The Englishman

chapter 27

“SO TELL ME ALREADY,” Irene says, not wanting to know.

“What?”

“Well, so you f*cked him. Now what?”

My heart begins to race, and it’s not with pleasure at the memory. We’re sitting in my former life, at Antonio’s on Amsterdam Avenue, and are each having a panini and salad.

“I did not…f*ck him.”

She inflates her cheeks and exhales like an impatient balloon.

“Right, you had the most romantic night of your life with him. Now what?”

I don’t want to fight with Irene. I want to slap her, yes, but then we would fight, and I am too dejected to fight.

“I wanted him, that’s all. The truth is, I want him, and the truth is—”

But I’m not sure I will lay myself open to more jibes than absolutely necessary. Irene waits for me to go on, but I shake my head again.

“The truth is it was the best sex of your life. Cue violins!” There is no escaping the jibes.

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“What, then? Talk tachlis. Why are you bent on ruining your career? I thought I’d—”

“Don’t, Reenie!” I interrupt her, almost with my hands over my ears. “Look, there won’t be any more sex, okay? I left him.”

“How do you mean—left him?”

“Left while he was sleeping. Left for the airport first thing and bought a ridiculously overpriced ticket that someone else hadn’t picked up.”

“Wait—you did what?” Irene is genuinely shocked, and my throat is getting so tight it hurts.

“I panicked. When I went to his room, it was almost completely dark, but later the moon came round to that side of the building, and—”

“You had sex in the dark?”

“I made him switch off the light. I couldn’t have—I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it, with the light on.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know. But I can’t even begin to tell you how beautiful he is to me.”

“Hence the light. All the better to see him by.”

“No, because—” I’m staring at my hands shredding the napkin in my lap, and suddenly tears are dripping down like from a leaky faucet.

“Anna, for heavens’ sake!”

I swallow and swallow again, gulp down the tears, although I feel that there are many more, a torrent of salt water.

“All I could manage was sex,” I manage to say, feebly but mercifully without sobbing, “and he…I think he wanted to make love to me!”

The first time I almost called him was in the departure lounge at South Bend Airport. Since then, I have been on the brink of calling him a dozen times. But what would I say?

You are a wonderful lover, and you’re so beautiful it stops my heart. But don’t touch me again.

I knew all this before I went to his hotel room.

“You’ll never be able to stay away from him,” Irene predicts after she has ordered two shots of limoncello and made me down mine in one.

“Oh, you can rely on Giles to stay away from me. I h-have—I have h-hurt him, and now he’ll hate me!” My chin wobbles, and she pushes her own glass of limoncello toward me. “It’s like a disease!” I rally against my tears. “Foolish infatuation! You remember what Elinor says, in Sense and Sensibility? That it is foolish—no, I think she says ‘bewitching’—that it is a bewitching idea to think that all our happiness depends on one particular person. Jane Austen knew it was wrong, dangerous, to think that! We all know it! And yet…”

“Why don’t you come home?” Irene asks gently.

“Failure.”

“No one would think that!”

“I would. Although that place, Ardrossan, is a madhouse.”

Irene waves her hand in a gesture that says, I told you so, but I’m not going to rub it in. “You could even sleep with the Englishman, for a while, and then come home.”

I should be annoyed with her for advocating an affair with Giles because the inevitable fallout will set me free to move up north again. But I feel guilty for not telling her about the letter I kissed in the Ardrossan post office, so I leave it at that. There is no point in discussing an affair with Giles, because there will not be one. It may even have been necessary to hurt him. I’m not at all sure that he agreed that we were having a one-night stand, and I’m pretty sure that I would not have been able to resist him if he had continued to…um, woo me. Now I needn’t worry he’ll woo me. He won’t even speak to me.

“I haven’t seen you cry since your bubbe died,” Irene says after a couple of minutes.

“I know. And she had lived her life. I…not so much.”

“Now you’re being melodramatic! You have a life, you have a career!”

“I think I have a career so that I don’t have to have a life. I know this sounds melodramatic and adolescent, but—” I shrug, too dejected to try further explanations.

“You’re exhausted, that’s all. You should have rested and gone hiking for three weeks before you started that job down there, not squeezed every drop of energy out of yourself to finish your book!”

I look up at her impassioned face and smile.

“That’s what Giles said.”