“I’m not worried.”
A scurrying beyond the door made them sit up. The sound stopped, then began again on the roof, louder, before resolving into the pattern of a chipmunk or squirrel. They lay back down, Emma’s head on his chest, which was nearly as hairless as his hands. A sudden vertigo washed through her, guilt and revulsion entwined. She sat up.
“Your wife must sleep well, for you not to worry,” she said.
“Very well, yes. It was part of her education, when she was small. She and her brothers would roam all over with their father—this was for timber, and then the railroad—staying in hotels or strangers’ houses, she and her brothers sharing beds, and she would find a way to sleep, no matter what. Sometimes, she says, they would be directly over a depot, where the men repaired the engines all night, clanking and banging. One time she slept through the whistle of a night train they were meant to board, and her brothers carried her between them onto the train, set her down on her bunk, watched her sleep through the night all the way to Omaha, then carried her to the house of their father’s friend, where she slept right through the rooster’s crow in the morning.” He paused. “She tells it better than me. Susannah’s a very good storyteller.”
“You tell it fine,” Emma said. He loved his wife, she thought, but not in the way he should have—not in the way that would have made him ashamed to go on about her to Emma in such bland, friendly detail. Last time he had told her about Susannah’s childhood pets, and the time before that about Susannah’s love of the stars and her skills with a telescope, and the time before that—the first time—about Susannah’s remarkable strength as a swimmer. Somehow the more sweet things Story told her about Susannah, the more unreal she became to Emma. She was a tale of a wife, a character.
Emma let herself touch his hair. It was as soft and thick as felt. She hooked one of his curls, then watched it spring back.
Story stopped her hand. “Do you think my hair needs cutting?”
Emma waited, thinking the question must be a joke. But Story didn’t laugh—against her ear, beneath the skin and bones of his chest, his heart sent up its steady effort. She considered him. His hair was different, certainly, from the rest of him. It flopped in his eyes, crept down his neck, ferned out across his ears so they showed through only occasionally, like buried treasure. Emma liked the overall effect. She thought the moppish wilds of his hair suited his broad brow and strong jaw, kept things in proportion. And maybe it was also true that all this hairiness made up in some way for his hairlessness elsewhere, and for this pristine, white cave of a room, for everything about the current situation that reminded her how far she was from home. Emma’s father and uncles had all been hairy. She cut her children’s hair so infrequently that the boys wound up looking like girls—they had to put the scissors into her hands, remind her. And when Roland returned from his trips looking and smelling like a woolly mammoth, when other women would have shaved and scrubbed and scolded, Emma wanted him more frankly at those times than at any other.
“Is it such a difficult question?”
No, Emma could say, no, it’s not so difficult and no, your hair doesn’t need cutting, in my opinion. But lurking behind his plaintive tone she grew aware of Susannah in the room, not the faultless myth of Susannah but the real one who must not have liked her husband looking frowsy. Susannah was with them as unmistakably as the candle and the ridiculously heavy white robes on their hooks, which Story had asked Emma not to use because he really didn’t know her at all, didn’t know that she would never even think to wear another person’s robe. Emma shivered with disgust. She had no intention of entering into a debate with Susannah—however indirectly—about her husband’s hairstyle.
“No,” she said. “And yes, it does need cutting.”
He groaned and was on top of her, catching the afghan in his teeth and backing down the couch, uncovering her as he went. The wool tickled, raised her hairs, made Emma gasp despite herself. How could it be? And yet it was. Later, composed, she wouldn’t be able to explain it to herself. She would decide it was time to go to confession. (She had not been in nearly three weeks.) But now, here, she was on her back in a glowing bathhouse, a man she barely knew biting her hip bone, licking it, now her legs opened and she was barely required to give in because she already had.
? ? ?
“Will the children miss you?” he asked, once they were cooling again under the afghan.