Endless Love

“That’s right. He was furious you’d made a fire and you knew no one but Hugh was allowed to work the fireplace but you pretended to be so bewildered. ‘I’m in charge of the fireplace,’ Hugh said. He thumped his chest —his gestures were so basic. A real man. He made no attempt to hide the nature of his complaint. He didn’t say it was June and too late for fires; he didn’t say we were almost out of wood; he didn’t even mention you guys forgot to put up the screen. He was at the end of a long, loose night and you know he always had a taste for the bare, unpleasant truth—little embarrassing admissions were Hugh’s hidden chocolates. So there he is, flat-footed and red- eyed, saying, ‘I don’t like people making fires in my fireplace. The fireplace is the one thing in this goddamned house that I’m completely in charge of.’”

“Jade said we were cold,” I said.

“And Hugh said you should wear gloves, or sweaters, or go someplace else.”

“He was staring at me when he said that. He meant I should go someplace else. Home.”

“Oh, I’m glad you said that, David. I always wondered if you noticed things like that.”

“Of course I did.”

“I’m glad. It seemed you didn’t.”

“Then I said I would leave after the fire burnt out.”

“Yes, searching for your advantage and pressing it at the same time. You two did a little more clumsy emotional fencing—you were a lot less agile than you imagined, you know, David—and at one point Hugh put his arm around me, the way men on dates will suddenly make physical contact when they think you might be getting bored. Hugh warned you to be quick getting home and then he and I walked upstairs. God, I loved that house at night, when the windows were black and the children were asleep.

“I turned on the reading lamp on my side of the bed and Hugh asked me if I planned to stay up. I was reading The Wapshot Scandal and I wanted some time with Cheever and some time to think. My mind was blown from being with so many people and I needed to regroup. Hugh slipped into our enormous bed wearing his shorts, a signal that he was insulted I’d chosen to read. His way of saying I was unworthy of intimacy. I asked him what was wrong and touched the elastic band on his shorts beneath the blanket. He inched away. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said and how I hated to hear his poor injured voice. He turned over and folded his hands over his big chest. He hardly had any hair under his arms and his chest and belly were as smooth as Sammy’s. ‘I’m lonely around you,’ he said. And I said, ‘I’m a lonely person. It’s contagious.’ But what I was thinking was Oh go to sleep, please go to sleep so I can have fifteen minutes alone.

“Hugh started reviewing the people at the party but he was yawning too and I relaxed. I knew it wouldn’t be long. Somewhere in there, I heard the front door open and then close and I assumed it was you, making your exit. Then I heard Jade come upstairs and go to the bathroom down the hall and I assumed she was preparing for bed.”

I had a powerful impulse to stop Ann at that moment. I remembered myself opening and closing that door, with Jade at my side and both of us giggling like the children we still half were, and creeping back to the living room certain our sound effects had been foolproof. And I remembered taking off my shoes and my shirt as Jade went upstairs, thinking to myself that I would never be so immense and would never forget an instant of that night, and being so right.

“I fell asleep for a few minutes,” Ann said, “with the book on my belly and the lamp on. But suddenly I was up, as if a shadow had passed over my face. I heard noises from downstairs. I clicked off the lamp and listened. Twittering floorboards. Squeaks and ticks that seemed more purposeful than the simple breathing of the house. I wonder what I thought it was. Did I really think a thief had found his way into our house? And if he had, what would he take? The magazines? The radio? My chocolates?”

“Stop, Ann,” I said, finally. “You’re getting too…”

“Close?”

“No. Strange. You’re hurting me.”

“This shouldn’t hurt. You remember it all anyhow. I’m telling you what I remember. I remember being in my bed and hearing noises from the downstairs of a house that I don’t live in anymore.”

Her eyes were bright, alert, but she didn’t seem to be using them. They shone like those lights people leave on in empty houses to fool burglars.

“I slipped out of bed and put on my robe, that blue-quilted robe, a winter robe but it was all I had. In one of Hugh’s dresser drawers there was an old hickory-handled buck knife—one of his many many boyhood souvenirs— and I thought I’d grab it in case I needed to stab someone. What a laugh. I was making no noise at all, less than a cloud, floating through the bedroom, into the hall, onto the landing of the stairs. It was more like an acid high than marijuana. I could see everything. I had the night vision of an electric cat. The ripples in the wallpaper, the scratches on the banister, everything.

“Including you, the both of you.”

“Please don’t, Ann,” I said. I could feel her dismantling my memory of that night, tilting it, enlarging it, until it was no longer mine.

“Oh stop, don’t be so damned squeamish. There’s nothing in this that’s going to hurt you. And you know there’s no one else to tell it to. Are you embarrassed? You explode like a bomb in the middle of my life and you’re embarrassed? I didn’t get very close, you know. I was much too surprised, and scared. I only made it halfway down the stairs and if it wasn’t for the fireplace I might not have even known you two were making love. I saw Jade’s hands on your shoulders and the tops of her knees, the way they were raised…”

I lowered my head onto the table and my arm knocked over my wineglass. Ann righted the glass and continued.

“But the thing I noticed most was your clothes. They weren’t strewn all over the place. They were nicely folded. Which meant you both knew exactly what you wanted and didn’t have to pretend to mindlessness. Oh, I was so touched by that, you have no idea. I honestly was.

“So up I went and crept back into bed. You never knew I was there. Isn’t that so?”

I raised my head. My eyes felt fifty degrees warmer than the rest of my body. I reached out for Ann’s hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry? What for?”

I shook my head. “For everything. For being at your house that night, making too much noise, making you see us. I don’t know.”

“Then listen to me, if you are. And think of me getting into bed with Hugh after seeing you and Jade downstairs. I was shaking and my mind was a tornado. I moved so close to him and God did I feel bad he hadn’t stripped down because I would have given a lot to feel his nakedness just then. I didn’t want to be alone. But you see I must have been radiating desire. Because suddenly Hugh stirred. His snoring stopped and he turned toward me and his eyes were slowly coming open. I touched his smooth, smooth face and he kissed me and when he kissed me I held my breath and I heard the floors squeaking downstairs. Hugh put his hands between my legs and that certainly finished the job of waking him up. I felt ready. For him. We’d been making love for eighteen years and we knew each other’s signals like high-wire acrobats—only we were low-wirers and we weren’t acrobats. Anyhow, I said I’d be right back and Hugh smiled because this meant I was going to put in my diaphragm. I walked across the bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom, listening for you two downstairs, and trying not to, and feeling slightly crazy and close to tears.

“And the bathroom was freezing. I was naked and shivering and those glass shelves Hugh put up looked to be bursting with the life of my family—deodorants and foot powders, shampoos, bubble bath, brushes and combs, Stimudents, a plastic frog, those hand-muscle flexers Sammy liked to squeeze when he soaked in the tub. It all looked so immense and beautiful; I stared at it with my mouth open, like a miser gawking at his gold. I never felt that way about the family; I wasn’t in my normal mind. My diaphragm always was on the second shelf, next to the shampoos, and there it was, as always. Encased in a maroon plastic pouch. I zipped it open, and my heart flipped out. My diaphragm was missing.

“I wasn’t confused over this, at least for not longer than a moment. I remembered hearing Jade going to the bathroom earlier and I realized that she’d gone and taken my diaphragm. Before you came along and relations got a little strained between me and Jade, we used to talk about how alike our bodies were and I suppose she figured what was good enough for me would hold the fort for her. And you, Jewish-radical-rock-and-roll-pot- head, you