The Clairvoyants(28)

Del flopped down onto my couch, folded up for William’s visit. “Poor orphan? And what are you? His new mother figure?”

“We’re friends.” I rummaged through my bureau drawers for an outfit, holding one sweater, then another up to myself in the mirror. “I like him.”

“What do you like?” Del said.

I knew his interest in me was what made him special, and it embarrassed me to be so needy. I spread a red lamb’s-wool sweater on the couch.

“It’s not Christmas,” Del said, and I balled the sweater and stuffed it back in the drawer.

“Don’t be the one who loves more,” she said, softly. “Remember Mr. Parmenter.”

“I don’t think that’s a good comparison,” I said.

Since Mary Rae, nothing out of the ordinary had appeared in gloomy Ithaca.

The town’s dark pall, its strange, shifting cloud patterns, and the fluttery lake-effect snow that went on for days seemed to create a no-astral season. Nothing could materialize in such weather.

I told Del not to worry about me.

“Such an innocent, Martha Mary.”

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

So far, we hadn’t discussed David Pinney, or that summer, and I wondered if, like Gene Tierney, she’d received too many shock treatments. Had that summer been entirely erased? Had her act for Detective Thomson not been an act at all? This would be the best scenario, and I decided not to press her for whatever slip of memory remained.

The night William came over, Mary Rae was absent from her spot beneath the elm, and I was grateful. He walked down the sidewalk and stepped onto the porch, and I found myself rushing down the stairwell to meet him at the door, tugging him by the arm in from the cold.

“Come here, you,” I said.

His cheeks held the flush I’d noted at Anne’s, and he wore the wide-brimmed beaver-skin hat. We stood on the old, worn Persian rug in what had once been the vestibule, the walls papered in brown, with tiny pink roses. The woodwork was brown, too, mahogany glowing in the weak yellow overhead light. There was a coatrack and an umbrella stand and a small, rickety antique table. The whole downstairs smelled of Del’s incense, and I knew my urgency was prompted by a fear of her emerging from her apartment and saying something that would put a damper on all my plans.

William looked around, somewhat sheepishly, and removed his hat with one hand, grabbing it at the crown and revealing a mass of coppery curls. “Nice place,” he said.

“Your hat is different.” I should have said something else.

He looked at it in his hand. “Well,” he said. “I guess it is different. It was my father’s hat.”

Del called him “Indiana Jones.”

He hung his hat on the coatrack, and I worried that he knew Del had made fun of him. He was someone alone in the world, without family or ties. I didn’t wait to kiss him. It felt natural to ease the sadness about his mouth with mine. His lips clung and trembled, kissing me back. His hands were cautious, suspended midair alongside my hips. I took his hand.

“Up here,” I said. I pulled him up the stairs. His face was bright, his chest heaving under his coat.

Upstairs in my apartment, by the wavering fireplace candlelight, we kissed some more, and I undressed for him, a somewhat awkward striptease that I performed without any prompting. I’d assumed this was what he wanted from me—we’d talked around sex every night on the phone, and I’d decided to give up my hold on my virginity.

“You’ll have to tell me how it is,” Del had said before she left that afternoon. She’d smiled at me, though I sensed something hollow and distracted in her teasing.

I suppose my behavior was spurred in part by what I’d seen in movies, and what I’d imagined Del had done in the Firebird guy’s car, or in the woods with Rory, her back against dead leaves and fern, or with the myriad other men she’d had sex with, mostly in cars, she’d said, which were preferable to the woods, though she loved the woods. I understood that the cars in the ravine had been the best of both things. I’d expected that the offering of my body, stripped of its clothes, would be enticement enough. Yet William stood by, his face marked with surprise. I took his hands and placed them on my waist. He slid his palms up and down my body and felt the raised bumps on my skin.

“I can’t warm you up,” he said.

So I pulled off the cushions and unfolded the bed, and we climbed in under the blanket and the crocheted afghan. William kept his clothing on until I asked him whether he was going to take things off, and he reluctantly, it seemed, removed his shirt and his pants and tossed them aside. His belt buckle clanked to the floor. He told me he’d brought me a poem, and he reached down to retrieve it from his pants pocket. He had copied it out from an old college anthology onto a sheet of paper, he said. The paper rustled, and my heart contracted from the sweetness of his motives. When he read his voice was the same soft hum I had grown used to over the phone. What I caught of the poem were a few images—a nest fallen into the mud, a rabbit’s bones, an empty house—and I suspected he thought the poem would resonate with my artist’s sensibilities, though I couldn’t explain it was less the abandoned landscape than the presence of the dead that inspired me. After he finished, he carefully folded the paper. The words hovered, ghostly and solemn in the dim room. He asked me did I like it, and then why I thought it was good, and other things, until I found myself watching his mouth, craving it, even.