She knew anyway. We were enough alike in these ways and so I felt her get very far into me and felt myself close around her. I wanted to put my legs around her, too, but I couldn’t move them. I felt limp and wonderfully exhausted, slack and peaceful. She seemed to find comfort in this because when I looked she was smiling. Not in any large way, but this small change in her face that I hadn’t seen in a long while, maybe ever.
She took her hand from me slowly, let it stay underneath her when she sank into me. And I felt her hand and the weight of her body as indistinguishable things. And I came in this way, too. A way that made it hard to make out what was what, and harder to care because all that seemed to matter right now was her having had me this way.
But it didn’t last. It went wrong because she wasn’t the right one to have done this, to have done me this way, done this to me. And so from underneath came an emptiness. Seeping through me, despite my attempts to keep it away. It nagged me. Gnawed from inside, forcing me to see Ingrid and I weren’t so very alike, or weren’t anymore. What still worked for her seemed now to fail me. Couldn’t keep pace with what Beth had begun – something that seemed unstoppable, yet might never finish. Or might finish me.
Twenty-Four
I slept, really slept deeply, for the first time in longer than I could determine. Still, I woke uneasy again. Felt nervous of Ingrid, and having her here. I was glad it was late. Glad there was less of the day to face. Glad that it was only a few hours until I’d see Beth because, in the backwards way I have of thinking, I thought she’d help me sort out something I’d never mention to her.
I wanted to feign sleep, let Ingrid get up first and she did seem to be awake, though I didn’t exactly want to know for sure. I had my back to her because, the way we were arranged, her bruises gave her just one way to sleep, which was facing me.
I could feel her body shifting, first in little ways and then she ran her fingers down my back, slipped her leg between mine. It seemed she’d woken to where we’d gone to sleep. I envied her this, wondered how she could manage it. But as I took her hand and pulled her arm around me and felt her mouth on my neck, I realized this was maybe only escape.
Once I’d gotten to this, I couldn’t lie there any longer. If I did I’d see all of last night in this one way only and I needed it to mean more than that. At least for a while I needed it to because I was the one who’d begun from that place. Who’d needed to escape myself, the place Beth had taken me. That old place awash with sorrow.
No matter how hard I wanted to, or pretended to, I couldn’t use Beth for escape. I’d never been able to. What she offered was its opposite. She plunged me into the very things I’d needed to get away from. Swamped me with them through the same means I’d always used to evade them.
Sex with her wasn’t only sex. Not in the way I’d known it for so long. With her it became something else entirely. Something she knew so much better than I did. And her knowing more of this thing I thought I was expert at forced me to see I’d only known its most insignificant pieces. That for as long as I’d let myself remember, I’d kept it to these little bits.
Thinking this way got me to the kitchen and smoking and making coffee, having my first cup there without Ingrid. I brought her hers trying not to think that this mimicked how we’d been at their house. I was tired of the way we couldn’t get beyond the things that had happened there, and that these things still happened to her.
She let me alone. But when I got back into bed I felt her looking for a way in and it pressed down on me. It made me want out – out of the bed, out of the apartment. Made me know I had only the one place to go and not yet.
The day kept awkward like this. The two of us not saying much, doing less. And me trying to keep from the one way we knew each other. She tried to get us back there a few more times, but I wouldn’t let her. I didn’t know until I was on my way to Beth’s that my reluctance was about her and not Ingrid. Or about both of them.
In truth, Ingrid had never let me escape myself either. She’d begun this, started disabling my mechanisms. Not the way Beth had, but by being so like me I couldn’t not see myself. I’d seen myself in her. Seen all the holes in my system – in me – and how apparent they were to anyone who cared to notice. And Beth? She’d been the one who’d noticed, whether I’d been ready for her or not.
I went into her office with this still in my mind. It kept me wary. Kept me from looking at her even longer than usual, and kept me on my feet even longer. She waited me out.
When I finally sat down, I let myself look at her. And soon as I did something large and quiet took me over. The looseness of my body made me want to tell her all about Ingrid. But at the same time it made speaking feel too far away. And it seemed my hearing was off too because when she spoke to me, I barely noticed.
“What?” I asked. And I wondered how long it had taken me.
“Who was with you last night?”
She said it without emotion. But the complete flatness of her voice made clear how hard she was working to keep it that way. At first I thought she somehow knew everything already. I nearly proceeded that way, but my general slowness let her be the one to say what came next.
“I don’t think you should bring them home with you.”
Now her voice wasn’t so steady and this and what she said gave me a direction to take.
I said, “So you’re convinced those are the only people who’d come to my house?”
My voice stayed even through this, but I wasn’t trying. It was this thing still inside me – this quiet that had hold of my limbs and seemed to be running the rest of me.
“I’m saying it might be dangerous.”
I had no clue how to play this. The urge was there, tell her about Ingrid, to use her as a weapon. Instead I said, “I’ve never done that.”
“Then who was it?”
“No one. All right? Who else is there?”
We were still looking at each other. Her face had colored. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. I surprised myself by getting up and walking toward her. I took one of her hands and, when she didn’t get up, looked too startled to, I crouched down. Was on my knees to her. And then, feeling out of my skull, I began kissing her hand. I did this until she let it open.
I pressed her palm against my cheek. Held it there for a little while until I was kissing it again, sucking her fingers. She didn’t move for the longest time. Then her knees, which had begun firm together, loosened, let me closer. I put my other hand under her skirt. Ran it up her thigh to where her stockings ended. And just for a moment I found myself wondering if she’d always worn stockings or if this, too, had something to do with me.
I couldn’t think this way for very long, so instead I listened for her breathing. I tucked my hand in back of her, pulled her close to me and lay my head in her lap. I had my other arm around her, too, but outside her clothes. She’d begun stroking my face and I closed my eyes and simply held on.
We stayed this way for some time – not speaking, not moving too much. Finally she said, “Come on, let me take you home.”
I knew what she meant and wished it was that easy. Wanted her in my bed more than I could ever remember wanting anything, except her, and just last night, just this way. To have to say no, to have to invent some way around it, felt like more than I could manage.
What I said was, “All right.” And we got to our feet and got pulled together. We got ourselves outside and into her car. And I believed that between here and there, in those five minutes, I’d figure something out.
I didn’t and, of course, she could feel me trying to. She kept asking me what was wrong. And then she pulled into the little lot by my place instead of up at the curb. From here, so clearly, you could see my lights on and I watched her noticing this. Ingrid might as well have been standing in the window.