"Briefly."
"It must be a hundred and bloody two. I got into a cab on Seventh Avenue and the-"
"Do you want to shower?"
"Just a glass of water. The windows of this cab were rolled up. I hopped in, and it was a furnace inside. The bastard was pretending he had air-conditioning."
"Let me get you a towel."
"Jesus, what a day. A producer from the BBC rang to see if I'd go on camera for a show about Sister Wendy and her contribution to culture. 'Her what?' I said. 'She's spreading the word,' he said, 'and she's phenomenal.' 'The word about Van Gogh? Since when is Van Gogh a secret?' 'But you don't understand,' he said. 'She can do a twenty-minute riff on Rembrandt in one take, no notes.' Guess what? So can my mother. I told him I had to take a call from the Sultan of Brunei." He pulled at the knot of his tie to loosen it while he wandered toward my desk and the swivel chair, where we often began. "You'll never guess who got married. For the third time. It happened a few weeks ago, but I only now got a fax from London. What are you doing, reading Tony Bennett's autobiography? Since when do you know him? There's a card that says Compliments of the Author."
"The editor sent it. He must have put the card in. He called me today and wants me to ghost another book. Here, drink deep. Towel down. Who got married?"
I'd been hoping for a somewhat more romantic entrance, as I always do from Daniel, but the extreme degree of his distraction that day was actually a relief: I was in thrall to my own distractions, wondering how I would delicately, discreetly, without betraying Vicki's confidence, bring up the subject of his paying more attention to his children, or a different kind of attention, to Vicki in particular.
He drank half the glass in one gulp, paused, and said, "Ginger Miles." And kept drinking.
"Are you heartbroken?"
Still guzzling water, he cocked an eyebrow at me, as if to say, You must be mad, and I was reminded that Daniel did not suffer easily from heartbreak, even the hokey-jokey kind I meant. "I haven't seen her in twenty years, for God's sake, and last time I did-"
"Who'd she marry?"
"A guy I knew at Cambridge, a barrister, a bit dodgy, I always thought. The wedding was a bash at someone's country estate. When I knew her, she was practically homeless, trying to out-Orwell Orwell. How was your day?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary," I lied. I said no more about the Eighth Deadly's semi-offer, nothing about Jesus's proposal of marriage, Vicki's visit, or my stark encounter with Lili, which ended badly: I had no idea how to breathe life into her and no clue about what to do next.
I didn't want Daniel to see me vulnerable, didn't want him to think I might be needy, truly needy, any sooner than necessary. It no longer seemed odd to me that I maintained multiple versions of the truth with him; that there were so many things essential to my well-being that I didn't tell him. Where had she come from, this stranger, this woman who admitted to wanting nothing from him but sex? Had I left the rest of me on Swansea with my husband and taken an imposter to New York? I wasn't sure, but I was determined to tell Daniel that the children needed more from him, determined.
I crossed the room to turn off the ringer on the phone and to mute the voices on the answering machine, and he reached for my half-clad thigh. I was wearing running shorts and a T-shirt, and his fingers wandered to the top of my leg, and we exchanged a knowing, foreplayish laugh. "I got the fax from London an hour ago, about Ginger's wedding"-his tone low and intimate-"which got me thinking about coming over here immediately. But I restrained myself for as long as I could. Some unaccustomed impulse toward propriety."
He motioned for me to straddle him, daddy-long-legs style, on the swivel chair. I leaned forward, and he bit me lightly on my chin. I bit him back, lightly too, and felt the stubbly growth he gets in the late afternoon if he doesn't shave again. When I ran my tongue along his bottom lip, the tenderness of the flesh just inside his mouth brought to mind the feel of his daughter's forearm, and I wanted to speak about the weight of her neediness, but I did not know how to begin.
"Is it Ginger you've been wanting or me?"
"I would have to say I was at the mercy of a rather elaborate fantasy. She liked it when there was another woman."
"So you've said." Pillow talk; antique Ginger stories. By now we had swapped large chunks of our past. "But how will I know you'll be happy with only one of us?"
"I promise you'll know."
"I think I just became convinced."
