The Myth of You and Me (22 page)

For dinner we went to a seafood restaurant, a warm place where the light was dim and the wooden walls were a rosy brown. We sat in a booth in the back, drinking Ipswich Ale, and ordered fish that arrived wrapped in tinfoil. We were still sitting there long after the food was gone. I was content, full and tipsy, feeling the sort of pleasant weariness that comes after a leisurely day spent mostly outdoors. Neither of us had spoken for a minute or two. I was studying the artwork and rudders hung high on the walls—I had already looked at the framed photos of actors and what Will called “famous fleet people” behind the bar.

Will said, “Where will you go after this?”

I laughed. “Home to pass out.” I caught myself and flushed. “Not that your place is . . .”

He dismissed this with an impatient gesture. “No, I mean after you find her. What’s home?”

What was home? The tree-lined streets of Oxford. The Nashville skyline. The red mountains of New Mexico. Yucca and brown grass. A white silo. Grit kicked up by a wind. All of it. None of it. The highway went everywhere.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “I like your ring.”

“What?” Without knowing it I’d been tapping my ring against the glass. It was the antique, set with five small opals, that Oliver had given me. “Oh, thanks. It belonged to Oliver’s aunt. He always said I reminded him of her.”

“Why?”

“Because she was wicked, and according to Oliver, so am I.” Thinking of this, I felt amusement and affection, only slightly tinged with loss, and I thought maybe this was how I could look forward to feeling about Oliver in the future.

“Are you?” Will asked me, his voice low and flirtatious. But before I could answer, he said, business-like, “What are the stones?”

“Opal. Really I’m not supposed to be wearing them. It’s not my birthstone, so it’s supposed to be bad luck.” Perhaps I had imagined that flirtatious tone. I almost hoped, my stomach still fluttering with nerves, that I had. Strange how uneasy I was at the thought of actually getting what I wanted. Maybe I was afraid of exchanging desire for disillusionment. I said, “You’re only supposed to wear them if your birthday’s in October.”

“My birthday’s in October.”

“Well, maybe you should wear it.” I took off the ring and presented it to him with a flourish. He put it on his ring finger.

“A perfect fit,” he said. “How embarrassing.”

“Why? We’re practically the same height. I’ve got big hands.” I held my hand up, palm toward him, and he pressed his hand against it. “Same size,” I said.

“No, you’re cheating.” With his other hand he repositioned mine so that the heels of our hands were aligned. Now his fingers extended a little past mine.

“Your fingers are longer but thinner.” I smiled. “They’re slender and tapering.”

Will frowned. “I hate my hands. I look like I’ve never worked a day in my life.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I’ve always thought you had beautiful hands.”

He looked at me a second—we were still palm to palm—and then he said, gruffly, “Thanks,” and withdrew his hand. He made a fist and cupped it, paper smothering rock.

I blushed so deeply I was certain even the dim lights couldn’t hide my embarrassment. Why had I used those words
always
and
beautiful
? I might as well have told him I’d been in love with him for years. I wanted to shout, “You’re stupid!” and run from the room. Instead I caught our waitress’s eye and mouthed, “Check, please.”

Will stared at the table, his hands hidden beneath it, and now I worried that he thought I had asked for the check because I was desperate to get him home and into bed. There was nothing I could do or say that couldn’t be misread. So I sat quietly until the check came, and then insisted, despite his protests, that I pay for my half.

We drove back to his house in silence. He unlocked the door and went inside without a backward glance at me. I followed him, trying to decide if it would be too dramatic a response to pack my things and go. He went to drop his keys on the kitchen counter, and then he stood there a moment with his back to me.

“So.” I swallowed. “I guess I should go.”

He turned. “Go? What are you talking about?”

“You just seem like you . . .” To my dismay, my voice sounded tearful. I wished I’d never come to Gloucester—it was unbearable to be around him—I wished I had never met him at all.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said, as though the admission pained him.

“Why not?”

In two long strides he reached me. He reached out like a man hypnotized and ran the tips of his first two fingers along my collarbone. My breath caught in my throat.

“Because,” he said. He touched my cheek, ran his hand down the side of my neck to let it rest on my shoulder. Then he kissed me.

The beauties of his body, its hollows, its muscles, skin and bone. The valley above his pelvis, large enough for my hand, laid flat. The fine clear lines of the tendons in his neck. The thick veins rising from his forearms to spread across the backs of his hands. The grace of the small of his back. The heat that lived in his belly. To touch him was better than anything I could have imagined. I felt like I was getting what I wanted for the first time in my life, and this was both terrifying and exhilarating, a free fall. I hoped he couldn’t tell how badly I was trembling. Or was he the one trembling? I couldn’t tell, I didn’t care, it was us both.

I woke in
a panic, found myself alone in Will’s bed, and sat up. It was not just dark but black in the room. I must have had a nightmare. It had faded from my mind, but my body was still cold, my breathing shaky—the aftereffects of adrenaline. Will was gone. I imagined he’d woken with regrets, and had gone to sleep the rest of the night downstairs. My throat began to close.

Then I heard the bathroom door open. At this evidence of Will’s presence, instead of a flood of happiness, my panic returned. I rolled over on my side, away from the door, and as I heard him approach I tried to breathe like I was asleep. The bed bounced under his weight as he eased back under the covers. I could feel him there behind me, on his side and propped on his elbow, looking at me. I thought, If he touches me I’ll know he’s not sorry.

