Pillow Talk
Marie and David lay supine side by side in her king-size bed, the fairy lights that she had strung across the ceiling sparkling above them.
They both still carried a sheen of sweat from what Marie considered their most passionate evening of lovemaking to date, and, for once, Marie did not crave a drink or a cigarette.
She glanced at the gold band on her finger and thought she might actually be happy.
“How did you meet Harry?” asked David.
“Why would you ask me about my dead husband right after we had sex?”
“Because he was important to you. He’s part of who you are, and I want to understand him. And I want to understand what happened so I can help you heal.”
“No one understands what happened.”
“I wish I had met him.”
“No, you don’t,” said Marie.
“You think because he was a world-class physicist and I’m an HVAC contractor we couldn’t have been friends?”
“Actually, Harry would have liked you.”
“How so?”
“He would have liked your sense of humor—how you can laugh at a stupid Will Ferrell movie or at a Dorothy Parker turn of phrase with equal enthusiasm. He would have liked your taste in beer—leaning toward the English, respectful of the German, dismissive of the mass produced. He would have liked that you do something useful. He used to worry that his work didn’t improve people’s lives in any meaningful way.
I never knew a college professor who was more friendly with the custodial staff, the IT team, the guy mowing the lawn, the plumber.
He loved the idea of tangible results, and he lacked that in his own career, so he felt drawn to people who could, at the end of the day, point to something and say, ‘I did that.’ Most of all he would have liked the fact that you take care of me.
He didn’t always do that, but he felt guilty when he didn’t.
He used to say to me, ‘Maybe the next husband will do a better job than I have.’ I hated it when he said that, but if Harry were here, he’d look at you and say, ‘I told you so.’”
“He sounds like a nice man.”
“Don’t get me wrong. He could be a real bastard.
His work obsessed him, and he never believed I would understand what he was doing, even though I knew a hell of a lot more about astrophysics than most school administrators.
But he walled that part of his life off from me.
He would share it with Tess, even when she was a little girl, but never with me. I resented that sometimes.”
“Did you resent Vivian, too?”
“Because of the way they bonded over science?”
“Yeah.”
“You have to understand—Harry and Vivian had an intellectual relationship that I could never be a part of, but Vivian and I had a sisterhood that Harry could never be a part of, and Harry and I had a romantic relationship that Vivian could never be a part of. But we all had a friendship that bound us together as tightly as any spouses.”
“So, they never had an affair?”
“Harry and Vivian? God no. But he loved her. Hell, I loved her. I still do.”
“Then why the hysterics about Vivian ruining everything?”
“She did ruin everything. She’s the only one who could have stopped Harry. And she just stood by and let it happen. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss her every day. It was bad enough losing Harry, but Vivian was my best friend. Losing her hurt, too.”
“But doesn’t she still live in town? Still work at the university? Couldn’t she still be your friend?”
“It’s complicated, David. I shut her out afterward because I blamed her, as much as I blamed Tess. Seeing her again now—it would just be too painful.”
“And what about Tess?”
“I don’t want to think about Tess,” said Marie.
“I want you to know that you can talk to me about them—no judgment, no jealousy, no resentment. I promise.”
“Thank you, David. You really are a good man. I don’t deserve you.”
“Of course you do. But you still didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“How did you and Harry, and for that matter Vivian, how did you all meet?”
“The official story,” said Marie, “or the real story?”
“You mean there’s a secret story you never tell anyone?” asked David, turning on his side so he could look into Marie’s eyes.
“There is,” said Marie mischievously.
“Tell me that one.”
Marie fidgeted with her pendant—an art nouveau concoction of turquoise and gold with tiny emeralds and sapphires set around the edges.
She never took it off, wearing it on a silver chain around her neck hidden underneath her clothing.
Now, it was the only thing she wore, and she let it drop into the cleft between her breasts as she returned David’s gaze.
“The official story is that we all met at a party, or a movie, or a play. I can’t even remember exactly what we decided.
The world’s most boring meet-cute. But the real story is one that could only have been dreamed up by Harry Maxwell.
Even though he was just a sophomore, he drifted around campus like he was already a professor—dressed in tweed, chomping on an unlit pipe.
He was in a couple of my classes, but he never said much.
Harry was one of those people that everybody knew about, but nobody knew.
I was aware of Harry, though I didn’t know his name. And I didn’t know Vivian at all.
