The Eliot Girls (17 page)

As Audrey opened her knapsack, Arabella was already standing to leave. “By the way,” she said. “Your hair looks really good that way.”

Audrey fought to keep the smile off her face.

 

AUDREY HAD NEVER BEFORE
known the thrill of rebellion, of real secrets that could get her into trouble. Her body had gone unexpectedly quiet, but her mind leapt and blazed, a flashing mess of wordless impressions that couldn't properly be called thoughts. Later, it occurred to her that this was her body's way of letting her do something risky. If her body had been in the same state as her mind, all tingling, turbulent disorientation, she would barely have been able to walk. But her legs were dependably solid, carrying her to her purpose.

It was Monday morning, and Audrey was hurrying down the hall. She had reached the point where physical and mental determination were unified. Transiently, transcendently, she was nearly able to obliterate all awareness of the outside. She registered the classroom as she passed it, registered even the figure of Seeta, standing by the window, but she averted her eyes and kept her pace. It was like diving into a cold lake. An immersion.

She was unzipping her knapsack as she rounded the corner to the lockers, pulling out her binder even as she hastily surveyed the scene, noting just one person in sight giggling into a cellphone at the far end of the hall. Circumstances were as close to ideal as they were going to get. Seeta's locker was second from the end. Wasting not a second, she dropped her bag and, barely glancing at the note, slid it through the crack.

And it was done.

Two strides took her to her own locker, where she exhaled heavily, feeling as though she were breathing for the first time in minutes. Now her body came back to life. Her fingers trembled as she fiddled with her lock. Her heart began to race violently. The sensations of her body were so commanding that it took her a moment to account for her emotions. And when she did, she realized that what she felt was not the expected guilt, flaring uneasily in her gut, not panicky regret. No urge to reach in with tweezers and reclaim the message. No, she was overcome by elation, thorough and unconflicted. Her nerves only fed the rapture, intensifying its novel countenance. She wanted only to stand where she was, letting it wash over her.

As she stood there, she understood that this feeling was the only necessary end. That all along, the note had been about this, just this. The act itself. The heady, resolute journey down the hallway. Her too-known fingers set to a purpose never foreseen. Her awkward body, in a moment of utter clarity.

 

IT WASN'T UNTIL NEARLY
the end of the day that Ruth knew it would happen. With Richard late at work and Audrey at a French tutorial, she had been frantically determined to take her proposal to Henry, but she hadn't been able to locate him until lunch. His reply had been that he had to check his schedule, as if she were booking him for a dental appointment. It wasn't until just before the final period of the day that he snagged her in the hall and confirmed that he could make it. The lack of resolution had made her testy and restless—how easily she shifted from adoring him to hating him and then back again—but she realized as she rushed home from school that not knowing sooner had preserved her sanity.

Once in the door, she fussed about the house. She had only fifteen minutes to get ready for his arrival. She let the dogs into the yard, stifled the impulse to hop in the shower, and focused on the appalling amount of dog hair in the front hall. She dragged the vacuum up from the basement and went aggressively to work. She worried about how her house would represent her. Looking around, she saw all the antiques, the pieces she had loved when she bought them, and was somehow embarrassed by them, by the values they revealed her to have. She should seem to care less about things.

Ruth had just stashed the vacuum back in the basement and was becoming convinced that Henry would not show up when his knock broke the silence.

Approaching the door, she saw his tall figure perfectly framed by the long, oval window. He was looking downwards and to the side. When he glanced up and saw her, she gave an awkward wave. Stevie and McGill, spotting the visitor, howled and paddled at the back door. She held up a hand to Henry to indicate that she'd be with him in a moment, then let the dogs back in and was almost knocked over as they made for the front door, wagging uncontrollably. Marlow took a seat at the base of the stairs, panting heavily, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. He had recently had several decaying teeth pulled, and the gaps were well displayed now; the rank odour of his breath filled the hallway. Embarrassed, Ruth gave him an ineffective shove in the direction of the kitchen.

