The Secrets We Kept(66)
I brushed off the thin layer of snow and dead pine needles and took a seat. A sudden movement behind me caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand at attention. I looked around: nothing. Had I been followed? I looked up: Two yellow lanterns hung high in the towering pine. An owl steadied herself on a branch that seemed much too small to hold her. She swiveled her head, surveying the garden for an unlucky mouse or chipmunk. She was a regal bird, there on her throne, poised to pass judgment and carry out the sentence herself. She paid me, a commoner, no mind as she patiently waited for her dinner to appear. To operate fully under instinct was a gift given to the animals; how much simpler life would be if humans did the same. The branch creaked as the owl shifted her weight. With a flap of her wings, she coasted up and over the garden’s wall. It wasn’t until she was gone that I noticed I’d been holding my breath.
I pushed my red glove back and looked at my watch: seven fifty-six. Chaucer was due in four minutes. If he was late, I was to leave immediately and take the number ten bus to Dupont Circle. If he was on time, I was to take a small package from him, two rolls of microfilm containing Doctor Zhivago in its native Russian, then board the number twenty bus and deliver the film to a safe house on Albemarle Street.
It started snowing, and I watched the flakes dance in the spotlights pointing at the cathedral. My thighs began to itch, as they did whenever I was cold, and I tightened the belt of the long camel-hair coat Sally had insisted on buying me when she noticed the cigarette burn on my old winter jacket—a small gift from a man who’d bumped into me on the bus. I took off my red leather gloves and blew hot air into my balled-up fists. When I released my fingers, my engagement ring slipped off and clinked to the cobblestones. It was two sizes too big, and I hadn’t gotten around to having it properly fitted. But my, it was beautiful. Teddy’s grandmother had given it to him when he was a boy, telling him that someday the woman he’d love for the rest of his life would wear it. He remembered telling her he’d never marry—he’d be far too busy fighting Nazis, like Captain America. His grandmother patted him on his head. “Just you wait,” she’d told him.
Teddy recounted this story before he got down on one knee at his parents’ house the day after my twenty-fifth birthday, just before the strawberry shortcake was served. Instead of looking at Teddy, I looked at my mother, who beamed with a look of pride I’d never before seen in her. Then I looked at his parents across the table, smiling as if their baby boy had taken his first steps. Then I looked back at Teddy and nodded.
It was a beautiful ring, but I hated wearing it. Wearing it felt like a cover.
I knew that what I really wanted was impossible. But I wanted it anyway. I wanted the excitement, the home, the adventure, the expected, the unexpected. I wanted every contradiction, every opposite. And I wanted it all at once. I couldn’t wait for my reality to catch up to my desires. And that need was my constant companion, the underlying current of nerves that caused me to overanalyze every interaction and question every decision—the source of the never-ending conversation in my head that kept me up nights while Mama snored softly on the other side of the thin wall separating our bedrooms.
I knew what people called it: an abomination, a perversion, a deviance, an immorality, a depravity, a sin. But I didn’t know what to call it—what to call us.
Sally had shown me a world that existed behind closed doors, but it still didn’t feel like my world, my reality. All I knew was that I hadn’t seen Sally since the night I spent at her apartment two weeks and three days earlier, and that in those two weeks and three days, I hadn’t spent one waking hour not thinking of her.
I picked up the ring and put it back on as the cathedral bells rang out eight times. After the final bell, Chaucer appeared, as planned. There had been no sound—not of the gate opening, nor of footsteps. He arrived silent as snow, wearing a long black coat and a plaid hat with flaps that covered his ears. With his funny hat and curious expression, he reminded me of a basset hound. “Hello, Eliot,” he said.
“Hello, Chaucer.”
“Lovely night for a stroll.” His accent dripped with the articulations of a high-class Londoner.
“Indeed.”
He remained standing, and a beat of silence passed between us. He made no move to hand me the package, but turned and looked up at the cathedral. “Impressive structure. You Americans do love making new buildings look old.”
“I suppose so.”
“Take bits and pieces from the Old Country, cobble them together, and put the old American stamp on it, isn’t that right?”
I wasn’t about to debate him, nor did I understand why he seemed to want to debate me. Maybe this was what the men did when they met like this, but I had no time for the volley of clever banter. There was a job to be done.
He looked hurt at my nonresponse and reached into his coat, handing me a small package wrapped in newspaper.
I placed the package in my Chanel purse.
“Let’s do this again sometime.” He tipped his hat and remained standing there as I left.
The thrill never dampened—like the moment when a roller coaster crests at the top of the hill and pauses just before it lets gravity pull it down. I walked to the corner of Wisconsin and Massachusetts. But instead of boarding the number twenty bus as I was supposed to, I walked the twenty minutes to the large Tudor house at 3812 Albemarle. If I couldn’t have everything my heart desired, at least I had that moment, that feeling—and I wanted to savor it as long as possible.