"Be slow," I told him, "be slow."
"Come to the bed and turn over on your back," he said, and I thought he must not have heard me. In the life I invented for Lili before Hollywood, she has an Algerian lover who calls her darling and holds her face when they make love and issues no commands. But after we moved to the bed in the alcove and I did what he said and he lowered his full weight onto me and held my hands gently above my head, he surprised me and did what I said, moving on top of me in gestures so small it was as if he was not moving at all, and then something happened, like a switch being tripped between my legs, and I forgot to breathe. The current surged through me and flooded my brain, and I thought, What would I give up for this? My first edition of To the Lighthouse? My twelve Billie Holiday CDs? A husband who used to tell me how sweet it was to see my sheepskin slippers next to his on the floor of the closet? A husband who used to say my name and my pet name and honey and baby and lover when he made love to me? All of the above, every single one of them-though I missed, I cannot tell you how much I missed, the sound of my name in my ear.
We were locked into a rhythm we had never found before and it could go on and on and on, an infinite loop of pleasure-those were the words I was thinking when I felt my eyeballs roll up in a jerky motion and a drop of his sweat fall into my open eye and sting-
The voice erupted into the room, a man at the door, interrupting the soundtrack of swallows. What we heard was him asking for me, some version of me, and I realized it was the answering machine. I'd remembered to turn off the ringer on the phone, and I'd muted my outgoing message but not the caller's voice.
"I need to leave a message for, uh, Sophy O'Rourke."
"Oh, fuck," I whisper-moaned, and Daniel and I began to laugh between gasps, but we kept going. We would not stop for a call from someone who knew me so little-so not at all-that he thought I went by my husband's last name.
Then Daniel's panting grew lower and everything else sped up, and there was a concatenation of hard human sounds, my own rhyming with his, that made it impossible to hear every word except that this was Sergeant Burns with the Massachusetts State Police. Daniel's noises ended, and I heard a phone number, the Swansea area code, and the prefix almost everyone on the island shares. I wriggled out from under Daniel, or maybe he let go of my hands and flopped to my side, maybe we moved apart together, because he told me later he had heard the man say "State Police" and thought the call was for him, about his family, and he was about to leap to his feet when he saw me leap to mine.
I stood by the side of the bed with the phone in my hand, dazed and breathless with the effort. "This is Sophy, don't hang up," as if I had run up ten flights of stairs, and I knew in the time it took me to push the wet strands of hair from my wet forehead that there was no other reason the police would call me from there, it must be the highway patrol, though how did they get my name and number? A computer, an old insurance policy? A bolt of fear struck my knees, but for a few seconds I had my wits about me, or maybe it was that my body needed those extra seconds to prepare itself to absorb what I knew was coming.
"Do you have bad news to tell me?" was what I said, and I pictured the motorcycle he had just bought, all of him smashed to pieces. I looked down at Daniel at the edge of the bed, looking up at me, a slice of alertness, or maybe I mean terror, on top of his breathlessness, his hair blown sideways and backward, beads of sweat like quicksilver gathering at his temples. I touched his shoulder to steady myself and felt the prickly hair on the side of his thigh against my knee. On the quilted bedspread was the ghostly indentation of my body.
"I'm afraid I do," Sergeant Burns said, but I didn't wait for him to say more. I began to whimper and shake, a shuddering noisier and more feral than I can describe. Then I did all of them at once or so close together it felt like a seizure. "Is there someone there with you?" the man said, "I hope there's someone with you-"
Daniel must have taken the phone from my hand, or I must have dropped it. He was patting the night table for a pencil, and I heard myself howl, as if I were falling down a well, or someone else was.
"Officer," I heard Daniel say, "can you give me the information, tell me if there's anything we need to do immediately?"
I don't remember walking across the room and walking back to the bed, but somehow I was wearing Daniel's long-sleeved starched ice-blue shirt, which hung on me like a nightshirt, and I curled up on the bed while my entire body chattered, fueled by images of the motorcycle skidding, Will's body flung, mangled, crushed, verbs twisted into adjectives that no longer breathe. I pulled the bedsheets to me and the pillows, but I could not make myself still.
Minutes passed. I heard him say, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," and "Thank you, yes, yes, quite, of course," and then I felt him lie down at my back, curl his chest against my spine, and wrap his arms tenderly around me. I forgot after a moment how surprised I was that he knew, he actually knew, what to do. An embrace that comforted was in his repertoire, but buried so deep that you were sure it would never turn up, like the remains of the Titanic. "A neighbor found him in his house, a chap named Ben," he said quietly. "It seems he died in his sleep," and that was a great relief, that was nearly good news. That he did not suffer. Did not know. I bunched the pillows in a gesture I knew even at that moment had something to do with wanting to conceal my grief and shame and rage. Daniel had never seen me weep. He had been making me moan and tremble and cry out in this bed for three months, eight days a week, but if I had cried over something smaller than this, he would have fled. If I had shown half this much feeling, he would have abandoned me, and I knew even then, as deep as I was inside that wave of grief, that I despised him for that.
I was not thinking clearly, but it surprised me that I was thinking at all. I was thinking that Will could not be dead, because I'd spoken to him-when was it?-last week or the week before, about the money he owed me, but when my friend Geoff died last year, there were people who said, "He can't be dead, I just had breakfast with him"; "He cant be dead, we were supposed to go to the movies tonight"; "He can't be dead, his wife is about to have a baby." I was thinking that this state of consciousness, which must be shock, is analogous to making love, which you imagine will lead to ecstasy, and ecstasy will be so true to its meaning that you will not be capable of a clear, reliable thought, and in that too you are wrong.