“Well, I haven’t done it for longer than that. But it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re kind.”
And so even though they were unpracticed, they were kind and that made it all right. And afterward they lay for a long time pressed together, her head on his shoulder, his hand stroking her hip while the night deepened around them. There was no urgency to move apart; morning and work were a long way off.
Jean remembered how Frank could never lie still with her for one minute once the loving was over but would sit up, light a cigarette and start scrabbling for his clothes in one impatient movement. She’d thought it was something all men did.
“Are you tired?” Howard asked, kissing her hair. “You can sleep if you like.”
“No—I’m wide awake,” said Jean, not wanting to waste a moment of their time together in mere sleep.
They shifted into a sitting position with their backs to the couch, the eiderdown gathered around them, and she confessed that she had had no supper and was hungry. So he made them tea and toast, which they ate there on the floor, and when he noticed that she was shivering he fetched a soft woolen shawl for her shoulders.
“It’s not Gretchen’s,” he said. “It’s one of Aunt Edie’s cast-offs. She’s never worn it, I promise.”
He had a gift for anticipating her vulnerabilities and reassuring her before she was even aware of them.
“You know all my thoughts without my saying them,” Jean replied. “Am I really that transparent?”
“Let’s see,” said Howard, gazing into her eyes with a frown of concentration, his lips moving slowly as he pretended to read.
“What does it say?” she laughed.
It was so easy and natural to talk nonsense when your love was returned.
“It says, ‘I would like to come back and do this again tomorrow and possibly the next day.’”
“More or less,” she agreed.
“Why shouldn’t we?” he asked, more serious now. “We are not hurting anyone, are we?”
“No. But, Howard, we won’t tell Gretchen, will we? I’d feel so awkward.”
“I can’t see that I’d have any occasion to tell her. But I don’t see any need for deception.”
He was right, of course. Dishonesty could never bring peace of mind. Always he was there just ahead of her, with that lantern of decent behavior.
“I just feel guilty somehow, for stepping so quickly into her shoes. Her bed, I mean.”
“She was never in her bed!” he protested, gathering her in his arms again. “But whatever you say.”
“Did you really never make love with her? Even in the beginning?” Jean asked.
“Of course, at first. But I could tell she didn’t like it—it was just something she felt she had to do, with gritted teeth, so to speak. Which made me feel like a monster. So I gradually stopped asking and the intervals got longer and one day I realized that it had been more than a year and it sort of dawned on me that we would never make love again.”
“It was selfish of her to marry you, knowing that she couldn’t love you properly.”
“The thing that hurt most was being made to feel that my desires were unreasonable for all those years. Gretchen always insisted that sex was unimportant and meant nothing to her, but that wasn’t true. As soon as Martha reappeared, suddenly her desires trumped everything. Her ‘natural feelings’ couldn’t be suppressed for five minutes, but I’d had to suppress mine for years.”
He still loves her, Jean thought with a tightness in her throat of swallowed jealousy.
“I understand,” she said in as steady a voice as she could manage, “that she’s still your wife and your feelings for her won’t change overnight. I do understand that.”
He looked at her with concentration and amazement.
“You are generous, Jean,” he said, kissing her again, “but you don’t need to be. It’s you now.”
“It’s you, too,” she said.
A feeling of peace swept over her as if she had reached the end of a long journey and could now rest.
“I sometimes wondered . . .” she said, drawing him to her so that he lay back with his head in her lap. He looked at this angle and without his glasses quite different, a stranger. “Whether Gretchen was trying to engineer things to throw us together. Did you ever think that?”
“It’s possible. Something like it happened once before with Margaret’s first piano teacher. Gretchen always made me take her home and seemed to find ingenious ways of leaving me alone with her. It was as if I was being given permission to stray. All unspoken, of course. But I wasn’t the least bit attracted to the piano teacher. Or she to me, I might add.”