I told him how when I was little, I’d thought the stars were perforations in the sky, little pinpricks into some other, surrounding universe that was only light.
He told me that his dad liked to say the stars were lanterns hung out by the past so the lost could find their way. “He thought he was so deep,” Alexei said.
That night we were late to dinner with Oliver because we’d been in bed. But we weren’t having sex when we lost track of time. I mean, we’d had sex, but we were lying there talking, making those first big careless, gleeful excavations when everything about someone is new and unknown, before you have to get out your little picks and brushes, work tediously around the fragile, buried stuff. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to tell everything. We didn’t even notice the daylight fading in the room because the glow between us was so bright.
“You guys seem to get along,” Oliver said later, in a different bed in the same hotel, stroking my stomach, trying to get me interested in sex, which worked because I was still all keyed up.
“He’s a nice guy,” I said. “We had a good day.”
When I got back to L.A., Alexei asked if he could come to my house, bring me lunch, and I shaved and fussed and obsessed over what to wear （cutoffs, old button-down） and changed my sheets and gave Augustina the afternoon off, and while we sat by the pool eating the grain bowls he’d brought from a pretentious salad place, he told me we had to stop. This isn’t who I am, he said. I don’t do this. I have a family.
I asked why he’d done it in the first place.
“I’m weak,” he said.
I looked at the avocado and amaranth in my bowl, at the papery bougainvillea blossoms sailing along the surface of my pool like little magenta boats. In retrospect, I think Alexei found weakness easier to admit to than the wormlight. Maybe he was already thinking about what version of the story his wife would find simplest to forgive if she ever found out: A momentary lapse in judgment or a powerful infatuation? Maybe he was thinking about which version he’d rather live with. Or maybe he was telling the plain truth, and meanwhile I’d been laboring eagerly up toward a bunch of fake stars.
I made a helpless gesture. “If that’s how you feel.”
“It’s not how I feel. It’s how it is.”
In the moment, I had to do anything I could to change the way I was feeling, so I went to stand in front of Alexei, between his legs. “Hadley,” he said in a resigned voice, but he held the backs of my thighs and rested his forehead on my stomach. He’d taken off his suit jacket, and his dreadlocks were bound in a neat bundle down his back, against his crisp white shirt. “I think it’s the illicitness, to be honest,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re coated in it like sugar. Without that—”
I said, “I’d be dull and disgusting instead of sparkly and delicious.” I stared off at the far corner of my yard, where my landscaper, an expert in drought-resistant plants, had planted rows of spiked and serrated yucca and agave and palms, ranks of them, like marching soldiers waving their weapons.
“I just mean, how much of this is the thrill?” His hands were moving on my legs.
“I guess we’ll never know.”
So, yeah, that was the second time. Probably Alexei was the one I was really sticking it to when I made a spectacle of myself with Jones.
House of Virtue
Missoula
March 1929
A year and a half after Marian’s haircut
The day had been warm, and a sense （not quite a sound） of buried melting had prevailed, of subterranean trickling beneath the snow. The river, open at its middle, flowed black and narrow between broad white banks.
But in the evening the city had contracted and hardened again. Clouds came over the mountains, promising more snow.
A delivery truck rattled across the railroad tracks, away from downtown, its side panels advertising stanley’s bread and cake. At the wheel, Marian kept to the low gears, followed frozen ruts packed by earlier wheels, calmly countering slips and slides. She must not get stuck in snow or mud, must generally avoid drawing attention to what an unusual delivery driver she made, a girl of fourteen, tall now as some men but skinny in overalls and a sheepskin jacket and a brown muffler knitted by Berit, cap pulled low over her cropped hair. The police got their cut to leave her alone, but no good came from indiscretion. She delivered bread and cakes, yes, but also, tucked under Mr. Stanley’s signature calico covers in the delivery baskets, were bottles.
Bottles had been the answer.