A Small Indiscretion Page 10

  I passed out on the way back. When the train stopped, I found that I had been sleeping with my head on Malcolm’s shoulder and my hand in his on the table between us. I sat upright and tried to collect myself, moving my hand away and running my tongue over my teeth and blinking the sleep from my eyes. There were a number of men from our party heading from the train to a pub, and I wanted to join them.

  “I think it’s time I took you home,” Malcolm said.

  “I thought we could go for a drink,” I replied.

  “I think we’ve had enough for now.”

  “It’d be fun to go to a pub, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would, it would,” he said. “But I thought we might have some time alone together.”

  “Don’t you have to get home?”

  “No, not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told Louise this morning I’d likely spend the night in London.”

  “With whom?”

  “I didn’t say with whom.”

  “But where are you spending the night?”

  “I was hoping to spend it with you.”

  Had I led him on to such an extent that the request was reasonable? I didn’t know. But I know that what I felt as we stood on the train platform was that here was a problem—Malcolm beside me with a pleading look on his face—and there was no way to solve the problem except to acquiesce. It was not a romantic impulse, but a practical one, that led me to agree.

  We took a cab to Victoria. We walked into the boardinghouse, up three flights of stairs to my room. We lay down on the bed, and he began to kiss me. His lips were trembling. Instead of making me resist, the trembling worked to his advantage. I wanted the awkwardness between us over with as soon as possible, so to hurry things along, I removed my own clothes. He lay staring at me, and I saw that now his whole body was trembling. He leaned over and kissed me. The kiss was so tentative, it repulsed me. I rolled toward him anyway, my determination growing with each failed advance.

  “I don’t know that—” he said, when my body was crushed against his, but he didn’t finish.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I may be too excited, just now,” he said, so quietly I barely heard him.

  “Too excited for what?”

  “To, well, to perform.”

  I rolled abruptly away from him. It was just as I’d feared. Worse than I’d feared. It was a disastrous embarrassment that would ruin everything between us. I felt that all the blood in me was rushing to my face in shame, and I knew it was my fault, even as he apologized again and again.

  “It’s all right,” I said, grabbing my clothes and putting them back on. “I’ve changed my mind, anyway. I think it’s best you go, now.”

  “Please,” he said. “Let me stay. We can just spend the night together. We don’t have to try again. I could just hold you.”

  I could not stand his desperation. It made him seem weak and unattractive. It severed any remaining obligations.

  “No,” I said. “I want you to go, now.”

  I felt a rush of longing for Patrick—his nonchalance, his selfishness, his unfailing ability to perform—and I knew it was a night he was working at the gallery. If I hurried, I might still catch him.

  “All right,” Malcolm said. “I’ll go. We’ll have other chances.”

  He hugged me goodbye. I had to force myself to keep from squirming out of his embrace. I knelt on my bed after he’d gone, watching out the window to make sure he exited the building and was out of sight before I put my coat back on. Patrick was just locking up as I arrived at the gallery. He seemed happy enough to see me. He caught me up in his arms. We went somewhere and ate curry, then returned to my room and made love, though it was a stretch to call it that. I was making love, I think; he was taking what I made. Sometime in the night he wrote me a note, a goodbye note, as always. In the dark, he stuck it to my left breast and kissed me and took his leave.

  Nineteen

  EASTER MONDAY. Your father and your sisters have flown off to Wisconsin, and I am alone in the city for the week with the dogs. I stepped outside this morning, determined to distract myself by taking pleasure from the day. I stretched out on a chaise longue with my coffee. The dogs lay beside me. The yard was still and hot under a cloudless sky, and there was that summertime silence we sometimes get early in the spring. A column of gnats hovered above the grass. From where I reclined, it looked like rain afraid to land.

  I thought of Emme stretched out at the pool on the Fourth of July. I remembered her walking beside you, her red bikini hanging on the stark bones of her hips. I remembered that she smiled—a smile I know now was for you. Sometimes I try not to think of you. Or at least I try not to worry. But I am superstitious; it might be when I fail to worry that you will slip away for good. Not that basking miserably in the sunshine, thinking and worrying, was going to turn up any more leads, or loosen any threads, or reveal any untaken paths.

  The hatbox was waiting for me inside, on the kitchen table, its contents laid out like museum artifacts. The yellowing photographs. The ancient notes on scraps of paper. The official documents with their damning, printed type. And my own words on these pages, ready for me to take up where I’d left off.

  WEDNESDAYS AND SATURDAYS. Those were the days I was allowed to see Patrick, or at least those were the days Patrick indicated he was available to see me. I spent the time away from him replaying the time together, thinking of him constantly, wondering if he was thinking of me and waiting to see him again. I tried to keep my obsession in check, but I had no one to share it with, no friend to force it out of my head into the open air, where it might have lost some of its power. Malcolm was the only other person I really knew in London, and he was the one person who could never know that I’d fallen for Patrick.

  I don’t know what Patrick did with the rest of his week. I was desperate to ask whether he saw other women, and whether Louise still crept out to the cottage at night to sleep with him. But I knew I could not ask Patrick. Nor could I ask Malcolm. A door had closed on that conversation and I was afraid if I pried it open, I would give myself away.

