mind. It was as if they were all waiting, holding their breath for her arrival, letting the smiles spread across their faces when she finally bounded onto the stage.
He had to kiss her. It was in the script, and for several nights before the first time, he lay awake imagining that kiss. He wished he didn’t have to do it in front of Harry Saunders and the rest of the cast. He wanted to kiss her in private.
When the afternoon of the kiss finally arrived, he made it quick and light.
“Again,” Harry said from the front row. “Longer this time, Macelli.”
He kissed her longer, trying to keep his wits about him, and when he pulled away from her she was grinning.
“You’re not supposed to smile, Annie,” Harry said. “You’re supposed to look seductive.”
She giggled. “Sorry.”
“You two better practice on your own till you get it right.” Harry gave Paul a knowing nod.
So they practiced. They met in his dorm room or hers, reading their lines, working up to the kiss and away from it, the rest of their lines anticlimactic. When they had finished rehearsing for the day, he would read her his poetry if they were in his room, or look at the jewelry she was making if they were in hers. She’d form gold and silver into intricate shapes for earrings and pendants and bracelets. He loved watching her work. She’d tie her hair back in a leather strap which was rarely up to the task, and her long red tresses would spill out bit by bit as she worked with the glittering metal.
Paul felt the addiction taking hold of him. He’d known her for just a few weeks, but she was constantly on his mind. He’d call her, ostensibly to read through their lines, but they wound up talking about other things, and he treasured every word he got from her, playing their conversations over and over again in his mind as he lay in bed.
Then the gifts began. On opening night, she surprised him with a gold bracelet she’d made for him. The following day, he found a basket of pine cones outside his door, and the day after that, she arrived in his room carrying a macramé belt.
“I stayed up all night making this for you,” she said.
She pulled the belt he was wearing out of the loops of his jeans and began fitting the new belt through. It was slightly too wide, and the pressure of her fingers as she worked with the belt made him hard in an instant. He turned away from her, embarrassed.
She looked up at him from her seat on his bed.
“Paul,” she said, her dark blue eyes big and sad. “I don’t get it. Don’t you want me?”
He looked down at her, startled. “I…yes. But I didn’t think you…”
She groaned, curling her fingers into the pockets of his jeans. “God, Paul, I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out how to make you fall in love with me.”
“I’ve been in love with you for weeks,” he said. “Here. I can prove it.” He pulled out the top drawer of his desk and handed her a poem, one of many he’d written about her in the past few weeks. It made her cry.
She stood up to kiss him, a far longer, far steamier kiss than the one they’d shared on stage. Then she walked over to his door and turned the lock. He felt his knees start to buckle and wondered how he would get through this. “I’ve never made love before,” he admitted, leaning awkwardly against his desk. He’d had a number of girlfriends in high school, two in particular, who were drawn to his sensitivity and his poems, but he was still very much a virgin.
Annie, however, was not.
She smiled. “So that’s it,” she said, as though that explained everything. “Well, I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen, so you don’t have a thing to worry about.”
Her words shocked him at first. Disappointed him. But then he felt relieved, because as she began kissing him, touching him, it was quickly obvious that she did indeed know what she was doing.
“You are to do absolutely nothing,” she said. She undressed him to his boxer shorts and rolled him onto his stomach. Then she straddled him and began a long, deep massage, her hands soft and cool at first, heating up as she worked them over his skin. She rolled him onto his back and took off her T-shirt and bra. Paul reached up to touch the creamy white skin of her breasts, but she caught his hand and set it back down at his side.
“You may look but you may not touch,” she said. “I told you, you have to just lie here. Tonight is entirely for you.”
She made love to him the way she did everything in her life—generously, putting his pleasure ahead of her own.
In the weeks that followed, he realized that she could give endlessly, but she could not take. When he’d try to touch her during their lovemaking, she’d brush his hand away. “You don’t need to do that,” she’d say, and he soon realized that she meant it, that she’d be overcome with discomfort, thrown completely out of equilibrium, when he tried to turn the tables and give to her, in bed or out.
