The Clairvoyants(30)

“You don’t have to stay,” I said. I rolled away from him, to the metal edge of the bed. Geoff would be waking with his Saturday morning routine—toast, black coffee in a china cup, listening through the wall with buttery crumbs on his fingers. I thought of Del, her ear pressed to the other side of my door. William heaved himself out of bed. He was tall, and his body unfolded, a sound of cracking joints and rustling sheets. He found his clothes, and the fabric slipped over his arms and legs. Finally, he put on his shoes, big boots that clomped on the wood floor. I rolled over and he was standing by the bed.

“Ask me not to go,” he said.

“Tell me you want to stay,” I told him.

“Tell me to kiss you,” he said.

“Do you want to kiss me?” I was confused.

“I want to kiss you more than anyone I have ever met,” he said, but he made no move toward the bed.

He went out the door and thumped down the stairs. I didn’t get up and lock the door behind him. I lay there for a long time before sleep overtook me, wondering whether or not to believe him.





12




When I awoke it was early afternoon. Weak sunlight marked the end of the bed. And William was there, sitting in the duck-carved armchair. He was watching television without the sound, and the station wasn’t tuned in well. He ate from a carton I recognized from the Korean place in Collegetown. Beside him on the floor was a camera—an old Leica, his favorite, I would learn. I was suddenly afraid of him, coming into my apartment without asking, and I feigned sleep, my heart thudding beneath the blankets. In my Romantic Poetry class we’d read Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Madeline awakening in the poem to Porphyro’s lute. Then I remembered William’s work—the sleep studies—and I wondered, crazily, if he’d photographed me and captured my astral body rising up to mingle with those on the astral plane.

As if he could sense that I was awake, he smiled at me, wide and happy, and that quickly his presence seemed perfectly normal. I hadn’t seen him smile like that before, and I thought we were embarking on this adventure in which each day would be marked by the new things we learned about each other.

“You’re back,” I said. It was as if he had chosen me again. My body was warm; my limbs slid across the soft sheets. Did he know of the tradition on the eve of St. Agnes? He said he did not.

“Virgins fast all day. They make sure that they kiss no one. At bedtime they remove their clothing and lie down on their backs with their hands beneath their pillow and say before sleeping: ‘Now good St. Agnes, play thy part, And send to me my own sweetheart, And shew me such a happy bliss, / This night of him to have a kiss.’”

William put a chopstick full of noodles in his mouth. “And?”

“They see a vision of the man they’re going to marry.”

“And you’re a virgin?” he said, looking skeptical.

My face must have gone blank. I hadn’t wanted him to guess that.

“You’re very beautiful when you’re sleeping,” he said.

“But I’m awake now. Does that mean you’ll leave?”

He brought the food over to the bed and sat on the end.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Not really.” I wanted some kind of explanation for his presence, but he seemed perfectly at ease, as if it were a natural thing. He took a mouthful of food. I watched him chew, and he pointed to the television.

“Do you remember this show?”

I looked at the screen and couldn’t make anything out. “No,” I said, propping myself up to get a better view of the images beneath the static. My grandmother’s afghan slipped down my body.

His face changed, quickly, like clouds moving over the sun and the shadows lengthening on a lawn. “You’re still naked under there,” he said.

He set the food down on the floor. He pulled me onto my knees and put my arms around his shoulders. I tasted the food’s spices on his mouth. His breathing caught, his body’s tension shifted like something coiled and tight, releasing. His hands were cold, but it felt wonderful, his hands and mouth moving, his groans. I didn’t worry about what made him change his mind. I thought: He came into my room while I slept. He fell back into bed with me and fumbled with his belt, with the clasp to his pants. His entry was hurried, knifelike, and though I was prepared for it I may have cried out. He stopped suddenly, surprised. But then I pretended that nothing was different or wrong, even though at that moment I understood it to be. My deflowering, I thought, and then I knew I would never be able to tell Del a thing about the moment, that it was mine, not something I could share.

William and I stayed in bed all that day. Geoff came up the stairs and slipped his key into his lock. I wondered what Del was doing, but only briefly, and with no guilt for having forgotten her. Once or twice I may have heard her footsteps on the stairs, a gentle tapping sound. Maybe she really was listening at the door, but William held me in his hands. I felt my body transform, heighten and strain and sigh. The light moved, watery, across the foot of my bed, across the worn oak floor. It settled in the lap of the duck-carved chair. We let the room grow dim and darken and match the outside. When the streetlight came on, we watched the snow falling in it.

“Does it ever stop snowing here?” I asked. His hand was heavy, pressed to my bare stomach.