I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(55)
Chapter Nineteen
Edith
Winter 1955–Spring 1956
The first time coincided with the first snowstorm of the season, a few days before Christmas, flakes pouring dense as flour, and, when Edith stood alone afterward at the back window and watched her yard become mute and smothered and finally lose itself under the anonymous weight, she found there was no piecing the events together, no first this, then this, then this. She had neither decided nor been persuaded. George had merely shown up at her door, breathless, red-cheeked, snow on his shoulders and inside the brim of his hat, and said, uncertainly, “I walked from the hotel,” and her desire had bolted out of hiding, huge and fleet and hurtling forward, forward, carrying Edith in its slipstream.
During future encounters, she would be deliberate. She would relish undressing him, this man whose clothes seemed so intrinsically part of who he was, her fingers easing buttons from their holes, unknotting his tie, negotiating his belt buckle and slithering his belt free a loop at a time, sliding off his layers of wool and silk and fine cotton, feeling her way like a blind woman, her eyes locked on his, refusing to rest so much as a fingertip against his skin even as he strained his body toward her hands. When she got to the last layer, she would close her eyes and rest her cheek on his chest, feeling his heat through the thin, ribbed cotton of his undershirt. Only when he was naked would she touch his bare skin or allow him to touch her. Naked, George was transfigured, was someone else, was anyone, no one.
Edith, who had not so much as held hands with a man before Joseph, learned the acute, concentrated pleasure of sex with a man she did not love. George’s body was a means to an end and an instrument to play. They met several times a month, always in the downstairs bedroom, George knowing better than anyone when that room would be empty. She didn’t ask about his wife, although she knew he had one. She didn’t ask how he managed to get away so often. She didn’t ask him anything or ask anything of him, except to instruct him, occasionally, as to what part of her to handle or enter or take into his mouth, exactly how, and for how long, words he liked to hear and, after listening, to obey.
The second time he came, he brought a bag with him and spent the night; propped up on an elbow, watching him sleep, she marveled at her own abstraction. For a day or two, after he left her house, he came back to her in flashes, pure sense memory; her nerve endings resurrecting him in precise and aching detail. But that was all. When he arrived, always without warning, she burned her desire out against him over and over; when he left, she never asked when he’d be back.
Sometimes, after they were finished and he’d gotten dressed again, she would photograph him, the real George, a distant, elegant, dark-haired man.
After the first few times, he began to talk to her, the two of them lying together in bed, his voice threading faintly through the dark as if from far away. He told her about the places he’d traveled, about the restaurants and the hotels, the museums and boats and women. Once, he told her, with no emotion at all, that he and his wife were unable to have children. Another time, he described his first love; he was sixteen, she was twenty-one, his cousin’s friend from college visiting for the summer. “She went back to school and never even wrote. Dashed my heart to pieces,” he said, laughing.
And then, one night, four months in, he told her the story of his parents.
His father beat his mother, regularly, brutally. George’s first memory was of hearing his father shouting during the night and then, afterward, his mother crying in the bathroom, something she would do again and again, her throat-wrenching sobs nearly masked by the thunder of water into the tub. For years, with almost clinical accuracy, his father was careful to leave bruises only in places her clothing would cover, but when George was eight, for reasons unknown to him, his father’s rages became less frequent, but wilder. He would hit his wife in front of the maid, in front of George, with his fists, yes, but also, sometimes, with whatever was closest: a frying pan, a shoe, a candlestick, his briefcase. On one occasion, he threw a five-pound bag of flour at her head. On another, he beat her with the heavy, black telephone until the phone cord snapped from the wall. Whenever George witnessed this, he would be sick afterward, his stomach yanked into knots, but he never tried to stop it from happening.
“Maybe I wasn’t brave enough,” said George to Edith. “But what I remember is feeling that it was just the way things were in my house, and nothing in the world could ever make it stop.”
A handful of times, a neighbor or a passerby called the police. The uniformed men would come to the family’s grand house purchased with his mother’s money, tuck their hats under their arms, and stand in the marble foyer, speaking to George’s father, who could turn on charm like throwing a switch, his laugh big and rollicking. If George’s mother were presentable enough, she would appear, would stretch her mouth into a smile, offer the officers tea, say she was fine, fine, fine, even if her hands were shaking, her eyes red from weeping. And the police officers would nod and tell them all to please be quieter and to have a good night. On occasion, the officers would apologize to his parents for disturbing them.
When George was ten, a night came that was worse than the others. George’s father arrived home crazy with rage over something that had happened at work. He slammed George’s mother against the wall, her head jerking backward hard. George remembered the sound of it, bone on plaster. He remembered the streak of red on the wall as she slid to the ground, unconscious, looking dead, her head lolled to one side. He remembered blood on her mouth; she must have bitten her tongue. George’s father nudged her with his foot, shouted at her to wake the hell up, and finally, she opened her eyes, blinked, and looked straight at George who was across the room, watching from his hiding place between the closed velvet drapes; she smiled at him to reassure him, her little boy, that despite the blood and her oatmeal-colored face and the way her head wobbled on her neck, she was fine.