The Clairvoyants(35)
“This is a nice view,” I said.
He laughed, and his voice was low and pleasant. In the confusion of other voices I hadn’t had the chance to notice.
“So is this,” he said.
I watched the way his eyes shifted to my breasts, and I felt the heat in my face. Del called me then, stood by the rim of the pool, her towel wrapped around her. The sun moved behind a cloud. She told me she was going to the beach, and was I coming with her, and I told her no. She stood, waiting, but I ignored her, and then she rejoined Katy and a few others, all of them crossing the lawn, moving toward the pebbled drive. Del looked back once, and I waved to her, and she must have believed David Pinney was harmless, a quiet boy who kept to himself. Maybe she thought we were talking about school in the fall, or our favorite movies, or books, or songs—the sorts of things you talked about with regular boys. David’s face and mine were so close he might have kissed me there in the pool, but he didn’t.
“Meet me in the barn,” he said.
He pulled himself out onto the pool’s rim, the water dripping from his suit. He dried himself with a towel in the grass and started up the lawn toward the hedge, his back speckled with water dripping from his hair, his arms swinging by his sides. He didn’t once look back at me, as if he knew, from the moment he’d been next to me in the pool, that I was the kind of girl who’d be intrigued and, once hooked, would never refuse him.
14
William began spending every night in my apartment, and it seemed natural that he would simply move in—although when he did he brought very little with him, claiming his old place was furnished and that he didn’t need many things. Owing to his orphan status, I didn’t press him. It seemed incredibly bohemian to live the way he did—free of all the material encumbrances that defined my life growing up. My own clothing overwhelmed the bureau my mother had purchased for me. When I made tea William handled my grandmother’s dainty Limoges with exaggerated tenderness. “I’m just a mug sort of person,” he said. His choice of vessel would have been a large stoneware cup, medieval-looking and clumsily crafted—something my family might have used to hold screws on a shelf in the garage. Then I felt like my grandmother, passing judgment on my father for not being our kind.
At first, William and I stayed home alone evenings—watching my little television or reading. Once, we went walking together, as we did that first night, and the groups of students and their revelry seemed a species entirely different from my own. The sex was a given—the reason we never felt the need to leave the apartment. It was part of our day—like heating soup for lunch, or brushing our teeth at night. I loved the regularity, the way we’d created our own little world, a bubble broken only when one of us had to leave, or Del came to the door. More often than not I found a way to avoid her. I told her I had a sore throat or I was too tired to go out. She never argued. She’d taken my relationship with William in stride, though I suspected she wasn’t entirely happy about it. When I felt twinges of guilt for avoiding her, I reminded myself it was her decision to move to town; I didn’t have to entertain her.
William and I liked the shadowy elm, its familiar rattle of branches, and the way its shape, cast by the streetlight, moved against the plaster ceiling. Mary Rae was often out there, and I grew resentful, as if she were spying on us. It was clear from her appearance at the encampment, and her leading me to William at the party my first night in town, that they’d known each other, though I wouldn’t have gone as far as to assume they’d had a relationship. When I tried to ask him about his past girlfriends, and mentioned Mary Rae, he seemed confused, almost angry.
“Why would you ask me that?” he said.
I couldn’t say that I’d never heard anyone else call him “Billy.”
Then, as if Mary Rae could read my irritation, she stopped appearing.
When William wasn’t teaching, he was working in the lab on the photographs for his new series. He came in some nights after a long day and he flung himself onto the bed and began to talk, full of stories about our future together—how we’d one day buy a house in the country, like Anne’s. How we’d set up our own studio, and have children and dogs and a swimming hole reached by a path across a field, then through the woods. I liked the sound of his voice and let him ramble on. Slowly, his dream of the future became my own.
I wondered if Geoff minded the sound of William talking, or if he sat by the wall and listened in his plaid robe, his eyelids heavy, soothed by the sound, as I was. Sometimes, as William talked, he touched me, his hand moving over my body like a blind man’s over Braille. I bit my lip, willing his hand to move higher up my thigh, between my open legs, the waiting unbearable. He asked me to tell him not to stop. I did anything he asked. I never questioned the bruises I found on my inner thighs, my arms, the marks on my breasts. The more urgent the sex, the more desperate I believed his love for me. These things, hidden beneath the layers of clothing necessary to survive the winter, never seemed to matter. What kept me moored to him was the sound of his voice at night, his roaming hand. I believed I had gotten what I wanted—I was loved finally, unquestioningly. I became complacent.
When William and I finally socialized together it wasn’t with his colleagues, as I would have thought, but with his old friends in Milton, the town where he’d grown up. At the center of this circle was Anne, his mentor, who had retired from teaching due to her illness and hosted regular gatherings at her farm, Windy Hill. The first invitation was for Thanksgiving. William came in from shoveling the walk with Geoff and announced that Anne was hosting dinner.