Soon she was touching the bare skin on his stomach. He put his hand up her skirt and she pushed against it and he undid his pants and slid them down and reached for her. She let him. She rolled on top of him and he pulled her underwear over and got partway inside, it was as quick as that. She raised herself up to get it in smoothly. They were still for a minute. She grabbed his shirt and squeezed it hard and then quickly rolled to one side and took her underwear off.
They started again and after a minute or two there was a look on her face like she was concerned with something and he pulled her mouth to his neck so she wouldn’t make noise. Eventually the tension went out of her and they were going slower.
“Do you want to be on top,” she said.
“I think I’m done.”
“Me too,” she said.
After lying like that for a while they took all their clothes off, just to be touching, and she lay with her back to him, his arms around her. She had a raised mole on her back, on the one shoulderblade, and he leaned and kissed it. He knew the other one wouldn’t, is why. He knew she meant something different to the other one, she did not mean as much to the other one. It didn’t matter. She was not the same for him but that didn’t matter, he was going to write it down, a life lesson. Shut the fuck up, he told himself.
Then he thought she was just doing this as a favor. It was just her doing a favor for you, old times’ sake, next time she will be gone to you. He felt cold. He was considering all the possibilities but then he decided no, it wasn’t from pity, it was from several different things, he was fine with it. But it was time to get going, in an hour he might be nervous or angry, he didn’t want her to see that. He slipped out from behind her and began to look for where his clothes had fallen, then stood up and began dressing.
The coldness woke her and she opened her eyes.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“I dunno,” he said. “I guess home.”
“I’ll drive you.” She stood up, naked. She was so small. “Jesus, I’m shitfaced,” she said. “No wonder I wanted to seduce you.” She smiled at him.
He was slightly hurt by the implication but he smiled anyway and his head began to feel straight again, this was as good as it would get, two old friends, occasional benefits, any more and she’d take him under and then leave him there. He was glad it had happened, a good reminder of how it was supposed to be. It was supposed to mean something, it was more than just body parts. Life was long and he would feel this way again only not with her. He couldn’t figure out why he was feeling so natural about it, he hoped the feeling would last, he knew this was how he should close it. The end of one book of his life. He did not want to think about it.
“I’m glad I got to see you again,” he said. He cleared his throat and made himself lean forward to kiss her forehead. She tried to pull him back to the couch.
“You might as well stay a while longer,” she said. “We might as well do it all night.”
“I should get home.”
“I meant what I said.”
“I know,” he said. “I know you did.”
As he was leaving, he turned to wave and saw something move in Isaac’s window. He kept walking. Soon he was in the dark under the trees.
8. Lee
She was lying on the couch, looking around at the home she’d grown up in but had put from her mind five years now, water- stained ceilings, patches of wallpaper curled from dry plaster, Isaac’s books flung everywhere. Since she’d left, the books had filled the house. Old science textbooks he’d picked up at thrift stores, copies of
On one hand she loved her brother for it, his curiosity, he was always teaching himself things, but she was beginning to worry about him. He was getting more isolated and eccentric. Right, she thought. You’re the one who stuck him here. It didn’t seem like she’d had a choice about it. She’d always thought she had escaped just in time, outrun the sense she’d had her entire childhood that with the exception of her even-stranger younger brother, she was fundamentally alone. It was not a good way to think. It had changed completely when she got to Yale, not right away, but quickly enough, her sense of aloneness, of what she would now describe as an existential isolation, had disappeared. Her entire childhood in the Valley now seemed like a past so distant it might have been another person’s life. She’d found a place she belonged. It seemed impossible she’d have to give that up and come back here.
There was a creaking from upstairs—her brother was still awake. She felt guilty. I’m working on it, she told herself. Simon’s family had agreed to pay for a nurse, she’d made some phone calls, tomorrow she would start the interviews. It could not have gone any faster. Same as what they taught you as a lifeguard—you have to save yourself before you can save anyone else. That’s what she was doing. She had gotten herself to solid ground and now she was coming back for her family. You sure took your time about it, she thought, but that probably wasn’t true, she was just being hard on herself. She hadn’t been a particularly good lifeguard, either—her body wasn’t big or buoyant enough and technique only went so far. A heavy enough person would drag her under every time.
She got up and walked around the stairs, through the small dining room, and into the kitchen. Off the kitchen, in the den which had been converted to a bedroom, she heard her father snoring, the long pauses when his breathing seemed to stop. It is him, she thought. He is the problem. Her ears and neck got very hot and she had to wash her face in the sink, it was the old feeling that there were terrible things in motion and she would only understand when it was too late, it was the feeling she associated with this house, with the entire town. She felt it every time she came home. Soon they would all be gone from it. It was a conversation she’d been planning for years, telling her father it was time for both of his kids to leave. That he could stay in the house with a nurse or move to a home, but that the time for Isaac to stay had passed.
She had always been the favorite. Their father treated Isaac like a foster child, because he, Henry English, was a big man from a line of big men, because Isaac had a curious mind and Henry English did not, and while those same faults, smallness and fine- mindedness, were acceptable in his wife and daughter, when they appeared in his son it was as if everything he had to offer, everything he had valued in himself, it had all been submerged under the character of his wife. Including her Mexican coloring, which both children had inherited. Their skin wasn’t that dark, really, they just looked slightly tan, Isaac could have passed for someone from the hills. Not so much her, though. A little more foreign. Dark eyebrows, she thought. Meanwhile Henry English was pale and red- haired. Or had been, anyway.
Their mother had come to the U.S. to study at Carnegie Mellon, and as far as Lee knew, she had never gone back. By the time her kids were born she had no trace of an accent and neither Lee nor Isaac had ever heard her speak Spanish. Right, she thought. As if Henry would have allowed that anyway. He wouldn’t have been happy either if he knew you checked the box, called yourself Latina, on your college and law school applications. She’d thought it over many times, but when the time came she hadn’t hesitated to do it. It was true and not true. She could look the part if she wanted, but she didn’t know the language, not even a nursery rhyme—she was the daughter of a steelworker, it was a union family. At Yale she’d learned French. As far as college and graduate school went, she probably would have gotten in anyway, she had perfect SATs and nearly perfect LSATs but there were times she wished she could know for sure. Obviously it was a luxury to even wonder about it.
She took a handful of vitamins for all the wine she’d had, drank a glass of water, and went back to the living room. She couldn’t get over the house—it was bigger and grander than some of the houses of her professors. Built for some businessman in 1901, the date in stone over the front door. A little ostentatious, but that was the style then. Her father loved the house more than he would ever admit. They had bought it in 1980, when things were beginning to slow, when people in the Valley were much less sure about buying big houses. Later, it had been the
