Five

The bedroom furniture had been replaced since the days of Leah’s childhood: a king-size bed instead of a queen, muted wallpaper instead of the lavender she’d insisted on as a teenager, museum-quality paintings on the walls instead of her Madonna posters. But while the décor had been updated long ago, in her mind’s eye, it was still 1988.

Steven turned on the TV, a news channel. She slipped into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and changed into a well-worn tank top and loose cotton night shorts. When she was growing up, her mother had always worn fancy nightgowns—“peignoirs,” she called them. Vivian Hollander would never dream of wearing a T-shirt to bed. Leah didn’t hold herself to that kind of standard, but in the summer she did like to find cute things at the GapBody store on lower Fifth Avenue.

She returned to the bedroom, where Steven was unpacking his clothes.

“What do you think about Sadie showing up like that?” he said.

“I’m thrilled, obviously. But I have to wonder if something’s going on with her.”

It was so unlike Sadie to be spontaneous; when she explained her sudden appearance by saying that she just couldn’t miss the family vacation, Vivian had nodded approvingly. But Leah and Steven had exchanged a look: Sadie had been too busy to answer their calls for days, and suddenly she felt compelled to run out to the vineyard?

“Your mother kept asking me if you and Sadie planned the surprise all along,” Steven said, closing a set of drawers and putting his empty suitcase into a closet. Leah was one of the few among her friends who didn’t have reason to complain about her husband being a slob.

She climbed into bed. “Why would we do that?”

He shrugged. “You know your mother loves to make things dramatic.”

“Oh, she doesn’t. Come on.”

“Did you notice that she barely spoke to your brother’s girlfriend the entire dinner?”

Leah sighed. “Yeah. I’m sure she’ll have plenty to say to me about her tomorrow when we’re alone.”

Steven slipped into his side of the bed. Leah gave him a smile before he turned out his light. She felt a slight pang—very slight—when she thought about how their first night of vacation used to end. The tank top she’d just put on would quickly be coming off. But it had been a while since “going to bed” together meant anything more than going to sleep. The worst part of this was that she didn’t mind.

There had been a time when Steven’s touch could have made the entire world recede. Her love for Steven had been so strong it had overwhelmed her at times. Their attraction had been like a force, a storm that overtook her, and she hadn’t had to think about responding to him any more than she had to think about breathing.

The first night she gave in to her feelings for Steven, it had been a co-worker’s birthday. After the last shift at Murray’s Cheese, a bunch of them went to a bar on West Fourteenth Street. This was before the Meatpacking District had been turned into a glittering outdoor mall. The streets were desolate, some of the butcher shops still in operation by day but dark and secured with pulldown grates at night. Rumor had it that the bar they were going to, the Cooler, had until just recently been a meat storage facility.

The Cooler was dark and crowded, with raucous live music and a red cast to the lighting that gave her a headache. She sipped her beer and stayed longer than she otherwise would have because she happened to have a huge crush on the cheese shop’s assistant manager, Steven Bailey. She had a weakness for men with light eyes and dark hair, that striking combination known as “black Irish.” Steven was reserved and kind, even when someone messed up by not letting the cheese rise to room temperature or missed a shift. Plus, he was working his way through Columbia Law, so she had a lot of respect for him.

Or maybe it was just the eyes.

Either way, by midnight, even the pull of Steven Bailey’s charms couldn’t keep her at the loud bar another minute. She said her goodbyes, and surprisingly, he offered to walk her out.

Standing on the corner of Ninth Avenue, she said, “Okay, well—see you Monday.”

He just stood there, looking at her in a way that made her stomach do a little flip.

“I’ll walk you to the subway. It’s pretty late,” he said after a moment. A group walked by, laughing and debating the merits of two nearby bars. Steven watched them pass and said, “Look at the type of shady characters this neighborhood attracts. It’s really not safe.”

She laughed. “I’m not taking the subway. I live on Bank Street.”

After she’d graduated college and discovered that she wouldn’t be returning to the North Fork after all, she’d rented an apartment in a West Village brownstone, a fifth-floor walk-up that she shared with a roommate she’d found through a service. It was run by a man working out of a shoe box of an office in Chelsea. He had chain-smoked and shuffled through three-by-five cards like a matchmaker from the old country, but he did find her someone compatible. Keira worked in fashion and traveled constantly. She and Leah had barely exchanged more than a few sentences in the entire year they lived together. They kept track of whose turn it was to buy toilet paper or clean the kitchen by a magnetic whiteboard on the refrigerator. Sometimes Keira’s exclamation points could feel a little passive-aggressive, and Leah looked forward to being able to afford her own place. Her parents had offered to help with her rent, but out of pride she’d refused.

“I’m taking the Six, so Bank is on my way,” Steven said. “Unless you really don’t want company.”

Again, their eyes met.

“Company would be great,” she said softly.

To this day she remembered the details of that walk: stopping at the Korean deli on the corner of Fourteenth and Eighth (now the site of a high-rise condo) for a bottle of water, and the way it smelled like grease from the hot buffet (if she’d been alone she would have gotten a container of fried rice). When they reached her building, a long-haired tabby cat occupied the top step, and when they walked up it jumped to the adjacent garbage bins.

She couldn’t recall what they talked about, but she could still feel the tension as she turned the key in the front door. The brownstone had double doors, the first a heavyweight wrought iron. Steven helped her pull it open, and in the time it took for her to unlock the second door she’d decided to invite him in.

Still, she made a show of acting like this was in no way a romantic overture, trying to act casual as she stopped in the mail room and collected her bills out of the small square door in the row of a dozen other square metal doors. She had closed and locked the door with her tiny mail key when she felt his hand on her back—gentle, an almost imperceptible touch. When she turned, the intensity in his eyes gave her butterflies. He’s going to kiss me, she thought. But he hesitated, and so she took one step forward, tilting her face toward him. He pressed against her, moving her back flat against the wall of mailboxes, his mouth meeting hers. In the morning, she would look in the mirror and find marks where the metal had bit into her shoulder blades. But in the moment, all she felt was the soft pressure of his lips, the coolness of his hands slipping under her light jacket, the hammering of her own heart.

Somehow, they made their way upstairs, into her bed. A little voice in her head asked her if she really wanted to sleep with someone she worked with—on the first date. Not even a date! But that voice was no match for the overwhelming drive she felt to be naked and against him and touched by him.

He peeled off her clothes so slowly, it was as if he was giving himself a chance to reconsider. In fact, he murmured at one point, “Is this a good idea?”

Her answer was tugging off her underwear and unzipping his jeans. His body was chiseled and taut, and she ran her hands over it with unabashed admiration. She had slept with only two other men, and neither had inspired such fervor. After a short while, a switch seemed to flip within Steven, and any hint of hesitation was gone. His mouth was on her neck, her breasts, and when he touched her between her legs, her stomach fluttered like she was looking over a ledge. When he moved inside her, she felt, Yes, this is it. She was twenty-three years old and finally experiencing the delirious heights of sexual ecstasy. Her body had a mind of its own, and that night, it spoke in a language she’d never heard before but in which she became fluent over the decades.

But lately, for the past year or so, it seemed they’d somehow fallen into the “friend zone.” They still enjoyed each other’s company; they talked and laughed and kissed and hugged. But sex? She had no interest. And he barely seemed to have more than she did. Or maybe it was her own lack of enthusiasm that had dampened his. Either way, it was concerning.

Steven gave her a peck on the cheek and was snoring lightly before she’d even adjusted her pillow.

Leah turned off her bedside light. She would be awake for hours.