Alice’s eyes widened and she began to tremble. She looked to Del, not with solidarity but with mistrust.
Del went into the kitchen and scraped her food into the sink. I didn’t wait to hear Del’s explanation. I left her apartment and climbed the stairs to mine. Inside, it was dark, colder than downstairs. I slammed the door and fumbled for the light, and then I heard a noise in the darkness, and the lamp came on across the room, and William was sitting in the duck-carved chair.
“What are you doing in here?” I asked him.
“I live here,” he said.
“I mean in the dark,” I said. “Sitting in the dark. I had no idea you were here.”
“It wasn’t dark when I sat down,” he said. “Then I fell asleep, and you woke me up coming in.”
“Didn’t you get my call?” I went over to the bed, anxious, distracted. Even the bedclothes were cold. “It’s so cold in here.”
William had on one of his heavy wool sweaters. He had, in fact, been reading. The book was open on his lap. “Where were you?” he said.
“With Del, downstairs,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” he said. He moved the book from his lap to the floor. “Why are you acting so oddly?”
I sat down on the bed. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s Del. She drives me crazy.”
He chuckled then, and rose from the chair to sit beside me on the bed. “How did she take your news?” he asked me.
I felt the warmth of him through his sweater, and I leaned into his shoulder.
“You know, once,” I told him, “I thought I wanted to join a convent. You had to give up everything you owned to go there. You could choose one of two paths—work in the fields, or spend all day in prayerful contemplation.”
“Which would you have picked?” William said. He ran his hand through my hair.
“I couldn’t choose,” I said. “I liked the idea of having nothing, but I was afraid of having to live with my decision.”
“The idea of living without sex never occurred to you,” he said.
“I didn’t think of that,” I said. “This was before.”
He probably believed I meant before him, but I didn’t mean that. I meant before David Pinney, but I let him think what he wanted.
“This wasn’t about changing my mind, anyway,” I said. “It was a decision to live a certain way forever.”
I knew it was possible to acclimate to the results of irreversible conditions. Like death, I thought.
“Like marriage,” William said. His eyes grew serious then, almost worried. He took my hand.
“They used to think marriage saved men and women from being sinful,” he said. “That there was a vein or nerve that ran directly from the ring finger of the left hand to the heart.” He spun the band on my finger.
“You’re kidding, right?” I said.
“It’s just something I read,” he said, then he rose and went back to his book.
I looked at the room and its disarray. The unmade bed, the clutter and closeness of the place, suddenly reminded me of the cottage in the woods. On the small stove the few pots I owned sat on the burners with their previous contents congealing. My clothes lay scattered on the floor, over the bed—my books and notes, the remains of meals on plates abandoned on other surfaces. Our first Christmas tree, a pathetic little thing, still sat in its pot on the table by the window, its branches absent of green life. The glass ornaments slipped off, one at a time, at night. In the darkness, they made small splashing sounds when they shattered, like spilling water. I suppose this carelessness reflected our life at the time—and it occurred to me that even before our marriage had begun, William and I had fallen into a kind of decline.
I told him I was tired, and I changed and climbed into the bed. Though I sensed there were things he didn’t tell me, I convinced myself they were things I didn’t need to know. I would learn to let the undiscussed spaces in our life together flourish. I would practice pretending all was well.
21
Our father spent Christmas in Acapulco. Our mother called and tried to entice me to come home with Del, claiming she’d decorated a tree with all of our childhood ornaments. A Christmas album played—Robert Goulet singing “Do You Hear What I Hear”—and Sarah’s baby, born in September, wailed from a distant room.
“Convenient for a live nativity,” I said.
The door to the back terrace swung on its squeaking hinges, and the baby’s crying faded. I pictured my mother outside, shivering with the phone, and behind her the dead grass, the bare horse chestnut trees.
“I think we may have a white Christmas,” she said.
I could have told her Del and I had had enough of snow, and that I had a husband now, but I said we’d made plans of our own.