I feel the bed move underneath me. The blankets pull back and Henry’s hand, soft as silk across my skin. He pulls me against him and my stomach swoops with relief. We’ve always done this, we’ve always made up, made love, nothing has ever been permanent. I was silly to think otherwise. His breath flutters, hot in my ear.
Before I know it, his hands push up my nightgown and he’s on top of me, in me, hard and pressing, his wet gasps against my collarbone come quick and his hand grips my hip as he grunts, once, twice. It’s over in a minute. He pants quietly next to me, his palm smooths my hair off my forehead. In the dark, he stands up, the moonlight reflecting off a sheen of sweat on his skin and I realize that he is naked. That he came to me for one purpose and I’ve served it. He’s leaving. He pauses in the doorway, his hand resting on the doorknob, a thin, white line of light reflected down his back and leg. His face is turned and in the half-light, his mouth opens and closes, like he wants to say something, and still, stupidly, my heart catches on the unspoken maybe.
“I’ll see you in a week, Zoe.”
CHAPTER 19
The Japan trip has eased some of the pressure. I could not have reasonably told Henry about Caroline if we were a) barely speaking and b) he was out of the country. Maybe. Who knows? I’ve decided not to care. The weather has suddenly gotten hot, in the eighties, and today, it’s all anyone can talk about. Cash’s neighbor, the gas station attendant, even Cash himself. I’m meeting my mother for the first time and all I can think about is whether she will look as much like me as her picture? Will she have the oddball habit of tugging on her ear when she’s nervous? Will she bite her thumbnail cuticle? And yet, all I seem to be conversing about is temperature and humidity. They say tomorrow is supposed to be even worse! Even as I hear myself say the words, I can’t fathom anything about tomorrow.
We take the subway to Queens and walk to his mother’s house from the station. His childhood home is a square clapboard, smooshed in on the sides like someone had taken it between their palms. The street is lined with similar structures, variations of dinginess, and yet there are flowers in the window boxes (some are plastic) and well-worn but not tattered American flags hanging from the flagpoles—the kind that stand tall, not the suburban idea of a flagpole that hangs jauntily from the porch post, usually draped with a nylon slip of fabric silk-screened with a smiling cat, Have a Mawr-velous Day! The lawns are shorn, bare in some spots, but maintained.
His mother’s house is empty. She’s working, he says, a doctor’s office receptionist, and I nod. Cash waves his hand around and mutters something about the neighborhood, how it used to be better. It’s the way the middle class always feel around the rich: apologetic. I’m used to the excuses, the explanations. Truthfully, there’s no appropriate response. My money is not mine. We are the same, Cash and I. But to say that denies the privilege that comes with Henry’s influence. Instead, I nod and smile. We climb in Cash’s late-model Honda and head onto I-87 North.
The city recedes and Cash turns on the radio to a Top 40 station that plays music I’ve never heard. I think about how that’s possible, that I’m thirty years old and I’m not familiar with contemporary pop music. Lydia would be appalled. Our apartment in Hoboken was never quiet, always bursting with underground punk, hard-core rock, and then sometimes just blasting the latest Pink song. Lydia lived her life in music. Loud, harsh, thrumming beats for Saturdays and soft jazz for Sunday hangovers. The past year of my life has been outlined in shades of silence.
“What will you say?” Cash turns the volume down on the radio.
“I have no idea.” I shrug.
“What do you want from her? A mother?” He avoids my gaze and taps the steering wheel to a softly thumping beat.
“No,” I’m quick to reply. Maybe. “Do you know what it’s like to have no one?”
“You have Henry.”
“Henry’s not around. He’s in Japan. I didn’t even know he was going.”
“You were the model couple at the benefit.”