The Clairvoyants(29)

“Am I talking too much?” He shifted to his side and placed his head in his hand.

“Maybe,” I said.

I had thought he wanted me. But when I touched him he took my hands away, like a correcting parent. I was resigned to kissing him, and even that he interrupted with a story about his motorcycle, a Triumph he was eager to ride again in the spring.

“This is different,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me.

“Than what?” I felt awkward then for having taken off my clothes. He must have seen this on my face.

“Than I expected,” he said. “Not that it isn’t wonderful.”

Under the blankets his hands moved, barely skimming the surface of me. He talked about the two spaniels his neighbor had at his house, and the way they came when you were sitting in a chair and settled their heads under your hands. His father had had a brown retriever that would lie in the dust of the garage floor while he worked on the mowers. Some people, William said, are happier working with their hands. Gradually, his eyes closed and he fell asleep, and I was left wondering about his discussion of dogs and their flanks.

My bed was lumpy with springs, and I had a certain angle in which I slept. But with William taking up the space, and my body burning from his fingertips, I could not sleep. Was this how Sister had sometimes felt? She’d entered the abbey at twenty-six, maybe worried she’d be an old maid—that she’d never find anyone but God to love her. I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself alone in a chaste bed, consumed with desire for something ineffable and bodiless, but lying beside William I knew you could not separate the two—body and desire. The elm cast shadows on my white plaster wall, and its branches, sheathed in ice, clicked together like bones. Beyond this sound was the silence of the snow. Was poor Mary Rae still waiting out there in the cold?

That first night with William, I envied Geoff. I tried to breathe in and out, regularly, to feign sleep. I considered slipping out of the apartment, down the stairs to Del’s. But she would press me for details, and I didn’t want to confess that nothing had happened. After a while, I slid from the bed and went across the room to peer out the window. Mary Rae’s frozen hair framed her face, her eyes luminous. “What do you want from me?” I wanted to ask.

William and I were each similarly connected to our art, and though William was more taciturn about his work, I felt some tie to his approach that I couldn’t explain. He’d said that, like me, he still shot film. He liked the way film captured light. He liked the old lenses. We’d talked for a long time on the phone about our cameras and our preferences. I enjoyed making prints—I didn’t tell him why—and I thrilled to see the figure I’d photographed appear, though others saw only the light and some sort of golden glow that seemed to tremble in the location of my subject.

I sat by the window and pressed my face against the glass. After all of our talking on the phone, I didn’t know this man in my bed at all. Perhaps he didn’t want me pliable, eager to have him. Maybe he wanted me to play hard to get, to dole out pieces of myself—a mouth, a breast, a hip. Maybe he wanted me to object, to refuse him so he could force me. His sleeping, slack expression revealed nothing, and I felt a small, pitiable stone of fear. What was his interest in me? I wanted to wake him and demand an answer. But I carefully slipped back beneath the blankets. When I finally slept it was near morning, and I awoke to find him watching me in the gray light. We were like sentries who had traded places.

“Here we are,” I said, a little too cheery.

His cheeks flushed. His breath came out in a white cloud. The candles in the fireplace had burned down to flat saucers of wax. He sat upright, his bare chest exposed, and my grandmother’s crocheted afghan swaddling his waist, multicolored and gaudy.

“What time do you think it is?” he said.

“Do you need to leave?” I asked.

He ran his hands through his hair. “Do you think,” he said, “I might be someone you could actually have feelings for?”

“Well.” I sensed his staying or leaving was dependent on my answer, but I didn’t know what to say. Del had cautioned me against revealing any true feelings, of having any feelings at all. I knew experience had taught her this—but I also knew Del didn’t want a man’s love and wouldn’t have known how to return it if any had offered it. A boy had flowers delivered to our house once—a dozen roses. My heart had sunk when I answered the door, when Del pulled out the card with the boy’s sloppy handwriting. Later, when I’d asked her what she did with them, she said she’d taken them to the cemetery and put them on David Pinney’s grave. Back then, before the Institute, these were the kinds of things she said to me. “I like to get your goat, Martha,” she’d said.

I had thought William and I wanted the same thing—that neither of us needed any real declarations of feelings, that what we felt could remain unspoken. I considered pulling him down under the blankets and warming him up, but even that seemed like coveting his body.

“You look cold.”

His chest rose, pale against the afghan. “That’s your answer?” he said. I felt like one of his students, bullied to provide a better response. But he didn’t make a move to get up and leave. I felt sorry for him then. He was a nice man who thought we might have a normal relationship, and I’d tarnished it by not having the courage to voice my feelings. There was nothing I could do, honestly, that would change the situation. I didn’t dare attempt to touch him, for fear he would recoil from me.