“You’ll have to tell me how it is,” Del had said before she left that afternoon. She’d smiled at me, though I sensed something hollow and distracted in her teasing.
I suppose my behavior was spurred in part by what I’d seen in movies, and what I’d imagined Del had done in the Firebird guy’s car, or in the woods with Rory, her back against dead leaves and fern, or with the myriad other men she’d had sex with, mostly in cars, she’d said, which were preferable to the woods, though she loved the woods. I understood that the cars in the ravine had been the best of both things. I’d expected that the offering of my body, stripped of its clothes, would be enticement enough. Yet William stood by, his face marked with surprise. I took his hands and placed them on my waist. He slid his palms up and down my body and felt the raised bumps on my skin.
“I can’t warm you up,” he said.
So I pulled off the cushions and unfolded the bed, and we climbed in under the blanket and the crocheted afghan. William kept his clothing on until I asked him whether he was going to take things off, and he reluctantly, it seemed, removed his shirt and his pants and tossed them aside. His belt buckle clanked to the floor. He told me he’d brought me a poem, and he reached down to retrieve it from his pants pocket. He had copied it out from an old college anthology onto a sheet of paper, he said. The paper rustled, and my heart contracted from the sweetness of his motives. When he read his voice was the same soft hum I had grown used to over the phone. What I caught of the poem were a few images—a nest fallen into the mud, a rabbit’s bones, an empty house—and I suspected he thought the poem would resonate with my artist’s sensibilities, though I couldn’t explain it was less the abandoned landscape than the presence of the dead that inspired me. After he finished, he carefully folded the paper. The words hovered, ghostly and solemn in the dim room. He asked me did I like it, and then why I thought it was good, and other things, until I found myself watching his mouth, craving it, even.
“Am I talking too much?” He shifted to his side and placed his head in his hand.
“Maybe,” I said.
I had thought he wanted me. But when I touched him he took my hands away, like a correcting parent. I was resigned to kissing him, and even that he interrupted with a story about his motorcycle, a Triumph he was eager to ride again in the spring.
“This is different,” he said.
I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me.
“Than what?” I felt awkward then for having taken off my clothes. He must have seen this on my face.
“Than I expected,” he said. “Not that it isn’t wonderful.”
Under the blankets his hands moved, barely skimming the surface of me. He talked about the two spaniels his neighbor had at his house, and the way they came when you were sitting in a chair and settled their heads under your hands. His father had had a brown retriever that would lie in the dust of the garage floor while he worked on the mowers. Some people, William said, are happier working with their hands. Gradually, his eyes closed and he fell asleep, and I was left wondering about his discussion of dogs and their flanks.
My bed was lumpy with springs, and I had a certain angle in which I slept. But with William taking up the space, and my body burning from his fingertips, I could not sleep. Was this how Sister had sometimes felt? She’d entered the abbey at twenty-six, maybe worried she’d be an old maid—that she’d never find anyone but God to love her. I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself alone in a chaste bed, consumed with desire for something ineffable and bodiless, but lying beside William I knew you could not separate the two—body and desire. The elm cast shadows on my white plaster wall, and its branches, sheathed in ice, clicked together like bones. Beyond this sound was the silence of the snow. Was poor Mary Rae still waiting out there in the cold?
That first night with William, I envied Geoff. I tried to breathe in and out, regularly, to feign sleep. I considered slipping out of the apartment, down the stairs to Del’s. But she would press me for details, and I didn’t want to confess that nothing had happened. After a while, I slid from the bed and went across the room to peer out the window. Mary Rae’s frozen hair framed her face, her eyes luminous. “What do you want from me?” I wanted to ask.