“Sex is for our pleasure,” Kayla finishes. The two friends break into laughter.
“Oh, God, Annie, I miss you.”
Anne hears the front door open. “Listen, I should run. I’ll call you in a couple of days. Love you.”
“Oh, the genius just walked in? You’re still a lovesick pup at heart, aren’t you? Charles Davis uber alles.”
Dinner doesn’t go as Anne hoped. In spite of the Coltrane and the candles, the mood is about as romantic as a trip to the dry cleaners. Charles is tense and uncommunicative; he has three drinks and only picks at his food. Anne tries-a little too hard-to keep things warm and lively, bringing up the latest movies and political gossip, but it’s obvious that he’s bored and distracted. When she raves about her website she’s rewarded with a condescending “Terrific.” She feels like telling him he’d better hope the website is a success because his royalties on Capitol Offense sure as hell aren’t going to pay for the apartment. She curses herself for buying into his sulk, is too wound up to eat, keeps flashing on the shards of glass, and her left foot won’t stop twitching.
“Charles, why don’t we get away, maybe down to Saint Bart’s, even just for a long weekend?”
He finishes his drink and looks out the window. “You’ve got to stop crowding me, Anne.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was crowding you.”
“You can’t help it. You’re just so full of enthusiasms. Sometimes they’re hard to take.”
“Our marriage is one of my enthusiasms. Perhaps it’s a misplaced one.”
“At the moment it may well be.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that right now I’m consumed by my own struggle and incapable of giving you the attention you deserve. Maybe I should rent a little apartment in Rome for a year.”
Wonderful-the great novelist spends a year in a garret overlooking the Tiber while she sweats it out in New York.
“Don’t expect me to be here when you get back,” Anne says.
Charles gets up and crosses the room. He lifts a painted Balinese monkey off the mantel and stares at its screeching face. “Only one thing is going to save me, to save us, Anne, and that’s a great book. We have to work as a team. I need your help.”
Anne goes around the room turning off the lights until the only illumination is the reflected glow that pours through the windows from the city outside. She stands in the middle of the room and steps out of her dress. Charles is watching her. She slips out of her bra and stands there in her soft cotton panties in the beckoning light. She knows that he still loves her body.
“Let’s make love,” she says.
Charles just stands there, looking at her. She can see it in his eyes-desire, faint at first, but building.
She goes to him and kisses him. “Please, darling, let’s forget about the world for a little while. Let’s get back to you and me.”
She pulls off his jacket and runs her hands down his shoulders. Then she unbuttons his shirt, her fingers trembling lightly. She can smell his pine soap, his sweat, the wine on his breath. She pushes his shirt open. She touches his chest, his neck, the warmth under his arms. His eyes are half closed.
Slowly, very slowly, he moves an index finger down the curve of her breast. “You and me?”
“Yes,” Anne whispers.
Charles leans in to kiss her, slipping his hands down the back of her panties and pushing them off her hips, taking control.
They met at a benefit softball game in Bridgehampton. She was twenty-three, winning raves from her bosses at Vogue, besieged by suitors, adoring the East. He was thirty-six, tanned and famous, and when he hit that triple and slid into third base, she was gone. They had a few cursory dates, but they both knew what those were about- prolonging the tension, foreplay basically. When they finally fell into each other’s arms-in a bedroom that looked out on the endless dunes of the Hamptons, the Atlantic glistening beneath a billion stars-it was what she’d been waiting for all her life.
They got married three months later-at City Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey, just for the hell of it. The first years were bliss. And it wasn’t just the sex. It was exploring hidden corners of Brooklyn on windy Saturday afternoons, arguing over conceptual art at the Whitney, laughing at each other’s imitations of dull or pompous people they met, spending long winter nights reading on the overstuffed sofas in the living room of their Turtle Bay apartment.
Charles was a red-hot ticket in those days, and he made furthering her career a personal crusade. Lunch with the president of Doubleday; dinner parties to introduce her to editors, photographers, and writers; high-profile literary and cultural events- New York magazine named them one of the city’s Ten Most Glamorous Couples. They got a good laugh out of that one. But it all paid off: within a year Anne had a contract to do the first of her popular coffee table books on the “art” of entertaining.
Anne thought their happiness would last forever. Although the erosion has been slow and steady, she has never looked at another man. Still does not want another man.
After their lovemaking-a fierce, greedy, almost impersonal bout-Anne gets up and walks to their bedroom. She brushes her teeth, being careful not to step on the broken glass. She suddenly feels guilty and ridiculous, almost bends down and sweeps up the shards-but no, she must know; it’s that simple. She lies on the bed and pretends to study a contract. Where is Charles? The apartment is so quiet.
Then he materializes-like a ghost-in the doorway. Anne starts.
“Scare you?” Charles asks. He’s naked and has a drink in his hand.
“You’re so quiet.” Even from across the room Anne can smell him, his after-sex smell, pungent and moist.
“Thinking. Thinking is quiet.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Shhhh.” He puts a finger up to his lips. “Loose lips sink books.”
“Ah.”
“Going to go do some work,” he says.
“Don’t you want to shower?”
“Do I stink?”
“No.”
“Yes, I do. I stink.”
“Well, if you stink, why don’t you shower?”
“Probably because you suggested it.”
Anne glances over to the bathroom. She gets out of bed and goes to him, puts her arms around his neck and kisses him softly on the lips. She presses her body, her hips, against his. “Or we could take one together. Who knows what might develop?”
“Oh, no, I’ve had too much to drink. You’re right, though, I do stink. A nice long shower and I’ll be good as new.”
Anne stops breathing as she watches him walk into the bathroom. His feet cross the black-and-white tiles, he’s heading right for the glass-he misses it. Her breath escapes in a rush.
Then he turns to grab a washcloth.
“Shit.” He turns his foot up and blood is running from the cut.
“What is it, darling?” Anne says, going to him. “Oh, no.” A shard of glass is sticking out of the sole of his foot. “Let me get it.”
She kneels and pulls out the thin shard and then squeezes his foot, watching as large drops of blood fall onto the tiles. “I dropped a glass earlier, I was sure I got it all up. I’m sorry. You get in the shower, I’ll clean this up.”
“ ’Tain’t nothin’,” Charles mutters before stepping into the stall. Anne opens the closet door, ostensibly to reach for a sponge. She leaves the door open, blocking Charles’s view, and retrieves a vial. She gingerly uses a piece of glass to push several drops of blood into the vial, her heart hammering in her chest. She puts the stopper in the vial and quickly wipes up the rest of the blood. Then she walks quickly to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, takes out her box of Maison du Chocolat chocolates-Charles hates them, eats only Hershey bars-and slips the vial under the top layer. Then she savors a cocoa-dusted truffle.
