Elaine’s station was a lonely strip of platform in a near-empty parking lot. As I got in a taxi, I discovered I had left the scrap of paper with her directions on it behind, presumably in my office. Oddly enough, given my recent forgetfulness, I remembered the address without difficulty, even though I had only looked at it once, as she wrote it down. I took this to be a good omen.
The town was just a series of new residential developments; twenty or thirty identical houses in each, with identical blobs of shrubbery out front and big signs offering units for sale. I had seen these kinds of places on summer days. The people you saw drifting around them wore pajama-like clothes, as though their conception of leisure was inextricably bound up with the idea of sleep. Lincoln Court, where Elaine lived, was still partly under construction. Plywood-covered frames stuck up out of the raw dirt, and between some of the houses there were still patches of old, scrubby farmland, not yet reprocessed into manicured lawns. The cold air smelled of pressure-treated lumber. I paid the taxi and went up the short path to Elaine’s door.
Perfume billowed up at me as she opened it. There she was, a look of ardent joy spilling from her eyes. She wore a lemon-colored chemise, and a brown, calf-length, hip-hugging skirt.
Before arriving, I had made up my mind that I would greet her with a light kiss on the lips. For a moment now I baulked: there was something softly overpowering about her; her indefinite features rendered somehow daunting by the formalised glamor of her outfit. I braced myself however, plunged my head into the cloud of scent, and brushed my lips against hers. She seemed surprised by the gesture, but not displeased. She led me into a gray-carpeted room with prints of semiabstract flowers on the wall. At the back was a tile-floored dining area with a glass table set for two.
The place felt brand-new: unpenetrated, yet, by its human inhabitant.
I sat on a denim-covered couch, oatmeal in color, while Elaine poured me a drink. It crossed my mind that I should have brought something – flowers, or at least a bottle of wine.
Handing me my drink, Elaine looked hesitantly at the space next to me on the couch. I patted it, and she lowered the sweetened weight of herself into the cushion beside me. I took her hand and gave it a squeeze.
‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she said.
I had given up trying to figure out what it was I could have said or done to bring this situation into being. I accepted it in all its strangeness: looked on it as a premise rather than a result. The question in my mind was where to go from here.
I hadn’t slept with a woman for some time – long enough that my thoughts and dreams had started decomposing into erotic fantasies with a frequency I hadn’t experienced in years. Theoretically the idea of leveraging my apparently substantial credit with Elaine into some kind of fling had a certain appeal; or would have, if I had felt the slightest physical attraction to her, which so far I had not.
But that indifference, related as it was to a similarly unqualified emotional indifference, was possibly not the end of the story. Whenever I had denied to Dr Schrever that I was attracted to her, or missed her between sessions, or had tried to hurt her by not showing up, she would suggest that I wasn’t necessarily able to experience the reality of my own feelings. I had always privately dismissed this as an example of the kind of cant her profession was prone to, but in view of some of the things that had been happening recently, I had begun to wonder if there mightn’t really be some kind of interference between the feelings I had, and my ability to register them.
Was it possible, I had wondered, that I was attracted to Elaine without knowing it? Such a thing seemed beyond the bounds of likelihood, but I found I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. My unconscious choice of her name for the mistress in S for Salmon, was surely an indication of something. Perhaps if I placed myself in her presence for long enough, I had thought, my feelings might become sufficiently focused to make themselves known to me.
Was that why I had come here tonight? Partly. But I was aware of something else too: something obscurely, soothingly expiatory in deferring to another person’s version of reality. As if there were something significant to be gained by giving myself to this woman out of nothing more than sheer self-sacrificing agreeableness.
I turned to her. She looked at me expectantly. I felt her vulnerability; her strange humility too, and under it the throb of a real passion: incomprehensible to me, but undeniable.
‘I brought you something,’ I heard myself say, standing up.
With a vague feeling of annoyance, I realised I was going to take the bag with Carol’s sweater in it from my briefcase and give it to Elaine. I did this.
She unwrapped it. ‘You got me a sweater!’ she said, beaming. ‘Thank you Lawrence. Thanks so much!’
She held it up against her chest.
‘That’s just so gorgeous! I’m so flattered you would think to do a thing like that!’
‘Why don’t you try it on?’
‘I will. But not over this. Wait right there.’
She went out of the room. I heard her go upstairs. A moment later, I wandered up myself.
‘Can I see up here?’ I called out.
‘Help yourself.’
There was a spare room with a single bed on a gray fitted carpet; bare walls. The bathroom next to it was green tile and chrome; spotless, with fluffy green towels neatly folded over the rack. I knocked on the bedroom door.
‘Oh… Come in.’
This also was strangely featureless, like a hotel room; the bed immaculately flat and smooth under its gold-brown bedspread; the bedside table with its brass reading lamp, china tissue dispenser, red-digit radio-alarm. A black TV faced it from the dresser opposite. There was an infant’s wooden rocker with a rag-doll asprawl in it, but even that seemed like something that might have been supplied along with the rest of the fixtures. The only noticeably personal touch was a small, hand-painted wooden box on the dressing table. Otherwise the aspiration here seemed to be toward total anonymity.
Elaine stepped out from behind the opened closet door, smoothing the sweater down over her front.
‘What do you think?’
It was tight on her: she must have been a couple of sizes larger than Carol. But the sight of her in it had an immediate effect on me. I saw there were possibilities in this situation that I hadn’t considered. It wasn’t that she resembled my wife, but she put me in mind of her, and the very lack of any powerful singularity about herself or her home, allowed the thought to grow more vivid.
‘You look spectacular,’ I told her.
She coughed and reddened, patting her chest.
‘Thank you!’
I was struck again by the curious dominion her version of me seemed to possess over her. In deferring to her sense of what existed between us, I appeared to have put myself in a position of paradoxical power.
I took her hands in mine and drew her close, smiling at her. She smiled back. Then with a playful laugh she freed one of her hands and placed it on the little painted box.
‘Guess what I keep in here.’
‘What?’
‘Guess!’