William Bell came to my apartment on a Friday night in mid-November. I watched for him from my window, through the branches of the elm. Del had moved into the professor’s apartment, and the light from her window downstairs shone out onto the snow. Though I’d spoken to Geoff about the heat, the house remained cold. I had a fireplace in my apartment, and Del had one in hers, but Geoff had stated emphatically that we were not allowed to use them. I pictured hibernating bats with singed wings filling the winter sky above the house. We put large, lighted, pillard candles in the grates, and these gave, at least, an illusion of warmth.
The cold was bitter, different from New England’s. Outside the city the wind spilled across the sweeping, open land dotted with abandoned farm machinery and old houses buckling in on themselves. You wouldn’t think such houses were habitable, but once in a while there would be a tacked-up sheet in the doorway, or plastic nailed over the windows, and the trace of smoke from a chimney. William wasn’t from anywhere else. He was born in Tompkins County, and except for the time he spent in Buffalo, acquiring his degree, he’d lived here all his life—most recently in the house on Cascadilla Street, where he’d rented an apartment and had held the gathering the night I met him. His father, who’d died two years before, had sold and repaired lawn mowers in a shop behind their rented house in Milton, and before that he was a famed attorney with a drinking problem. They had an enclosed front porch with an air hockey game, and gnome statuary on the front lawn that William, an only child, believed came alive at night. His mother had been gone since he was four years old, but before she died she grew apples and sold them from a small roadside stand, Macoun and Winesap and Cortland, and William had made change from a small metal tin. I supposed, from these aspects of his life told to me over the telephone at night, I knew everything about him. “Mon pauvre orphelin,” I said to Del.
Del flopped down onto my couch, folded up for William’s visit. “Poor orphan? And what are you? His new mother figure?”
“We’re friends.” I rummaged through my bureau drawers for an outfit, holding one sweater, then another up to myself in the mirror. “I like him.”
“What do you like?” Del said.
I knew his interest in me was what made him special, and it embarrassed me to be so needy. I spread a red lamb’s-wool sweater on the couch.
“It’s not Christmas,” Del said, and I balled the sweater and stuffed it back in the drawer.
“Don’t be the one who loves more,” she said, softly. “Remember Mr. Parmenter.”
“I don’t think that’s a good comparison,” I said.
Since Mary Rae, nothing out of the ordinary had appeared in gloomy Ithaca.
The town’s dark pall, its strange, shifting cloud patterns, and the fluttery lake-effect snow that went on for days seemed to create a no-astral season. Nothing could materialize in such weather.
I told Del not to worry about me.
“Such an innocent, Martha Mary.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
So far, we hadn’t discussed David Pinney, or that summer, and I wondered if, like Gene Tierney, she’d received too many shock treatments. Had that summer been entirely erased? Had her act for Detective Thomson not been an act at all? This would be the best scenario, and I decided not to press her for whatever slip of memory remained.
The night William came over, Mary Rae was absent from her spot beneath the elm, and I was grateful. He walked down the sidewalk and stepped onto the porch, and I found myself rushing down the stairwell to meet him at the door, tugging him by the arm in from the cold.
“Come here, you,” I said.
His cheeks held the flush I’d noted at Anne’s, and he wore the wide-brimmed beaver-skin hat. We stood on the old, worn Persian rug in what had once been the vestibule, the walls papered in brown, with tiny pink roses. The woodwork was brown, too, mahogany glowing in the weak yellow overhead light. There was a coatrack and an umbrella stand and a small, rickety antique table. The whole downstairs smelled of Del’s incense, and I knew my urgency was prompted by a fear of her emerging from her apartment and saying something that would put a damper on all my plans.
William looked around, somewhat sheepishly, and removed his hat with one hand, grabbing it at the crown and revealing a mass of coppery curls. “Nice place,” he said.
“Your hat is different.” I should have said something else.
He looked at it in his hand. “Well,” he said. “I guess it is different. It was my father’s hat.”
Del called him “Indiana Jones.”
He hung his hat on the coatrack, and I worried that he knew Del had made fun of him. He was someone alone in the world, without family or ties. I didn’t wait to kiss him. It felt natural to ease the sadness about his mouth with mine. His lips clung and trembled, kissing me back. His hands were cautious, suspended midair alongside my hips. I took his hand.
“Up here,” I said. I pulled him up the stairs. His face was bright, his chest heaving under his coat.
Upstairs in my apartment, by the wavering fireplace candlelight, we kissed some more, and I undressed for him, a somewhat awkward striptease that I performed without any prompting. I’d assumed this was what he wanted from me—we’d talked around sex every night on the phone, and I’d decided to give up my hold on my virginity.