6. “A Name on the Desk” #3
I came down to her slowly. I kissed her throat, the hollow of it, the place at the base where her pulse was, and it was fast against my mouth and I let it be fast. I kissed the line of her collarbone.
I pushed her cardigan off her shoulder. She let me.
Her hand came up to the back of my head and held me there, and the sound she made was the kind of sound a person makes when they have been waiting for something so long that when it finally arrives the body does not know whether to lean into it or break under it.
She did neither. She held me.
I worked down the buttons of her dress with the particular care of a man who understands that he only gets one first time, that this is not a thing he will be able to do again for the first time.
She watched me do it. She watched me the way she watched everything she was paying attention to, steadily, without looking away.
When I reached the last button she sat up slightly and helped me.
The dress came off her shoulders. I folded it. I set it on the chair.
She laughed softly. The laugh I knew. The one she tried to suppress when she found me funny in a way she thought I didn’t notice.
“Old habits,” I said.
“Old habits.” She reached for me. Her fingers found the buttons of my shirt, undid them in the order she had decided on, did not rush.
I sat still and let her. When she pushed the shirt off my shoulders her hands moved across my chest and she looked at me the way I had looked at her, which was the way of someone taking inventory of a thing they intended to keep.
We took our time.
That is what I want to say about it, the most important thing.
We took our time. I had forty-six years of being careful behind me and I gave none of them to this.
I gave her all of it, all the time in the guesthouse, all the quiet, all the dark and the small pale square of light from the window.
Her hands and my hands and the quilt and the low sound of the Sound outside and her voice saying my name in the way she said it when there was no one to hear but me.
I learned her. She let me learn her. She turned into my hands like someone who has been waiting for a particular piece of music to finally start and now that it has started cannot believe it took so long.
When she came, she pressed her face into my shoulder.
She was quiet. She was always quiet, I understood, when it counted.
Her whole body shook with it and she pressed her face against me and I held her through it with my mouth at her temple and her hair in my hands and my chest against hers and the whole guesthouse was very still.
Afterward I lay beside her. Her head on my chest. My hand in her hair. The light from the main house on the ceiling. Outside the Sound moved in the dark. A loon called, once. The compound settled.
I thought about Chip in the library. I thought about the shelf he had offered me and I thought about the thing I had just done to the shelf.
I thought about Foster’s voice in the kitchen, saying: you are going to have to be a different thing than careful.
I thought: yes. I thought: I understand now what that means.
Eden’s breathing slowed against my chest.
I lay there with the ceiling and the light and the whole quiet compound above us and I thought about the morning, about Foster and the leak and the work that needed doing.
I thought about the promise I had made in the library.
I thought about Chip’s face when he had said: I am putting it on a shelf.
I thought: I have taken it off the shelf.
I thought: the only thing left to do is be worth it.
She lifted her head.
“You did not promise him anything.”
“No. I asked him for time. He gave me time.”
“You did not ask me to wait. You waited yourself. He gave you time. He gave us time.”
“Yes.”
“Then we use it. We let Foster do his work. We let my father catch his breath. We hold our faces in front of the boys. And I keep coming to your apartment when nobody is looking.”
“Eden.”
“What.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what.”
“Yes to all of it.”
She gave me the smallest possible smile.
There was a knock on the door.
Both of us went still.
“Eden,” her father called from outside. “Mrs. Harris has soup. Come to the kitchen.”
She looked at me.
She looked at the door.
She said, very loudly, “Coming, Daddy.”
Then she whispered, “Hold your face.”
“I will.”
She stood up.
She straightened her dress.
She opened the door and walked out into the hallway where her father was waiting.
I followed her back to the house with my hands in my pockets and my heart doing the thing it had been doing since Tuesday morning: beating like it might break through my ribs.
I made it through the soup.
I drove back to Manhattan at 11:47 p.m.
And on the drive home, I did not text her.
I did not text her because I had told her father I would be careful, and I had told her I would be careful, and I was going to spend the next two weeks proving I was the kind of man who could keep a promise made in a library where the fire had not yet gone out.
The 95 at midnight was empty.
I drove the whole way with my hands on the wheel and the radio off and the windows cracked, and I let the wind off the Sound do the thing it did when a man had been told he had been seen by his oldest friend and had been given a small piece of grace to become a different kind of man than the one who had spent twenty-eight years not being seen at all.