“Did you hear something?” he asked me, his eyes glazed with desire and not really seeing. He urged me back into his arms. He had a way of holding me that made me feel breakable, like a soft-feathered bird. I kissed his mouth, his chest. I slid down his body and undid his pants. When he left I made sure to walk him out onto the porch and kiss him so William across the street, and even Mary Rae, standing in her down coat under the elm, could see.
“Look at me, ghosts,” I as much as said.
Mary Rae smirked. William, stonelike, stalked off with his limp.
Inside, Del was waiting for me, too. “A boyfriend?” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “Just a boy.”
“Be careful.” She twisted her hair into a bun and slipped an elastic band from her wrist to secure it. “You don’t want to get knocked up.”
I didn’t want to be angry with her. “Thanks,” I said. I gave her a halfhearted smile.
“Sometimes I don’t understand it, either,” she said. Her eyes were so sad, I was sure even if she was guilty of sleeping with my husband, I should have had some sympathy for her. But neither of us deserved any sympathy at all. Del went into her apartment. Later that I night, I went down to see her, but Alice’s quick laughter came from behind the door, and I felt glad for Del and Alice’s friendship, even if the Milton girls weren’t friends of mine.
*
IT OCCURRED TO me that Del had become the steady, responsible one, and somehow I had taken on her old high school promiscuity.
“I’m already ruined,” she’d said then.
I wouldn’t let the boys I brought home interfere with my goal of finding out what happened to Mary Rae. I pored over the journal Del had given me. It covered the year prior to reconnecting with William, and during that time Mary Rae had dated a series of boys—ones she named and described, providing details of their various dates—to the Regal Cinemas at The Shops at Ithaca Mall, to the Antlers restaurant, swimming at Buttermilk Falls. I took Geoff’s car, the air rushing in through the open windows smelling of melting snow and wet earth, and I drove to Milton or the nearby villages and I tracked them down—Jimmy Cahill sorting bulbs at the Agway hardware store, Russell Watkins tending bar at Viking Lanes, Frankie Duncan carting gravel at the Milton Department of Public Works. Each of them seemed to emanate a sorrowful sense of loss.
Jimmy Cahill sat behind the store alone, eating lunch, a book opened in front of him. Something about the way he tucked a pencil behind his ear spoke of his grief. With Russell the ache was in the way he hitched his pants walking across the Viking Lanes parking lot, in the shape of his hands below his rolled-up sleeves.
“You don’t know me,” I’d say. “But I was a friend of Mary Rae’s, and she always used to talk about you.”
Seriously? A mix of disbelief and gratitude.
There was always a reason to draw them close. Each reason presented itself, like a blessing. Sudden rain. A desire for coffee. Russell and I ducked back into the Viking Lanes. We drank and played pool. I leaned over far enough, let my hair fall onto his arm. With Jimmy we walked to the diner down the street, past the funeral parlor, the bed-and-breakfast. I whispered to him, my hand cupped around his ear. As with the boy in the Laundromat, it would just happen. I’d say we could go to my place. I’d feel a satisfied thrill when they agreed—though I couldn’t admit I wanted to flaunt them in front of a ghost.
The day with Jimmy was chilly, and we walked back to my car in the Agway lot. He wore a T-shirt.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked. I reached out and touched his bare arm.
He looked at me in the slow, lazy way of boys who know exactly what you’re doing. He didn’t say anything. By the time we reached my car and climbed inside, we were both dizzy, breathing fast, falling into each other’s arms with one long exhale, our mouths too busy for words, the car windows steaming up.
When I took Jimmy home, Geoff came out of his apartment with Suzie as we stood on the landing, my key in the lock. He didn’t admonish me. I was an abandoned wife, and he pitied me. He shook his head in disapproval and silently descended. Only Suzie glanced back, and then he gave her a tug with the leash, and a harsh word that was surely meant for me. Jimmy wrapped his arms around my waist and I sank back into his shirtfront, into the muscles of his chest, the bones of his rib cage, wondering if Mary Rae felt the way I did when she was with him.
I stopped locking my door. Sometimes I dreamed William’s boots stomped up the stairs, scraping mud on the landing. He would come in and stand by the bed in the gray light. His gaze did its usual sad dance over the body he no longer held, and sometimes he would take a seat in the chair, and at others he’d turn and leave the room. Once in a while I awoke to his retreating footsteps and I chased after him, slipping out of bed and down the stairs, out the front door onto the porch. There I stood shivering, half-dressed, fooled by what was dream and what was real, no longer able to tell the difference.
One morning Geoff stepped onto the porch from the sidewalk and found me. I had no idea where he’d been—if he’d been out all night or had just stepped out for some air.