He bought her flowers once, for no particular reason, and her smile faded when he gave them to her. “These are way too pretty for me,” she said, her cheeks crimson. Later that day, she gave the roses to another girl in the dorm who had admired them.
He bought her a scarf for her birthday, and the next day she took it back, slipping the twelve dollar refund into the pocket of his jeans. “Don’t spend your money on me,” she said, and she would not listen to his protests. Yet her gifts to him kept coming, and he grew increasingly uncomfortable accepting them.
One day he and Annie were eating lunch in the cafeteria when they were joined by a pretty brunette Annie had known in elementary school. “You were the nicest girl at Egan Day School,” she said to Annie. Then she turned to Paul. “She was by far the most popular kid in the entire school. She was one of those girls you wanted to hate because she was so popular that she left no room at all for the competition, but she was so nice you just couldn’t help but like her.”
That night Annie lay next to him in his bed and told him how she had earned her popularity. “I have an enormous allowance,” she said, her voice oddly subdued, almost flat. “I bought the other kids candy and toys. It worked.”
He pulled her closer. “Didn’t you think you were likable just as you were?”
“No. I thought I was an ugly little girl with terrible red hair. My mother fussed with my hair every morning, and she’d say how horrible it was, how bad I looked. I’d end up crying practically every day on my way to school.”
“You’re so beautiful. How could she do that to you?”
“Oh, well.” Annie swept her arm through the air. “I don’t think she meant to hurt me. She just…I guess she has her own problems. Anyhow, I really panicked when I got to high school and there were zillions of new kids to meet. I knew candy and toys weren’t going to work anymore. I had to find some other way to get people to like me.”
“Did you find a way?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I found a way to get the boys to like me, anyhow.”
“Oh, Annie.”
“Don’t hate me.”
He stroked her cheek. “I love you. You don’t have to do that anymore. You’ve got me.”
“I know.” She snuggled close. “Hold me tighter, Paul.”
He did, loving that she would confide in him, and he thought the time was right to ask her the question that had been on his mind since the first time they’d made love.
“Something bothers me, Annie,” he said. “Do you ever come when we’re making love?”
He felt her shrug. “No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m content just to be close to you and see you enjoying yourself.”
He was disappointed. Embarrassed. “I must be doing something wrong.”
“It’s not you, Paul. I never have.”
He leaned away so that he could look at her. “You’ve made love since you were fifteen and you’ve never…?”
“I truly don’t care. It’s never been important to me. I’d see a guy and want to hold him, to feel good that way, warm and loved. If sex was what I had to do to get that, so be it.”
He pulled her close again. “If you really want to make me happy, Annie, then let me make you feel good for a change.”
“You do,” she said. “You make me feel wonderful.”
“You know what I mean.”
She shrank away from him. “I figure it must not be possible for me,” she said. “I think it would have happened by now.”
He was unwilling to talk to his friends about something so personal, so he spent the next afternoon in the library hunting for a solution to Annie’s dilemma. He found a book filled with advice and illustrations which he couldn’t bring himself to check out from the wizened old gentleman behind the desk. So he sat in a secluded corner and read it, from cover to cover.
That night in her dorm room, he sat down on her bed and patted the space next to him. She joined him, wrapping her arms around him and planting a wet kiss on his neck.
“I read a sex manual today,” he said.
“What?” She jerked away from him. “Why?”
“Because it’s your turn tonight.” He reached for the hem of her T-shirt, but she stopped him.
“No,” she whined.
“Annie.” He held her by the shoulders. “Do this for me if not for yourself, all right?”
“What if it doesn’t work? You’ll be disappointed in me… You’ll…”
“I’m not going to be disappointed in you or stop loving you or anything else you’re worried about. It’ll be fine. But you have to relax.”
She bit her lip. “Turn off the light,” she said.
He did as he was told, and then returned to the bed where he undressed her, rather methodically, and sat behind her with his back against the wall.
“What are we doing? Aren’t you going to take off your clothes, too?” she asked.
“Nope.” He spread his legs wide and pulled her back against his chest. The illustration from the manual was burned into his brain. All day he’d thought of how it would feel to hold Annie this way, to touch her, to finally feel her respond. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her shoulder. She was shivering.
