FIVE
I have always been the kind of person who wonders what things mean. You would think, as a writer, that Hunter would also tend to analyze life, but the truth is, Hunter reports on things. The moral ambiguity of his stories, which allows readers to draw their own conclusions, is what reviewers love about him. Perhaps the readers of Outside are tired of the old “hubris in the face of nature” chestnut, which is the point of most of the magazine's articles. With Hunter, you get an art school ending—the pattern of blood on the windshield as the deer limps away, the intricate whorls of the tribal tattoo on the face of a young Maori prostitute.
So there was no point in my asking Hunter what had precipitated the sudden change in our sex life. For several weeks after Hunter's return, we made love every day, and this unexpected second honeymoon chased every other thought from my mind. I didn't spare another thought for my strange encounter with the scruffy, auburn-haired wildlife operator. I went to work on autopilot, not even noticing that Malachy had become paler and weaker until Lilliana pointed it out. There was no more talk of Unwolves and no mention of Hunter's research. Like me, Malachy seemed to be sleepwalking through his days, and Ofer was openly lobbying for a transfer.
But while Malachy was in the grip of some nameless illness, I was drifting in a fugue state of reciprocal lust. Literally and figuratively, I was Hunter's slave girl, in thrall to his attention and his touch. As for my husband, he was autocratic and imaginative and more passionate than I recalled him ever being before, even in the beginning.
I met Hunter eight years ago, during my junior year of college. He was a senior. We were both in the Science Library, cramming for midterms. It was a late afternoon in early November and the sky outside was the kind of pale dark that always makes me feel cold and a little despondent.
I was feeling low for a variety of reasons. I was sleep-deprived, I had gained five pounds, and my roommate had deserted me to go have wonderful sex with a guy in another dorm. I knew it was wonderful sex because sometimes they had it in our room. My mother had sent me a card telling me she was going to volunteer at the local animal shelter for Thanksgiving and I was free to make plans with my father. My father was in Key West with his girlfriend, Moon, running the kind of hotel local people live in, paying by the week. Moon was only five years older than me, but most people assumed she was over thirty because of the dark circles under her eyes. She claimed to be psychic and knew I was a virgin without my telling her.
Which didn't prove a thing: Most people seemed to figure that out on their own.
At first I couldn't understand what the good-looking guy in the fisherman's sweater was doing. He kept looking at me with a frown on his Heathcliffian face, and then checking his watch. I had lost one of my contact lenses and was wearing the blue eyeglass frames my mother thought brought out the color of my eyes. It didn't: My eyes are gray. I figured Heathcliff wanted my seat on the little couch by the window. Or possibly he was waiting for a computer terminal and just happened to be looking at me while he scowled.
When he came over and dropped a note in my book, I looked up into that brooding face and thought, He must need help with chemistry. I unfolded the little strip of paper. It read: Aaggh Midterms Aggh Agggh. Want to go for a cup of coffee at the Student Center?
It was only my certainty that I was a momentary distraction, my utter conviction that no man that handsome would ever be seriously interested in me, that made me appear indifferent. After “Midterms Aggh” I wrote an exclamation point. Then I added, Not yet, must finish chapter. Heathcliff stood next to me, reading my edits as I wrote them.
—In an hour? He wrote.
—Sure. I was sure: Sure he'd be gone by then. But he waited the hour, glancing up at me from time to time, and I had lost all semblance of concentration by the time the big clock on the wall struck six.
“Ready?” There he stood, regarding me with a look that was equal parts admiration and bemusement. I felt that he was surprising himself by asking me out. I was so tense that it required a conscious effort not to twitch, blink repeatedly, or keep nodding. As we walked to the Student Center, I listened intently while Hunter told me about his major, his irritating house mates, his plans after graduation, and his dietary peculiarities.
It turned out that Hunter despised cheese. He called it “the corpse of milk,” quoting James Joyce. I joked that we would be a terrible couple to invite for dinner, as I was a vegetarian and basically lived on cheese. This sounded as though I assumed he would want to see me again: I burned with humiliation.
