The Last Romantics(85)
It was over quickly, both of them coming with a speed and force that startled her. Afterward Caroline lay against the couch, stunned more than sated, as Nathan stroked her stomach, her breast, her cheek.
“I love you,” he said.
Caroline nodded. “I know,” she replied.
After that night on the couch, Nathan tried to entice Caroline back to life. Sex. They returned to it as though they were newlyweds again in those short, fevered months after the wedding, before the first move, when the idea that they could do this without secrets or lies or shame acted as the greatest aphrodisiac. Nathan changed his office hours and began to return home by two o’clock on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
And so on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Caroline waited for him. She wore satin negligees or matching bra-and-panty sets in electric reds and pinks. Sometimes she greeted him at the door in nothing but a pair of stilettos or a short, frilly apron. They began an affair that was similar to their honeymoon in sexual intensity, but now the sex was slower, smarter, better. Now they came to each other with an unapologetic, unembarrassed understanding of what they wanted and what they could do. Nathan attended to Caroline with such precision that she forgot everything else. She was left only with a crystalline awareness of how he touched her and moved within her.
Soon Caroline had left her bedroom and began again to ferry her children from this place to that, soccer games, doctors’ appointments, play dates. To make dinners and load laundry into the machines. She cut and colored her hair into a sharp-edged bob the color of honey, lighter than her natural color ever was. She fired Betty.
The twins, eleven years old now, seemed satisfied by Caroline’s renewed presence, by these acts of going through the normal motions. Only Louis, fifteen and taller already than Nathan with angry raw patches of acne on each cheek, looked at Caroline askance. He spoke to her as though she were a child. Or, worse, a disappointing pet. Louis, Caroline suspected, understood her secret. That even as she went about her maternal duties, even as she cooked and joked and brushed her teeth, her essential self remained upstairs in that bed, underneath the down duvet, wrapped in darkness.
Every so often Caroline wondered what we, her sisters, were doing. If we were okay. If Renee was still angry, if I was still searching for Luna under the guidance of some shaman or raven-haired witch. Sometimes Caroline dreamed of Luna, and it was as though she, Caroline, entered the Polaroid picture and stood beside Joe at the bar and watched him but did not touch him. Caroline studied Joe’s face, and then she turned to Luna and examined her as you might a piece of art. Looking for meaning. Joe and Luna remained still and silent for these examinations, and then, as though charged with a sudden electric pulse, they began to move and talk. Caroline stepped back and watched them together. She recognized the way Joe and Luna looked at each other and touched, fingers lingering, gazes held, because once she had done the same. It was clear to Caroline that Joe and Luna were in love, and in the dream this realization brought her a great upswell of joy and also unspeakable regret.
One morning after Nathan left for work, the kids at school, Caroline sat alone in the humid, ticking house and wondered what it said about her that she mourned for her brother by fucking her husband until she was raw and senseless. “What do you want?” Nathan would always ask before they began. “Caroline, what do you want me to do?” Caroline always offered a detailed reply. Nathan’s imagination only got them so far. But she and Nathan seemed no closer. Nathan operated on her, he made her come night after night, but there was no corresponding transcendent intimacy. If anything, the sex pushed Caroline deeper into herself. She sailed away during their lovemaking to someplace fast, primal, dark. Afterward she would fall immediately asleep, exhausted, and Nathan did the same. In the mornings, when he kissed her and smiled and placed a hand on her cheek or stroked her hair, she felt doll-like, an empty-headed body responding mechanically to another empty head.
Today Caroline sat at her dining-room table, the long one they used at holidays and for Sunday family dinners and the parties they threw—or once had thrown—and she examined her hands. Caroline, what do you want? The veins were risen, the skin spotted faintly with irregular freckles; her wedding ring, scuffed and scratched, cut into the pink, swollen flesh of her finger. Her nails were raw and bitten, though she could not remember biting them. The mysterious failings of her own body, Caroline thought. Like the nightmares that had fallen upon her as a child, and she powerless to make them stop. Now her body again seemed consumed by its own set of principles and needs, divorced completely from what she herself, Caroline Skinner-Duffy, wanted. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to feel like things mattered. She wanted her brother back.
*
Nathan’s promotion to chair of the biology department of Hamden College surprised no one. But still, when he told Caroline, she gasped and felt tears spring to her eyes. It seemed the appropriate response.
Nathan wanted to host a party, something for faculty, administrators, a few standout graduate students. “You know how much I hate these things,” he told Caroline. “But I think it’s important. A new day in the department. That kind of thing.”
“Of course,” Caroline replied. “Shall we do steak or salmon?”
Caroline had been “better” (Nathan’s word) for over a year now. She had not spoken to me since that rainy day in Brooklyn four years before. Renee communicated with us all via the occasional group e-mail with subject lines of “Update from Jo-burg” or “Notes from the clinic in Port-au-Prince.” Personal phone calls were difficult to arrange, unreliable, and expensive, Renee told us. Caroline did not bother inviting either of us to Nathan’s party, and I understood why: it had been too long, it seemed too risky, as though a chemical reaction might occur. Without Joe our atoms did not know where to rest, how to behave. We were free radicals, spinning in our own small orbits, dangerous, poisonous, causing invisible but elemental damage to anything we touched.