When she finally opened the door, the barrier remained. She and Henry stood on opposite sides of the threshold, and they neither moved nor spoke, at a loss for how to go ahead. It wasn't until this moment that she stopped wondering whether he would go through with it. Her own follow-through she had never questioned. Such thoughts, she felt, were rarely anything more than a disingenuous, rather cowardly nod to morality for people who wanted to believe they were better than they were. At least she would be honest with herself.

She pulled him inside—fear of the neighbours masquerading as an assertion of desire—but once she had him in the hallway, she had no idea how to behave. Even though they were in her house, she wanted him to take the lead. She couldn't figure out either how to be with him in her home or how to be in her home with him. Where was all the consoling busywork of the hostess? The prospect of offering him a drink made her feel like the aging fifties housewife in her pink satin bathrobe, clanking the ice in her glass of Scotch, trying to seduce the young mailman. The fear of getting caught was present, but only abstractly. She was conscious of her stupidity, her recklessness, but was unable to take their full measure. More immediate was the mystifying stress of having him in her space, among the things that reflected her so inaccurately.

“Would you like a glass of water?” she finally asked.

He shook his head.

The dogs were skittering around them, sniffing his pant legs, their noses aspiring upwards towards his groin. He patted their heads dismissively and tried to ignore them, but they persisted.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Strangers excite them.”

Henry nodded with a tolerant smile.

When she had finally managed to bribe the dogs away from him and settle them on the couches, using cookies from the pockets of her winter coat, she returned to the hall and dropped her head defeatedly. “Listen,” she said.

“Must I?” He stepped towards her and grabbed the front of her shirt.

As she led him upstairs, she offered a cursory nod to all the thoughts she knew she should be having. She knew how it was supposed to go. You think of the fact that you shouldn't be doing this. You think of what can go wrong. You think of the minutes, the seconds that remain for you to change your mind. You do not lead a man who is not your husband into the master bedroom, the bed still unmade from last night's sleep, certainly not when there's a perfectly impersonal guest room across the hall, with a barely used queen bed dressed with barely used sheets, with freshly dusted night tables and tastefully generic botanical prints on the walls, with the airy nowhere smell of a place no one has fought in, no one has spent a wakeful night in, no one has made love in. You do not breeze past that place of indifferent welcome and fall back on the rumpled sheets that smell, just slightly, of your husband's hair. You do not let yourself go so completely without a thought for the consequences.

Ruth's hair was in Henry's hand, being pulled somewhat uncomfortably, but she had no time to adjust his grip, to consider the improvement of this choreography, so grateful was she to find herself here, with him. A button popped off her blouse and went skittering across the wood floor. As if in repudiation of the comic potential of this gaffe, Henry roughly pulled her skirt off, followed by her underwear. Then his clothes were gone, and his kiss was pushing her head into the pillow. It was not like her to be so submissive, so ecstatically trapped, but dominance suddenly felt like passion, submergence like flight. She could do nothing but yield as his hands pushed her thighs apart. Yet for all this force, it was the lightness of his body upon hers that confirmed how far she'd strayed from everything she knew.

Afterwards, Henry lay on his back on her side of the bed, his arms folded behind his head and her pillow bunched under his neck. His body was as lean and athletic, as taut and insignificantly muscled as a teenager's, and his grey hair was damp along the temples, his brow dewy. Though his long body was open and languid, laid out with an almost feminine looseness, his left hand grasped her inner thigh tightly, as if it alone were still caught in the transports of several minutes ago.

Then he began to shake his head and laugh, a real laugh erupting from his belly. Abruptly he rolled onto her and lifted himself up on his elbows. His face hovered over hers.

“You should know this,” he said. “Some vaginas are like tomatoes. Some are like apples. Tomatoes and apples are both good. But yours? Yours is most definitely an apple.”

Ruth giggled. Held up against his usual reserve, the absurdity of this made her delirious. She had never thought him capable of madness.