“This is nice,” she said. “You could just hold me like this. I’d rather do this than…”
“Shh. Rest your legs against mine. That’s it.”
“This is stupid. I feel ridiculous.”
He stroked her arms, her shoulders. “You have to tell me what feels good,” he said, moving his hands to her breasts. “Let me know if anything hurts.”
“That doesn’t hurt.” She giggled and seemed to relax in his arms, but she went rigid once he lowered his hands to her thighs.
“Come on, Annie, relax.”
“I’m trying. I just don’t like all the attention being on me. I don’t see why… Oh.”
His fingertips had found their mark. Annie drew in her breath and her legs suddenly opened wider, pressing hard against his own, her hands grasping the denim that covered his thighs. He slipped a finger of his left hand inside her and she shuddered.
“This feels good to me, too, Annie,” he said, encouraging her, but it was unnecessary. She was letting herself go, letting herself take. When she came, he had one sudden pulse of terror that she might be faking, but then the waves of contractions circled his finger, and he felt her go limp.
That night was a turning point for them, not just that it made sex better—she continued to refer to sex as a “by-product” of being close—but that it shifted their relationship to a different plane, one in which Annie allowed things to be done for her. The addiction, though still an addiction, was mutual now.
His family adored her. He and Annie visited Philadelphia twice that year, and Annie slipped right into that female dominated household as easily as if she’d been born into it.
“Your family’s so warm, Paul,” she told him. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”
She would not take him to meet her own parents, however, even though they lived no more than a half hour’s drive from school. After much arm-twisting on his part, she finally agreed to take him home with her on her father’s fiftieth birthday. “You talk about him all the time,” he said. “I want to meet him.”
She did talk about her father a great deal, her voice often swelling with her pride in his accomplishments as a physician. She worked for a month on his birthday gift—gold cufflinks she had designed herself—showing Paul the progress she was making on them each time he came over.
Paul held the small package containing the cufflinks on his lap as he and Annie turned onto the tree-lined street leading to her house. She had been quiet during the entire trip, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel of her red convertible.
“What time is it?” she asked, as they passed one enormous mansion after another.
Paul looked at his watch. “Ten past four.”
“Oh, God. My mother will throw a fit.”
“We’re not that late.”
“You don’t understand. She has this thing about time. When I was little and she promised to take me someplace, she wouldn’t do it if I was even a minute late getting ready.”
Paul frowned at her. “You’re kidding.”
She shook her head. “Let’s tell them your last name is Macy,” she suggested.
“Why?”
“Just for fun.”
He stared at her, confused. “It’s not my name,” he said.
She stopped at a stop sign and looked over at him. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Paul, but my parents are very prejudiced.” She lowered her hands to her lap and began kneading them together. “Do you understand? I mean, unless you’re just like them, they… They’ll like you better if they think you’re…”
His cheeks burned. “Do you want me to lie about what my parents do for a living, too?”
She looked down at her hands. “This is why I didn’t want you to meet them.”
“I won’t lie, Annie.” Back then he never did. She said nothing, pressing her foot once more on the gas pedal.
“I thought you loved me,” he said.
“I do. I just want them to love you too.” She turned into a long driveway, and he caught a glimpse of a Tudor-style house far down the expanse of manicured lawn before it disappeared behind a row of pines. “They have my life planned out for me, Paul,” she said. “I’m supposed to be majoring in something useful—we had a terrible fight when I told them I wanted to be an artist—and I’m supposed to marry one of the eligible sons of their elite little circle of friends. Do you understand now why I didn’t want to bring you here?”
Yes, he understood, but she was a little late in telling him her reasons.
An elderly woman dressed in a dark uniform and white apron let them in. She kissed Annie’s cheek and led them into the living room. “Your mum and dad will be down shortly, dear.” The woman left the room, and Annie smiled at him nervously. He shivered. The living room was huge and cold, like a cavern.
“You get used to it,” Annie said. She was perspiring despite the chill.
Her father walked into the room first. He was a thin, good-looking man, tan and fit and stern. His thick hair was mostly gray. He bussed his daughter’s cheek.
