The Last Book Party(33)
The floor creaked. Henry stood in the doorway, barefoot, in a black T-shirt and jeans, holding a large cardboard box. Unshaven, he looked younger, and even vulnerable. The wind rattled the old windows. Henry put the box down by the bookshelf and pulled a step stool from under his desk. Standing on it, he asked if I could give him a hand.
I went to the box and began passing him the books, one by one. We didn’t speak as he reached up to slide them between other books on the top shelves. As he stretched to reach the tallest shelf, his T-shirt slid up, exposing his back above his belt. When we got to the last book, I said, “That’s it, the final one,” and waited for him to step down from the stool. He stood on the floor, close to me, as close as we had ever been.
“Thanks,” he said.
I looked at him with surprise.
“What?” he said.
“Not ‘your assistance has been invaluable, for which I am grateful’?”
“Am I really so absurd?”
“Sometimes.”
“You must think I’m terribly old.”
“I don’t,” I said, perhaps too quickly. “I mean, I did, but I don’t anymore.”
“What’s changed?”
I could hardly breathe.
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “Maybe me?”
I pressed my lips together. I knew I should take a step away from him, but I couldn’t deny that I wanted more of Henry. More of how smart and interesting he made me feel. More talking and laughing. More of how he looked at me when he thought I didn’t notice.
I started to turn to go back to my desk, but Henry let his fingers brush mine. He moved a strand of hair off my cheek and tucked it behind my ear. I met his gaze. He ran a finger along my upper lip, his expression tentative, as if asking, “Is this OK?”
With courage I didn’t know I had, my heart beating so heavily I could feel it in my stomach, I put my hand on his chest. He covered it with his own hand, warm and heavy. His chest rose and fell. He lifted my chin with one finger and kissed me. It was a total free fall, away from rational thought, away from meaning. We kissed again, more urgently this time, pressing our bodies against each other, my back against the bookshelf.
Outside, a car door slammed. We froze. The slap of the screen door and then quick footsteps from the kitchen. More footsteps, getting louder. Henry stepped away, smoothed his shirt. I felt dizzy, panicked. I sat at my desk and started flipping through pages of Henry’s memoir.
“Henry, where are you?” Tillie was at the bottom of the stairs. “The downstairs toilet is backed up again. Where’s the damned plunger?”
It was the most domestic thing I had ever heard her say.
27
A new pattern emerged. I’d arrive at work midmorning, as usual, but at some point in the afternoon I’d cycle down to Jams, where I’d lock my bicycle behind the building. Henry would pick me up and we’d head to places where we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew. We drove to Head of the Meadow Beach in North Truro, but instead of entering the parking lot for town residents on the right, we turned to the left and paid two dollars to park in the lot open to day-trippers. We walked down the beach toward Provincetown and then through the spiny grass and into the low dunes until we found a clearing large enough to lie down in.
We went to Cap’n Josie’s on Route 6, where we ordered what I considered winter food—Portuguese kale soup and baked stuffed sole—and drank white wine. Henry was amused by my stories about Hodder, Strike, particularly if they put Malcolm in an unfavorable light. I didn’t let on how much I liked Malcolm, who was the first to admit he had “re-created himself” after leaving West Virginia, and so I played up Malcolm’s pretensions, like the Anglophilia that led him to say things like “please have this done by Monday week.”
Henry regaled me with stories about his early days as a reporter. I loved imagining him as a young man, traveling the country with a reporter’s notebook in his back pocket, listening intently to farm folk and factory workers who had never spoken to a reporter, let alone one from New York, or sitting at his portable manual typewriter in a seedy motel room, shirtsleeves rolled up on his muscular arms, a cigarette burning out in a blocky glass ashtray as he wrote into the night. I was taken with the idea of learning about writing by looking outward—to the world and other people’s stories—instead of by retreating to my inner world, which too often left me stymied by self-doubt.
I was undeniably nervous the first time we slept together, the day after that first kiss in Henry’s office. Insisting that we weren’t going to start off like “teenagers in the back seat of the car,” Henry took advantage of Tillie’s presence at an all-day poetry workshop at Castle Hill and booked a room at the Governor Prence Motel in North Truro. We walked into the room, and when he’d closed the door, I was afraid to look at him. I sat on the edge of the bed, anxiously tracing the swirling pattern on the orange polyester bedspread.
“Is this all new to you?” Henry had asked softly, sitting beside me and placing his hand over mine.
I looked around the room, at the faded lampshade on the night table, the crude drawing of a lobster boat in a driftwood frame.
“Being in a motel with an older man?” I purposely left out the word married. “Definitely new.”