Chapter 8 #2
Without warning, an old memory broke through the surface of Anne’s introspection.
Second grade, or maybe first. A playground game of knights and princesses.
And at some point, pretty little Jenny Cowles had pretended to faint in Anne’s small arms. As Anne swept dark, tight curls off Jenny’s forehead, hot joy had jolted through her.
She could remember the exact outlines of that feeling, could resurrect it right here and now.
It was sharper and brighter than her recollection of Brooke’s first steps or Claire’s first word.
Anne had held Jenny Cowles over half a century ago.
A tremendous rush of astonishment, humiliation, and grief suddenly choked her. Then this had been there all along. Since she was seven years old, at least. Maybe even before that.
She’d been pushing down these feelings for girls, for women, since early childhood.
“Three years, huh?” she managed, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice. “That long.”
Sadie reached out and put her hand over Anne’s, which rested on the steering wheel. She rubbed gently, then let go, and in that gesture was space for the bitterness Anne wanted to push away.
They drove in silence for a while.
Eventually, Anne said, “Tell me more about your feelings. I’m ready now.
” She wasn’t sure about that, but hearing Sadie talk might make it easier for Anne to think more about her own history.
“You said it took you three years to realize what you felt. Do you think this was buried somewhere in your subconscious before you figured it out? Are there any memories that—seem different, in retrospect?” She didn’t want to be the only one.
A very long pause. Then Sadie said, “Shit.”
“What?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”
“Think of what?” Anne looked over at Sadie, who had the expression of someone who’d been slapped with a giant flounder. “Sadie? What?”
“That time we went to the opera. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Remember?”
“You mean when I got us center orchestra tickets for Turandot and you nodded off two minutes into the first aria? I remember.”
“In fairness, it was a sauna in there and I’d been up all hours the previous night wrestling with some absolutely wretched student sonnets. But that isn’t the part I mean. I’m referring to when I met you in the lobby. I remember I’d gotten all dolled up before coming—”
“Right, you were wearing that gorgeous fuchsia wool cape with embroidered roses—”
“And you hadn’t arrived yet. I remember staring at the second hand on my watch, and then something made me look up. Just as though I’d sensed you. I was right.”
Anne remembered that, too. There’d been a strange expression on Sadie’s face, one she’d chalked up to low blood sugar or exhaustion. “Keep talking.”
“It’s the oddest thing. I can picture exactly what you looked like, even without closing my eyes.
You had your hair pinned back, showing off your earrings—they were large silver fan palms—but the dress was the showstopper.
” Sadie shifted in the passenger seat. “Do you remember the one I mean? French blue, satin, fit and flare. Tom Ford, I think. Sleeveless, no necklace. You were breathtaking. I hadn’t ever seen your naked shoulders before.
I couldn’t stop looking at that place where your neck slopes into your shoulder, the way it curved.
I wanted to write a poem about that curve more than I’d ever wanted to write a poem about anything.
At the time, I assumed I was just responding to aesthetic perfection, but now I’m starting to think poetry wasn’t what I really wanted to do to you. ”
“Oh,” Anne said faintly. Dozens of men had called her breathtaking over the years, but she’d never felt lightheaded over it before.
“I’d forgotten it completely. Until just now.”
“Maybe you knew yourself a little better than you thought. And—I don’t know—maybe I did too. We just couldn’t see it.”
“If we’d both realized what we felt back then,” Sadie said softly, sounding far away, “that evening could’ve ended with the two of us in a bathroom stall, with my hand over your mouth, ruining your perfect makeup just to keep you quiet.
” Then she gasped, as though she’d shocked herself.
“Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—that’s a remarkably specific fantasy checkbox, isn’t it? ”
Anne got out a sound that might’ve been “uh” or maybe “um,” and despite herself, she remembered how good she’d felt in that satin gown, how much she’d gotten off on being the center of everyone’s attention while walking through that lobby.
Sadie’s eyes had been on her, too, but not Sadie’s hands.
Not Sadie’s palm pushed over Anne’s mouth in some barely concealed public place while Anne whimpered, both of them knowing that she was too desperate for it to control herself.
A sharp, sudden pulse between her legs shrieked for attention. She grabbed one thigh with her left hand, nails digging in hard to distract herself, and breathed. In and out. In and out.
“Anne? Are you all right?”
