She passed under the Cluck-U Chicken sign, dark for the time being, its arrogant fowl hidden under snow. Without the lurid glare of its neon lights, the street looked serene, classic, even charming. Although it was late in the evening, she could see light coming from the Korner’s big plate-glass window. She peeked inside. She meant to take only a quick look and continue walking by, but she saw that John was there, looking right out the window at her. He had closed up for the night, and sat alone, with his feet up on a chair. She was about to pull back from the window, when something—perhaps her sudden, furtive movements—drew his attention. He smiled at her and jumped out of his chair. When he opened the door for her, the most beautiful music poured out into the cold night air. Pru recognized it as a Duke Ellington suite—languid, lush, sensual. The music and the way he pulled her indoors and wrapped his arms around her left her discombobulated.
“I was looking for you,” he said into her hair. “And look, here you are.”
“Oh?” she said. She still hadn’t recovered.
She closed her eyes. She felt the knot of worry that had been lodged at the base of her neck loosening. She felt their legs pressing together, his hands slipping inside her coat, the camel-hair with the robin’s-egg-blue silk lining. Ellington swirled around them, making her knees buckle. She felt as though she’d just walked in the door to a Moroccan brothel.
“You smell clean and neat,” John said, brushing his nose against her temple.
She smiled into his shirt. “A person can’t smell neat,” she said.
“Well, you can. Neat as a pin.”
His shirt was soft, and he had another shirt, a thermal one, on underneath it. For some reason, Pru was touched that he thought to layer two shirts together. He smelled like a wood fire, and of soap.
He kissed her then. It was their first kiss, and it might as well have been her first kiss ever. No: She was glad it was not her first kiss ever. Because if she hadn’t been kissed before, she might have thought that this was how it always felt.
“John.” They were moving to the area with the couches, near the back.
“What?”
“Are you seeing that girl? Gaia?”
“Gaia?” he said, as if it were a name from a distant past. “Not really.”
“Not really, or no?”
“No.”
“Were you seeing her?”
“Yes,” he said, as if pleased to be able to answer something in the affirmative.
It knocked the wind out of her sails for a minute. She wanted him to have been pining for her. Why hadn’t he been pining? An ex-wife, first, to contend with, and then another lover? It was too much. She sat up and put on her glasses, which she’d removed when he’d started kissing her.
“Listen,” he said, raising himself up on one elbow. “You don’t just decide one day you’re going to run a marathon, right? You have to do some training first.”
“Aren’t you being a little glib about this?”
He sighed. “I am. I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed, I guess. I don’t want you to feel bad.”
His hands slid around her, inside her sweater, touching her naked back.
Everything in her wanted to melt. Oh, just let it go, she told herself. “Am I the marathon?”
He smiled and nodded. “The New York Marathon.”
“The Boston is harder,” she muttered.
“Okay, you’re the Boston, then.”
“And what was she? Just a little warm-up?”
“She was like a 5K,” he said, so near her ear that she got goose bumps. “Well . . . maybe a 10K.”
He was nuzzling her ear, and shivers went up and down her arms. She could hear the end of “Thunder Road” in her head, the wordless part, the part with bells and exploding riffs. She wanted to laugh—it was the same make-out song she always heard inside her head. But the something pissy inside continued to gnaw at her. She wished she could be the kind of girl who could just let something go. It bothered her, the idea that he had slept with someone else so recently, while wanting to sleep with her. That wasn’t how she’d imagined this going. When was the last time? How had it ended? What did it all mean?
Then she realized something, as they found each other again: All she had to do, to be the kind of girl who lets something like that go, was to let it go. Let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go. Maybe she’d have to let it go a thousand times. But she’d just do it, over and over. As often as she needed to.
So she did. She just let go. She all but shoved it away from her, with both hands.
Sixteen
She had forgotten what it was like to be so into another person, under a warm coat and entwined together on a junky couch, that nothing else outside of you could possibly exist.
You forget you have to get up and go home. You forget that people are waiting for you, wondering where you are. You forget that, at any moment and for no apparent reason, the cops could bust down the door and drag you, naked, through the streets. Well, that might be a stretch, she thought, watching John sleep. But they could. There was misery lurking just outside the camel-hair coat that covered them, in its many unhappy forms.
She managed to slip out of the café before the first customers came, before even the sun was up. She’d never really fallen into deep sleep, as two people who are in the process of discovering each other on a ratty old coffee house couch never really can. Rather, one minute she was drifting off, and the next she was walking down Columbia
