Necessary Lies(14)
“Don’t worry about it,” he said and poured more wine into her glass.
When the world whirled in front of her eyes, she tried to stop it by staring in one direction only. She took a sip of water. In the morning she had passed by his McGill office in the Music Building. Second floor, third door to the right. The corridor was empty and the floorboards creaked under her feet. Quickly she touched the brass knob of his door and walked away before anyone could see her. She thought about borders. The dangers of crossing them. Of finding herself on this other, forbidden side. Of the point, still hidden to her, from which there would be no turning back.
“You are changing, Anna,” she heard William say, his voice so warm, so full of concern for her. “Your new needs are as real as your old ones.”
“Are they, really?” she asked, thinking of Piotr, trying to remember the touch of his lips.
William drove Anna back home. There was no place to park the car, and, as soon as he stopped in front of her apartment, she released the latch of the seatbelt, ready to flee.
“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said then. Blood rushed to her cheeks. “You know that, don’t you?” The car behind them honked. The driver leaned out of the window. “Hurry up,” he motioned to them and flashed his headlights.
She opened the door and dashed out. She didn’t even turn around to look at him. Inside her apartment she didn’t switch on the light. She sat on the floor, back to the wall, and held her knees. She rocked her body, until the phone rang.
“I’m sorry,” William’s voice on the phone was quiet, almost shy. “I shouldn’t have said it. You have enough problems without me.”
She was sobbing into the black receiver.
“Anna,” she heard. “Anna. My darling. Are you all right? Am I hurting you?”
She didn’t answer.
“If you tell me to go away, I will. Tell me to go away.”
“I love you,” she whispered, and then waited in the dark, tears and laughter mixing together. She heard the soft knock at the door and let him in, his face white and drawn. He bent to kiss her, and she stood there, still crying, feeling his soft lips on hers, both happy and terrified of what she had done.
“I’ll go mad,” she kept saying. “I’ll go mad. I’m so happy I want to die.”
In the bedroom she watched him kneel on the floor and kiss her hands, and bury his face in them. She felt her skirt lift, rise above her knees. She was shedding her clothes like skin, like another, inferior version of herself. She no longer wanted to resist. That she allowed herself to be so besotted was a sign in itself. This love was like a new life, too strong to oppose.
“Anna,” he whispered, “my darling.” She knew then that she would never go back to Poland, to Piotr, but the thought didn’t hurt yet. Gently she licked the tips of his fingers as they moved over her lips. His hand slid down her neck onto her naked breasts, down between her legs. “Oh my God, please don’t punish me. I’ll be better, I promise. With him, I’ll be better, I’ll understand more,” she prayed, closing her eyes.
She repeated the words he whispered to her, the English words his voice gave new meanings to, “My precious darling, my love.”
“I don’t want an affair,” she said. “I won’t lie about you.” And then, her eyes still closed, with the pores of her skin she felt the warmth of his lips. “I’m thirsty,” she said.
He walked barefooted to the kitchen and poured her a glass of cold water. She was shaking when she drank it all, gulp after gulp, a cold snake entering her, filling her insides. He kissed the glass, licked the drops of water from her chin. They laughed. Through the window they watched the roofs of houses, the lights of lampposts, of passing cars. Across, in the distance, was the giant cross on the Mountain, erected by a city grateful for being spared from a flood, now long forgotten. He pulled her toward him again, her hair tangled, her body ready for him. It occurred to her that she should check the balance of desire. That it was dangerous to love too much, to be that insatiable. Before she had completely formed the thought, she was ashamed of it.
There was moonlight in the room where they lay, entangled, still hungry for each other. The furniture was grey — all shadows, dark, indistinguishable. There were layers to their bodies, whole territories to explore. The soft outer layer of his skin wrinkled when she pushed it. The veins were like underground tunnels criss-crossing the body. She breathed in the smell of his hair, a vague scent of wood smoke and the wind. “Are you making sure I’m real?” he had asked, capturing her hand, and she laughed in response. A teasing laugh, a challenge.
Her first dream of him must have been a nightmare. She woke up in the middle of the night and found her flat, narrow pillow wet with tears. She could not remember the dream, just the feeling that he had been there in it, the centre of everything, and that she, in some dreamy, bodiless form, was being dragged away from him. The emptiness that descended on her took away her will to live.
Still crying, she sat up in bed. She embraced her legs, drew them tighter and rested her chin on her knees. The room was cold, and she was shivering. The air coming from the open window was thick with the smells of cooking, stale food and last night’s garbage, the smell of downtown alleys, wet from the rain.
In the apartment on Rue de la Montagne Anna could spot Piotr’s letters in her mailbox before she had opened it, blue envelopes showing through the brass slits. They all had blurred ink stamps on them — EKSPRES— underneath her address, an attempt to speed them up.