  Wednesday evenings, I went to the gallery straight from work. Malcolm never asked why I rushed off one day a week like that, and neither did I volunteer an excuse. I simply packed up my things and said goodbye, secretly pleased that now I, too, had someone else in my life. Saturdays I forced myself to pass the day alone and arrive at the gallery no earlier than four o’clock, half an hour before Patrick’s shift ended. I always ordered tea and read the paper while I waited. Sometimes he was there. Sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he hadn’t shown up for work at all. Sometimes I was told he’d left early. Alone? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t dare. When he was there, he greeted me with enthusiasm. He bounced toward me and sometimes he lifted me up and spun me around.

  “Annie Black!” he’d say. “You’re just in time.”

  Then he’d describe whatever it was he had in mind for us, a journey or a meal or a show. One Saturday afternoon, we walked from the gallery all the way to Victoria Station. We stared up at the departures board, the white letters flickering on their black signs, announcing all the places a person could choose to go. There was no reason, Patrick announced, that we couldn’t just board a train and see where we ended up.

  Canterbury. That was where we ended up.

  We walked from the train station, passing under the ancient stone arch that was the original gate to the city. It rained. The ground was mossy and the air was damp. There was a forlorn little cemetery with stone coffins and headstones leaning sideways and a stone structure, a keep, it was called, where valuables were kept safe from invaders. We stood beneath a rusted green crucifix outside Christchurch Cathedral. A brown river ran between brown brick buildings. There was a Norman castle made of piled-up rubble and cement, and Canterbury Castle itself, with its massive walls of flint and limestone. Across the brick street was a courtyard outside a tiny house where laundry hung in the rain.


  Patrick said we ought to spend the night, and we found a bed-and-breakfast on a side street. He paid. We ate dinner in the dining room. He paid for that, too. I already knew he was a person who could focus intensely on a single object. He could direct his sensibilities, and his camera, and the whole force of his personality, toward uncovering its special qualities. But until that night, that object had never really been me. After dinner, we climbed the stairs to our room. There was music coming from somewhere, and we danced. He was tender. He put his lips on my neck, and my breasts, and later, the flesh at the back of my knees. He told me he could taste the sparks on my skin. He could see my heat outlining my body like an unholy halo. When he fell asleep, I pressed my front into his back. I lay awake as long as I could, trying to hold on to time. But it passed, and morning came. Patrick grew remote, as he always did, and I tried to beat down the hope that more nights like the last would come my way.

  Hope doesn’t like to be beaten down, though, does it? Hope is what gets us through. Hope, and the prayer it wants to become.

  Twenty

  TUESDAY, THE SECOND WEEK OF APRIL. The girls are still away. The store is shut. If it were not for the dogs, who need their walk, I’m not sure I would force myself out of bed at all. I give them a full hour, up and down the hills, then I sit again at the table and begin. I try to force my pencil to stay in England, in 1989, where it belongs. But it wants to leap forward from that London winter to a memory of Christmas, here in the city, last year.

  The holiday season did not really begin for your father and me until we collected you from the rehabilitation center on December 20. There was a bright winter sun in the sky, and the wind was flushing leaves from the trees as we left home. Then, when we were returning, the daylight was ebbing and the wind was dying down and you were in the backseat looking very nearly like your old self. We pulled up to the house and found that my father and brother had strung our holiday lights. I could see the Christmas tree through the front window, and I could see my mother inside, stepping from the kitchen and pulling off her apron.

  Your father parked the car in the driveway, but he didn’t open the door. Instead, he turned up the volume on the radio. Natalie Merchant was playing the piano and singing an acoustic version of a 10,000 Maniacs song, “These Are Days,” that your father and I used to listen to when you were a baby.

  These are days you’ll remember,

  Never before and never since, I promise,

  Will the whole world be warm as this,

  And as you feel it,

  You’ll know it’s true

  That you are blessed and lucky.

  I remembered your father and me stretched out on our living room rug, listening to that song, you an infant between us. You used to fall asleep on the floor like that sometimes, and we were afraid to move you, so we simply watched you as you slept. We dozed off occasionally ourselves, the three of us passing half the night that way together.

  I looked over at your father beside me in the car. He was staring straight ahead, and he was crying. He wasn’t trying to stop the tears or hide them or wipe them away. He was just letting them run down his cheeks. I’d never seen him cry like that. I’d never seen him claim his own feeling with that kind of abandon. I reached over and squeezed his hand. I felt lost in my feeling, too—that we were indeed blessed and lucky now that you were finally coming home—but I know now that his emotions were much more complicated than mine.

  From the backseat, you couldn’t tell your father was crying. I wonder if you have ever seen your father cry. I don’t think you were listening to the radio, either. You didn’t notice what song was playing. You didn’t know what it meant to us. You were in your own world, in back, staring at the house and its lights.

  “Everything looks different,” you said. “It’s weird. It’s like I don’t know my own house.”

  “Maybe it’s the lights, Robbie,” I said. “It’s the same house. Nothing has changed.”

  “Some things have changed,” your father said, but so quietly, I don’t think you heard him over the music.

