The weight of water - Anita Shreve [13]
“That was an interesting game you were playing with Adaline,” I say, studying the card for a moment.
“Not really,” says Thomas. He leans in toward the window and squints at the sign.
“THE PORTSMOUTH ATHENAEUM,” he reads. “READING ROOM OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.” He examines the hours listed. He seems to study the card a long time, as though he were having trouble understanding it.
“Who was the poet?” I ask.
“Fallon Pearse.”
I look down at my sandals, which are spotted with drops of oil from cooking in the kitchen at home. My jeans have stretched and wrinkled at the tops of my thighs.
“If any place would have archival photographs, this would be it,” he says.
“What about Billie?” I ask. We both know, as Rich and Adaline do not, that even a half hour with Billie can be exhausting. All those questions, all that curiosity.
Thomas stands back and scans the building’s height. “I’ll go back and find Adaline,” he says. “I’ll give her a hand with Billie. You see if they’ve got what you need, and we’ll meet back here in, say, an hour?”
Underneath my feet, the ground seems to roll slowly up and away as it sometimes does in children’s cartoons.
“Whatever you think,” I say.
Thomas peers into the front window as if he might recognize something beyond the drapes. With a casualness and tenderness I suddenly mistrust, he bends and kisses me on the cheek.
Some weeks after Thomas and I met each other in the bar in Cambridge, we parked my car by the waterfront in Boston and walked up a hill toward an expensive restaurant. Perhaps we were celebrating an anniversary — one month together. From the harbor, fog spilled into the street and around our feet. I had on high heels, Italian shoes that made me nearly as tall as Thomas. Behind me, I could hear a foghorn, the soothing hiss of tires on wet streets. It was raining lightly, and it seemed as though we would never make it up the hill to the restaurant, that we were walking as slowly as the fog was moving.
Thomas pressed in on my side. We had been at two bars, and his arm was slung around my shoulder rather more passionately than gracefully.
“You have a birthmark on the small of your back, just to the right of center,” he said.
My heels clicked satisfyingly on the sidewalk. “If I have a birthmark,” I said, “it’s one I’ve never seen.”
“It’s shaped like New Jersey,” he said.
I looked at him and laughed.
“Marry me,” he said.
I pushed him away, as you would a drunk. “You’re crazy,” I said.
“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you since the night I found you in my bed.”
“How could you marry a woman who reminded you of New Jersey?”
“You know I’ve never worked better.”
I thought about his working, the dozens of pages, the continuously stained fingers.
“It’s all your doing,” he said.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You were ready to write these poems.”
“You let me forgive myself. You gave this to me.”
“No I didn’t.”
Thomas had on a blazer, his only jacket, a navy so dark it was nearly black. His white shirt seemed luminescent under the street lamp, and my eye was drawn to the place where his shirt met his belt buckle. I knew that if I put the flat of my hand there, the fabric of the shirt would be warm to the touch.
“I’ve only known you for a month,” I said.
“We’ve been together every day. We’ve slept together every night.”
“Is that enough?”
“Yes.”
I knew that he was right. I put the flat of my hand against his white shirt at the belt buckle. The shirt was warm.
“You’re drunk,” I said.
“I’m serious,” he said.
He pressed toward me, backing me insistently into an alleyway. Perhaps I made a small and ineffectual protest. In the alley, the tarmac shone from the wet. I was aware of a couple, not so very unlike myself and Thomas, walking arm in arm, just past the narrow opening of the alley. They glanced in at us with frightened faces as they passed. Thomas leaned all of his weight against me, and put his tongue inside my ear. The gesture made me shiver, and I turned my head. He put his mouth then on the side of my neck, licking the skin in long strokes, and suddenly I knew that in