The Most Wanted (29 page)

“What’s the matter?” Stuart asked.

“I’m wishing,” I said.

“Looks painful.”

“I’m almost there,” I said, and I wished hard. I wished for . . . family happiness. I figured that covered everything. When I opened my eyes, Stuart was shaking his head and grinning. “You’re one crazy chick,” he said. “Let’s go see if Mother Bates is sitting up in the front parlor at your house.”

A light was, in fact, burning in one window at 4040 Azalea Road. Charley was gone, but now he left a light on every night at my request. I wanted my house to take on the look of being lived in as soon as possible. In the dimness, the house did its best boasting. It looked magnificent, and from my window a tongue of lace curtain billowed in the breeze like a beckoning. We’re a pair, I thought then, my house and me. I’d reached the age when low light was going to be my best friend as well. Stuart and I leaned on the fence, and I told him all about the progress of the renovation: in a few weeks, once the plumbing and electricity inside were at least at the level of a primitive Scout camp, Charley would start planting for summer. He would “liberate” native species from all his gardens and step-gardens. That last sweet explanation had been a symphony to my ears—finally, something that wasn’t going to cost me a little more.

“Ah, Stuart,” I told him, gesturing up at the portico. “This is my dowry, not to mention my retirement condo and everything else I ever hoped to buy or own. My little piece of the rock.”

“Annie,” he said then, “I have a present for you.” He took out a flat, round package, shaped like a mirrored compact. It had an acrylic resin dome with the slender image of a skeleton Madonna in the center. Dressed in rags made of Spanish moss, the fragile skeleton was ringed by a wreath of chiles pequins sculpted into the shape of flowers.

“Oh, Stuart,” I breathed, in frank amazement.

“It’s really sick, Annie,” he told me cheerfully. “You should love it.”

“I do, I do, and I can’t believe you gave it to me. . . .”

“Huh? I’m a sentimental guy, baby.”

“I mean, I know you don’t like it. Stuart, you don’t tend to give people things you . . . don’t think are good for them.”

“Well,” he replied, after a long beat, “then you should probably have this too.”

It wasn’t a diamond. It was a pearl, set in the hollow of two arabesques of gold, like wings.

“It’s an engagement ring, Annie,” Stuart said. “It’s Valentine’s Day. Don’t think I forgot. It’s the day you get engaged. It’s not like any other engagement ring, because you’re not like any other woman. I want us to be engaged. But it won’t be an engagement like any other, because we already live, as they say, under common law, as husband and wife. But I’d also like it to be as short an engagement as possible. Like, until the weekend.”

“It’s gorgeous. It’s wonderful,” I told him, meaning it, holding my hand up under the streetlamp to watch the moon-colored light slip and slide on the surface of the pearl. “Is it a real pearl?”

“Oh Jesus, Anne.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, you know . . .”

“Actually, yes, it is real. And it’s from Texas. Right from here.”

“I love it. And I love you for it. But, Stuart, is this really the time for this? We didn’t count on the job change and everything, and this leaky old joint. . . .”

“Well, Anne . . .” Stuart put his hands in his chino pockets and inclined his head to take in the blue-jean sky, the witchly stoop of the pecan tree over my porch. “This here’s Texas. And I guess this here’s our house too.” I had my arms around his neck before I had a chance to reflect. “I can always get some kind of county job here. And if that doesn’t work out, we’ll just peddle the place. . . .” My heart bumped, once, hard. “Or I’ll do private practice. There’s lots of options.”

“But you don’t want other options, Stuart. You want what you want.”

He bit his lower lip. “I . . . do. But, well, I love you too, Anne.”

“And as far as marriage, what about . . .”

“I’ve researched this, don’t worry. Basically, it’s a simple act. I say I do. Then, if you’re not up to it, I say that you do too.”

“I do,” I said into his neck. He was so sweet. He smelled, anachronistically, of Lilac Vegetal, as familiar a smell to me as Rachie’s Opium, which breathed from every closet in her house. “I really do.”

“You mean what about a baby, though, don’t you?” he said.

“Well, I haven’t changed my mind. I mean, honey, I haven’t made up my mind. I might want a child. I might very well want a child.”

“And so?”

“Stuart?”

“So we’ll have a kid.”

“Are you serious, Stuart?”

“Annie, look. I’m not kidding, if that’s what you think. I don’t think I’m really father material. I don’t know if I want to have a child, and I don’t know if I can do it. But I’m also not going to count on the fact that once we’re married, my excessive physical charms and intellectual probity will dissuade you from sharing your life with anybody but me. Though that’s probably what I want.”

“This doesn’t sound very hopeful, Stuart.”

“Well, you didn’t let me finish. But then, you never let me finish.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What I was going to say is, I’m not sure I’m up to it, but if I’m ever going to be up to it, I’m going to be up to it now, with you.”

“Stuart . . .”

“Because I want to be your husband more than I don’t want to be a father. And it isn’t like I don’t want to be a father. I’m sure I would make very cute offspring.”

“I’m not so sure,” I dithered. “I mean, we’ve taken chances and nothing has happened. . . .”

“Baby, you ain’t taken the kind of chances I intend to take with you.”

“Seriously, Stuart.”

“Seriously, Anne. The body has a head, you know?
We
haven’t really tried to make a child. I think maybe you have to want to. . . .”

“Sure, Stuart. Like all those people in Rwanda or Biafra . . .”

“Well, I don’t know. Jeez, Anne, don’t put me in the position of reassuring you on something I don’t want—”

“You didn’t say you didn’t want it. You said you weren’t sure you wanted it.”