  THE EBBING DAY. The house ablaze with light. Your father’s tears. The images of that homecoming evening are merged, in my memory, with those of our Christmas Eve celebration, four nights later. Clara and Polly in their finery, dragging the dogs under the mistletoe and smacking their furry heads with kisses. My brother, Ryan, sprawled on the couch with a guitar in his lap. Your father shoving wood into an already blazing fire. My own mother and father standing together in the kitchen spooning the stuffing from the turkey. My mother pausing entirely by accident under the mistletoe, and my unexpected happiness as I watched my father lay a deep kiss on her unsuspecting lips. Then Mitch arriving at the front door with an outrageously expensive bottle of champagne, and a moment later, the star of the show—you, Robbie—materializing in a bow tie at the top of the stairs. In that moment I felt again that we were blessed and lucky. I hoped that this time I could make it last.

  DECEMBER HAD ARRIVED in London. I remember that it snowed, but the snow melted as soon as it hit the ground. In the office, I pretended Malcolm had never come to my room that night after the races. He never brought it up, and nothing changed between us, at least not that we acknowledged.

  I wrote my mother a letter. I told her I was not coming home until spring, at the earliest. I did not detail my holiday plans, since I hadn’t made any. I was holding out hope Patrick would invite me to Ireland. In the meantime, Malcolm invited me to France.

  I can’t quite reconstruct the circumstances under which he first introduced the idea that I come with him and his family to Paris for Christmas. I only know that as December marched forward, it became the principal item of discussion between us. He did not approve of my spending the holidays alone in London. He thought I would enjoy Paris. I had studied French, after all, hadn’t I? It was no imposition, since there was plenty of room. Louise was enthusiastic about the idea. The penthouse had been in Louise’s family for generations, so it didn’t cost them anything, and Louise thought it would be nice for Daisy to have a companion.

  “Is that why you want me to come?” I said. “To babysit Daisy?”

  “Of course not. I want you to come because I want to be with you. And I don’t want you to be alone.”

  I didn’t tell him, of course, that I hoped to be with Patrick. My plans for the holidays had not come up in conversation with Patrick. The future rarely did. Not even the immediate future. Not a day or an hour and sometimes not even a moment in advance did I have any idea what Patrick had in mind for me, or whether he had me in mind at all. This uncertainty lay like a sore under the surface of my skin, erupting again and again, then subsiding, but never healing.

  Sometimes I told Malcolm I would think about coming to Paris. Sometimes I told him no, outright. But he would not give up, and every day he had a new prop. A photograph of the penthouse. A description of the holiday decorations on the Champs-Élysées. A review of the restaurant he’d booked for the twenty-third of December.

  I ventured to the gallery on the Wednesday two weeks before Christmas. Patrick wasn’t there. On Saturday, he wasn’t there again. The following week was the same, until finally, beside myself, I inquired with the owner and was told that Patrick’s work schedule had changed. I could not call Patrick, because the only phone he had was in the cottage, and he shared the line with Malcolm and Louise. He couldn’t call me, because the only place I could be reached was at work, and Malcolm would be there. He did not once come to Victoria to find me.

  Two days before Malcolm and Louise were to leave for Paris, Malcolm pulled up a chair next to my desk and sat down. He leaned toward me and put his elbows on his knees and folded his hands.

  “It’s not too late to change your mind and come to Paris,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “If you don’t come, who will sort out my French?”

  “I’m sure your wife can sort out your French.”

  “She could, but
she won’t.”

  “Why won’t she?”

  “She’ll be too timid. She won’t want to speak French in front of Patrick.”

  “Patrick?”

  “Louise has invited him to come along and he’s agreed. We received news that Daisy won’t be arriving until Christmas Eve. She’s been invited by a school friend to ski at Saint-Moritz and she seems quite set on going. So Louise said she’d like to invite Patrick, and there was no reason I should object, and now there is absolutely no reason you should not allow yourself to come.”

  He looked triumphant. He had played his final card, and he was about to win, but not for the reasons he thought.

  “Louise is all right with this, Annie,” he said quietly.

  “She’s all right with what?”

  “Us. The two of us. I mean if you will ever … if we were ever to try again to be together.”

  “You asked her?” I could not believe he would do such a thing.

  “Yes,” he said. “I did.”

  “When?” I asked, wondering if it was before or after that first failed attempt in my room at Victoria, which I’d worked so hard to pretend had never happened.

  “I cleared it with her when you first arrived,” he said.

  Twenty-one

  WE LEFT FOR PARIS three days before Christmas, at seven-thirty sharp. I waited on the sidewalk in front of the boardinghouse with my duffel bag. The sky pressed down flat and cold, and the street was emptied of life. The car pulled up to the curb. Malcolm put my bag in the trunk and opened the front passenger door. I had imagined that for appearances’ sake we would pretend this was an everyday sojourn, a married couple and their younger friends traveling from London to Paris—and I thought I would sit in back with Patrick. But it appeared Louise was to have Patrick to herself, and I was to be stuck with Malcolm. I had to remind myself that officially Patrick and I had met only once—at the gallery the night of the anniversary party. I turned halfway around to the backseat to say good morning.