The Pillow Friend (27 page)

“I mean sex.”

“So do I. It's better to let these things take their natural course. You mustn't take a little, er, hydraulic failure on my part as a slur on
you
. You're lovely. It's not your fault if I can't rise to the occasion.”

Her face was burning hot, but at least her tears had dried up. She had never imagined that talking about sex with someone who was her lover could be so excruciatingly embarrassing. “I don't mean tonight. I meant sex in general, between us, how it's been . . . or not.”

“Please don't let's get started on something that . . . you're tired and emotional. We both are.”

“We haven't made love very often. . . .”

“Did you think I hadn't noticed?” His voice, although low, was a howl of pain which caught in her throat. Tears flooded her eyes again, and she clutched at him. “Did you think I couldn't feel you willing me not to touch you whenever we were in bed?”

“Oh, Gray, oh, oh, darling, I did want you, I did, and I still do, only—” Sobs strangled her words.

“Hush, hush.” He sounded weary. “Don't upset yourself. Don't try to say any more.”

But there was one thing she was determined to ask him in the darkness, while they were still this close, one thing she had to know. She struggled to stop crying, to control her breathing. “The first time we made love wasn't the greatest—I thought it was a mistake, really, and that I'd kind of pushed you into it. That's why I left.”

“Silly girl.” He kissed the top of her head.

“But after that, the next time, when I took you to—when we made love, there, it was totally different. At least it was for me. Was it for you? Do you remember? Was it as good for you, that time?”

“Let's not dwell on the past.”

“But I want to know. I need to know.”

“Yes. Yes, it was good for me. And it will be again, even better. I promise you, it can be. I'm just sorry I couldn't prove it to you sooner.” He sighed rather shakily, and then said firmly, “No more talk. We'll talk in the morning. Go to sleep now.”

Relief flooded her. So he wasn't the same as Alex; he did remember, and he wasn't afraid of her. She realized how weary she was, and stopped fighting against sleep. Just as she was dropping off she thought she heard him say, “I love you.”

Things were strange and strained between them the next day and it was hard to know how to fill the morning. They left the house after breakfast and she took him to the Galleria. It was either that or art galleries, and he hadn't been to a mall yet.

“Not that the Galleria is really typical of American malls. It's kind of more . . . well, ritzy and expensive. There's a Neiman-Marcus and a Saks.”

“Hmmm, I don't know that my budget will run to souvenirs from Neiman-Marcus. I have scarcely any money left. Although there are a few people I really ought to bring presents back for, like the neighbor who's been watering my plants, and, um . . .”

“Caroline?” She heard the sharpness in her own voice.

“What are you implying?”

“Just that she might expect a present.”

“Then if I don't bring her one that's another mark against me. And if I do, I'm trying to curry favor and we'll carry on—is that what you'd like? For me to continue with Caroline?”

He had told her too much about his problems with Caroline, although he probably thought he hadn't. She had been careful never to express anything but sympathy for him and had almost convinced herself that she was not jealous, yet knowing that he could be with the other woman tomorrow, she felt bitter. “I'm not telling you what to do. That's up to you.”

“How about you? Will you be going back to your bloke once I'm gone?”

She shrugged uneasily. She'd had some painful moments of missing Jack, regrets about what she had done, but that was that. “We'll probably break up.”

“Only probably?”

“I'll have to tell him the truth. He's an easygoing guy, but he's not a doormat. We'll break up.”

“Will you be sorry? Have I just ruined your life?”

She was suddenly tired of all this emotion. She longed to be alone in her car, on the highway going home, three hours spent driving toward Austin without the sound of another voice except for that of the radio DJ calling out the hits. She thought she might wait a few days before seeing Jack. It would be good to have some time to herself. “Of course not. We were bound to break up eventually. Let's shop.”

On the way to the airport, their final journey together, there were long stretches of silence. Anything said now had to be trivial or it took on an almost unbearable significance. Only a few more hours left to say everything there was to say. Agnes wished it over with.

She parked in the long-term parking lot and took him inside to check his suitcase and get his boarding pass. Then, with nearly two hours to kill before his flight was called, they looked for somewhere to sit down. She spotted an empty table in a cafeteria-style coffee shop and told Graham to claim it while she stood in line. “I'll get coffee and . . . do you want anything else? A sandwich? No? Sure? I'll get us both coffee, then.”

She'd only been standing in line about a minute when she heard him behind her. “This is crazy,” he said. “Come away from that queue. I was looking at you across the room and wondering what I was doing, letting you walk away from me. I don't care about coffee. I just want to be with you.” She was shocked to see that he was crying.

“Oh, Gray!” She reached up to wipe the wetness from his cheeks. “Don't, please don't cry.” Her own eyes filled sympathetically.

“I don't want to lose you. I can't bear it. I never expected this to happen, I never planned to fall in love with you, but I have. Oh, Nancy, please, please come with me. Come and live with me in England.”

She stared at him in astonishment. It was like something she might have imagined long ago, but not now, not after what had not happened between them.

“I'm serious. I know I'm no great prize, I know I'm difficult to live with, I know my past history with women is—but I'm serious about you, I want something different with you, I want to change my life. Oh, God, I wasn't going to say it now, here, like this, but—I want to marry you. I want you to be my wife.

