Elizabeth was systematic, almost professional, with him. She turned around, still on top of him, and they watched themselves through the cheval mirror that stood at the foot of the bed. Their lovemaking was becoming more polished, less of a rush, and for the first time Dennis felt his mind wander as she rode him. For some reason he thought of Polly, the fake girl that would be murdered if he didn’t find her. What would it have been like to be with her? She was wild. She had piercings, Dennis remembered, all over her body. Or maybe she would have been submissive, weak. Vulnerable.
Thinking of Polly, Dennis came in a spasm.
“It wasn’t the same,” Elizabeth said later. They were lying on the bed, spooning each other, the ceiling fan softly looping above them.
“No,” Dennis admitted. Again, that brutal honesty.
“Maybe it’s over.”
“Probably.”
They lay there in silence, the cool air prickling their skin. Dennis thought of the British boy, the one who’d cried in the living room while Dean Orman watched secretly from upstairs. In some ways, he was glad that it had come to this. Ever since his conversation with the dean he had been thinking less of Elizabeth and more about Polly-and, strangely, he didn’t mind.
“My mother did this,” Elizabeth said.
“This?”
“This thing. What we’re doing here. This sneaking around. Deception. Always hiding out, calling on the phone from somewhere and saying she would be late. My father knew about it. This was the sixties, you see. Free love. I once caught them having one of those parties. I was maybe seven years old. I walked downstairs and everyone was naked, all the women with their flabby breasts. Incense in the air. ‘Go back upstairs, Lizzie,’ my mother said. And I did, just as I was told.”
“You’re lucky,” Dennis joked. “The wildest thing I ever saw was my dad scribbling equations on the windows. He said that he liked to see them from both sides. Mother disagreed.”
“You don’t understand,” Elizabeth said. “It got completely out of control for my mother. She couldn’t contain it. She fell in love with an artist, a guy who did lithographing in San Francisco. Finally, she moved out there with him. A few years later, when I was in college, she came back. Broke. Dirty and damaged. She was a completely different person. And still married to Daddy. He took her back, of course. There really wasn’t any question. He still loved her, fiercely. He took her back even though my brothers and I warned him not to.”
Elizabeth was turned away from him now, speaking into the pillow. Dennis felt her speech wasn’t for him. These were things, he knew, that she could never say to Dean Orman. He would look down on her for it, think she was low class, weak and disposable. So, Dennis realized: the same act-the covering of the ring, the omission of her name-had been played with Orman in Morocco. He thought of the dean and Elizabeth in the desert, the sandy wind sweeping across their tent, and all those half-truths being told.
“And a few years later she was dead,” Elizabeth went on. “Cervical cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” Dennis said.
“Don’t be. If you had known her you wouldn’t have felt anything but a loss, like some sort of phantom pain. At her funeral, no one mentioned her years in San Francisco, those hippie parties. I never told anyone about what I had seen that night. It was just assumed that these things happen, you know. They happen. There is no randomness in the world. Everything falls into a certain pattern. My mother-she knew this. She called me once from the West Coast. She said, ‘Lizzie, I think I’ve been cursed.’ I didn’t say anything. I silently agreed with her, of course. She had been. Cursed with some sort of bitter disease. An obscene pleasure drive. An urge to fuck anything that moved. And it killed her. This is what I’ve inherited from her.”
Dennis said nothing. The fan turned and whirred above them. Some children passed in the hall, laughing deliriously. Someone’s telephone rang in another room.
“I was married before. Before I met Ed. I was studying at Cleveland State, working toward a master’s in psychology. My life was as good as it had ever been. I met this man who was unlike anyone I had ever met: sincere, loving. Magnificent. You would have liked him, Dennis.”
“Would I?” Dennis said, just to fill up the space with his own words.
“He was charming and sweet. Just like you. When he fucked me, it was for my pleasure, not just his. He didn’t want to come on my face or put his finger in my ass or watch me with another woman. He didn’t want to jerk off while I danced around in red leather. He was the type who spread roses over the bed. He took me to fancy restaurants all over Cleveland and introduced me to his friends at the office. I felt important, more than somebody’s decoration.”
“Do you feel like a decoration when you’re with him?” Him: it was their code for Dean Orman.
“Sometimes,” Elizabeth said, turning even farther away from Dennis. He couldn’t see her eyes anymore, just the back of her hair and the deep crease between her shoulders. He touched her there, wanting her to come back to him, at least so he could see her eyes, but she turned over onto her back and pulled the blanket up to her face. Now she was hidden completely.
“We were married in just a few weeks,” she said, her voice muffled in the blanket. “It was nothing, just a civil service with a justice of the peace. We thought our love was above marriage, that it was just something you do, a commitment that was expected by a petty society. Marriage was reserved for the weakhearted, the suspicious. Mike wore blue jeans and I wore a summer dress. My father was there, taking pictures with one of those disposable cameras. We were so happy.”
Mike, Dennis thought. He turned the name around in his mind, silently mouthed it.
“Then, as it goes, things changed. Mike started working all the time. He became consumed with this project at work. Months and months of work. My mother’s curse would burn inside me, mock me, and for a long time I was sickened with myself. Disgusted by my own body. I dropped out of school and fell into a depression. I hated the fact of my own lust, absolutely hated it. When Mike was home I would ravish him, take him in my mouth and suck out everything he was, leave him raw and bleeding. Afterward, I would apologize and feel guilty about what I had done. But something had changed between us. There was some rift there, some sort of divide.”
She turned and glanced at him. Her eyes were slick and wet. Yet something was in them, some hint of a deeper knowledge. What is she doing? Dennis wondered. What is this?
“The job got to him,” Elizabeth said. “He was under pressure all the time to finish a project of some sort. I can’t even remember what it was, that’s how important it must have been. Something to do with an animal project.”
“Animal project?” Dennis asked. “Like dog shows?”
“No, not like that. Mike was in advertising. Now I remember what it was: Pollyanna Pet Food. There was a girl in the advertisement, this pretty blonde, and she was feeding her cats. The problem, if I recall correctly, was that Mike didn’t like her. He wanted her to be older, more set. A professional type. He didn’t want this bimbo selling his product. He used that word, bimbo. Are you still listening?”
“Yes,” Dennis said. She had caught him drifting off. Mike. Even though it was a common name, he couldn’t stop tossing it around in his head. “Go on.”
“He talked about her so much, this actress, that of course I got suspicious. I thought he was fucking her. By that time I was alone all day with nothing to do, and my imagination was free to go wild. Of course I realized how ridiculous it was for me to castigate him for something that may not have even been true.