“What about you?”
“I don’t act on my instincts. I don’t engage the world.”
“Sure you do. You just fell out of practice. But now you’re back, babe.”
“Don’t call me babe.”
“Okay.”
“You’ve been running this mining scam for, what, four years?”
He thought about it, did some math in his head. “About that, yeah.”
“But how long have you pretended to be Brian Delacroix?”
Something akin to shame found his face. “On and off for almost twenty years.”
“Why?”
He was quiet for a long time, turning the question over as if no one had ever thought to ask him before. “Back in Providence, I was at work one night at the pizza place when a coworker said, ‘Your double’s in the bar across the street.’ So I went over and, sure enough, there was Brian Delacroix with several guys like him, looked like they came from money, and a bunch of hot girls. Long story short, I hung around the bar long enough to figure out which coat was his and I stole it. It was a beautiful coat—black cashmere with blood—red lining. Every time I put it on, I felt . . .”—he searched for the word—“. . . substantial.” His gaze was that of a little boy lost in a shopping mall. “I couldn’t wear the coat much, not in Providence, too many chances I’d run across him, but once I got bounced from Trinity, I went to New York, and I started wearing that coat everywhere. If I needed to talk myself into a job, I wore it, and the job was mine. Saw a woman I liked, I put it on, and abracadabra, she ended up in my bed. I realized pretty quick that it wasn’t the coat per se. It was what I covered with it.”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“The coat,” he explained, “hid my old man bailing on me and my drunk old lady, hid the Section 8 unit we lived in that always smelled a little bit of the dude who OD’d in it just before we moved in, hid all the shitty Christmases and the birthdays we never celebrated and the WIC checks and the power getting shut off and the drunk assholes who hung around my mother and how I’d probably just become one of those drunk assholes someday in the life of a woman just like my mother. I’d have the same nothing jobs and the same barroom stories and put some kids into the world I’d neglect until they grew up to hate me. But none of that was in my future when I put on that coat. I put that coat on and I wasn’t Brian Alden, I was Brian Delacroix. And being Brian Delacroix on his worst day always trumped being Brian Alden on his best.”
The confession seemed to exhaust him and embarrass him in equal measure. After looking at the wainscoting along the wall for a bit, he sighed and glanced over at the papers his sister had signed. He turned one of them upside down on the table. “The trick to forging a signature is to see it as a shape, not a signature. Try to duplicate the shape.”
“But then it’ll be upside down.”
“Oh, right, I wouldn’t have thought of that. We might as well quit then.”
She elbowed him. “Shut up.”
“Ooof.” He rubbed his rib cage. “I’ll teach you how to do it right side up, once you master upside down. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough.” She put her pen to the page.
In the spare bedroom, she could hear him on the other side of the wall, first as he turned back and forth in the bed, and then as he began to snore. So she knew he was on his back then, which is when he snored, never when he was on his side. It also meant his mouth would be open. Typically, she’d nudge him—gently, it never took much—and he would turn on his side. She pictured herself doing so now but that would mean climbing in bed with him, and she didn’t trust herself to do that and stay clothed.
On one hand, this was the definition of insanity—her life could end tomorrow or even tonight because of this man. No other reason. He’d unleashed demons from their basement cages who would not stop until she was dead or in prison. So to feel a sexual pull toward him was batshit.
But, looked upon another way, her life could end tomorrow or even tonight, and that knowledge opened up every pore and receptor she had. It transformed and sharpened everything she saw, smelled, felt. She could hear the ping of water moving through the pipes and smell metal in the river and hear rodents scuttle along the foundation. Her flesh felt as if it had been freshly slathered over her body this morning. She bet if she tried to guess the thread count of these sheets she’d come close, and her blood raced through her veins like a train moving across a desert at night. She closed her eyes and imagined waking as she had once, in the first months of their relationship, to find his head buried between her thighs and his tongue and lips moving softly, ever so softly, along her folds, which were already as wet as the bath she’d been taking in her dream. When she’d come that morning she kicked her left heel into his hip so hard she left a bruise. He grasped the fresh injury, still working the kinks out of his jaw, looking so silly but so sexy at the same time, and she was giggling and still trembling from the orgasm, still, in fact, receiving small electric aftershocks as she apologized. She didn’t even wipe herself off his mouth before she kissed him, and once she started kissing him, she couldn’t stop until she had to take a gulp of air, a big ravenous gasp of it. He’d refer to that kiss over the years, say it was the best he’d ever had, that she climbed so far into him with that kiss he could feel her swimming in the darkness of himself. And after she’d brought him to climax and they lay in the wreckage of the bed with stupid grins and sweaty brows, she wondered aloud if sex was its own mini life cycle.
“How so?” he asked.
“Well, it starts with a thought or a tingle but something small and then it grows.”
He looked down at himself. “Or shrinks.”
“Well, yeah, after. But for the sake of my argument, it grows and grows and builds in power and then there’s the explosion and after that a kind of death or dying, a diminishing of expectation, and usually you close your eyes and lose consciousness.”
She opened her eyes now in the strange bed and assumed the reason she was contemplating sex with a man she currently hated was because of her proximity to death. And even though her rage at him was as close to the surface as her top layer of skin, she had to tamp down the urge to slide out of this bed, pad barefoot around the corner into his room, and wake him the way he’d woken her that morning.
Then she realized it wasn’t sex she wanted. Not at all. It wasn’t even touch.
She walked down the hall and let herself into his room. His breathing changed as she closed the door softly behind her. She knew he’d woken and was trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness as she removed her T-shirt and underwear and left them at the door. She climbed onto the bed, but did so in the opposite direction, her back to the footboard, her feet up by his elbow.