“Just what I was thinking. Don’t you want to know what Tanya said?”
“I never in my life heard her say anything worth repeating, and we’ve been talking about what she said for the past six hours.”
“She said you and I are sleeping together. Peter? You’re not laughing.”
“Tanya really said that?”
“Oh, shit. Why isn’t it funny? It was funny as hell when she said it. But I didn’t laugh then either. I blew up at her and she almost cried, and then I came home and broke up laughing, and I thought you would too if I saved it for when you were in a good mood, and all of a sudden it isn’t funny, is it, Peter?”
They looked at each other for a long time. She couldn’t get her eyes away from his. Gretchen was in Philadelphia and the room was full of her absence and the heart was growing fonder all the time.
“I have to check Robin,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway, it’s late.”
“Don’t be long,” she said.
She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. Don’t be long. She should not have said that and it was good he had not reacted to it. He would go downstairs and go to bed, and that was as it should be. It was a good thing one of them had sense.
She took off all her clothes. She turned on the bathroom light and left the door open a crack, then turned off the other lights. She touched herself, thinking One hand or two? and sniffed her fingers. She got in bed and covered herself only with the sheet.
She thought Don’t come back, and then she heard his footsteps on the stairs again.
He stood in the doorway with the hall light framing him from behind. He said, “I just came up to say good-night.”
“Kiss me good-night.”
“Linda, I’m scared.”
“So am I. Kiss me good-night.”
Until he sat on the bed and kissed her it was never entirely real. It was the mood and the wine and the absence of Gretchen and it was not entirely real. It was kids playing chicken. You could always change your mind at the last minute, and so it was not real.
There is always a moment when you can change your mind and a moment when you cannot, and the line that divides them holds fewer angels than a pin head. There is the moment in roulette before the ball drops. There is that instant before a trigger is quite squeezed, before a trap is sprung. On one side of the line is possibility and on the other side is certainty.
Such moments come one after another in the course of every person’s life, and in the vast majority of cases they approach and are resolved without anyone’s being truly aware of them. They are most commonly recognized after the fact, enlarged a thousand times in hindsight. That had been the turning point. There was the crisis. But even in retrospect most are shrouded from view, for one prefers to regard the good turns as planned and the bad as unavoidable.
But in this case she saw herself at a critical moment and knew that he shared this awareness. He was so close to her, they were so close to each other, and yet he could still get up and she could still turn away.
Then he did not get up, and she did not turn away, and then he kissed her, and after that everything happened just as it had to happen.
They lay a long time together, neither one willing to move first. Then they moved at so nearly the same instant that it was impossible to say who had initiated it. They disengaged and lay very close together but did not touch. She was close enough to feel the warmth of his skin but no part of her body touched his.
The silence lasted forever. Thoughts kept flooding her head and she tried to find the right words for them but nothing seemed worth saying. There was an increasingly unbearable tension in the silence.
Finally she said, “I can’t think of anything clever.”
“I can’t think of anything. Period.”
“Oh, I can think of a ton of things. All of them wrong.”
“Oh, wow.”
“That was one I hadn’t thought of. I think maybe I should have. Oh, wow.”
“Yeah.”
“What I keep wanting to say is I never thought it would be like this but some silly cunt says it in every really bad novel I ever read. What really sucks about clichés is they’re so appropriate. I never did.”
“Neither did I.”
“Did you ever think about us? Did you ever think to yourself, ‘I wonder what it would be like to fuck Linda?’”
“No.”
“If I had any class I’d be insulted. I’m not. That doesn’t mean I don’t. Have any, I mean. Class, I mean.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How the hell do I know? You honestly never thought about it? Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“Cross your heart and all that jazz?”
“Oh, come on.”
“I never did until Tanya. Like telling a kid don’t put beans up your nose. It would never occur to her otherwise. Did you ever tell Robin not to put beans up your nose? Up her nose, I mean. Not up yours.”
“Up yours.”
“Yeah, I was just thinking that. Did you?”
“Which? No, I never told Robin not to put anything up her anywhere. No, I never thought about us. No, I never thought it would be like this either, if that’s what you’re asking me to say, but then I didn’t think about it at all.”
“I did, and you know what I thought? Well, first of all I thought it would never happen in the first place, so it was sheer fantasy.”
“Right.”
“And then I thought it would be horribly awkward. You know what I thought? I thought it would be silly. Silly Linda and silly Peter pretending to fuck. Pretending. That’s exactly what I thought. I thought it would be the two of us pretending to be two other people fucking.”
“That’s very far-out.”
“You know what I mean, don’t you?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“But it wasn’t like that.”
“No.”
“Are you glad or sorry?”
“That it happened? I don’t know. Both.”
“I’m more glad than sorry. I think. It was something that was going to happen sooner or later. I never knew that before, but it’s true. And if it had to happen it couldn’t happen to a nicer evening. I’m not drunk anymore. I wasn’t as drunk as I acted. I don’t mean it was an act. I thought I was that drunk but I wasn’t really. Or I was drunk but it wasn’t just wine. I was drunk on us. Or on you and me. Do you know what I’m saying, because I don’t know if I do or not.”
“I think so. You’re saying that you... oh, the hell with it. I know what you mean. The hell with it.”
“Right, the hell with it. God, I’m so glad we can still laugh together. I couldn’t live if I forgot how to laugh. It keeps you going. It wasn’t being horny. I wasn’t horny, Peter, I swear I wasn’t. I didn’t have an urge to get laid. I haven’t had an honest-to-God urge to get laid since January, as a matter of fact. Are you gonna say it or am I? I guess I am. One, we won’t do this again, and two, we can still be friends. God, talk about clichés. Just go ahead and talk about clichés.”
“We won’t do it again because we don’t have to now.”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“I do ninety-nine percent of the talking and you make ninety-nine percent of the sense. Peter? We’ll never tell anyone.”
“God knows I won’t.”
“I mean ever. No matter who we marry or where we move to or what we wind up doing. It will always be something that nobody knows about. It’s so beautiful I want to cry. I’m picturing two old people who made love once a million years ago and never told anyone and neither of them ever forgot it. Don’t ever forget me, Peter.”