We Are Not Ourselves(121)

She was watching the movie so intently that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had to give her mother a report on it afterward. All he could think of was how much like spring she smelled and whether she could tell he had an erection.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey yourself.” She glanced at him and then looked back at the movie.

“I’m feeling sad.”

“What’s up?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing.”

She turned to him fully now. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s watch the movie.”

“You tell me right now.” She had a deadly earnest look on her face, and he couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. He felt bad when he realized she was serious. Her father’s bar, and his ghostly presence at it, looked on in silent disapproval.

He put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, which inflamed her.

“Either you tell me or I’m not kissing you anymore tonight,” she said.

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said. “I just don’t know how to talk about it.”

She put the popcorn bowl on the coffee table and sat on her legs, drawing her feet up under her. “Now you really have to tell me. What? What?”

“I was just thinking of my father. It makes me sad to think of him.”

Her features arranged themselves into a look of concern.

“Tell me,” she said. Her hand was on his knee.

“Just that he’s not going to be here. He’s going away. He’s going to forget me.”

She started shaking her head. She looked like she was about forty years old. “He won’t forget you,” she said in a way that was both dismissive and reassuring. It was like she could see what was actually going to happen.

“He will. Everyone’s going to go away eventually.”

“Not me. I’ll be here.”

“You’ll go away too.”

“I will not,” she said.

She went to hug him. He kissed her neck and moved up to her lips. The movie kept playing in the background, but now she wasn’t watching it either. She was kissing him long and with a different level of feeling. His erection now pressed painfully against his pants. He was running his hands all over her body. He put his hand under the bottom of her shirt and moved it up quickly when she didn’t shove it away. He ran his hand over her bra and slipped his hand under it. He felt his breath coming short. He moved his other hand up under her shirt, so he had one of her breasts in each of his hands. It felt like he had made it to the other side of some great divide. He started kissing her neck and ears, and eventually he had lifted her shirt up and was kissing her breasts. He would not try to do more than this. There would be other opportunities. He would keep something in reserve. His father had helped him. It was a powerful thing that he would have to use sparingly, what was happening with his father; he didn’t want to get addicted to it. But there was nothing wrong with letting some good come from it.

The room seemed to get darker. He sucked at her nipple like he was trying to draw something out of it, which he knew was all wrong. She winced a few times at the pressure of his teeth.

The door upstairs came open, and she rushed to pull her shirt down, which was just as well, because his kisses on her breasts had turned into something he was practicing doing, and he had begun to feel guilty about losing his innocence. There was no going back for it now.





51


Virginia was in the phone book, as she’d said she’d be so many years before. Or rather her husband was: Callow, Leland. Eileen had been meaning to reach out to Virginia since the day she’d closed on the house. She’d gone for the phone several times, but the idea of fumbling through the initial conversation gave her an anxious pit in her stomach and she always hung up before dialing. She didn’t want to degrade herself any more than she’d have to. She decided to show up instead.

She chose a Saturday. If they weren’t home, she’d leave a note and try again the next day. She put on a nice blouse and skirt and did her hair. Virginia’s address was in the town proper, up the hill, on one of those winding streets with houses set far back from the street on enormous lots.

When she was a block away, Eileen felt so jittery that she had to pull over and calm herself down. This was the encounter she’d been anticipating for years, though she hadn’t realized as much until she was on its threshold. The visit Virginia had made to the dressing room planted a seed in her mind that had broken through the surface and survived long winters. She wanted Virginia to see the tree in its full flowering. Would Virginia recognize it for what it was? She hoped it would seem to Virginia like the most natural thing in the world for Eileen to be standing there, a neighbor of sorts, even if she lived across town, dropping in unannounced, an old friend, a surprise visitor.

There were so many trees on the front lawns. They seemed older than the nation itself. It was early October; the leaves had started to turn, and the sight of the street in the lightly misty air made her stop and pull over for a minute before she could continue.

She pulled up in front of Virginia’s house. There was a car in the driveway. She put her own car in park and turned off the engine, and the old vehicle settled heavily. She regretted not stopping at Topps for a box of cookies, or at Tryforos for some flowers, but on the other hand it would have been strange to come bearing a gift after thirty years. She imagined handing over the rattling box of cookies and Virginia receiving it with a skeptical look, as though it were a store of keepsakes from an intentionally forgotten past.