Each image captured just a woman’s sleeping form, her bare arms flung out, her legs entwined with sheets. Some of the women had their hands placed under their cheeks, their lips parted as if to speak. Their long hair fanned in disarray over their bodies. All of the women were nude. The bones of their backs showed, their skin luminous in early morning light, in late afternoon shadow, in a dark room illuminated by a bare bulb. Those whose faces were revealed seemed familiar to me, and yet I couldn’t place why. And it bothered me, like the sandalwood smell. The images were strange, compelling. I had to admit that they disturbed me. I went back through the portfolio again, studying each photograph. Despite the shadows and blurred effects of light that sometimes concealed them, I felt that wave of recognition again, accompanied by a slowly growing unease.
The faces in the photographs belonged to the Milton girls. Once I made the connection I recognized each of them—Alice’s ginger-colored hair, the point of Lucie’s chin, Kitty’s long lashes. I flipped through the pages, searching for one of Mary Rae, but there were none. I was stunned by his use of the girls in Milton as his subjects, but since I hadn’t officially been shown the photographs I wasn’t sure how to bring them up. His refusal to share them made sense to me now. Even more troubling, though, was the Milton girls’ silence. If they hated him so much, why would they agree to pose?
Anne had sketched a portrait of Mary Rae before she died, and it was displayed in a prominent spot in the living room—the girl, nude, on her side, an arm thrown over her face. It was eerily similar to William’s photographs. I told myself William was simply imitating his mentor, a woman with obvious talent and, we were constantly reminded, not long for this world.
The door at the far end of the hall opened, and William’s footsteps approached. I wanted more time with the portfolio, so instead of putting it back in the drawer, I slid it beneath a stack of folders he’d packed into a cardboard box on his desk. I locked the drawer, replaced the key in the tin, and then returned to the couch to feign sleep. He entered the office, and I felt him standing near me, the shadow of him over me. I assumed he was watching me, but when I peered up at him he was not looking at me but at the desk, his hands on his hips. I must have moved something on its surface when I opened the portfolio.
He readjusted some papers on the desk’s surface, then turned toward me, and I smiled up at him.
“What time is it?” I asked him.
“Did you fall asleep?”
I sat up. “I must have,” I said.
Something between us had shifted. We were each tense, and whatever we wanted to say remained unspoken. “No one is trying to hide anything from you,” Del had said. Clearly, she’d intended me to believe someone was.
“What?” William said. His eyes had grown hard to read in the office’s half-light. Beyond the high window it was night, and the walk home across the dark, windswept campus loomed ahead of us.
“It’s going to be cold,” I said.
“I already called Geoff,” he said. “He’s coming to pick us up.”
And then he hefted the box he’d packed in his arms, and checked the room one last time, as if for anything else he needed. His gaze took in the desk, and I knew he was thinking about the portfolio, and I almost confessed to having seen it just to clear the tension in the room, to ease my guilt. Then he reached out and tugged on the desk drawer, as if to make sure it was locked.
“Hurry up,” he said. “Get your coat.”
His voice was cold, distracted. Dumbly, I grabbed my coat off the couch, longing for the times we’d slipped in here to have sex, the sound of students passing in the hall, the occasional knock on the opaque class, the way we’d suppress our movements, our breath, until the person had left. I thought of the sandalwood smell, and William with Del here in the office together, and though I had no real proof she’d been there, I was filled with a rush of resentment and anger. He was mine and she had no right to him. I reached out and took William’s hand, and was surprised to find how cold it was—as if he’d been outside.
“Do we have to hurry?” I said. I pressed his cold hand to my cheek. “It’s so nice and warm in here.”
And like the first time, when I’d awakened to find him in the duck-carved chair in my apartment, his face changed, and his hand slid around to the back of my neck, and he tugged me in to kiss. This time his lips were cold and hard. He dropped the box to the floor, and he kicked the door shut—although no one was around who might have seen us. The office, lit by the desk lamp, was filled with shadow, and he pulled me down onto the couch and tore at the clasp to my jeans. When I tried to help him he pinned both of my hands beneath his. I cried out, and maybe he took my cry for that of passion. His movements became harsh, his breathing ragged. He pulled my hair to tip my face up, and kneaded my breasts, and pressed my legs open.
I’d thought I was initiating sex—but this wasn’t that. Had it been my fault for being duplicitous? For desiring proof that he was mine? I was afraid, though I tried to not show it. I hurried things along so he would be done. I left myself, and watched him as if from above, like one of the dead. Later, there would be the familiar bruises from the pads of his fingers, from his mouth. I could not erase the past. I had only spun it, like a wheel, away from me. And I had gotten a small reprieve, but now it was back. What goes around comes around. For whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. He would make a joke about that night and tell me I surprised him, and I would think he didn’t really know what surprised was. If he wanted to be surprised, well, I could do that.
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