“No, don't answer me now, think about it, we can live together first and then decide if it really makes sense. I know life in England will be different for you, you might not like it, but please, won't you try it, for my sake? Give me a chance?”

She bit her lip. “I don't know what to say. I—this is a horrible place to talk about it, but . . . there is a problem, isn't there?”

“You mean the sex,” he said readily. “I'm a disappointment to you.”

“No! I didn't mean it like that!” She felt herself going red.

“This isn't the place to talk about it.”

“I know, but—”

“But I'm pushing you. It's so unfair. Nancy, we hardly know each other, and that's the truth. But I do know I love you, and I
want
to know you. We can work things out. There's often trouble at the beginning, adjustments to be made. The sex will get better, I'm sure of it. All we have to do is want it to.”

The sex could get better—it had been better, once. It had been the best ever. That memory would be with her always, the memory of their time in the little house in the woods, when he had been her perfect lover, better than she'd ever dreamed. If they'd had it once, why shouldn't they have it again?

“Yes,” she said. No other decision was possible, this story had been written long ago. This was the life she'd been waiting to find, and he was offering it to her. To live with a poet—her poet—in England. It was the great wish of her life, and she had to accept it, whatever the consequences. She smiled, seeing he hadn't understood. “I do want to. I will try. I'll come to England.”

“Oh, Nancy!” He threw his arms around her, squashed her to him. A button on his jacket pressed painfully into her breastbone. Just as quickly he let her go. “Come on, I'll buy you a ticket. I don't care what it costs if only there's a seat left on my flight!”

“Gray, I can't, not like that. I can't fly back with you now.”

“Why not? You want to talk to your boyfriend first, decide if I'm really a better deal?”

“No, of course not, it's nothing to do with him.”

“Get your roommate to pack your things and ship them to you, COD. You can write to your employers and your bank. What else . . . oh, your car. Surely you can leave your key here and call your mother, tell her to come and get it. She could keep it for you or sell it if you decide to stay. Come on, Nancy, if you love me, come with me now.”

She was torn. Part of her resisted his urgency while another part responded to his desire with a reckless excitement of her own. How wonderful, to live life like an adventure, like a fairy tale, to run away with the handsome prince the moment he asked, to let the god in animal form bear her across the sea to Europe. He wasn't perfect, but he was the man of her dreams. Of course she could manage to work out all the boring details of quitting her job and selling her car through friends and the mail.

“Say yes,” he urged.

She opened her mouth and winced as she remembered. “I can't. My passport's in Austin.”

THE POET'S WIFE

—Joyce Carol Oates, “Thanksgiving”

S
he waited too long before she went to him.

Two months of preparations and conclusions, selling everything that wouldn't fit in two suitcases, giving farewell parties, rewriting her book, re-creating Graham Storey inside her head until he became the man she loved, her future husband. She no longer doubted her desire to be with him.

The first thing he said when they met among the crowds at Gatwick, his voice a stark, accusing cry, was “You've cut your hair! Your beautiful hair—why?”

She'd worn her hair long and straight, a lazy fairy-tale princess, since she was sixteen. She'd cut it because she was grown up at long last, beginning her new life. She said, “Don't you like it?”

“It doesn't matter. I'm sorry. It's fine. Only—I did love your beautiful long hair.”

“You should have said so.” Regret seeped into her, a slow, distant pain. He looked more ordinary than she remembered, smaller and older. The lines that bracketed his mouth were deeper. Even the blue of his eyes had faded.

He smiled. It was a stiff, unconvincing grimace. “Never mind.” He hugged her. “Welcome. I should have said that first. Nothing else matters. I'm glad you're here at last.”

She knew, as she hugged him back, clinging too tightly and for too long, that she had made a mistake; they did not belong together. But she was not sorry she had come, because out there was London, England, that real place she had visited so often in fantasy, had lived in for the duration of so many books throughout her life. Part of the lure of Graham had always been his Englishness, the promise she imagined of being able to slip into his life and know it from the inside.

He drove her away in his little black English car, up through South London into the center, pointing out the sights. Some she recognized from pictures or movies; others had previously been only words on paper. Now it was real. Traveling along the Embankment, gazing at ornate lampposts, pedestrians, the River Thames, her heart beat wildly, until she thought it would burst with joy. She was here. Her wish had come true.

Harrow was a disappointment. It was not the village she had supposed, but just another part of the suburban London sprawl, only redeemed by the picturesque hill with the old school on top. Graham's “cottage” was a tiny, cramped row house, and the front door opened directly onto a main road, without the buffer even of a small garden. The windows were grimy, and the sound of traffic was a constant, even late at night. Heavy goods vehicles rumbling past made the whole house shudder.

It was only two rooms up and two down (plus a poky bathroom just off the kitchen by the back door), and with the muffled sounds of their neighbors' lives a parenthesis about their own, it felt to her more like an apartment than a house. The rooms were poorly lit, the windows at the front shrouded in netting, and even now, in summer, with the back windows open, and flies coming in, it was cold. There was an omnipresent smell of damp paper, stale cigarettes and something else she couldn't identify. The furniture, inherited from his parents, was ugly and there was too much of it.