On a Night Like This (13 page)

He ran his hands over her warm skin. She made a noise and he looked at her, surprised. She was watching him.

“I’m not used to this,” she said quietly.

“Sex?” he asked.

“Sex, I’m used to. This is something else.”

He smiled up at her.

“This is what you deserve,” he said.

She closed her eyes, and he saw her smile as his hands ran over her body.

He stood up and began unbuttoning his shirt.

“My job,” she said.

She worked her way down the buttons, her tongue running a line down his chest.

“Luke Bellingham,” she whispered. “The cutest boy in the school. And this morning he’s mine.”

“Blair Clemens,” Luke said. “The mystery girl. And I get to discover her mystery.”

She had worked off his pants and pressed herself up against him, reaching around to hold him tight.

“You are the mystery,” she told him. “What brought you to me?”

“I need you,” he said; without understanding his own words, he somehow knew they were true. He felt something inside him opening up, something that had been tightly closed for a long time.

He lay down on the bed with her, their bodies wrapped around each other, their tongues and hands exploring every inch of skin.

When they made love, it was long and slow and sweet, and Luke saw that she had tears in her eyes.

“I could love you,” he whispered when they were done, lying in each other’s arms, breathing each other in.

Luke drove home after breakfast and a shower and a walk around the neighborhood with Sweetpea. He left Sweetpea with Blair.

“Can I come to your restaurant?” he had asked.

“Yes,” she said, pleased. “You might have to give a few autographs. One of the waiters knows your movies.”

“No autographs,” he said. “This would be your show. I’d love to watch you work.”

“You can’t do that,” she said. “Daniel would die if anyone entered his kitchen. But I will feed you. I will fatten you up for tomorrow morning so we can work it all off again.”

“I can come back tomorrow morning?”

“If you eat well tonight.”

He drove home smiling. He had used her shampoo—peach—and felt like he was taking her smell home with him.

When he pulled onto his street, he saw the yellow Miata sitting in the driveway. He stopped the truck where he was, until the man in the car behind him blasted his horn.

He drove on, pulling in next to the Miata.

He sat in the truck, waiting. He had been waiting for this, for Emily, and now he couldn’t move, couldn’t open his door and set his feet in motion.

He saw the curtain move in the bedroom—beyond it, he thought he glimpsed her hair, that long sweep of blond hair, and then the curtain closed again, trembling, the way he was.

He pushed the truck door open and forced himself out.

At the door he paused.
Do I knock? Use the key?
And then it opened, and Emily stood there, looking at him.

They didn’t speak for a moment. He saw that her hair was longer, perhaps blonder. She was wearing a sweater he didn’t recognize, a pale blue cashmere sweater, and he thought:
Gray Healy bought her that. I should have bought her that sweater.

The jeans were the same, her old worn Levi’s. She wore black boots that they had bought together in New York last year. She had forgotten to wear earrings—she always said she felt naked if she went out without earrings.

“I like the beard,” she said finally.

He moved his hand to his chin, as if needing to remind himself:
Beard, months gone by without her, I’ve changed.

He couldn’t find any words, though they all raced through his mind crazily, as if he could choose any one:
I love you; I hate you; go away; stay.

“Where’s Sweetpea?” she asked after a moment.

“At a friend’s,” he said.

“I miss her,” Emily said.

“You can’t have her,” Luke said.

“I wouldn’t ask for her,” Emily told him.

“Then why are you here?”

“Dana told me you wanted to talk to me. You found my house. I can’t hide. I don’t even want to hide.” She was so calm. But then he saw that her eyes were tearing.

“Then why did you disappear like that?”

“It was the only way I could leave you,” Emily said.

“What does that mean?”

“You would have convinced me to stay.”

“No, I—”

“Yes, Luke. You could talk me into anything.”

He stood there, in the doorway, and realized that he couldn’t quite catch his breath. He felt as if he had been running for miles and then had stopped suddenly, without winding down.

