Kissing did make her feel better. They had been kissing for years, after all. They never opened the wine. They didn’t have to step apart after ninety seconds or think about patrons or Head Librarian Elaine. Sylvie put her fingers in Ernie’s hair. When he unbuttoned her shirt and gently moved her bra aside to kiss her breast, Sylvie thought she might die from pleasure.
He rose up to check her face and said, “You like this?”
She said, “Oh yes.”
More kisses, and then they were tugging clothes off each other. Sylvie couldn’t believe that her body could feel this much. She couldn’t believe anything could feel this good. With her eyes closed, she saw warm colors: reds and oranges. They spoke, but Sylvie barely paid attention to her own words. Her body was responding to his body, her mouth to his mouth.
Afterward, though, when they were lying in each other’s arms, panic tickled the back of Sylvie’s neck. She heard herself say, in a voice that sounded too loud to her own ears, “Just so you know, I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”
“Okay.” Ernie’s stubble rubbed against her shoulder. “What are you looking for?”
Sylvie pictured William sitting on the bench and squeezed her eyes shut to make the image go away. “I’m not sure.”
“So we can just have fun together,” Ernie said, and rolled her over.
Can we do that? Sylvie thought. This certainly was fun. She’d never been this close to a man’s chest. It was so different from her own. Hairy. She ran her finger down the rivulet in the center of his abdomen. He ran his finger down the center of hers. He had to wiggle his finger slightly to fit between her breasts.
Kiss them, Sylvie thought, and somehow he knew, and did.
“I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything normal,” Ernie said finally, “from the girl who siren-called me to kiss her.”
He stopped touching her for a moment, and Sylvie almost yelled at him to resume. Her body arched toward his. “I siren-called you?”
He smiled at her body’s eagerness and pressed his cheek to the side of her breast. “A couple years ago,” he said, into her skin. “I was in the library. To write a paper for Mrs. Brewster. You came out of a row of books and gave me a look. No one had ever looked at me like that. I looked back. Then I pushed my chair back and followed you.”
“And we kissed.” Sylvie liked this story; she liked what he was doing to her body; she liked the girl she used to be.
“Mmm-hmm. Even when my life was terrible,” Ernie said, “I knew I could go to the library and kiss you.” He pulled back a little, looked at her. “Although one time I went there and you were kissing another guy.”
Sylvie blushed. “I didn’t see you.”
Ernie lowered back down with his sturdy body. She held on to his upper arms. “I was angry,” he said. “At first. But I had no right to be, you know? We weren’t dating. When you asked me to come over here, I thought of that other guy, though. I wondered—I wonder—if he was here first.”
“You’re the first.” Sylvie suddenly felt sad, and her voice sounded sad too—was there some basic human truth that if you were naked, you couldn’t control the tone of your voice? Like, her voice was naked too? She said, as evenly as she could, “There’s been no one else.”
But she was relieved when Ernie said he had to be at work early the next morning and needed to go home. “Maybe we can see each other tomorrow night?” he asked, and she made a noise that even she didn’t recognize as a yes or a no.
Sylvie waved to him awkwardly while he let himself out of the studio. Alone in bed, she covered her face with her hands. She felt a jumble of emotions at the same time: embarrassed, pleased with how great sex was, uncomfortable about Ernie. He’d said they could just have fun, and she found herself repeating the word fun inside her head. She didn’t think there was anything morally wrong with having sex with someone she liked but didn’t love, but a new loneliness had arrived deep inside her. She was aware that if her mother heard what Sylvie had done, Rose would drag her to St. Procopius and leave her there on her knees. But Rose lived on a beach in Florida now, and that felt like a punishment too. Sylvie curled into a ball under her covers and pushed herself into sleep.
The phone rang next to Sylvie’s mattress early the next morning, and she rolled over to answer it. She squinted at the sky through the window: pale light striped with pink clouds. Dawn.
“I hope it’s not too early,” Julia said. “Alice was up, and I know you wake up early.”
Sylvie yawned. “Are you all right?”
“I think so.” Julia paused. “But something strange happened.”
Her sister’s tone made Sylvie sit up, and she realized she was still naked. She’d never slept naked before. She thought, In a minute, when it’s my turn, I’ll tell Julia the strange thing that happened to me. She said, “What is it?”
“I called the history department to ask William a question yesterday. I don’t remember what the question was. And the department secretary, when she found out I was his wife, said he hadn’t shown up for over a week and that he’d missed teaching three classes. She said she’d overheard a professor saying that he might be put on probation. I think she told me because she felt bad for me.”
Sylvie tugged the covers closer; her sister’s words had given her goosebumps.
“I was mad when I hung up, because I thought she must be wrong. I thought she was confused and it was irresponsible to tell someone’s wife such nonsense.”
“That sounds wrong to me too,” Sylvie said.
“Yes,” Julia said thoughtfully. “But the woman was correct, and I just didn’t know William as well as I thought I did.”
Part of Sylvie’s brain noted that her sister had used the past tense. She remembered the footnote from William’s book: This is terrible, I’m terrible. She leaned forward, trying to understand what Julia’s words meant.
“Last night I asked William how his day was, and he told me about a class he taught, what one of the students said, and who he ate lunch with in the faculty cafeteria. I told him that I’d called and spoken to the secretary in the department. I told him what she’d said, and he got very pale.” Julia hesitated. “And then he left me.”
“What do you mean, he left you?”
“He gave me a note and a check and walked out.”
Something was terribly wrong. This knowledge broke over Sylvie like a wave. “I’ll get dressed and be there as soon as I can,” she said. “We’ll figure this out, Julia. Don’t worry.”
“There’s nothing to figure out.” Her sister’s voice was calm. “William has been lying for a week, at least. And he doesn’t want to be married to me anymore.”
William
August 1983