“Why are you a vegetarian?” Hunter and I had compromised on a meal of coffee and french fries. All around us, it seemed, thinner, prettier girls in tight black turtlenecks and perfectly tattered Levi's were drinking cappuccinos and reading annotated copies of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Only one of them wore glasses, the fake little black kind models wear when they want to look intellectual.
“I don't like the idea of supporting the meat industry.” I was wearing a navy sweat suit, and my hair was unwashed and rolled into a messy bun on the top of my head.
“All those poor little battery-raised chickens without beaks? All those innocent little overfed veal calves with ulcers on their eyes and hooves too soft to stand on?” Hunter ate another french fry.
“I see you've dated vegetarians before.” Before! As if this were a real date!
But Hunter only laughed. He had brown wavy hair that curled at the ends and wonderful dark eyes that sort of drank you in. He sat like an athlete, muscular thighs spread wide; later, I found out that he played soccer for the school team. When he took off his sweater I could see the shadow of his pectoral muscles through his thin white T-shirt. “Hey,” he said, “can I ask a personal question?”
“Sure,” I replied, trying to hide my nervous ness.
“How long is your hair when it's down?”
This is where I was supposed to pull out the pins and dazzle him. “To the small of my back. But it's not too clean right now.”
Hunter leaned back and took a swallow of coffee. “I need a cigarette,” he said. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
He wants to sleep with me, I thought, but by dawn he'll be back in what ever hellish frat house he lives in and I'll never hear from him again.
“I have to get back to the fishbowl.” Which was what we all called the Science Library.
“Bloody midterms.” I later learned that his family had moved to En gland when he was sixteen. Hunter had managed to retain a sort of Ralph Lauren patina of upper-middle Britishness, which was to grow even more pronounced after we moved to Manhattan.
Outside, on the badly lit path back to the library, Hunter stopped and gripped me by the elbows. I was dizzy with the smell of him, masculine and Marlboro-tinged, with a hint of verbena soap. “Abra. Are you at all interested in seeing me again, or am I just bugging the hell out of you?”
I wanted to sink my teeth into his lower lip and kiss him till there was blood. I wanted to sink down to my knees and bite him right through his jeans. Shaken by the violence of this lust, I took a moment to answer. “Interested,” I said.
“Good.” A grin flashed over his heavily shadowed face like a light going on. Then he lit a cigarette and became moody and unknowable again. What do you see in me, I wanted to ask. Is it the hair? Do you have a thing for virgins? Months later, I finally worked up the courage to ask him what first attracted him to me.
“Your confidence,” he said. “The way you just sat there in your comfortable clothes, completely consumed by your work. The way you didn't seem to need to check your watch like all the other poor slobs putting in their study time. With your hair up, and those goofy big eighties glasses, you seemed … I don't know. Like a little nun, perfectly at peace with herself.”
When he finally made love to me, two weeks after our first encounter, I was so unused to being touched that I kept laughing. I was so sexually inexperienced that all my erogenous zones were ticklish. I wanted to beg Hunter to be rougher with me, but he was desperately considerate. I'd ridden too many horses as a girl to bleed when he entered me, but there was a little pain as he stretched me.
I wanted to follow that pain wherever it would take me, but Hunter held himself back until the end, and by then there wasn't enough time to catch up.
“You okay, ‘Cadabra girl?”
“Mm,” I said, secure in his arms. After he fell asleep I touched myself between my slippery legs and conjured images stolen from my mother's old movies: the pretty young witch, writhing in sensual panic with her wrists tied to a stake, as Satan moves in, glistening with red makeup.
The magazines all tell you to be open and frank about what you want in bed, but this presumes a deeper confidence. I never felt completely certain of what Hunter loved in me. All I had to go by was his image of a young woman as self-possessed as a little nun.
My mother used to say that she hoped the sex was good, as he was likely to treat me like crap in the near future. Which was why I couldn't bring myself to ask her about the slave girl business now, even though I was dying to know: Did this mean Hunter was suddenly seeing me differently?
Or did it mean he wasn't seeing me at all?