“I will be in a second,” Anne said roughly. “Just—driving a car on the freeway at seventy miles an hour and trying extremely hard not to think about your checkbox.” Absolutely no more on that subject, unless they both wanted to compromise Anne’s ability to operate heavy machinery.
Thankfully, Sadie let her recover without another word.
In about another mile, the ache had blessedly faded, and its absence made room for a question Anne had been holding onto.
“You said earlier you were too frightened to even imagine I could feel the same way about you. Why, if it was so easy for you to realize you weren’t—ah, only attracted to men?
What terrified you so much about the possibility of me reciprocating? ”
A hesitation, a long one, that grew.
Anne realized, with an accompanying lurch of unease in her stomach, that she’d stumbled across a question Sadie didn’t want to answer. That couldn’t be a good sign.
“I owe you complete honesty,” Sadie said finally. “So I’ll begin with the most relevant fact: About four hours ago, you proposed to me.”
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t minimize what you did. You proposed to me,” Sadie continued, ignoring Anne’s stammered dissent, “informed me that the proposal was entirely platonic, and then five minutes later, gave me a kiss that transformed my entire body into an erogenous zone. Which I think we can both agree is somewhat incongruous with your stated intentions vis-à-vis chasteness. Correct?”
“Correct,” Anne conceded, not entirely steadily.
“Between that and some other unsubtle clues you’ve been darting my way tonight, I think it’s reasonable to assume we’re now putting sex on the table. Not literally, though. My back doesn’t much care if the rest of me’s obliging.”
Thank God it was getting dark. Easier for Anne’s facial reactions to be unobserved. “No sex on a literal table. Fine by me.”
“What, in a bed, then? I’m going to make you say it outright, Anne.”
How could Anne tell Sadie what she wanted with any certainty when she wasn’t positive which direction was up anymore?
But staring straight ahead, she could see her desire shimmer through the windshield, immense and growing by the minute.
Far too big, now, to be crammed back into the smallest, deepest place inside her.
Anne had to face forward. No turning around. Not even if it meant she’d lock herself out from the only world she’d ever known.
Slowly, she managed, “I think I would like a bed.”
“I appreciate your candor. So the offer you’re now making me, as it currently stands, is a physically intimate and monogamous lifelong commitment. Do you still want to stand by your earlier argument that this is somehow different from what I had with Fred?”
Anne thought she understood the problem now. “I’m not Fred, Sadie.”
“You told me that before, too. At the same time you told me that what you want would be nothing like a marriage. This would be like a marriage, and I don’t care how many times you say it wouldn’t be, because that’s exactly what you’re asking me to have with you.
My second marriage. With the one person whose presence in my life helped pull me out of a truly horrific hurricane of grief.
I’ve never told you how bad I got the year after he left.
Didn’t want to scare you off.” A little, thin laugh. “Hal was the only one who really knew.”
“I know it was hard,” Anne said softly. Sadie’s liveliness had the uncanny effect of making her seem more open than she really was.
Behind that excitable exterior lay a woman who kept her cards close to her chest. Very few people who knew Sadie perceived that, but Anne—who understood needing privacy—did.
“And I knew you didn’t want to talk about the details. So I didn’t push.”
“No. That’s never been your style. You took me to the Getty instead. And started our two-woman book club. And taught me that the best way to pick up tiny shards of glass is with a slice of Wonder Bread.”
“The only thing it’s good for.”
Sadie didn’t let the conversation divert. “The one reason I grew around that grief was because I had you. But if you ever decided to leave me, too”—Sadie’s voice caught and shook—“I honestly don’t think I’d survive it a second time.”
“Sadie, the reason I’m not Fred doesn’t have to do with marriage, all right?
I’m not Fred because I could never leave you.
” Anne gripped the steering wheel, hard.
“I can’t live without you. I meant every single word of what I said this afternoon.
When I thought you were leaving me for New York…
If you weren’t near me, I honestly don’t know if I could get up in the morning.
I’m never going anywhere. I think I’m actually incapable of it. ”
From the passenger seat, Anne heard quiet sniffling sounds.
“Oh, please,” she whispered. “Don’t cry. This is different. I promise.”
“You’re right,” Sadie said at long last, and her voice still wobbled. “This is different from what I had with Fred. And that’s why I’ve been so terrified. Because I think it might be more.”