“Daddy, this is Paul,” Annie said, avoiding the surname issue altogether.
“Paul…?” Dr. Chase shook his hand.
“Macelli,” Paul said, the name sounding suddenly dirty to his ears. He shook the man’s hand with a sense of defeat, imagining that he was already being ruled out as a serious candidate for the hand of his daughter.
Annie’s mother made more of an attempt to feign warmth, but Paul felt the coldness in her hand when she touched her fingertips to his. She was a plain-looking woman, perhaps even homely, despite the heavy use of cosmetics. Her red hair was drawn back under serious control into a bun.
He could barely eat the slab of roast beef a second servant put on his plate after they’d sat down to dinner. He didn’t balk at the probing questions about his family, however. Instead, he began to enjoy them, making it clear to Annie’s parents that they had the son of blue-collar workers eating off their fine china, perhaps even sleeping with their daughter. He talked at length about the fireworks business and he told them about the time his mother cleaned the house of the mayor of Philadelphia.
During dessert—a birthday cake in the shape of a tennis racket—Annie presented her father with the set of gold cufflinks. “Why, thank you, princess.” Dr. Chase leaned over to kiss Annie’s cheek and then set the box next to his plate. Paul had the feeling the cufflinks would find themselves in the back of a drawer somewhere, if not in the trash.
“Annie’s jewelry instructor says she’s the best student he’s ever had,” Paul said.
“Paul.” Annie blushed.
Dr. Chase looked up from his cake. “Well, Annie’s quite bright when she puts her mind to it,” he said. “She could be anything she wants to be. She has the brains to do a lot more than twist little pieces of metal into jewelry.”
Paul glanced at Annie. He saw the shine of tears in her eyes.
Dr. Chase set down his fork and looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to run, kids.”
“But Daddy,” Annie said, “it’s your birthday.” Her voice came very close to breaking. Paul heard the splintery little catch in the huskiness, but her parents didn’t seem to notice.
Her father stood up and leaned over to kiss the top of her head. He nodded toward Paul. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Macelli. I’m sure we’ll all think of you the next time we see a good show of fireworks.”
Paul and Annie left shortly after dinner, and Annie was crying by the time they reached her car.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” he said.
“It’s not you,” she said. “I always leave there in tears.”
“I hate them. I’m sorry, Annie, but they’re abominable.”
“Don’t say that, Paul, please. It doesn’t make me feel any better. They’re all I’ve got. You have your sisters and everyone, and I’ve got them. Period.” She opened her car door and looked up at the house. “He never has time for me. He didn’t when I was little and he doesn’t now.”
They spent the summer after their freshman year in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Paul living with a friend he’d known from high school, Annie with two girls from Boston College. Paul worked as a waiter during the day and in the summer stock production of Carousel at night, while Annie worked in a gallery, where she learned the basics of stained glass. It was a wonderful summer, both of them doing things they loved and spending their free time together. They were just nineteen, but Paul felt a maturity in their relationship. They talked about the future, about having children, little red haired Italians they would name Guido and Rosa to torment her parents. “Guido and Rozer,” Annie would say, in her Boston accent, which sounded strange to Paul’s ears now that they were no longer in New England.
They took leisurely strolls around the little town of New Hope. Annie fell in love with a small blue cloisonné horse she found in one of the shops. Although she stopped by the shop to look at the horse every few days, Paul knew she would never buy it for herself. So when he had finally made enough money, he bought it for her as a surprise. It cost him nearly every spare cent he’d earned, and at first she wanted to take it back. He insisted she keep it, though, and she wrapped it in a soft cloth and carried it around in her pocketbook, taking it out to show anyone she met. She named it Baby Blue, after a Dylan song.
Her parents visited her in mid-July, and for three days he didn’t see her. He finally went to the gallery where she worked, and he knew right away that she wasn’t herself. She had circles under her eyes; her giggle was gone. He hated the way her parents poisoned her.
“They want me to change majors,” she said.
“To what?”
