The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [111]
It would be very pleasant to be his wife. He was a thoughtful man and a good lover. He would cherish her. That was a good word—cherish. No man had ever cherished her, ho man had ever thought her someone to cherish.
And it would be secure to be his wife, both financially (which Olive said was important, and which probably was) and emotionally. There would be stability in her life, and she had lived too long with too little that could be called stable. She could belong to that fine old house. She could put down roots in those woods. His home could be her home as no place had ever been home to her. And it seemed now that she had never had a home. The house in which she grew up, even that had never been her home.
Did she love him? Well, she supposed that she did. She loved him but was not in love with him—the schoolgirl distinction which somehow persisted over the years. But had she ever been in love with anyone? She rather thought not, although she had thought herself thus from time to time. Did she love him enough to be married to him? Now that was another question, wasn’t it?
She had been married once. She could review that marriage, as she so often had done. She could try to see it in the context of the love that had or had not been there, as she could review her relationship with Marc. But it was hard now even to remember that marriage, and there were times when an accurate memory of her time with Marc seemed similarly elusive. It was hard to remember what it was like at the time, hard to summon up the person she herself had then been. And whoever she had been, she was in so many ways different now.
Would she want to have his children? Yes, if she wanted to have children at all. Would she want her children to look like him? She regarded him thoughtfully, projecting his strong features onto the countenances of children. Yes, she would like to have a son who looked like this man. Or a daughter—a daughter in his image would be unquestionably attractive, she thought, and then realized that he already had a daughter in his image. Karen had his features down to the last decimal place.
Karen. Was that the problem? Was that what bothered her? It seemed to be the point of Olive’s story, certainly, some aspect of the father-daughter relationship.
He asked if she was feeling better, and for an instant she forgot her story about menstrual cramps. Then she remembered, and said that she was feeling a good deal better, that he seemed to be good for her. His smile told her she had found the right thing to say.
“But I’d better get you home,” he said. “It’s getting late.”
On the way back her thoughts turned unpredictably to Peter Nicholas. She remembered their one night and felt herself responding to the memory. How unfair, she thought, to force Hugh to compete with ghosts. Because that was what the night had been. A phantom experience, shadow rather than substance. Hugh was a better lover than Peter, an infinitely better lover for her than Peter, but the night with Peter had been forbidden, the love they shared doomed in advance. Thus there had been nothing held in reserve, no worry about where the relationship might lead because it was a foregone conclusion that it could lead nowhere.
And yet. And yet—
As they reached the outskirts of New Hope she realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted him to make love to her. She was sitting close to him, her head on his shoulder, her seat belt gloriously unfastened, and his arm was around her and the wind was in her hair and she felt the moon drawing tides in her liquid flesh. When he parked in front of her building, she kissed him with a special urgency, pressing her body to him and clutching him. He held back at first, then matched her passion. Boldly she dropped a hand into his lap and took hold of him.
“Oh,” she said.
“You’ve awakened the sleeping giant.”
“Oh, my.” Cramps, yet. Christ. “Can I do something about that?”
“It’s not necessary.