“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Let’s see if I ever see you again first.”
I stood up and joined her by the diagram. “Do I have to stop eating beef?”
She turned to me in surprise. “Yes, now that you mention it. That would be a requirement.”
“And what sort of thing would you give up?”
“A lot,” she said, retreating to the table. “I’ve gotten good at being alone. This kitchen smells the way I want it to smell. I have a problem with smells, I smell things that nobody else can. I’m smelling greasepaint on you right now. It’s nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it’s quiet. It wasn’t easy to become a person who’s OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there, and now some part of me is wishing I hadn’t gone out tonight. Some part of me wants you not to be here. But it’s like you were fated to be here.” She took a breath and looked me directly in the eye. “I waited at that corner for you, Tom. I looked at my watch, and I said I’m waiting five minutes. And you came in four. Four eight, eight four.”
My heart began to pound. I was becoming a sign, I was losing my self, and although I was obviously excited to learn that Anabel had waited for me, the surge of blood in my groin might have been the erection they say men get at the moment of being executed. That was how it felt.
I went to her and dropped to my knees. No less powerful than my desire for her was my wish, now on the verge of being granted, to be the person she allowed into her private world — to mean something in the story she was telling herself. When she put her hands on my shoulders and knelt down in front of me I experienced the gravity of what it meant to her to do this, and was excited even more for her sake than for mine. I looked into her eyes.
She said, “This is our fourth encounter, you know.”
“If you count the phone call.”
“Are you going to kiss me?”
“I’m afraid to,” I said.
“I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of us.”
I brought my face closer to hers.
“You break it, you pay for it,” she whispered.
I could have kissed her all night. I did kiss her all night. How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth. And there were pauses, certainly. There was gazing into each other’s eyes, there was pleasurable discussion of when exactly we’d become inevitable. There was the bounty of her hair, the pure Anabel smell of her skin, the little gap in her front teeth, the physical outskirts with which I needed to acquaint myself before proceeding deeper. There were new apologies and small confessions. There was her sudden, mad, amusing licking of the linoleum to prove to me how clean Anabel Laird kept a kitchen floor. Later there was a move to the sofa in her living room. There was the closed door of the bedroom that nobody but Anabel entered. But mostly we just kissed until dawn exposed us to our raw-eyed selves.
Anabel sat up and reassembled her composure like a cat after an awkward leap. “You need to go now,” she said.
“Of course.”
“I can’t let you in all at once. You can apparently go straight from Lucy to me without skipping a beat, but I’m out of practice.”
“I wouldn’t call myself practiced.”
She nodded seriously.
“I have something to confess and something to ask you,” she said. “I need you to know that Lucy told me things about you. I wanted to scream at her, Shut up! shut up! But she told me you’re a virgin.”
How I hated that word. It sounded outmoded and obscene and accurate.
“Well, so here’s my confession: it matters to me. It’s why I waited for you at the corner. I mean, I waited because I wanted to see you. But also because I thought you might be a person I could start over with. Do you even understand how clean you are?”
My underpants were sticky from hours of steady seepage, but Anabel was right: my dick and I were barely on speaking terms. The stickiness, like the dick itself, was a male embarrassment and seemed to have little to do with the tenderness I felt toward her.
“But that’s not my question,” she said. “My question is what did Lucy tell you about me.”
“She told me”—I chose my words carefully—“that you’d had some bad experiences in high school and hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long time.”
Anabel gave a little shriek. “God I hate her! Why did I stay friends with this person?”
“I don’t care what you did at Choate. I won’t talk about you again with her.”
“I hate her! She’s a gutter with no grate. She has to drag everything down to her level. I know her. I know exactly what she told you.” Anabel squeezed her eyes shut, pushing out mascara tears. “You have to go now, OK? I need to be in my room.”
“I’ll go, but I don’t understand.”
“I want us to be different. I want us to be like nothing else.” She opened her eyes and smiled at me timidly. “It’s really OK if you don’t want to. You’re just a very nice person, Denver-born. I’d understand if you didn’t want any of this.”
My communication lines with my dick were maybe not so very bad, because my response was to pull her face into mine, force her swollen lips into my sore ones. I can’t help thinking that if we’d done the sensible thing and gone ahead and fucked there, on the floor, we might have had a happy life together. But everything in the moment argued against it — my inexperience, my suspicion of my motives, Anabel’s strange notions of purity, her wish to be left alone, my wish not to harm her. We separated, breathing hard, and glared at each other.
“I want it,” I said.
“Don’t hurt me,” she said.
“I won’t hurt you.”
Back on campus, I slept away the morning and went to the dining hall just in time to get food. I found Oswald at the table we preferred, and he greeted me with headlines.
“Aberant to Friend: Enjoy the Party.”
“Really sorry about that.”
“Apologetic Aberant Cites Secret Laird Summit.”
I laughed and said, “Hackett Found Guilty in Laird Hatchet Job.”
“You’re blaming me for that?” Oswald batted his eyelashes.
“Not anymore.”
“Please tell me some butcher paper came into play.”
The Monday issue of the DP was light work, because we had all weekend for it. By late afternoon we’d put it to bed and I was able to call Anabel. She’d slept until three and should have had nothing to report, but lovesickness makes the most minor thoughts and doings worthy of narration. We talked for an hour and then discussed whether to get together that night, since I wouldn’t have another free night until Friday.
“So it begins,” she said.
“What does?”
“Your important responsibilities, my waiting. I don’t want to be the person who waits.”
“I’m the one who’ll be waiting until Friday night.”
“You’ll be busy, I’ll be waiting.”
“You don’t have work to do?”
“Yes, but tonight is my one chance to make you wait. I want you to have one little taste of what it’s going to be like for me.”
If the logic had been anyone else’s, I might have become impatient, but I, too, wanted us to be like nothing else. To prolong an essentially semantic disagreement for half an hour, as we proceeded to do, didn’t frustrate me. It led me deeper into her singularity, our soon-to-be joint singularity. It meant keeping her voice in my ear.