“Can we talk inside?” she asked.

He nodded. She turned away from him and moved down the hallway.

He thought, oddly, of running away. Of turning and hopping into his truck, of fleeing. “It was the only way I could leave you,” he’d tell her years from now.

He walked into the house and pulled the door closed behind him.

He looked down the hall and she was gone. Had she been there? Had he written her dialogue, given her stage directions, then whisked her out of the story line?

She would have walked into the living room—he knew that. And he stood there, still catching his breath.

“Are you coming?” she called out.

“Yes,” he said, and that got him moving again.

He stood in the entrance to the living room. She was at the window, looking out, as if still waiting for him to come home. He watched her profile and saw that her shoulders were raised, as if she were cold. Was she scared? Did he still know her so well? Or did he know nothing about her?

“How long?” he asked.

She didn’t turn around.

“I don’t know what you’re asking,” she said. She wrapped her hands around a glass of water.

“How long were you having an affair?”

“I didn’t leave you because I was having an affair.”

Finally she turned and faced him. Her eyes were tight, as if she were peering into the darkness.

“I didn’t ask that. I asked how long you were having an affair with Gray Healy.”

“I met him right before I left you.”

“Weeks before? Days?” Luke’s voice was getting louder. He moved toward her and she seemed to flinch, step back. He had never hit her—surely she didn’t think he could do that now.

He walked to the couch, sat in the middle of it, watching her.

“Does it matter?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

She stepped toward him and then sat in the chair across from him. She had never sat there before, in years of living here. That was the chair for a guest. Her place was next to him, curled into him. She sipped her water.

“Do you love him?” Luke asked. It wasn’t a question he had considered until it was out of his mouth. He wanted to take it back, rewind, rewrite, respeak.

“No,” she said quickly.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he finally said. “I don’t know what I want to know.” He saw that her chin was trembling, and he remembered how hard she could cry when she let go.

“Gray Healy has nothing to do with it,” Emily said. Her voice broke, and then she got up, walked away for a moment, turned back. “I should have been able to leave you without running to someone else,” she said, her face wet, her voice uneven.

“What does that mean?”

She didn’t answer. She started walking in circles, around the couch, around the chair.

“Please sit down,” he said gently.

She sat across from him again.

“I felt like a little girl in a grown-up marriage,” she told him. “It was bad enough when it was just about our age difference, but then you hit the big time and I was still trying to figure out what to do with my life.”

“I don’t care about whether or not you’re a big success,” Luke offered.

“I care, Luke. And I’m not. I dabble in art; I dabble in some silly affair. I don’t even run away like I mean it. I never left San Francisco.”

“You were in the house in Noe Valley the whole time?”

Emily nodded. “Remember that time you told me I don’t take risks in my art and that’s why I wasn’t winning prizes?”

Luke remembered the argument. He was helping her with a competition she had entered for an AIDS-awareness organization that wanted to reach out to street kids in the Haight. She was creating posters that were too clean, too white, too old. He pushed her on each attempt, urging her to try something she had never done before. Finally she had exploded: “You wish I were someone else.”

“No,” Luke had told her. “I’m just suggesting that you think like someone else.” But even then, he wondered for a moment if it wasn’t true: if he hadn’t wished she could not just think bolder, but be bolder.

For a quick moment Luke thought about Blair, and saw her lying next to him in bed, after making love. Her face open, staring back at him. He reached for Emily’s glass of water and took a long drink.

“I took a risk,” Emily said, and she looked shy about it, her voice wavering. “I moved out. I thought about going to New York or to Paris. But I was so scared. I couldn’t imagine leaving both you and Dana at the same time. I’ve never been on my own. Isn’t that terrible? So I hid out in San Francisco. And I hated every moment of it.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “First I didn’t leave the house. I thought you’d find me. I was scared someone would see me and tell you and that you’d come after me.”

She looked up at him, and he saw how vulnerable she was.

“You’re scared of me,” he said sadly.

