He answered Bridgette with a laugh, and drank again.
The moments of flirtation were ticking away. The angle of Bridgette’s head; the way she cast her body sideways in her narrow chair; the lengthening pauses between her wry questions about the solemn university life and his parries: every cue followed a script Aaron knew. This was the instant when he was supposed to make a move. And this. Now. He felt each opportunity pass, felt Bridgette register his immobility. In fact Bridgette was undeniably attractive. Nor was Aaron too scrupulous to say yes when a married woman made herself available; he’d slept with a married woman in college, in her own house no less, with children at school and husband at work. Still, the time was passing and Bridgette was waiting and it hadn’t escaped even Aaron’s notice that he was failing to play his part. The silence of the house pressed on him intolerably. He wanted to stand, to shout: Explain!
But the house had explained the best it could. He simply wanted more than it had to give him.
Bridgette made another show of checking on his drink. As she leaned over him, he raised a hand—an almost automatic motion—and parted the swinging curtain of her hair. It was only a small gesture—but it was all that was needed. Her face flashed with a hopefulness that made no sense to him—then, smiling softly, she ran the tips of her fingernails across the leg of his jeans. The touch was electric, and he felt his body answer without consulting him: a bolt of clarity amid his confusion.
It happened shockingly fast. She had his hand, she laid it on her breast, and the thin silk of her blouse seemed to dissolve so he could feel the hard nipple beneath, and he rose to his feet with a feeling like floating. And there they were, ascending a 350-year-old staircase, with windows looking in on them at every turn and treads that creaked taking their weight—and as they rose up into the dark, Bridgette tugging his hand, they could have been levitating, so swiftly and smoothly did they arrive at the topmost landing, at a half-closed door, and onto Bridgette’s cool sheets. Aaron had gone to bed with a woman on a whim before, but this blinded him with its suddenness. Bridgette smelled like lavender, like something at once spiced and anesthetizing, and it dizzied him, but that didn’t matter, she knew what she wanted him to do and it was easy for him to do it, to move with her, roll in a rush of sheets, of breath and pleasure. He caught her eyes once and laughed, delight rising suddenly in him—but Bridgette didn’t laugh, her face was fierce and focused—and he was swept away from this observation by an ingathering, down and down, the best of him concentrated in a single moment of such sweetness that distance disappeared, and he was flush with the world.
He came back to himself slowly. There was something sounding in his body . . . something steady, quiet as a voice whispering.
The ceiling above the bed was a clean eggshell white, an elaborate rosette in its exact center. Slowly his eyes slid down the far wall: the white trim; the paneled, white-painted walls.
At length he recognized it: the sound of his own heart.
He did not want to think of Marisa.
“Mmmm.” He could hear Bridgette smiling. She splayed a hand on his chest. Sliding up, she kissed his jaw.
He tightened his arms around her reflexively, but didn’t look at her.
“Don’t tell me that wasn’t good.” She was whispering directly into his ear.
“It was.”
There was a silence, enough time for him to hear how unpersuasive his own words sounded.
“Then,” she said, “what is it?”
He glanced at Bridgette—and saw on her face the last thing he expected: yearning. A heartbeat later he realized that his own face wore a similar expression—and that he and Bridgette Easton were looking at each other with a mutual desperation he didn’t understand.
He broke the gaze. When she spoke an instant later, she was once more the Bridgette he knew.
“Noooo!” she crooned. She pulled back as though to get a better look at him. “You feel guilty?”
He didn’t. What he felt, to his surprise, was old. And as stilled and powerless as the witnessing walls around him. Somehow, though, he’d stepped into some drama of Bridgette’s, some blunt-edged argument that she was carrying out with her husband or her life.
She’d propped herself on one elbow. “You do! You . . . feel . . . guilty.” With each word, a jab of her finger in his chest. “But you’re not even married, are you? How can you feel guilty,” she said, “if I don’t?”
It wasn’t clear to him that Bridgette didn’t feel guilty—only that this was the conversation she was willing to have. He opened his mouth and spoke his part. “Ian seems like a nice guy.”
“He is.” A small furrow appeared between her perfectly shaped eyebrows. “He is,” she spoke slowly, “a very nice guy.” It was clear this wasn’t a compliment.
He was aware, suddenly, that they were both naked. He drew a sheet over himself.
“Listen,” she said, looking away. “You know as well as I do that these things don’t mean anything. We were both just curious.”
Reflexively, so as not to appear prudish, he tossed back, “And are you still curious?”
But the flirtation was hollow.
She let the question hang. She’d registered that he was no longer enchanted with her. Her blue-gray gaze was bright and hard, and it told him that she saw through him too; and she had no use for a forlorn American in her bed.
“No,” she said.
Dressing silently beside the bedstead, he looked out the window at the view it framed: the long slope down to the river. From this height, in the falling darkness, the water looked deceptively still. Zipping his jeans, he moved closer to the window, and he was seized by the feeling that she—Ester—had stood here at this very spot, in this very room, staring out just as he was at the last of the light on the slow-moving water, its current mesmerizing and out of reach.
Only when he was out on the street, Bridgette’s ironic farewell kisses lingering on each of his cheeks, did Marisa’s voice sound clearly in his mind.
Aaron, he heard her say.
That was all. In his head, he heard her calling his name. A simple, one-word reminder, like a conscience.
He wished then, wholeheartedly, that he hadn’t had sex with Bridgette Easton. It wasn’t that he thought there was anything so disturbing about a spontaneous hook-up—one whose implications were Bridgette’s to sort out, not his. It was simply that a spontaneous hook-up was no longer right for him, Aaron Levy. He’d changed enough in these past months to know that his old life was hollow.
Yet not enough to see a clear path toward anything he desired.
He passed Prospero’s, his collar turned up against the dark and chill. Prospero’s. He still didn’t fucking understand The Tempest.
I loved. The words followed him through the darkness, down the long hill all the way to the station, and—as he could not leave them behind—he acknowledged them his.
Part 4
22
June 28, 1665
15 Tamuz, 5425
London
The message boy, having delivered the pouch, tipped his hat and readied to flee.
“A moment’s help?” Rivka gestured toward a poorly sewn sack of coal resting just inside the door, where a different delivery boy had dropped it earlier that week, refusing to cross the threshold to deposit it in the storage bin.
From her writing table, Ester watched this one, a tall blond youth with paltry whiskers, shake his head swiftly. So it was in London now, every soul afraid of every other.