The Light of Paris(81)

I didn’t want to endure that.

“Were you ashamed? Of the divorce, I mean,” I asked Henry in a small voice. That’s what it was, the emotion behind everything. Shame. Shame I had failed in this thing I had claimed I wanted, shame I had failed in this thing that mattered so much to the people around me, shame I had failed in something so public.

Henry lay back and looked up at the sky. It was a clear night, and stars speckled the darkness above us. I knew there were thousands, tens of thousands, millions more we couldn’t see because of the light pollution, but it was still so much better than in the city, where the best I might be able to see were Orion’s belt and the North Star, and I felt rudderless, like a lost sailor looking for direction under a cloudy sky.

“I was, a little. But more brokenhearted than ashamed. We’d been in love at one point, and it was so sad, that breaking apart of something that had once been beautiful. I knew it was the right thing to do, and it didn’t make me question the decision, but I mourned it. It was something real, and I felt—I still feel, actually—a tenderness toward that relationship. At least the way it was when it was new.”

“I don’t feel brokenhearted. I only feel ashamed,” I said. I lay back on the grass beside him. There was no funeral in my heart. If I mourned anything, it was the time I had spent with Phillip, the way I had buried myself in our marriage in order to be the person my mother needed me to be, to be the person Ashley Hathaway needed me to be, the person I had thought I had to be in order to belong.

Don’t you still? something inside me asked.

I turned my head, as though my thoughts were something unpleasant I could look away from, the honesty of my conscience too much to bear. My head rested on Henry’s arm. He was wearing a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms hairy against my skin. I wanted to roll over and bury my face in his chest, breathe in the scent of him, feel his heart beating against my cheek, feel someone solid and strong and alive.

And, I realized with a jolt, I felt attracted to him. Alive and aware and even aroused. He felt real, felt solid and imperfect, and so close, and his eyes were on me, seeing me, knowing me. We talked and I was aware of our lips moving in the darkness, aware of the smell of the flowers in my mother’s garden and the vegetables in his, of the earth and the air and mostly of him, strong and solid beside me.

I bent my elbow and rested my head in my hand, looking down at him. His eyes were dark and unreadable, shining dimly in the starlight, but I felt as if something were pulling us together, and when he rolled onto his side, I felt his closeness in my entire body—an awareness of not only his eyes and his mouth but every inch of him.

I don’t know who kissed whom first. I suppose it was me, but there was a point at which the kiss was inevitable, when we had moved so close together, the small space left between us filled with tension and heat and desire, it would have been impossible to draw apart again. Maybe it wasn’t so much my initiative as a slow, magnetic pull, as though the earth’s gravitational force wanted us together, and our lips met and we kissed, gently, softly. I had never kissed a man with a beard before, and it made the act of kissing him feel new and beautifully strange, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. His lips were soft, his beard brushed lightly against my skin as we fell together, his arm around my waist, mine around his neck, the brush of his hair against my fingertips, the length of his body against mine. We kissed like that, and I felt a long-forgotten warmth inside me, as though I were a flower opening to the spring of him, and I wondered where this would go, whether we would make love here on the grass, under the stars, as though the night belonged only to us. Until when I moved my hand to his shirt, pulling the back up and spreading my fingers over the warmth of his skin, he pulled back and looked at me, his eyes searching mine in the darkness.

“No,” he said gently, and he pulled away. “No. Not like this.” He removed his hand from my waist and shifted backward, letting the night fall between us, cold and dark.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He rolled onto his back and blew a long breath out toward the stars. “Well, for starters, you’re married.”

“Separated,” I said, my protest feeling weak even as I made it. Even if our separation had been something formal, it wasn’t an actual condition. It was a liminal state. It was the state of someone too afraid to commit, to speak her mind. A punishing fist squeezed at my stomach.

“And even if you were divorced, it’s too fresh. I don’t want you to get hurt, but, to be selfish, I don’t want to get hurt either. Your heart—I don’t know where your heart is.” He spoke to the sky, as though the stars and the moon and the satellites drifting lonely through space, bleating out their lights like Morse code, could hear him.

I sank back onto the grass beside him. “I don’t know where it is either,” I said. Above me, the stars kept their silent watch, their glacial changes invisible to me.

I hadn’t intended to kiss Henry. Hadn’t admitted to myself until that night I was attracted to him. It had been the moment, the conversation, his easy smile, the way everything felt comfortable with him. Was this how it was supposed to be? I felt like I had been clenching every muscle in my body since I had met Phillip, and with Henry I felt like liquid. I felt smarter, sharper, more creative. More alive.

In the end, it didn’t matter how much I liked him, or how I felt when I was with him, because he had turned me down. And I was married. What was I doing? Creating this whole fantasy life here, as though I could stay forever. I couldn’t be a painter. I couldn’t be friends with Sharon and Henry. Maybe that was why my grandmother had left Paris—because she knew it had to end. At some point you have to go back to reality. Nobody gets to live their dream.