I felt him bend over me, felt him brush his lips against the place where my throat joined the hollow above my collarbone. I sighed with pleasure and relief. He put a line of kisses down my bare shoulder, and as I rolled toward him I thought again of dancing with him at the senior prom. I had never danced with a boy so exactly the right height. We seemed to fit together, in a way that suggested nothing had ever quite fit before.

When we woke again in early afternoon Will brought two mugs of coffee upstairs, and we sat propped up in bed and drank them, my leg thrown over his. Will had opened the windows, and a breeze lifted the white curtains. I imagined I could taste salt on the air. I said, “Gloucester seems like a nice place to live.”

“I like it,” he said. He set his coffee down and laid his palm flat on my bare stomach. “Maybe you should stay right here,” he said.

I laughed. “In bed?”

“Exactly,” he said. “This bed is a nice place to live.”

“Won’t my muscles atrophy?”

He grinned. “No,” he said. He moved closer and said into my ear, “Is it crazy if I want you to stay?” He took my earlobe into his mouth.

“I like crazy,” I said. “Crazy’s good.”

“Well, then,” he said. “Stay.” He kissed the side of my neck. “Everything you own is in the car.”

“That’s true.”

“We could move you right in.”

“I could sleep in that back room. With my feet hanging off the futon.”

“I don’t know. I was thinking you could sleep with Jessie on the dog bed.”

I laughed. “I’m not sure how to take that.”

He stroked the inside of my thigh. “I want you to stay,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I just have to go back to the city first.”

Will tensed. He sat up straight. “You really don’t,” he said.

“But I’ve got to find Sonia. It’s my job.”

“Your job’s over.”

I flinched. I swirled the coffee in my cup and took a sip. “Oliver left me instructions,” I said.

“But he’s . . .” He stopped. “I just don’t think you’re going to find her if she doesn’t want you to.”

“How do you know?”

“What are you going to do? Hire a private eye?”

“Suzette,” I said. “I’ll start with Suzette.”

“And if she doesn’t know?”

“Then I’ll find this Martin guy. He’s her fiancé. He must know something.”

Will looked at the clock on his nightstand. “It’s late,” he said. “I guess we’d better get dressed.”

I watched as he got out of bed and disappeared into the bathroom. When I heard the shower go on, I followed him. He was standing with both hands on the sink, staring at himself in the mirror. He turned as I came in. I touched his arm. “What’s the matter?”

He pulled me close, holding me tight. “I’m afraid if you go you won’t come back.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

I found Sonia’s
apartment empty and dark. This was no surprise—at Will’s insistence, I’d called her before I left and gotten the machine. I sat on the couch with my feet propped on the coffee table and looked at the map Will had drawn to Suzette’s apartment. First thing in the morning I’d go there. In the meantime here I was, alone again in someone else’s home. I’d felt sure of my purpose when I’d parted from Will, and sure, too, of the happiness that awaited my return, but suddenly, as I sat there in silence, some uncertainty began to creep in. Everything had happened so fast—maybe I couldn’t trust Will when he said he wanted to be mine. My memory of the last two days seemed like a story someone else had told me, as though I hadn’t been living my own life but some shadow version of Sonia’s. Will had always belonged to her, after all—what if our relationship could exist only in her absence, and was just an echo of theirs? I’d slept with her boyfriend, slept in her bed, and considered working at her office, and now I was tracking down her friends. Oliver had accused me of wanting to lead his life—maybe that was what I was doing with Sonia, moving in like a magpie, trying to take back the life that, eight years before, she’d taken from me.

After college graduation,
Sonia and I drove west together, on a trip she kept calling our farewell tour. It had been almost a year since her father died of a heart attack, walking between his office and his car. In the last few weeks, as we planned the trip, Sonia had started to seem more like Sonia, instead of the remote, brittle person who had been inhabiting my room, staring out the window at the parking lot, drinking bottles of white wine. She had let a junior take over most of her duties at the paper, and she’d all but dropped out of her sorority after they called her before the comportment committee for public drunkenness.

When Mr. Gray died, I was in Korea, where my father had been transferred, and it was days before Sonia found me to tell me the news. I missed the funeral. When she first heard, Sonia was in Nashville, in the summer sublet we had rented with Owen and two of his friends, and Owen was the one to take the phone from her hand after her mother called, screaming as if Sonia herself had killed him. Owen was the one who packed her bag and booked her a ticket home. They had seemed irritated with each other ever since, and I thought perhaps Owen couldn’t cope with Sonia’s grief and need, and Sonia couldn’t cope with his having witnessed them.

After refusing for months to think about the future, Sonia decided a week before graduation to move to Boston with Suzette. She said she would find a job and try becoming a Yankee. There was no reason to stay in Nashville, and certainly no reason to go home. I was headed to the University of Michigan to start a doctoral program in literature. Owen had decided, in the last month, that he wanted to come with me. We had gone up to Ann Arbor and picked out an apartment, and I’d spent the entire weekend clinging to his hand like a new bride. For years he had talked of moving to Memphis with a friend to start a record label. Now all he wanted was to be with me.

Sonia and I planned to spend two weeks exploring Texas and New Mexico. Then together we’d pay a brief visit to her mother before I went back to Tennessee to pick up Owen for our move. As we headed west, the trees grew more and more sparse, until finally we were back in the flat, brown lands of our adolescence. “Ah,” Sonia said, waking up from a nap as we sped across the plains of Texas. “Don’t you feel like you can breathe?”