The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [60]
“I’ve just had a memory,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Jack and me.”
“Here?”
She nodded.
“Doing this?”
It was like this, she wanted to say, but not like this. It was early summer, and the screens were on. Mattie was at a friend’s house, and it was later in the day, nearer four o’clock or five. The light was unique, she remembered, shimmery and green like sea glass. They had had champagne. What were they celebrating? She couldn’t remember. Possibly nothing, possibly themselves. She had wanted to make love, she remembered, and so had he, but neither of them would sacrifice a hot boiled lobster, and so they had waited with a kind of delicious tension between them. She had sucked the legs of her lobster with exaggerated kisses, and Jack had laughed and said she was a tease, which she enjoyed. Being a tease. She seldom did that.
“I’m sorry,” Robert said. “I should have known. I’ll take these into the kitchen.”
“No,” she said quickly, stopping his hand as he reached for her plate. “No, you couldn’t have known. And anyway, my life is filled with these. Hundreds of little memories that catch me off guard. They’re like mines in a field, waiting to detonate. Honestly, I’d like to have a lobotomy.”
He moved his hand from under hers and laid it over her fingers. He held her hand in the way a man might hold the hand of a woman friend, waiting for a small crisis to blow over. His hand felt warm, because Kathryn’s had suddenly gone cold. All her memories did this to her; they made the blood leave her hands and feet. Like fear did.
“You’ve been good to me,” she said.
Time passed. How much? She could no longer gauge seconds, minutes. She closed her eyes. The beer had made her slightly sleepy. She wanted to turn her hand over, to have him touch her palm. To slide his hand along her palm and up her wrist. She imagined she could feel the warmth of his hand traveling along the underside of her arm, past the elbow.
Her fingers under Robert’s went slack, and she felt the tension drain from her body. It was erotic, but not, that loosening, that giving up. Her eyes seemed to have unfocused themselves, and she couldn’t see Robert or anything else properly, only a sense of light from the windows. That light, diffuse and dimmed, created an aura of languid ease. And she thought that she ought to feel disturbed for thinking of Robert and herself in that way, but a kind of leniency seemed to have descended upon them with the haze, and she felt merely vague and drifting. So much so that when Robert, perhaps in an effort to bring her back, tightened the pressure on her hand, she felt jolted into the present moment.
“You’re like a kind of priest,” she said.
He laughed. “No, I’m not.”
“I think that’s how I’ve come to see you.”
“Father Robert,” he said, smiling.
And then she thought: Who was to know if this man’s hand traveled up the inside of her arm? Who was to care? Weren’t all of the rules now broken? Hadn’t Mattie said so?
The silence of the steady snowfall enclosed them. She could see that he was struggling to understand precisely where she was and why, but she couldn’t help him, because she herself didn’t know. The front room was always slightly too cold in winter, she thought, and she shivered once in spite of the steam she could hear rushing into the radiators. Outside, the sky was becoming so dark it might have been mistaken for dusk.
He withdrew his hand, leaving hers uncovered. She felt exposed.
She drank another bottle of beer. Between them, they ate all of the bread and the lobsters. In the middle of the meal, Robert got up and changed the CD. From B.B. King to Brahms.
“You have wonderful music,” he said when he returned. “You’re interested in music?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“Piano, especially. Was the music Jack’s or yours?” he asked, sitting down.
She cocked her head, not certain she understood what he meant.
“Usually the CDs and the sound system are the passion of either the husband or the wife, but not both,” he explained. “At least in my experience.”
She thought about this.