The Sleepwalker(44)

“Well, if you do go home, I’m driving you. There is no way I’m allowing you behind the wheel of a car.”

I had hooked my arm through his, and now I stopped him in his tracks. “No, I wasn’t just wishing or worrying about having had too much wine.” I repeated myself, speaking as clearly as I could: “I don’t want to go home tonight. I want to be with you.”

He gazed down at me for a long moment and then, as I knew he would, he kissed me. He put his hands on the small of my back and pulled me against him there on the street and—his face almost grave, I thought before I closed my eyes—bent down and pressed his lips against mine, and the world around me went quiet. Except for my heart. When I opened my mouth and felt his tongue (a tentative probe at first, but then it was mirroring my own wanton playfulness and need), I heard my heart in my head. An idea came to me: This is why I am here. This was meant to be. This is really why I stayed home in Vermont.



And yet we didn’t make love that night.

I awoke alone in the morning beneath a quilt in his bed. At least I presumed it was his bed. I discovered I was still in my dress. I was still wearing my bra. My underwear.

My head was throbbing and my breath was toxic, even to myself, and I lay with my brow burrowed deep into the pillow, astonished at the disabling spikes of pain that accompanied just rolling my eyeballs. How was that even possible? Carefully I rubbed at my temples and pieced together what had happened after I had climbed into Gavin’s car. Mostly, I realized, I had slept. I had fallen asleep—passed out, if I was going to be precise—and slept all the way home. Here. Not home. Here. I vaguely recalled parking in Burlington and the elevator to his apartment. The paneling on the elevator walls and the bronze plate from another era with the numbers for the floors. I called home, expecting I would just leave a message on the answering machine, but of course my father had picked up. I had lied—badly, I presumed—that I was safely at my friend’s family’s house in Montpelier. Had he said he was just glad I was safe? I thought so, but the whole conversation was fuzzy.

I saw on the clock on the nightstand that it was already noon and felt a deep stab of remorse. Serious guilt. I remembered my vow to smoke less dope, and told myself that white wine and pear mojitos were ill-advised substitutes. In a heartbeat I would have traded the superfund cleanup site that once was my tongue for mere cottonmouth. I took a deep breath to steel myself against the pain that loomed and then sat up in bed. Gingerly, with the care of the oldest woman in the world—in my mind I saw a shriveled but beatific woman eating yogurt in the Caucasus—I swung my legs onto the hardwood floor and looked around. I saw my handbag beside the nightstand and pulled it toward me with my foot because I was afraid to bend over. I reached for my compact and looked at myself in the mirror, assessing the damage. I guessed I had looked worse, but probably not by much. I popped a couple of Altoids into my mouth.

The bedroom door was shut, and a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad had been slid underneath it. I walked gingerly there and picked it up. Gavin had written that he’d left for work. He explained where he kept the coffee in his kitchen and that there was Advil in the medicine cabinet. He wrote the name of a friend in the building and gave me his number, and said the guy would be happy to drive me to the Sears parking lot so I could retrieve my car. I sighed: I was the embodiment that morning of high maintenance. I was the definition of hot mess.

I reached for the door handle and saw it had a push-button lock on the knob and it was pressed in. Locked. Had I locked him out of his own bedroom after throwing myself at him in Montreal? Didn’t seem likely, but the idea caused me a pang of anxiety. I had no idea if he had slept in the bed with me. It was possible he had pushed the button before closing the door and going to work. I’d have to ask him.

I opened the door and saw a short corridor to the living room and the kitchen. There was a blue blanket and a sheet on the couch. So, he had slept out here. Above the couch was a long black-and-white photograph of a dairy barn in the winter. The snow was fresh and the trees were skeletal. The apartment was sparse, but clearly that way by design. The furniture was sleek and modern: a lot of hard edges and chrome. The only clutter was his skis and boots leaning near the front door, along with a pair of sneakers.

I found the bathroom and peed, popped a couple of Advils, and drank from the faucet. Then I drank some more. I squeezed out some toothpaste onto my finger, spread it onto my teeth and my tongue, and rinsed. I would shower when I got home. I would get some coffee at the nearby diner. Not here. And I wouldn’t call his friend, I’d call a taxi.

I regretted both the way I had drunk too much and the way I had chosen not to ask him more about my mother’s parasomnia—and, yes, about his. I couldn’t do anything other than apologize about the former, but perhaps I could learn a little more about Gavin before leaving. Was it a violation? Of course. But that didn’t stop me. I decided I would explore his apartment, but not ransack it. I understood it was a fine line, and I would try not to cross it.

His home was a one-bedroom on either the sixth or seventh floor of the Vermont House, an eight-story apartment in Burlington. The building was among the taller structures in the city, once the city’s most elegant hotel before its conversion to co-op apartments, and Gavin’s place faced the lake. I opened a random drawer on the credenza below the TV and saw it was filled with nothing but snapshots. I looked at a few, recognizing his sister from the birthday party, and gazing at one of his parents. He resembled his father: same iron cheekbones, same yellow hair. There were a few of him as a teenager or college student with a dog. A springer spaniel. Along an inside bedroom wall was a tall bookcase that was filled with military history tomes and police handbooks, and a couple of novels set in the midst of different wars. There were framed photographs of him fly-fishing, and with his mother and father at his college graduation. There was one of him with either a group of friends or a bunch of cousins—women as well as men—in bathing suits on three great boulders in the midst of a river I presumed was somewhere in Vermont. I peeked into his closet and saw a couple of blazers and a black suit. There were two coat hangers draped with neckties. The floor there was clearly where he piled his dirty clothes. In the back I saw a fly rod, a tackle box, and a hunting rifle. I imagined if I really searched the place, I’d find a handgun.