The Echo of Old Books(53)

I awaken to the sound of your breathing, deep and rhythmic beside me. The light has changed and shadows stretch up the wall and across the carpet. I run my eyes around the room but there’s no clock anywhere. I have no idea what time it is or how long we’ve been asleep.

Your arm is curled about my waist, heavy against my ribs. The weight of it, the fact of it, fills me with a savage rush of joy. This is what it would feel like to be your wife, to wake each morning in a tussle of warm sheets, your breath on the back of my neck, your chest fitted snugly against the curve of my spine. I envision breakfast in bed on the weekends. Eggs and toast on a tray with your paper. And coffee. I’d have to learn to make coffee. Or perhaps you prefer tea. I’ve never thought to ask.

The realization brings me to earth with a bump. There are so many things I don’t know about you, so many things you don’t know about me. The little intimacies that develop with time, the things that bind lovers inextricably together, are no part of what we have. In fact, we’re still strangers in many ways, two people who stumbled blindly into love, never once imagining a happily ever after.

The thought is still with me when I feel your breathing change. Your arm cinches about my waist and you pull me closer, nuzzling the curve of my shoulder. Suddenly I’m frightened, terrified that this fierce and fledgling joy will wither in the cold glare of reality.

I turn over, cupping your face in both hands, committing your features to memory, as if forgetting them would ever be possible. The subtle cleft at the base of your chin, the crease between your brows that never quite disappears, even when you laugh, the small crescent-shaped scar at the corner of your eye, the result of a childhood fall from a swing. All of it seared on my memory even now, the loss still so raw, it stings.

You cover my hand with yours and the crease between your brows deepens. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I say softly. “I’m just . . . memorizing your face. In case.”

“In case . . . what?”

I shrug and reach for the sheet, pulling it up over my shoulders. “I just can’t believe I’m here. That we’re here—together. It feels like a dream.”

“It is a dream,” you murmur, your voice still thick from sleep. “One I’ve had more times than I can count. Only this time, you didn’t disappear when I opened my eyes.”

You kiss me then, a kiss full of tenderness and wonder. But it turns into something else for me, something fierce and fearful. I cling to you, desperate to prove to myself that it’s real, that we’re real.

We make love again, more slowly this time, exploring tender topography missed in our first frenzied joining. We cherish each other, every touch and taste and murmur. We whisper promises as the afternoon ebbs into evening. Words like forever and tomorrow and always. And we mean them when we say them. Or at least I do. Because I haven’t begun to think any of it through. What it will mean. What it will cost. Where it all might lead.



In the days that follow, we spend every moment we can steal together. I invent outings with girlfriends I haven’t seen in months, purchase tickets for concerts I don’t attend, invent shopping excursions for clothes I neither need nor want, all to create plausible alibis for my increasingly frequent absences from home. When Cee-Cee assumes I’ve begun shopping for my trousseau, I don’t correct her. I nod and smile, all while trying to work out how to extricate myself from my engagement. Because I will extricate myself. Just as soon as Teddy and his father return from their latest trip to wherever the horses are running this week. For now, though, my time is my own, and it’s easy to put those plans off and just enjoy these sweet stolen moments with you.

I try to be at the apartment as often as I can when you come home from work. I use the key I keep secreted in my compact to let myself in, and pretend to ignore the looks I sometimes get from the woman who lives across the hall. The look that says, “I know what you’re up to, popping in and out in the middle of the day.” I suppose she does, but it’s nothing to me. She’s not likely to be part of my father’s circle.

I play at cooking now and then, to surprise you, but I’m not very good at it. That’s what comes of having people do for you your whole life. Still, you never complain. We eat together in your tiny kitchen and listen to the news on the radio, keeping careful track of events in Europe and Britain. We do the dishes when we’re through, side by side, like proper newlyweds. But we aren’t proper newlyweds. We aren’t proper anything. And when the dishes are finally put away and the news program ends, I must gather my hat and gloves and kiss you goodbye.

And rehearse a new alibi on the way home.

It’s getting harder and harder to leave you, to return to my cold life and my cold family. I’m still wearing Teddy’s ring, the symbol of my broken promise. Except that I haven’t broken it yet, not officially—not at all, actually—and Cee-Cee has begun to harangue me about setting a date. Teddy, on the other hand, seems in no great hurry to get down the aisle. His telegrams come infrequently and are blessedly brief when they do, perfunctory and almost comically polite.

Perhaps there’s a woman like me somewhere, who keeps a key hidden in her compact and slips in and out of his life when she can manage it. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge him if there were. Not that he’s ever been particularly discreet about such things. Nor, as a man, is discretion demanded.