“Something more useful than art.” She straightened a picture on the wall. “If I don’t change majors, they won’t pay for me to stay in school. But I can’t give up art. I’ll have to lie to them.” She looked at him. “I lied to them about you, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told them I’m not seeing you anymore. I never did tell them you were here. They’d never let me stay here if they knew.”
“But what about the future? What happens when we want to get married?”
Annie nervously wrapped a strand of her hair around her finger. “I don’t know. I can’t worry about that right now.”
“Would they disinherit you if you married an Italian?”
“I wouldn’t care if they did,” she snapped. “It’s not money I want from them, Paul. Don’t you know that by now?”
It was true she didn’t care about money for herself. She made her own clothes out of what looked like rags to him. She bought cheap shampoo that left her hair smelling like laundry detergent, and Paul could not go into the laundromat without thinking of her hair. Money was important to her only because it allowed her to help other people. She’d lay awake for hours at night, trying to determine who could use her money the most. At the end of the summer, she took the money she’d earned from her job at the gallery and threw a party for the kids at a nearby hospital.
Annie went off the pill just before they returned to school in the fall. She’d been taking it since she was fifteen. “It’s bad to be on it for so long,” she said. “I’m going to try this new sponge thing. It’s more natural.”
“I could use rubbers,” Paul volunteered.
“No, you may not,” she said. “You wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much.” He knew better than to try to argue with her. Thus started Annie’s long line of peculiar birth control methods, and there were times he secretly prayed they would fail. He loved the thought of having a child with her, of strengthening the bond that already existed between them.
When they returned to school, Paul moved into her dorm, one floor below hers. The placid tenor that had marked their relationship in New Hope followed them back to Boston and lasted nearly until the end of the year. That was when her parents received some forms from the school and discovered that Annie was still very much an art major. When they called her at the dorm to confront her with the lie, it was Paul who answered the phone in her room. He unwittingly identified himself, thinking it was one of Annie’s professors calling. By the time Annie called her parents back that evening, they were in an advanced stage of fury. The phone battle went on for a good hour before Paul left the room, unable to tolerate Annie’s meek apologies. A few hours after she’d gotten off the phone with them, her mother called back. Her father’d had a heart attack, she said. He’d collapsed shortly after talking with Annie and was now in the hospital. The doctors were not certain he would pull through.
She wouldn’t let Paul go home with her, and she was gone a full week. She didn’t return his calls, although he wasn’t at all certain his messages were being delivered.
She was different when she came back to school. There was a distance between them which she wouldn’t acknowledge, making it impossible for him to fight. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Paul. I’m out with you, aren’t I? I’m talking to you.”
They went through the motions of their relationship—talking, going to the movies, eating together in the cafeteria, making love—but a part of Annie was missing.
Finally one night, very close to the end of the school year, Paul blocked her exit from his dorm room. “You can’t leave until you tell me exactly what’s going on in your head,” he said. He sat her down on his bed, while he sat on his desk, far enough away from her that she would not be able to seduce him into touching her to avoid talking.
“My father almost died, Paul.” She played with the silver bracelet on her wrist. “I caused it by making him angry at me, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll have him. He’s so frail now. I can’t bear seeing him like that. He said a lot of things to me in the hospital. He said he loves me… Well, not those words exactly. But he said I’m the most important thing in the world to him. He actually said that.” Her eyes misted over. “He said he doesn’t understand why I set my sights so low, that it disappoints him so much. ‘Art’s nice, honey,’ he said, ‘but you’ll never be Picasso.’ So I’m going to change my major. I’ve already filled out the forms.”
“Change to what?”
“Biology.”
“Biology. You have no interest whatsoever in biology.”
She shrugged. “I think I could get into it. It would prepare me for nursing or maybe even medical school. Some career where I could help people. And my father would be so proud of me.” She looked down at the bracelet again. “I’m going to give away all the jewelry I made.”
“Annie…”
“My father said you’re trying to pull yourself up in the world through me, but that you’ll only succeed in dragging me down with you.”
He wanted to throw something against the wall. “Do you believe that crap?”
“Of course not, but I feel like I’m killing him, Paul.”
“He’s trying to kill you. He’s trying to make you a little clone of his goddamned fucked self.”
