The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [28]
And Seizek said, sotto voce, so that only she could hear, thus trumping her in battle etiquette as well, I didn’t know such fire could issue forth from someone whose bland exterior is matched only by the dreariness of her poetry. I suppose there are women who read this stuff? The kind of women who regularly read romance novels, I should have thought. I suppose there might be good money in it? No?
Linda matched his sotto voce. Don’t fuck with me, she said, trying the word on a stranger.
Seizek looked startled, even if only for an instant; Linda counted it as a victory, nevertheless. She glanced again at the Australian.
With deliberately slow movements, so as not to appear to be fleeing, Linda turned and made her way to the door.
She liked the word, she thought as she left the room. It sounded good. It felt good.
* * *
She took out the rest of her anger on the elevator button, which seemed to retaliate by refusing to fetch a car. An elderly couple came and stood beside her. From a room somewhere in the hallway could be heard the sounds of lovemaking: a woman’s rhythmic grunts, strenuous and lengthy. The elderly couple were rigid with embarrassment. Linda felt for them and wished a clever remark would come to her to put the couple at ease, but instead, their embarrassment became infectious. Moving toward the stairs, she thought, What reservoir of guilt has Thomas tapped?
Vincent’s apartment in Boston was unlike anything she had ever seen before — unadorned and architectural, like a schoolroom, its centerpiece a draftsman’s table that cranked up to different angles with a winch. He had black-and-white photographs on the walls, some of his prodigious family (it would be months before she learned all their names), others of windows that had captured his imagination: austere colonial twelve-over-twelves; vast, complex fanlights set deeply into brick; simple sidelights beside a paneled door. His rooms were clean and masculine, curiously adult and oddly Calvinist in their sunny moral rectitude. Sometimes, when he was gone for brief periods on weekends, she would sit at his draftsman’s table with a pad of paper and a pen and write simple paragraphs that functioned as letters to herself, letters that Vincent would never see. He did not know her as troubled, for he had met her laughing; and she discovered that she had no desire to taint the happiness she’d found with him with sordid stories of her recent past. And consequently — and partly as a result of expectation — she rose to his image of herself: sensible and practical (which was largely true), drowsy and easy in bed, and prone to laugh at the foibles of others and of herself. The first night he took her back to his apartment, he made her a meal — spaghetti with red gravy — impressing upon her the fact that he was Italian to her Irish. The sauce was smooth and thick and seemed to have little to do with any tomatoes she had ever seen or eaten. Yet, she, who had been carelessly starving herself, ate ravenously, furthering the impression that she was a woman of appetite, an impression that was not altered in bed when she (who had been starved there as well) responded to her new lover with an almost animal greed. (Was it Vincent’s sleek pelt that made her think of seals?) And it was not a lie, this presentation of herself as healthy, for with Vincent she wanted to be and therefore was. And she thought it was probably not so unusual to be a different person with a different man, for all parts were authentically within, waiting to be coaxed out by one person or another, by one set of circumstances or another, and it pleased her to make this discovery. So much so that when, at the end of that first glorious weekend together, she returned to her rooms on Fairfield, she recoiled from the sight of the bathtub on its platform, the single Melamine plate on the dish rack. And immediately she went out and bought more dishes to put in the drainer and a Marimekko spread for her bed, so as not to