“But I’d love to hear you say it.”
He turned on his side to face me. “I’m afraid that if you go, we’ll lose it. This.” He held up our combined hands. “What happened today.”
“No, we won’t. We couldn’t if we tried.” I detached his hand and rose to my feet. “Go to bed. I’ll clean up.”
He rose, too. “Vivian.”
“Go to bed.”
“Like hell I will.”
We cleaned up together, because he wouldn’t hear of anything else, finishing off the wine as we went along. I made him unpack the box marked KITCHEN so we could drink from genuine glassware next time. His kitchen was even smaller than mine, an L cut short by an old wooden table wedged against the wall, and a stack of plates had to be stored atop the asthmatic Frigidaire.
“I have an idea.” Doctor Paul folded his dish towel and placed both hands on my shoulders. “I’ll nap on the sofa while you take the bed, and when it’s time for me to go to work, I can drop you off at your own apartment. For one thing, your roommate will be wondering where you are.”
“Sally will be wondering no such thing. Sally will be out earning herself a new pair of shoes, maybe a nice new bracelet if she puts in a little elbow grease. She wouldn’t notice if I didn’t come home until Monday morning.”
Doctor Paul looked stricken. I patted his cheek. “But it’s a lovely plan. Where do I sign?”
A look came into his eyes, perilously close to mine: a look that said he knew exactly where I should sign on to his plan. His hands sank into my shoulders. He blinked his blue eyes slowly, like a cat readying for naptime, and I knew by the prickling of my skin that he was about to kiss me.
I’ve already explained that I’m not a shy girl, but some impulse overcame me as Doctor Paul’s warm breath bathed my face in chop suey promise. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted to make a meal of him; I most thoroughly wanted him to make a meal of me, and yet, at the last perilous instant, I dodged him.
Yes, you heard that right.
I dodged him.
Instead of tilting my face conveniently upward, parted of lips, closed of eyes, trip-hammer of pulse, I stepped into his chest and crushed my nose into his windpipe. His startled arms wrapped around me. A hearty consolation prize of an embrace.
We stood there in awkward disappointment. I felt the need to explain myself. “If we start now, we’ll never stop,” I said, next to his ear.
“And we can’t have that.”
He owned a terribly comfortable chest, my Doctor Paul. Solid and clean-smelling, his breath flavored with wine and dinner. He stroked my hair until I wanted to stretch like a cat.
He whispered to me, “What are you thinking?”
“I was thinking about Violet again.”
“She’s on your mind, isn’t she?”
“I can’t stop wondering. What she was like, what happened to her. How she lost that suitcase.” I pulled a little more Doctor Paul into my lungs. “I was thinking that maybe she was miserable with her professor. Maybe she had finally found someone to love. Someone to trust.”
“Do you think that excuses what she did?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know what he was like, do we? What he did to her. This Dr. Grant of hers.”
Doctor Paul kissed my hair. “Time to sleep, Vivian.”
“Please take the bed. You won’t be able to excavate the sofa in time.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“If I sleep—which I doubt—I’ll just curl up on the cushion.”
He pulled back. “It’s not very gentlemanly of me.”
“Nuts to that. Go put on your pajamas.”
We looked at each other for a moment longer, goofy with infatuation, and then he leaned forward to kiss me on the forehead like a good brother.
? ? ?
I AWOKE on the cushion an hour later, one arm stiff beneath my face, one head exploding with bizarre disconnected dreams in which I was my great-aunt Violet, and my chemistry lab was full of jars of old curiosities like two-headed snakes and rabbit fetuses in formaldehyde, and a naked professor chased me around the counter of a post office in Istanbul. And those were just the scenes I remembered.
In case you were wondering, I knew it was an hour later because I had located the source of all that thunderous ticking and discovered a battery alarm clock in a box marked BEDROOM, still set to California time. I had wound the hands ahead three hours and set it next to me so neither I nor Doctor Paul would oversleep. Eight-twenty-two, it said, and in my Violettinged confusion I thought perhaps this was morning, and we were doomed.