“You scream charmingly,” he says.
“I should give it up for Lent.”
“Can you?”
“Just the screaming,” Kelly says.
He smiles out the windows at this. Then he initiates a shifting of their bodies to lie facing each other, the official small-talk going-on-with-things after having made love for the first time.
He ripples again, from her eyes: they are large and they are as dark as the Gulf in the night and they are wide with the newness of their intimacy. On her forehead is a thumbed cross of ashes.
He lifts his hand and gently draws a fingertip across the ashes. “You went out early.”
“Did I wake you?”
“Are you Catholic?”
“No,” she says. “It’s just a remembrance. That we all die.”
“Today only in the Elizabethan sense,” he says.
“That’s why I’ll never give up sex for Lent,” she says. “It’s already the little death.”
“And that’s why I’m quiet when we do it,” Michael says.
Kelly smiles and she puts a hand in the center of his chest and she pushes him flat and she glides over him and rises above him and she bends to kiss him.
Michael sits up abruptly in his cottage at Oak Alley and he swings his legs off the bed. He does this to stop the memory. He sits there, a little hunched, and he tries to think about putting on a damned-fool of an antebellum swallow-tail dress coat, but he is still kissing Kelly on Ash Wednesday morning, 1984.
∼
And Kelly has, in the flow of her own memory, moved to the same Ash Wednesday morning, and she is screaming as something trembles into focus, into startled clarity inside her, trembles in the place where their bodies are joined and trembles outward into her limbs, her fingertips, her toes. And the silence of this man, which she has noticed at the back of her mind, deepens now even as she forgets about his silence and everything else, and her eyes are squeezed shut. So her memory does not contain — nor does her understanding of this man account for — the fact that his eyes are open and holding steady on her as his body clarifies itself in its own rushing heartbeat of a way. And she will never realize — in all the times of love-making in the quarter of a century before them — that he always keeps his eyes only on her face when his moment begins.
As for Kelly sitting on the side of the bed twenty-five years later, her memory has dissolved into the quiet time after they first made love. They are entwined on the bed and Michael turns his face to her and his fingertip is tracking across her forehead.
“You got up early,” he says.
She understands what his fingertip has found. She lifts her own hand, takes his, brings that fingertip to her mouth and kisses it, finishing the kiss, on an impulse, by parting her lips and touching the ash there with her tongue, which yields a faint texture but no taste. Death should have a strong taste, should burn on the tongue. This is too easy.
“So you’re Catholic?” Michael says.
“Did I wake you?” she says.
He shakes his head no.
“I’m not Catholic,” she says. “I just do the ashes as a remembrance. We all die.”
“Today only in the Elizabethan sense,” he says.
“Now that’s a good reason not to give up sex for Lent. The little death.”
She thinks she sees a tiny pop of his eyebrows at this. He didn’t expect her to get the joke. She sings softly, “There’s always something there to remind me.”
He doesn’t laugh or even smile. He looks at her steadily. But surely in that steadiness is affection. Even if her little outburst of song didn’t charm him into a smile, this steadiness has to be good. And she makes a mistake. As unthinkingly as touching her tongue to the ashes, she says, “Are you glad we met?”
She regrets it at once. His face does not change. Not a flicker of difference. This came out of nowhere for him, she realizes. But his face doesn’t even show surprise. That’s a good sign surely. But there is this scrabbling of need that’s come upon her. “Yes?” she asks.
And as tiny as the pop of his eyebrows a few moments ago, there is a brief, quick lift of the corners of his mouth. A minute smile. “You know the answer to that,” he says.
This is way short of what she needs at the moment. But they made love. He saved her and was gentle with her afterwards, not taking advantage of her vulnerability, not pushing for sex, ready to vanish from his own rooms if she wished and then from her life, but she asked him to stay and he held her and they made love — beginning with the same impulse in both of them at the same moment — impossible even to say who started it — and he thinks her screams are charming when she comes — he said this just a few moments ago, when she was feeling embarrassed. So all this is enough. For now. This is enough.
And in the present, Kelly abruptly rises from the side of the bed. She wants to shout something across the years, some denial to her stupid young self, wants to shout that aloud now. But she doesn’t. She struggles to stay silent, to stand perfectly still, and she succeeds. Of course she does. She’s not crazy.
∼
Michael has not moved from the side of the bed as Laurie hums in the bathroom. He has stopped kissing Kelly on the Ash Wednesday morning when all that would happen between them truly began. He should start dressing for Laurie, but he is putting on a tuxedo now for Kelly. He steps from the master bedroom cedar closet in their Craftsman house on the Bayou Texar. They’ve moved in at last. The muted pitch to its gabled roof, the exposed but rounded and polished rafters, the redwood shingles: all this feels like him and he appreciates that Kelly has let the house be him in these things, without his having to persuade her. She is presently campaigning for an Arkansas governor trying to be president who hasn’t got a rat’s-ass chance of the nomination, and later in the evening Michael will watch as Bill Clinton shakes Kelly’s hand with both his and he will watch how Clinton continues to hold that handshake for the longest time, even as the two of them talk on, and Michael will see her looking up into this man’s eyes and on the night when the man wins she will be curled up on their couch with Michael and she will weep and sing along: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. But now Michael steps out of the closet and he hates wearing this tuxedo and she knows it but he’s doing it for her — he simply pressed his lips tight together when she asked and he saw her eyes go to his lips and he knew she was seeing his feelings there and he knew she knew how he hates dressing up formally but how he’ll do it for her — and now he steps from the closet and she comes to him and looks up into his eyes and she holds his gaze for a moment, smiling faintly, and she straightens his tie. “Thank you,” she says. And no more needs to be said, and he is content. He thinks this is a moment when it is all good. As good as it can be between a man and a woman. He has quietly done this simple domestic thing on her behalf. She says two words to acknowledge that. They look at each other. His tie is straight, though such a thing isn’t important to him and even makes him oddly uncomfortable and she knows it and her little smile says to him she’s all right with his not caring about his tie but he will let it stay straight tonight for her, he’ll even stop before the mirror before he leaves the restroom at the fundraiser and he’ll straighten it himself, on her behalf. And he is not jealous of her joy at shaking Bill Clinton’s hand or of the man holding on too goddam long. He trusts Kelly. He trusts her instinctively and completely.
And he stops his mind now, as Laurie’s hair dryer roars on the other side of the bathroom door. He stops and he is about to rise and dress in a suit of clothes even more alien to him than that tuxedo. And along the way in this memory he’s just had — in his lingering for just a moment over the contentment he felt in the two of them wordlessly understanding each other — an even earlier event coursed beneath the surface. Michael does not go there now. He couldn’t even consciously summon this deeper memory if he was moved to try. But his sense of ease with Kelly on the night of the Clinton fundraiser was rooted in that past event, for it had given him an initial impression of what his life would be with Kelly, and that impression settled into him, and it would not change for a quarter of a century. The impression would remain and affect everything, even though the memory of the event itself would eventually vanish.