Pineapple Street(46)

The next Tuesday after work Brady caught up to her as she was walking home on Hicks Street. “Can we talk?”

Georgiana felt the blood rush to her face and a painful ache that shot from her throat to her groin. She nodded and took him back to her apartment. As soon as the door closed they began to kiss. She met his lips hungrily with her own, tears streamed down her face, but she didn’t stop. She cried and kissed him and pulled off her shirt and her bra and her pants. He kissed her neck and her stomach and lay her across the bed and went down on her. She was overwhelmed by him, by getting to touch him when she was so sure she never would again. He entered her and she kissed him again, and then they finished and lay spent and silent in her bed as the sun set. They ate cheese and crackers for dinner like invalids and slept curled together in a knot, and Georgiana felt it was the first time she had truly rested in a week.

Soon it was as though nothing had changed, but something had. In a strange way there was a new intensity and seriousness between them. They stopped playing tennis together—it felt like a waste of time when they could be alone—and instead they spent hours and hours in bed. Brady was tender with her, combing her hair from her eyes, sometimes looking at her like he was afraid she was going to melt away beneath him. It was impossible to know how it might end. Would Brady leave Amina? Would Georgiana spend her entire youth desperately in love with a man whose heart resided thousands of miles away? They never spoke of it. When they were together Georgiana was too afraid of breaking the spell and watching him vanish like smoke.



* * *





Brady’s apartment didn’t feel like another woman’s apartment. The first time Georgiana went over she was nervous, sure there would be a dresser covered in perfume bottles, framed photos on a shelf, tampons and makeup in the bathroom. And while there were tampons under the sink, it was not the home of a woman. It was Brady’s. Full of maps and thick rugs that he bought in Morocco, a brass Buddha from Cambodia, a neat row of basketball sneakers and running shoes by the door. His refrigerator was full of beer and hot sauce, a bicycle hung from the wall, his bed was made with a neat blue coverlet, and his bedside table was stacked with biographies. Georgiana wondered how it had looked before Amina moved out. Did they have wedding china she took to Seattle? A set of champagne flutes? A crystal cake stand that no single, takeout-eating man would ever think to buy for himself? She wondered if the apartment in Seattle bore traces of Brady, if there was a stick of Old Spice, a razor, a box of condoms.

She couldn’t bring herself to think about that part. The fact that the person she loved was also having sex with someone else. They knew better than to discuss it, but it was a certainty she lived with. When Brady came home from a weekend in Seattle, she had to bite her tongue, had to pinch herself to keep from thinking about him lying on top of his wife, kissing her face and holding her hand, both of them slick with sweat.

Sometimes Georgiana felt she was trying to memorize Brady, preparing for him to disappear and leave her dreaming about the small freckles on his back. But other times it felt like their future together stretched out before them, and she saw Brady trying it out and flirting with that vision of life. They had discovered that they both liked to sleep the same way, with the big and second toe of one foot locked around the Achilles above the other foot’s heel. “If we had babies I bet they’d like to sleep that way too,” Brady said.

“If we had babies they would be pretty great athletes.” Georgiana smiled.

“I’d want them to have your hair.”

“I’d want them to have your face.”

“I’d want them to have your breasts.”

“That might be awkward if they were boys. Tiny little baby boys with a woman’s breasts.”

“I would love them anyway,” Brady promised solemnly. “Our tiny little baby boys with beautiful breasts and long brown hair and man faces with five o’clock shadows.”



* * *



—

When Amina came to visit, and Georgiana couldn’t spend the weekend with Brady, her entire body thrummed with misery. She went to dinner with Kristin and Lena and tried to listen as they discussed Kristin’s boss, who was always wearing AirPods in meetings; she played tennis with her mother at the Casino and they had lunch afterward at the apartment, sitting silently as her mother read Cord’s Yale alumni magazine with a highlighter, looking for the offspring of social acquaintances. When Darley asked about Brady, Georgiana shrugged, mumbling something about things petering out. She couldn’t tell her sister that Brady was married, couldn’t tell her that she was knowingly sleeping with someone’s husband.



* * *





On Monday Georgiana awoke happy: Amina was leaving and Brady belonged to her again. When she passed him in the hall on the way to the library, he reached out and squeezed her arm and they grinned at each other like idiots before swiftly scurrying along in opposite directions.

Now that Georgiana was listening, Amina was everywhere. At lunch Brady’s friends from the first floor mentioned Seattle all the time in conversation; they referred to him in the second person plural, asking, “Are you guys going back to Maine for Memorial Day?” or “Are you guys leasing that Prius?” Their colleagues knew Brady so well, while Georgiana felt they barely even knew her name.