“Winter of sophomore year I was in the library one afternoon looking for a book on the history of science fiction for a literature class I was taking, but in the spot where that book should have been was a plain black binder.
I slipped the binder off the shelf and took it back to my carrel.
I felt a thrill of secrecy as I opened that binder to see twenty sheets of paper covered from edge to edge in meticulous handwriting and headed Chapter One.
I read the whole thing, and at the end of the last page were the words Please return. Chapter two on Wednesday.
“This was on a Tuesday night, so I returned the folder and came back the next afternoon and sure enough, there was chapter two. And the next Wednesday, chapter three. Chapter twelve came right before spring break, and while most of campus was headed for someplace warm like Florida, my big plans included organizing my sock drawer and getting ahead in my reading for spring semester. I was double majoring in English lit and art history, so I had plenty of work to do. But when I reached the final page, it didn’t say Chapter thirteen on Wednesday.
It said, The End. And below that it said, Readers gather Saturday night at midnight, followed by some numbers.
Now I’m thinking, maybe Millhouse College has secret societies and I’m about to be in one—especially given the content of the manuscript I just read.
“It didn’t take me long to figure out that the numbers were map coordinates, but this was before everybody had a GPS device in their pocket, so I had to find an atlas, and then a more detailed map of the area and so on until I finally found the spot—an island in the middle of a lake in northeastern Wisconsin.
And Millhouse is in central Pennsylvania—that’s a solid two-day drive.
So, I skipped my Friday classes and drove.
Saturday afternoon I made it to this boat landing where a man was on a ladder painting the boathouse.
I paid him five dollars to ferry me across the lake, and ten minutes later I was standing on the dock of what I later learned was Maxwell’s Island watching the man head back to shore and wondering if I’d made a huge mistake.
“Now it was maybe three o’clock and I’d had nothing to eat all day and as far as I could tell I was all alone.
There was a cabin just up the hill from the dock, so I went up there, but all the doors were locked, so I sat down on the steps to wait.
And wait. And maybe two hours later, I heard the boat coming back and I went down to the dock and that’s how I met Vivian.
“‘You read it, too?’ she said. And we started talking about the manuscript; she said she thought the science was a little iffy and I said the prose was stilted and before you knew it, we were talking like old friends, not like two strangers abandoned on a deserted island.
“At midnight, the lights suddenly came on in the cabin and the doors to the deck flew open and that’s how I met the famous Harry Maxwell.”
“And…” said David.
“And what?” said Marie. “You wanted to know the true story of how we met. That’s the true story.”
“But what happened? What was the book about? Did anybody else show up? What did Harry say? Did he write the book?”
“Nobody else showed up. Just the three of us.”
“And the rest of my questions?”
“Oh, I can’t answer those,” said Marie with a smile, twirling her pendant on its chain.
“Why not?” said David.
“It’s a secret.”
In spite of all the pain that had followed, Marie smiled at the memory of Harry Maxwell’s secrets.
In that first meeting he had confessed that he had chosen Marie and Vivian—watching them in class and in the library and placing his story where he knew they’d find it.
And he had confessed something else: Every word of the story he had used to lure them to Maxwell’s Island was true.
Long after David had rolled over and begun snoring lightly, Marie lay awake staring at the fairy lights—intensely aware that the sparkles in the dark blue ceiling did not represent the actual pattern of the night sky that she knew so well from summers at the lake with Harry and Vivian.
Those summers began a few months after they first met and while in later years one summer blurred into the next, she could remember almost every detail of that first summer.
They quickly discovered several things—that Vivian had that rare scientific mind that could keep up with Harry (though some of his math still puzzled her); that Marie and Vivian shared a taste in art (encompassing both Pre-Raphaelites and Postimpressionists) and literature (from Jane Austen to P.
G. Wodehouse to Umberto Eco); and that Harry and Marie were in love.
While Harry and Vivian found their greatest intimacy in scientific speculation and Marie and Vivian talked endlessly about books and paintings, Harry and Marie were soon sharing a bed nightly and to say they had been sexually compatible, thought Marie, would have been a grand understatement.
Their relationship evolved that first summer into what it would be for the next decade and a half.
Harry and Vivian couldn’t think without each other; Vivian and Marie couldn’t laugh without each other; but Harry and Marie couldn’t live without each other.