2008
One floor up in a hotel in Arlington, light from the streetlamps outside filtering through the curtained window, Dan tells her he is going to do a fingertip search to find all the familiar places of her body, the freckles and moles she’d had as a teenager. She leans back on the bed and laughs as he moves down her torso in the dim light of the motel room.
His touch is at once familiar and completely new to her, though how he lingers, and pauses, and talks every so often is the same. He says, “Here, this. I remember,” and traces an appendectomy scar. He finds a mole on her calf and says, “Gotcha!” He holds her feet in his hands, kisses her toes then all the way up. “Here, I am not sure,” he says. He licks the crease of her thigh, then inward. “I don’t recall exactly—”
She laughs, and he rolls her on top of him, his hands coming to a rest on her thighs. “Why can’t this be a very long, slow night?” he says. He has to return to his girls in a couple of hours. “I’m too old to make love quickly.”
She laughs. “You were always slow, if I remember. It’s a quality I’ve come to appreciate.”
She likes how he wears his hair, the front pushed up and away from his brow. She likes that she can see his smile, even in the dark room.
He lifts her up higher on his chest. “I used to hate watching you slither away through my window because it meant a whole week would pass before I saw you again. And here we are in the same situation—well, almost.”
They are quiet now, moving quietly, too. The headlights of passing cars throw blocks of shifting light across the ceiling. The air-conditioning in the little room clicks on. For some time, longer than planned, they engage in the splendid peaceable process of making love, still with the curious stop-start manner that she remembers, and with a graceful quality as though in a dream.
Afterward, still entwined, he asks her how come she never called him after she left, why she did not contact him again.
“I’d have done anything for you,” he says, speaking into her hair.
“I was in a horrible place,” she says. “Not physically horrible, though yes. I mean, I was just a mess. You didn’t want to be near someone like me.”
“But that’s all I wanted.”
She can feel him right up next to her, the fold of his body cocooning her. It is a loss she cannot think too much about: that she might have had this man near her all these years but has not. That his teenage daughters might just as easily have been theirs. “You had better things to do, important things—”
“I might have been able to help you.”
“I wanted you to live your life. I didn’t want you to worry about me.”
“That’s exactly what I did. I worried.”
“Don’t be cross.”
He draws back from her, taking in her shape, her breasts, the neat line of hair low on her belly. “Look at you,” he says.
She remembers the early years after she left home. She’d been lonely, that was true, but remarkably calm about her circumstances. Her worst winter was when she worked in a canning factory and all her clothes smelled like fish. One summer in Delaware, working in a camper van that had been converted to a mobile restaurant selling fried clams, clam bellies, and whole lobsters, she got a bracelet of burn marks on her wrist from the fry oil. She missed school more than anything, and the sorts of kids you meet who are still in school. For a brief, intolerable time she stopped believing her life would ever get better.
“I imagined you were really happy and that was why you didn’t come back,” Dan says.
She almost laughs. “Once in a while I thought of killing myself but only in the mildest, most comforting of manners, a kind of get-out clause I never intended to exercise.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“It wasn’t the way you are thinking.”
She heard him take in a breath. Then he said, “Yes, it was.”
How can she explain to him that thoughts of suicide had not required desperate sadness as much as it had a condition of non-feeling, no emotion at all? Killing herself would have been like walking into a swamp, deeper and deeper into the sucking mud, until there was no returning. It had not been something she wanted or didn’t want. She’d had no idea how much trouble she was in until later.
“Would you ever live in Maryland again?” he says. “If I gave you a very good reason.”
It occurs to her to ask about his estranged wife, but it wouldn’t make any difference in her answer, so she says, “I can’t. It would be impossible for me to live here again.”
She hears his sigh, solid and audible in the darkness. She can feel his despair in all his loose muscles and sense his thoughts racing toward some other conclusion than the obvious one, that they will disappear back into their own lives.
“I have a practice here,” he says, as though this is the worst, most onerous piece of news he could deliver. “And an NIH post.”
“Surely these are good things?”
“If they are good, then why do I feel so dug-in? Tell me that. Why do I feel so stuck?”
She thinks about this, lying in his arms. Then she says, “Because you’ve never had any real trouble. You’re just bored. Boredom is easy to fix with any imagination.” It comes out quickly and sounds critical. “Sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be sorry. I think you might be right. Tell me, though, how does that feel?”
“You mean real trouble?”
“Yes.”
“Like you are an animal that is being hunted,” she says. “Like you’ve been run to ground.”
He nods in the darkness, considering this. “Like someone is going to kill you?”
“Killing is one possibility. There are others.”
“Did you ever worry he would kill you?”
“No.”
“Did you think he might hurt you?”
“No,” she says, lying.