His eyes closed, his tongue lightly against my lips, my front teeth, the edge of my gums. He was capable of delicacy. I wanted the delicacy of those sensations at the front of my mouth to obliterate the sour taste of this exchange. I wanted it to erase the words of another Englishman that often came to mind when Daniel touched me: Try to love me a little more and want me a little less, said Ursula to Rupert Birkin in Women in Love.
My eyes swerved from his shut lids to the clock on the microwave. I didn't want to time us; I wanted to know how long we had before we had to leave for his house, for the children's anniversary celebration. An hour. Next to the time, today's date flickered bright blue, and I was surprised it had taken until this late in the day for me to realize that it was also another anniversary: three months since we first slept together. I doubt he knew the specific date, and I'm sure he had no desire to call attention to the sentimental possibilities. Despite what I had told Henderson, I held a good bit more than ten percent of his attention, but he could not bear to be reminded of our attachment or of what it could mean. He was a deer caught in the headlights of my affection, until he bounded across the highway and disappeared into the woods. I sometimes wondered whether those days and hours and ecstasies would ever accumulate, acquire a history, a specific weight and gravity, or whether they would remain flashy ornaments on our erotic Christmas tree.
When he grabbed my thigh, I felt a spike of anger toward him for his parsimony. And at myself, for accepting it, for craving it, when I knew how slender his offering was. But what I got in exchange was this: a degree of heat and hunger that still astonished me, and concentration-submission to the act, not to each other-both focused and preoccupied. We were arm-wrestlers; we were junkies on our way to a nod.
We were still dressed, and there was about this exchange, as about all of them, what I can only describe as a mutual bluffness. I slipped my forefinger between his teeth and let it roam across his tongue and around it. Then I took the finger into my mouth and sucked off his spit. It was metonymy, and it was my finger and his spit. I did it again, this gesture that acted on both of us like a narcotic injected into the bloodstream. "Kneel on the couch," he said, and his voice made me remember what I had to tell him about his children, about caring for them, but that would have to wait. This was not the moment for that; it was the moment for this.
Crossing the living room shedding our clothes, watches, socks, as if we were clowns in an X-rated circus act crossing the ring to climb into an Austin Mini. And for our next trick. There was even, I saw as I bent my knee on the edge of the couch, an audience: ourselves. A mirror, a large rectangle with a purple plastic frame, another Third World Pier One bargain, hung in the corner, above a glass-topped end table and a kelly-green glass vase of eucalyptus cuttings, and if we turned our heads to the right, we would be able to watch ourselves.
I watched. I was not as afraid as Daniel was of looking. Not afraid to see him slip inside me, my back bent forward, like an ironing board coming down from the wall, or a Murphy bed, at a sharp right angle to his. Not afraid to study us, to steady myself, my hands gripping the back of the couch. He held my hips and drew me toward him, his head tipped back, eyes closed, and I was disappointed that he was not admiring the woman I had become. Since returning to New York, I had shrunk one and a half sizes, firmed up my thighs and buttocks at the twenty-four-hour Crunch on Lafayette Street, and found Federico of Broome Street, who can make my hair the same shade of brown it was ten years ago. I am a typical Unitarian, with grandparents from four countries between Latvia and Ireland, and from each of them I inherited a trait or a feature that makes me an ethnic patchwork quilt: a buxom, naturally curly-haired brunette, a green-eyed kibbutznik with a Waspy surname-Chase-courtesy of my Scottish grandfather. I straighten my Medusa curls, wax my eyebrows, pay a woman from Croatia whose father was taken away one morning to a Serb concentration camp and has not been heard from since to paint my toenails cherry red, but I could not see them that afternoon in the mirror. What I saw was a scene from a porn flick, the mans head thrown back in some anonymous ecstasy, his slim hips thrown forward, pumping fast. I was the female lead in this flick, certain that what I was doing, the unequivocal nature and specificity of it, the way it resembled nothing other than itself, would short-circuit my capacity to hold a thought. But it didn't; it doesn't. It simply concentrates the mind, as Dr. Johnson said of a hanging. By then he was moving faster than he had any right to. I swear he did not know what it meant to slow down; I feared I might never again myself. But I knew that even if I could train him to be slower, gentler, I could never teach him grace. Never teach him to kiss my neck or stroke my back and stay there. There were moments of tenderness when he touched me that way, but they were so rare and brief, and left me hungry for so much more, that they felt like punishment.