“That’s when we were Puritans,” Ann said.
“We were Puritans?” I asked.
“Now we’ll do anything to get through a night. You know, I don’t know why I’m going up to my apartment. There’s no chance that my friend’s going to be awaiting my return. He’s not the type—that’s the kind of thing you’d do.” The elevator stopped; the doors hesitated before sliding open. “We should be out somewhere listening to music,” Ann said.
The hallway was empty, silent. I was a little disappointed her friend wasn’t waiting in front of her door—I would have liked to see him. But my principal emotion was relief. I wouldn’t be sent back to the Hotel McAlpin right away.
“I suppose I should call him,” Ann said, as she let us in. We walked to the front of the apartment and I sat on the sofa while Ann opened her telephone book to find her friend’s number. The sight of that book and knowing that Jade’s number was in it agitated me, but by now I’d been agitated for so long and in so many different ways I was scarcely able to notice it. “One ring,” said Ann, tilting the phone an inch from her ear so I could hear the ringing as a distant purr. “Two rings. Three rings. And…” she hung up the phone. “Free.” She reached into a kitchen cabinet and brought down a pint bottle of tequila and two of those thick, narrow orange-juice glasses you see in old- fashioned diners. “The cleanest of all alcohols,” she said, placing bottle and glasses onto the table. She sat in one of the director’s chairs. “And the most psychedelic. From whiskey comes dreams, from tequila comes visions. It’s liquid hashish.” She poured a modest, reverential amount into both glasses, picked up hers and left mine on the table.
We drank quite a bit of her tequila. Each time she poured some, Ann screwed the cap back onto the bottle, giving it a good hard twist as if she were going to be storing it away for months. I didn’t know if this gesture reflected her material caution or if it was a self-teasing game played by someone with a drinking problem. We also smoked a joint of Ann’s grass—specially grown for her in Vermont by Keith, using top-grade Colombian seeds—and I suppose if she’d had LSD or mescaline on hand we would have taken that, too. It was eleven in the night and the more familiar we became with each other the more solemn and mysterious our connection felt.
“Are you still a fledgling astronomer?” Ann asked me.
“I guess not. I’m just in college, finally. I studied a little astronomy when I was in the hospital but there was a limit how much I could get on my own. It’s complicated.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Sometimes I think I’ll still be an astronomer. But mostly I don’t think about the future.”
“Jade used to be so enchanted with you and your astronomy. She really did believe that you were going to name a star after her. I, on the other hand, didn’t believe in it for a minute. I thought you were taking her to the Planetarium just to have a place to feel her up and not pay for a movie ticket.”
I felt something touch my arm. I looked down but it was just the nerves ticking at the surface of my skin. When I looked back at Ann, her eyes were hazy and a high, warm color was in her face.
We were silent, totally, almost unendurably silent.
Ann poured two more drinks. She smiled and said, “I knew you’d sit in that chair.”
“How?”
She sipped from her glass. “Because you knew I’d sit on the sofa and you don’t think it would be safe to sit next to me.”
“Safe?”
Ann nodded. Her lips were pressed tightly closed, narrowing her face and deepening the lines at the corners of her mouth. “Sit next to me,” she said. “I want you to.”
I didn’t say anything, nor did I move.
“I think about you,” Ann said. “All the time. I return to my thoughts of you, my memories, my ideas, like a secret vice. You’re my hidden imported chocolates. Hugh used to have these old, I mean really old pictures of naked girls he picked up in Europe during the war, and he kept them—who knows? Somewhere in his underwear drawer. He had a yen for those pictures, even with a wife and a houseful of kids. They were his private sex life. After a tough day or a disappointment in the sack with me, he’d fish out those pictures. Never in front of me. Part of the thrill was sneaking it. It was like a kid and his rag-tag security blanket, but much sadder and more desperate, because the older you get the more sad and desperate everything is—not more serious, mind you, but more irrevocable.” She took another swallow of tequila, a longer one, almost emptying the glass. “I’m rattled,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” She closed her eyes. “And it feels so good.”
“Ann,” I said, leaning forward and raising my voice to drown the pounding of my heart and the dark frantic sloshing of my blood, “you have to tell me if Jade—” I stopped; anxiety coated my eyes and I looked at Ann as if through the far end of a telescope. She was shaking her head.
“Sit next to me,” she said. “I don’t want to sit here all alone.”
I stood up. It was like wearing someone else’s glasses, those thick spectacles that flash rainbows when the sun hits them from the side. My legs were long and stringy and my head was a balloon nuzzling the ceiling. Ann was a perfect miniature curled with remarkably human expectations on a sofa rendered in all its simplicity.
Yet when I sat next to her she was as large as ever, even a shade or two larger.
“The only things I regret,” she said, “and the only things I’ll ever regret are things I didn’t do. In the end, that’s what we mourn. The paths we didn’t take. The people we didn’t touch.”
That’s not true, I thought to myself, but I could barely feel my thoughts. I experienced my consciousness as a drowning man sees the shadows on the surface of the water.
“You seem frightened,” Ann said.
I nodded, but thinking of it now I realize that nod could have been taken to mean anything.
“I made love to a young man,” Ann said. “Younger than you. Not long ago. He chewed his nails. He was thin. He wore a white muslin shirt from India, see-through. I seduced him. Very expertly, if I can be allowed…” Her voice trailed off and then she glanced quickly at the black windows, as if she’d seen something. “He was terribly thin and terribly gentle. It was like making love to a butterfly. Too gentle. I hardly knew he was with me. He left in the middle of the night. It was like an erotic dream, except for the little half moons of fingernail in my bed the next morning.” She took my hand. The gesture was neither slow nor sudden. It was like someone engrossed in thought picking up a familiar object and absently feeling its weight, its texture. She skimmed her thumb along the side of my hand. “Are you terribly soft and gentle and careful when you make love, David?”
I waited in silence, hoping something would happen that would make none of this true. The scent of Ann’s perfume rushed toward me, as if she’d just put it on. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Of course you know. It’s absurd for you to be shy. Not at this point.”
“What point?” I said. “I don’t know what point we’re at.”
“We’re at the point where I’m asking you if you’re one of those terribly gentle lovers. And we’re also at the point where we say anything we care to. The mere fact that you’re here, David. For so many hours. We’re at the point where we admit the only reason we’re together is we need someone whom we hold nothing back with. Right now, David, I’m admitting that to you right now.”
She carried my hand to her face and pressed it to her cheek. She closed her eyes and nuzzled against my hand and I leaned toward her and kissed her half on the forehead and half on her hair.