Twenty-Eight #2
She shakes her head. “Just a second.” She walks outside.
I need to tell him. What am I doing, going on like this? Pretending when it’s Lionel here with us. When pretending might drive another person I love away from me. “Lionel,” I say. “I have to tell you something.”
“What’s going on?”
“Ginny and me,” I say. And that’s all it takes. I watch it dawn on him. He studies me, still and silent, his usual swagger like a coat he’s shrugged off and left at the door. I say, “There was a moment years ago. Her going away party. I thought you’d found me out then.”
“I could tell there was an energy. Sure. Didn’t know it was like this, though.”
“No one can know. It isn’t anything anyway. Not anymore.” But my voice catches when I say it and soon I’m telling him everything. How I can’t be with her but can’t leave her alone. How it hurts either way.
“Who knows?” Lionel asks.
“Only Elise. And now you.”
He leans against the wall. “Goddamn,” he says. “You and Ginny.” And just like that, there’s nothing I’m hiding from him anymore.
Lionel and Ginny talk alone outside for a while.
Back inside the house, I try not to watch them or listen, but I can see from the window above the kitchen sink that he hugs her for a long time before he leaves.
After he’s gone home, Ginny tells me that being in my studio felt intimate.
Like stepping into my mind or my heart, she says.
Suddenly hers to see. I ask her to stay.
She shakes her head. “I have to change my clothes. And check my mail. And water my plants.”
“Can I go with you?”
“How many nights would you give me this time?”
“I understand if you don’t want to.”
“No,” she says. “I’m really asking. How many nights?”
I take her hand, lead her into the kitchen, to the calendar that hangs in the telephone alcove.
Nathalie has drawn a star on the day they’ll return home.
I turn the page from August to September to show her.
She puts her fingertip to the star and nods.
Then she traces her finger to a square below it.
Clément’s neat handwriting: Mommy turns 29!
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go to my house. ”
And then it’s late, and we’re on Ginny’s sofa.
She gave me her robe to wear earlier, got it for me from her closet when I went to put my clothes back on.
“I wonder so many things about you,” she says.
“The woman you were with before. Why you married so young. I don’t want the short version. I want the whole thing.”
So I tell her about Hattie, about Cyril. I tell her about why Delphine ran away with Bill. All of it is still difficult to talk about. Maybe it will be, forever. Ginny traces her hand over my stomach where the robe’s slipped open, touches the faint lines left from my pregnancy.
“You were generous,” she says. “With Cyril. You gave him the happiest days that you could. A few perfect days—for him. What were they like for you?” I shake my head, too painful a question.
I was already in love, she gave me away.
Ginny’s watching me closely. “Can we try something?” she asks.
“We can stop if you don’t like it. But you’ll have to trust me. ”
I smile. “I’ve known you long enough.”
She takes my hand and leads me into her room. Pulls the covers back on the bed she’d just straightened. She lays a pillow down.
“What is all this?” I ask, but when she tells me to climb in, I do. “You can leave your robe on or take it off,” she says. “However you’ll be more comfortable.”
I keep it on, shy, climb in. It’s serious, I can tell, what she’s about to do.
“You’re nervous,” she says. “You don’t have to be.
” She straddles me, lowers her weight onto my thighs.
“Is this okay? Are you comfortable?” I nod.
“We’re doing it over. Your wedding day. You’re eighteen, and you get to marry whoever you choose.
Who is it? Hattie, maybe?” Ginny’s strong thighs are at my hips, holding me in place.
I take in her dark eyes and the dip above her top lip and her sharp cheekbones and chin. Regal.
“You,” I say, and she smiles.
“You marry me,” she says. “At Saint Peter Claver.” I laugh. “And then we’re in a borrowed car, headed to Baton Rouge. How do you feel?”
Her voice is low, I close my eyes. There we are: young, side by side. “Happy,” I say. “Eager to be alone with you.”
She leans forward, her mouth against my ear. “Why?”
My mouth against hers, I say, “Because we haven’t been together yet. We’ve been waiting.”
Her lips graze my neck. She says, “It’s a long drive to Baton Rouge.”
We’re on the highway, trees and mansions out the window, Ginny driving, looking over at me, winking.
“I want to kiss you,” I say. “But you have to keep your eyes on the road.” I turn my face to her mouth but she doesn’t let me reach it.
I kiss her neck, her shoulder. I hunger for her.
She keeps me waiting. Makes me lead her somewhere.
We go to a little place she knows of, an inn, and the innkeeper greets us with flowers and shows us to our room.
It’s the honeymoon suite. A view of the river and a deep tub shaped like a heart. “You draw the water,” I tell her.
“All right,” she says. “You undress.” In the fantasy, I’m unfastening my wedding gown.
In her bed, Ginny shifts her weight to let me cast the robe aside and now she’s making love to me.
We’re on the bathroom floor in Baton Rouge, the water running, the room filling with steam. She isn’t asking me any more questions.
“Don’t let me go,” I say. She flips me over, fills me, her weight an anchor.
“I won’t,” she says into my ear.
It could be minutes or hours, I don’t know. The tub might overflow and we wouldn’t notice it, or morning might come and surprise us. No matter.
Later, Ginny says, “You probably know it already, but I’d give anything to settle down with you.” Her heart’s still pounding, she’s shaky from exertion. I stroke her hair as she falls asleep. I lie with my eyes open in the dark for a very long time.