“I was scared of being without you.”

“You had Gray Healy to comfort you.”

“I didn’t have Gray Healy. He belongs to his wife.”

She stood up, circled the couch again.

He waited. She came back to the chair and fell into it.

“And then Dana told me you had left town. Headed to the hills. I was free. I started to go out—to classes, to meet Dana for lunch. And I kept coming home, calling out to you as if you were working on the computer in your study and you’d come out in a few minutes and wrap your arms around me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I missed you. Terribly. You took care of me. I wanted you to stop taking care of me, and then when you weren’t there, I felt so damn lost.”

Emily lowered her head and her hair hung over her face like a curtain.

She looked exhausted. He remembered putting her to bed after parties, helping her out of her clothes, tucking her in, lying next to her and stroking her back until she was deeply asleep.

“I needed to grow up,” she said as if envisioning the same image in her own mind. A child.

Luke shook his head. “You didn’t have to leave me to grow up.”

She winced as if he had struck her. “I sat in that theater at the screening for
The Geography of Love.
The film was brilliant—I knew it would be. I stopped watching after a while and looked around the audience. Everyone was stunned, amazed. And I couldn’t stand what would happen next—the way they would gather around to praise you and fight for your attention and they’d talk about the next big project and I’d stand somewhere on the side, watching the circus, feeling invisible. It was so easy for me to disappear that I thought I’d try it—I’d just disappear.”

“I didn’t want any of that,” Luke said, leaning toward her. “Emily—”

“Listen to me,” she insisted. “For once.”

He leaned back into the sofa. This, he remembered. Her accusations: “You don’t listen to me; you don’t take me seriously; you think I’m a little girl.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Maybe you didn’t say it,” she said, her voice calmer. “But I knew better than you knew. How I disappointed you.”

He shook his head.

“Then maybe I disappointed myself. Does it matter?” She glanced at him, then looked away. “Do you know what I thought?” she asked. She was looking out the window—he didn’t answer her. “I thought that by having an affair—by sneaking out and going to hotels, meeting in dark restaurants—that I’d become a more interesting person. I was doing something so adult, so illicit.” She turned and looked at him, her expression pained. “Isn’t that sad?”

“Emily,” he said softly.

She turned and walked out of the room. He waited to hear the front door slam, for the Miata’s engine to turn over, for the car to back up and speed away. He waited for her to be gone forever. Another forever.

But the house was quiet. Finally he heard a cabinet door close in the kitchen.

“There’s no food here,” she called out. “Not one goddamn thing to eat.”

He pushed himself out of the couch, walked slowly into the kitchen to find her. He had the odd sense of watching the scene as it was happening—as if he or someone else had written it long ago and finally some director was urging the actors to get through the scene, no matter how hard it was.

He remembered Blair in her bed, surrounded by her green velvet blanket, and he could smell the jasmine that grew outside her window and he could feel the lush heat of her body and he could taste something like oranges on her skin.

He leaned into the doorway and watched Emily. She was throwing open cabinets, banging them closed, rifling through the boxes of staples in the pantry.

“How do you live here?” she asked. She started throwing boxes away—sugar, salt, flour, pancake batter.

“I don’t live here,” Luke told her.

She stopped what she was doing, held a bag of peanuts in her hand and faced him.

“Why did you come back to the city?” she asked gently.

“I thought I had given up on you,” he told her. His voice was quiet, strange even to his own ears. “But I couldn’t.”

She dropped the bag of peanuts, missing the garbage, then kicked it across the floor as she walked toward him.

He opened his arms, and she fell into them.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and she let herself cry finally. He held her for a long time, and she pressed her wet face into his chest. He kept his mouth on the side of her head, close to her ear, pressed in a kiss.

Luke opened the door to the café and stood there a moment, unsure of where he was or what he was doing. Suddenly he felt drunk, as if he had stumbled through the streets of the city to get here.

A pretty waif of a woman, bare-armed and tattooed, put her hand on his arm.