She pressed her hands to her ears and he sat down next to her, pulling her close to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, when you see your father, you get under his spell or something. It’ll pass in a little while and you’ll feel okay about yourself again. And about me. We’ll be in New Hope again this summer and…”
She shook her head. “I’m not going to New Hope this summer.”
He froze. “What do you mean?”
“I need to be by myself for a while. I need to think everything through.”
“Will you stay with your parents?” He could not bear the thought of her spending two months with them. She would be entirely brainwashed by the end of the summer.
“No,” she said. “I thought I’d travel down the coast. From here to Florida.”
“What do you mean, from here to Florida? Who would you go with?”
“Myself.”
“You can’t do that. What if your car breaks down?”
“I’m going to hitchhike.”
Paul stood up. “You have this all planned out, don’t you? You’ve been thinking about this for a long time and haven’t said a word to me about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Annie, I can’t be apart from you for the entire summer.”
“Maybe it won’t be that long. Maybe the first week it’ll all come clear to me, and I’ll write to you every single day.”
He went to New Hope alone. He took a part in summer stock but was reviewed poorly, his first truly bad review ever. At first Annie sent him postcards daily from coastal towns in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. She’d write volumes in the little space on the cards, her handwriting squeezed together almost unintelligibly, telling him about the beaches, the water, the arcades. She was meeting lots of interesting people, she wrote, which disturbed him. How many of those people were men? She’d sign the cards, I love you, though, and he tried to relax, to tell himself she would come back refreshed and free of her father’s shadow. Little boxes wrapped in brown paper arrived for him several times a week and inside he’d find shells, a starfish, a seahorse. Annie and her gifts.
Suddenly, though, the gifts stopped, along with the postcards. He was sick with worry. After five days without a word from her, he called her parents.
“She decided to stay in North Carolina awhile,” her mother told him.
“Well, I…I was hearing from her just about every day and then the cards stopped…and I just thought.” He grimaced. He could imagine Annie’s mother smiling with delight on the other end of the telephone. “Where in North Carolina is she?” he asked.
“The beach somewhere. I think they call it the Outer Banks down there.”
Two more weeks followed without a word from Annie. He was in pain. His body literally ached when he got out of bed in the morning. He couldn’t imagine she would leave him hanging this way, that she would cut herself off from him so completely. He read her last postcard over and over again, and the “I love you” at the end seemed just as sincere as it did in the first one. Maybe her mother was lying. Maybe Annie was in Boston. Maybe she wrote to him daily and her mother intercepted the letters.
Then the note came from Kitty Hawk.
Dear Paul,
I’ve written this letter in my mind a thousand times and it never comes out right, but I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve met someone down here. His name is Alec and I’ve fallen in love with him. I didn’t plan for this to happen, Paul, please believe me. I left B.C. with thoughts only of you, but also with the knowledge that things between us were not what they once were. I still love you—I think I always will. You’re the one who taught me that receiving could be just as much an act of love as giving. Oh God, Paul, you’re the last person in the world I would ever want to hurt. I doubt I’ll return to B.C. in the fall. It’s just as well we don’t ever see each other again. Please, please forgive me.
Annie
He considered going to North Carolina to find her, claim her, but he didn’t want her on those terms. He became obsessed with thoughts of harming himself. He could no longer drive at night without being tempted to slip his car across the white line into oncoming traffic, and he’d sometimes sit for hours in his kitchen, staring at the blade of a steak knife, imagining how it would feel to draw it through the vein in his arm.
He quit the play and moved home for the rest of the summer, where his sisters clucked over him and his parents tried to force him to eat. They treated him like the sick, withdrawing addict that he was. Still, he could not stand it when his sisters called Annie a two-faced bitch.
He returned to Boston College a walking dead man. He tried out for the junior play, but Harry Saunders said he was “lifeless,” and cast someone else in the part Paul knew Harry had intended for him. He lost interest in acting altogether and switched his major to journalism. In November, one of Annie’s friends told him that Annie had married Alec O’Neill in North Carolina. O’Neill. He supposed an Irishman was preferable to an Italian in her parents’ eyes.
And in hers as well.