"That's what I thought," she says, and lies down beside me.
Leaving Anna, when we meet at night, remains difficult. She begs me not to go and is not above the tactics of a jezebel. Tonight she dresses reluctantly, and as we approach the door, she places both hands on it and gyrates her back end at me like a pole dancer.
"You're making it hard to leave."
"That's the idea."
She keeps up this lewd little shimmy, and I plant myself against her and join the motion, until I am fully aroused. I abruptly raise her skirt, pull aside her underpants, and push myself inside. No rubber: a daring act by our terms. Even the first time, Anna had condoms in her purse.
"Oh, Jesus," she says. "Rusty."
But neither of us stops. Her hands are braced against the door. Every bit of the desperation and insanity of our relationship is here for both of us. And when I finally release, it seems to be the truest moment we've had.
Afterward, we are both a bit shaken and re-dress in chagrined silence.
"Teach me to shake my ass at you," she says as I leave first.
Guilt is a commando who arrives in stealth and then sabotages everything. After that brief moment of abandon, I am visited perpetually by obvious fears. I nearly weep late at night when I receive one of Anna's cryptic e-mails. "Visitor arrived," it says, using the quaint Victorian slang for menstruation. But even after that, there is an acronym that feels like a frozen hand squeezing my heart, whenever it comes to mind: STD. What if Anna, who is well traveled, is unknowingly afflicted with something I could pass on? I repeatedly envision Barbara's face when she comes home from the gynecologist.
I know this concern is largely irrational. But the what-ifs are each like nails driven into my brain. There is so much torment already that I simply cannot cope with yet another random worry. So one day in my chambers, I put the search term-"STD"-in my computer and find myself at a site. I make the 800 call from a pay phone in the bus station, with my back turned so nobody can hear.
The young woman at the other end is patient, consoling. She explains the testing protocol and then says she can charge my credit card. The initials that would appear on the bill would be innocuous, but it is the kind of detail that would never sink below Barbara's attention; she always asks whether any unexplained expense is deductible.
My silence says it all. The polite young woman then adds, "Or if you'd rather, you may pay with a postal money order or a cashier's check." She gives me a PIN that will supplant my name in all my dealings with the company.
I buy the cashier's check the next day when I am at the bank, making one of my jiggered deposits. "Should I list you as remitter?" the teller asks.
"No," I say, with embarrassing speed.
I go straight from there to the thirtieth-floor office in a Center City building where I have been told to drop the check. I find myself at the door of an import/export concern. I peek in, then back out to reexamine the address in my pocket. When I enter again, the receptionist, a middle-aged Russian woman, eyes me with an imperial look and asks in a strong accent, "Are you here to give me money?" It makes sense, I realize, this front. Even if a sleuth has followed me here, he'd miss my purpose. She takes my check and throws it unceremoniously into a drawer and goes back to work. What a menagerie of the unfaithful this woman must have met. Gay men by the dozens. A mom with two kids in the stroller who's gotten pumped by the guy next door, at home these days while he's looking for work. And probably lots of fellows like me, graying and in middle years, raddled by fears about the three-hundred-dollar hooker they passed some time with. Weakness and folly are her business.
The actual test is uneventful by comparison. I am in a medical office across from University Hospital, where I sign in only with my number. The woman who draws the blood never bothers with a smile. After all, every patient is a potential peril to her. She gives me no warning that the needle may hurt.
Four days later, a counselor informs me I'm clean. I tell Anna the next time I'm with her. I debated saying anything but realize that hard science is better than my word about my personal history.
"I wasn't worried," she answers. She peers under her full brows. "Were you?"
I'm sitting on the bed. It is noontime, and down the hall I can hear the minibar porter knocking on doors so he can come in and check-a great pose for a PI, I think in my current state of disquiet.
"A lot of questions I didn't want to ask." Because I cannot promise not to sleep with Barbara, I have realized that I am in no position to ask fidelity from Anna. I still do not know whether she is seeing other men, but I seldom get responses to the brief e-mails I dare to send her on the weekends. Oddly, I am not jealous. I repeatedly imagine the moment when she will tell me she is moving on, that she's gotten what she can from this experience and is going to resume her progress toward a normal life.
"There isn't anyone but you right now, Rusty." 'Right now,' I think. "And I've always been safe. I'm sorry I freaked. But I'd never have an abortion."
"I shouldn't have done it."
"I loved it," she says quietly, and sits beside me. "We could do it that way. Now that we know. I have a diaphragm."
"And what happens when you meet somebody else?"
"I told you. I'm always safe. I mean," she says and stops.
"What?"
"There doesn't have to be anyone. If you tell me you're thinking about leaving Barbara."
I sigh. "Anna, we can't keep having this conversation. If we have only two hours together, we can't spend half of it fighting."
Now I've hurt her. It's always easy to read when Anna is angry. The hardest piece of her, the one engaged by the cruel mechanics of the law, takes over and her face becomes rigid.
Sorely tried, I sprawl on the bed and put a pillow on my face. She will recover in time and settle beside me. But for now, I am alone and in a kind of meditation where I test myself with the question she has often asked. Would I marry Anna if some freak circumstance somehow made it possible? She is howlingly funny, a pleasure to look at, and a person I savor, dear to me as breath. But I have already been thirty-four. I doubt I could rejoin her on the other side of a bridge I've already crossed.
Yet something else is as suddenly clear as the solution to a math problem I formerly could not solve. I see now what I have come together with Anna to recognize: I erred. I blundered. She may not be the right alternative. But that doesn't mean there never was one. Twenty years ago, I thought I was making the best of many bad choices, and I was wrong. Wrong. I could have done something else, found someone else. Worse. I should have. I should not have returned to Barbara. I should not have sold my happiness for Nat's. It was the wrong choice for all three of us. It left Nat growing up in a dungeon of voiceless suffering. And yoked Barbara to the daily evidence of what anybody, in a righter mind, would prefer to forget. My heart right now is like some overloaded man-ofwar toppled by a light wind, sinking into the waters it was meant to sail. And it will not do to blame anybody but myself.
When I return to chambers, there is an urgent message from George Mason on my desk. Three, in fact. Life in the court of appeals moves at the pace of suspended animation. Even so-called emergency motions can be resolved in a day or two, not an hour. When I look up, George is on the threshold. He has come down in person in the hope I have returned. He is in shirtsleeves, stroking his striped tie as a way to soothe himself.
"What?" I ask.
He closes the door behind him. "We issued the opinion in Harnason Monday."
"I saw that."
"I bumped into Grin Brieson on the way to lunch today. She called Mel Tooley to arrange for Harnason's surrender and never heard back. Finally, after the third call, Mel admitted he thinks the guy is in the wind. The coppers went out this morning. Harnason's been gone at least two weeks."