“And you aren’t sure
you
want it. So we’re in the same boat.”

I knew we weren’t. Not really.

“You got a key to this thing?” Stuart asked me, using the sleeve of his shirt to polish the brass “4040” worked into the iron gate of the house.

“I do,” I said, and Stuart carried me over the threshold.

“My God,” he said, looking around after setting me on my feet. “Where’s Morticia? Where’s Lurch?”

“It’s a lot better than the last time you saw it, Stuart.”

“Well, the bats are outside for the night at least, I guess.”

I sighed. There
were
bats, but if I told Stuart this, it would really spoil the mood, which was taking on that soft-focus quality that preceded lovemaking. Each time we’d touch—bumping hips or grazing arms as we negotiated the hallway—there was a growing awareness, a physical intention.

“Now come on. You look at this,” I told Stuart, leading him into the library, where Charley had smoothed a dropcloth under the ceiling of stars and planets. He’d begun restoring the gilt; I reached up and showed Stuart where the constellations, faithfully rendered, began at the edge of the domed ceiling.

“Anne,” he said after a while, fighting laughter. “You’re glowing in the dark.”

In the tiny bathroom mirror, I saw what he meant. My hair and even my eyelashes were dusted with a sifting of gold leaf. “I guess he hasn’t got it exactly . . . fixed, yet, or something,” I said.

“I think it’s pretty. I think you should keep it this way. It goes with the house.” He kissed the back of my neck, and slid his hands up under my sweater, neatly unhooking my bra with a practiced flick. He worked my breasts with both hands, increasing pressure from his thighs behind me as I leaned against the sink, pulling my sweater away and nuzzling and sucking on my neck and shoulders, nearly to the point that it nettled, pleasurably. I leaned back against him, feeling for a point of pressure, of contact.

“I want us to be naked, Stuart,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”

“You don’t have a bed, Anne.”

“Then here. Now.”

I unzipped my jeans and let them drop and listened as Stuart, behind me, rustled out of his own clothes. He reached around to open me, but I pushed his hand away. “I’m ready,” I said. “I’m all ready.”

As he made love to me, I watched my own face in the mirror, watched my lips part and grow plump with the sexual rush, the gold in my hair and on my chin catching the intermittent gusts of street light that entered the room—first hidden, then revealed by wind swaying a branch on the pecan tree. Stuart’s head and face were lost behind me in the shadows. In the bronze gloom of that mirror, I could have been a ghost myself, with my ghostly lover. The pulse of Stuart inside me became deeper, more rhythmic. . . . I thought of trying to wait, to tease myself and make it better, but I was already too far gone, and I crumpled against him gratefully, holding my breath, reaching down between us as if to seal us together. Then, as I finished, Stuart gripped my arms with both hands, and then pulled back abruptly, coming, awkwardly, hot against my cool bare backbone.

“What?” I asked. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry. Force of habit,” he told me, breathing in gasps. “Remembered we didn’t have any birth control . . .”

“Oh Stuart,” I cried, suddenly furious. “We just agreed we were getting married, what do a few months matter . . . ?” Unceremoniously, I stepped around him and left him, pants down, in the dark bathroom.

“Wait, baby.” He followed me into the library, and curled up next to me where I’d thrown myself down on Charley’s painter’s cloth. I noticed a similar cloth, draped over the old Victrola in the corner. I thought of that night at Christmas, of our dance. “We didn’t agree to have kids right now, Annie. Tonight.” Stuart sounded peevish to me, tiresome.

“Well, I probably wouldn’t have got pregnant anyhow. I’m probably sterile.”

“Well, then we won’t have one. Or we’ll adopt.”

“At a time like this, Stuart, having just practiced college-boy sex on me, you’re supposed to reassure me, not think logically.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, then I’ll tell you something really sappy. I’m sorry.” I was silent. “Okay?” he persisted. “Should I say the three most beautiful words in the English language?”

I started to smile against my will.

“I was wrong.”

“Okay, okay.” I nodded. “It’s not that big a deal.”

“You know, when I was buying that ring,” Stuart said, “I was thinking, you know, what if I’m already too late?”

“Too late?”

“Like, what if she doesn’t say yes?”

“Stuart, come on . . .”

“No, Anne, it’s not, that’s the thing. I never thought it was a given. I’m lucky, Annie. I’m a lucky guy is all.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“What?” Stuart sat up, spiking his hair with one hand. “And all this time, I thought I was the only one! Isn’t that what all this means to you?”

“Stuart,” I said, “you can be such a doof. Cut it out.”

“Well, I’m not all that good at this stuff. It’s not something I’ve practiced. I just . . . wanted you . . . to know. Now can we plan the wedding?”

“I’m the girl. Aren’t I supposed to say that?”

Throughout that long and good night, we talked and dozed. We agreed on a wedding in April—Stuart wanted his anniversary to be in the cruelest month. I thought I might have enough money by then to buy a fancy suit, at least at a vintage store. Charley could get the yard cleaned up so that we could have an outdoor tent here. And by then the house itself would probably be more or less habitable—or so I thought, though it did not turn out to be in anything near move-in condition until the end of the summer. Sometime during that night, we woke up and made love again (a not-so-common phenomenon after ten years, but then, neither was an engagement).

“Stuart,” I asked him when we finished. “Are you scared? About this marriage? And about me? I mean, you’re the one who says all life is timing. What if we passed our moment and we didn’t know?”