She didn’t talk during sex either, but she made a soft little humming sound in her throat, and at the end, when they were finished, she sighed in a pleased way.
It became a pattern. They ran together three days a week, and after running they went back to her house and fucked. Once they did it in her car. Once he caught her in the woods and had her up against a tree.
He had never been this adventurous before. The closest he’d come was a night at the beach when he’d slipped his hand down Christine’s blouse and would have taken her on the dunes except they heard people coming and she’d pulled away. Elsa never pulled away. She tried different sexual positions the way other women tried new shoes. The only constant was the light, rhythmic tinkling of the dozens of tiny silver bells on her bracelet.
During the rest of the week he saw her only from afar, wearing revealing dresses and three-inch sandals as she accompanied her husband in the evenings, or hiding behind enormous sunglasses while zipping off to lunch with friends. A bevy of service people came and went from the house — cleaning women, landscapers, carpenters, and pool boys. He knew she spent half her day at a spa.
One afternoon as they were loading the kids in the car to go celebrate their grandfather’s birthday, Christine said, “She’s well maintained,” and he looked up to see Elsa, wearing a filmy white dress and gold sandals, slipping into the Porsche. She glanced over at him and away as if he were of no consequence.
The next day when he fucked her, he took her harder because of it, and when it was over he said, “Don’t ignore me.” She laughed.
He didn’t think of sex with Elsa as making love. He didn’t know her well enough to love her, but he did lust after her. He thought about her constantly, and on the days they didn’t meet he found himself trying to catch glimpses of her. Once he went so far as to walk over to her house and ring the bell. He knew she was home, the BMW was there in the drive, but she didn’t answer the door.
Sometimes she’d talk to him while they recovered in the cavernous bed in the dark master bedroom. He learned about her husband, that he worked in finance, that she’d met him when she was modeling, and found out that she had a German mother and American father.
In her bathroom cabinet were rows of pills, including antidepressants with her name on the bottle. She didn’t appear to have a job or do any meaningful work. He asked her once and she laughed and told him her purpose in life was to look good.
Christine commented on his running so much and he talked about how good it was for him, but when she suggested that they go together in the evenings, he said he preferred to run during the day.
One afternoon, as Andrew pushed his lawn mower around the yard, Elsa’s husband hailed him, coming out of the castle house wearing suit pants and a dress shirt even though it was a Saturday. “Hey there, neighbor,” he said with an affable wave. He stepped gingerly across the freshly mown grass in Italian loafers. “Should have come over earlier and introduced myself. Michael Cantata.” He shook hands, hard, but as Andrew released his grip, the other man’s hold tightened. “I think you’ve met my wife,” he added, looking straight into Andrew’s eyes with a cold little smile.
“Yes.” Andrew met his gaze for a moment, trying to keep his own eyes locked with the gray, predatory ones.
“You trim your own lawn?”
“Yeah.”
“Important to take care of your own lawn. Never want to leave that unattended.” He gave Andrew’s hand one more squeeze and released.
“Does your husband know about us?” he asked the next day when he met Elsa in the woods. She was leaning against an oak tree doing her stretches and seemed annoyed that he’d interrupted her concentration.
“How could he know? He’s at work more than ten hours a day.”
He didn’t believe her. Nobody could be that clueless, but maybe they had an open marriage. Christine now suspected. He caught her checking the pockets of his clothes in the laundry room. “What are you doing?”
“Are you having an affair?”
“What? No! Of course not.” He’d never thought he was particularly good at lying and she stared at him for a long moment, the tension broken when Henry began crying in the other room.
“I’ve been going to the gym,” she said the next morning, barely looking at him, already engrossed in her BlackBerry, so he thought for a moment that she was speaking to someone on the phone. When she glanced up, he realized it was meant for him.
“Great. That’s great.”
“I’ve lost five pounds.”
“Wow! Good for you.” He patted her shoulder as he got up from the kitchen table.
The next time they fucked he told Elsa that they had to end it. She laughed and he realized his timing had been bad, that it would have been believable if he’d said it before having sex instead of after.
He told himself every afternoon that this would be the last time, but promptly forgot his resolve the minute he saw her. He’d known a few addicts — the colleague who really had three-martini lunches and secreted a bottle of scotch in her desk drawer, a former neighbor’s glassy-eyed teenage son who’d been sent to rehab for cocaine addiction, Christine’s roommate from college who threw up in the bathroom after every meal — and he’d pitied them all, never understanding what it meant to have desire consume you like a rash.
One day he found a bruise on Elsa’s arm. He knew her body intimately by then and the spreading purple flower jumped out at him. “How did you get this?”
She moved out of his grasp and he saw, then, that the petals of the flower corresponded to fingers larger than his. “He grabbed you here? Is he hurting you?”
He flashed to a man’s fist wrapped in silver hair at three o’clock in the morning, though he’d never told Elsa about the first time he’d seen her.
“He’s not a happy man,” she said. “He’s not happy if anyone else is happy.”
He fantasized about leaving Christine and marrying Elsa, but these thoughts lasted about as long as his orgasm. She was a kept woman, a trophy wife, and she wouldn’t leave the man who provided for her. And his role in this charade was to be the plaything. He told himself it was a summer fling and it would end before the new semester started.
They were past the two-month mark when Henry came down with a bad chest cold. “We can’t possibly drop him off with my mother,” Christine said. “She’s old and Winnie’s downright elderly.” She glanced at her BlackBerry, then at him. “I’ve got depositions all morning and then I’ve got to be at a hearing in the afternoon, but I can probably take off a little early. Five-thirty maybe? So you can take care of him until then, right?”
He watched over his son, took Henry’s temperature, snuggled with him in the family room while they stared at Sesame Street on the flat screen, and plied him with apple juice, all the while thinking about Elsa waiting for him in the woods. It started to drizzle in the afternoon and he thought of Elsa out in the rain, of her standing on the pathway in a sopping wet T-shirt, of taking her there, under the boughs of a hemlock tree. He left Henry sleeping fitfully and masturbated in the shower.
Three days later Henry’s fever broke, and the next morning he went back to his grandmother’s house. Andrew counted the minutes until he could meet Elsa, driving fast but carefully down hillside roads slick from rain.
Her car was there, but she wasn’t. He walked around it, looking for a note, and pressed his face against the tinted glass to try and see inside, but there was no evidence that she’d thought about him.
Disappointment left him sour and restless. He ran anyway, following their same trail, though it was masochistic in the pouring rain, his legs sprayed with mud, his feet slipping over wet tree roots. He thought he could catch her if he ran faster and pushed his body. When he came to the fork in the trail and had to choose, he thought he saw her imprint in the mud and took the path to the right, which got progressively steeper.