“It's going to be very hard to leave this bed.” He spoke in a low voice, as always, a boyhood habit he'd developed as a method of fighting his stutter.

When he kissed her neck, his breath formed a moist fog in the hollow of her collarbone. A noise from downstairs startled her, but it was only a dog digging at the carpet. Ruth tried to lose herself again, but the world was barrelling towards them: the car door slamming on the street outside, Stevie and McGill play-fighting in the living room, the loud whirr of some massive electrical tool in a house being renovated nearby. There had been an elemental innocence about the physical predictability of sex. It was far more difficult now to dispatch her mind into oblivion and the brief deliverance it offered. Dogs barked. Cars slowed and sped. Water dripped from the bathroom faucet. (Could she really be hearing that?)

He turned onto his back. “This I like very much,” he said, gesturing to a minimalist etching of a nude woman framed above her bedside lamp.

“It was my mother's,” she replied. “She met the artist once, I think.”

From the etching, her eyes cast down to the nightstand, to the framed photograph of Audrey and her taken a decade earlier. With her index finger, she tipped it down, then turned back to see if Henry had noticed.

“I like the way the artist doesn't try to make her beautiful,” he said, still looking upwards.

One of her long hairs lay across his forehead. Ashamed of her shedding, she reached over and pulled it away. “What I always liked about it is the way she's looking at something we can't see. There's all that subservience in the way she's sitting. When I was a kid, I liked to think she'd been captured and whisked away to some remote beautiful place. I thought she was looking into the distance for her saviour. Of course I don't see it that way at all now.”

“How do you see it?”

“I suppose I see less depth in it now. I assume the artist told her to look that way. It's his vision of how the picture should look, not hers.”

Henry sat upright and repositioned the pillow behind his head. “When I was young, I thought all women looked like this, that beauty was just their natural state. I never much noticed women who weren't beautiful. They simply didn't exist. My mother was the first woman I ever saw naked, as is true for most people, and of course, I didn't recognize her as beautiful. I just thought that was the way women looked. She was tall and slender, and entirely comfortable being naked. Publicly, she was quite severe, and indeed privately severe in most ways, but she used to walk around the apartment naked after a bath or a shower, rubbing her hair with a towel. I never thought anything of it. But when I saw an unclothed woman sexually for the first time, I was probably fifteen or sixteen, and I was unbelievably disappointed in her body. I didn't quite realize what she would look like naked, based on how she looked in clothes. She was about 160 pounds, not a particularly tall woman, so obviously I knew she would be thicker, but I was floored, absolutely floored, by how dowdy and flabby her body was. It didn't at all fit my idea of the female form.”

“Don't say that! It's terrible,” Ruth said, secretly delighted. “How callous of you.”

“I felt bad about it. I was still attracted to her. You know, I was a sixteen-year-old male, she was willing. I liked her fine, but I always had to make adjustments when I saw her body. I always took a moment out. I stayed with her for nearly three years. Didn't want to be superficial. But towards the end of our relationship, I would look at her body during sex and wonder how much longer I could carry on.” He paused. “Now that I think of it, I suppose that consciously resisting superficiality was solid proof of what a bastard I was in the first place.”

“I'd say so.”

He traced his knuckles down the side of her body, from her shoulder all the way to her knee. “But you,” he said, “you require no adjustments.”

“To be compared unfavourably to a lover's mother,” she said. “Not a desirable position to be in.”

“Think of all the scintillating hours of psychoanalysis I've contributed to.” He coughed into his arm. “I could use a little water.”

Before she could offer to get him a glass, he jumped up and headed for the bathroom. He slurped noisily from the faucet, then urinated, the door still open. She felt a rush of affection for him. The light was fading in the windows, but she couldn't bring herself to feel worried. Audrey was meeting Richard at the clinic after her tutorial, and he had said that he wouldn't be home until at least 6:30. Something could always happen to change that, of course, but she wouldn't let herself consider that possibility. The toilet flushed, and Henry returned, wiping water from his mouth as he crossed the room.