“Finally,” Owen whispered into the darkness as we lay beside each other afterward.
I turned to face him. I’d had sex with enough men to know that something else entirely had happened here. “Owen, what is this?”
“Shhh …” he said and he pulled the sheet over us and drew me so close to him that I no longer knew where my skin ended and his began.
I woke just as the sky was lightening through his uncurtained windows. Owen slept on his stomach, sprawled across the bed with the same unself-conscious abandon I associated with his laugh.
In the morning light I distrusted my own sense of what had happened the night before. I needed to be back in my apartment, at my desk, anchored to my small and tidy life, not swept away into this confusing territory. Who was this man? What was I doing? There was something tugging at a corner of my consciousness that told me to step back. I wasn’t sure if it was my natural caution or something more. I should leave, I told myself, while he’s sleeping. I got up and put my clothes on quietly.
But I couldn’t go without touching him. It was impossible. I leaned down and kissed him lightly on the side of his face. He smiled without opening his eyes. “You going?”
“Work,” I said.
“Mmmm, so glad I’m your work,” he said, “I get to see you later.”
And then I couldn’t leave at all. I sat down next to him and he gathered me into his arms. “Stay,” he said. And I did.
WHEN WE WERE ALONE IN HIS HOUSE or sometimes in my tiny apartment, we were both happy. Of that I am sure. And for a while, that was all we needed. The two of us, with time carved out of the rest of our lives, filled to the brim with the other’s presence. Owen would joke that we should find some small but fertile island somewhere in the Pacific or Caribbean and make a break for it. We could live out the rest of our days there, he said, supremely happy with each other.
“You are the love of my life,” he told me one day while we were preparing dinner together at his house. Owen had put some music on, the jazz he liked that I was struggling to understand, and had poured us each a glass of wine. For some reason I remember that on his refrigerator door along with the picture of his niece holding the starfish was a picture he had snapped of me running with a joyful Bandit across the grass of the dog park. I remember thinking that we were beginning to invade each other’s lives just a little.
While I chopped and he sautéed the vegetables for the soup we were making, he was telling me about a workshop he’d observed that afternoon. A young poet, female, black, was working with a group of fourth graders who’d never read a poem in their lives.
“Every time she got to the end of a line, this one kid would pipe up, ‘That don’t make no sense.’ Then she’d read the next line and he’d say the same thing. ‘That one don’t make no sense, either.’ ”
Owen was laughing as he told me the story and I began to laugh with him. We got the giggles in his kitchen as he mimicked the child’s voice and then the poet’s stern “Wait a minute …” whenever the child interrupted.
I was leaning against the kitchen counter, knife still in hand, wiping tears of laughter from the corners of my eyes when Owen just fell silent, mid-story, and the silence hung between us.
“What?” I said.
And that’s when he said it. “You are the love of my life, Anna.”
I heard my intake of breath in the quiet kitchen. I was staggered. I couldn’t say a word.
He grinned at me. “That’s a good thing.”
“I know,” I said, overwhelmed with the wonder that we had found each other. Owen, understanding without another word being said, gathered me into his arms.
I LOOK BACK NOW AND THINK, If only, if only we had been able to keep the world at bay. But that’s the dream of any woman newly in love. We all have pasts. We all have secrets waiting for the right time to tell. There is no way for the now not to be contaminated by the lives we’d lived before.
WE WERE VERY CAREFUL AT FIRST. I continued to write in the early morning hours, even if it meant leaving Owen’s bed at first light. I continued to walk Bandit and Huey and Dewey and my other clients’ dogs. Most days Owen was home when I got there to pick up Bandit but not always. We made dates. We didn’t willy-nilly overrun each other’s life within days or even weeks of sleeping together. Neither of us, it seemed, wanted to rush things. I understood my natural reticence to plunge headlong into any new thing. I wasn’t sure why Owen felt the same way, “reticent” not being an adjective I would ever associate with him. At the time I thought he was respecting my pace, not pushing for more time, more of me, because he understood I would have been uncomfortable.
And then we had the opportunity to go public. The head of Owen’s nonprofit, Christina Johar, was hosting a party to welcome two new photographers into the fold. “We should go,” Owen said one day as we sat in his dining room, having our mid-afternoon coffee, Bandit snoring at our feet, and I readily agreed. I was more than curious about this other world of Owen’s, his professional life. I was hungry for more of him.
We drove into the Hollywood Hills, east of Vine Street, “Old Hollywood” as it was known because when the film industry was in its infancy, this was where all the talent lived. As we climbed higher and higher on streets that narrowed and bent in hairpin turns around themselves, Owen told me a little about his boss. She was married to an Indian doctor, hence the “Johar,” but had grown up outside Atlanta on a sort of plantation. “Minus the slaves, of course,” he added and I shook my head, smiling, as he knew I would.
She had impeccable manners coupled with a steely sense of purpose and therefore managed to accomplish a myriad of things while retaining the affection of almost everyone she dealt with. Owen adored her.
When the iconic Hollywood sign — enormous white letters blazingly lit and spread across a hillside — popped into view, Owen pulled the car over to the curb and let one of the parking valets whisk it away. In front of us was a long and very steep set of stairs that led, presumably, to the house.
We climbed hand in hand, our breath becoming more ragged the higher we got until finally we crested on a flat pad of land that held the house. The view was spectacular. We could see the few tall buildings that made up the downtown skyline. This was 1976 and the major downtown building boom of the 1990s was fifteen years away. When we turned west, we could see straight to the setting sun, pink and orange tendrils gripping the horizon line at the Pacific Ocean. A 180-degree vista.
And then there was the house. I’m sure it had been designed by some mid-century architect, although I couldn’t have told you who. But someone had had an idiosyncratic vision and built a structure that seemed to float on air, out over the hillside, anchored by massive steel beams plunged into the rock. Through the floor-to-ceiling panels of glass that stood in for the front walls, we could see groups of people holding drinks and milling about. Floating out of the house was the forced laughter and busy chatter of cocktail party talk.
Instantly I regretted my decision to come. I was never much good at small talk or glib conversation, and the scene in front of us seemed like an obstacle course I was ill prepared to navigate. I said nothing, but that didn’t stop Owen from answering me anyway. “We don’t have to stay long.”
I rested my chin on his shoulder and we both took in the brightly colored scene in front of us. “Is there a safe harbor in there?”