Sleep No More

to the shadow that lived with them in the house, he refused. To do so, he sensed, would be to leap from the thin ledge of sanity where he now perched into the depths of madness.

The manifold dangers of their repeated trysts he saw but ignored. Blackmail was the most obvious risk, yet he no longer believed Eve intended anything of the sort. The fear of disease lingered until the day she casually left a copy of her blood tests on the piano, dated a week before their meeting at the soccer field. Being caught was always possible, and sometimes images of Lily’s face passed through his mind, how she would look if what was happening in the house on Wall Street were somehow revealed to her. Yet it was Eve who insisted they adhere to strict rules of security: no calls between their homes; no actual conversations when she called his cell phone; no following each other; no “surprises” in the mall or the grocery store. Her preoccupation with these matters gave him a feeling that some dark purpose underlay all her actions, but to think too much about this might have broken the spell she had cast upon him, and he had no desire to do that.

Eve questioned him often about guilt. His feelings surprised her, and she seemed not to trust his honesty on this point. Ever since Lily lost the baby on the ultrasound table-and with it her passion-Waters had worked hard not to feel resentment about his wife’s inability to let go of that pain. But he was human, and eventually the thousand small humiliations he endured accreted into resentment. Lily’s emotionally detached efforts to relieve his frustration only made the problem worse, and as months-and then years-passed, he struggled to keep his resentment from twisting into something worse. He thought he had succeeded. But now, experiencing all that Lily had denied him, and that he had denied himself, he could not feel guilt. He knew he should feel it, yet he did not. What he was experiencing with Eve, he desperately needed. He had wanted that ecstasy with Lily, but it was simply beyond her power. Lily’s inmost self had been wrapped in chains to which Waters did not have the key.

When he was home, he walked through the house like a secret stranger, a double agent who believed his own cover. I am a husband, he would tell himself. A father. I love this woman. I love this child. And he did. Sitting with Annelise in the evenings, he would listen in wonder as she told him about her day, each experience a suspenseful drama seen through the stark lens of seven-year-old perception. When he kissed Ana good night, her smile warmed him in a way nothing else could. Yet even before he passed through the door leaving her room, images of Eve would rise into his mind, as impossible to ignore as a fever in the blood. The urge to telephone her was almost irresistible, but he remembered her proscriptions and forced himself to wait until the next day, when she would call his cell phone. One night, though, the fever overcame him. He went to a pay phone and called her home. Eve was furious until he explained where he was. She met him on a deserted county road and made love with him on the ground, her dark eyes reflecting the moonlight, her voice weaving its ceaseless spell in his ear as he grunted like an animal into the surrounding forest.

The next day, when he took the portfolio from his desk drawer to look at Mallory’s picture, his eyes settled on the unopened bundle of her letters. That he had not yet opened this forced him to realize how badly he wanted to experience a reincarnation of Mallory without exhuming the darker remains of her personality. But that was as impossible now as it had been twenty years ago. Ominous flashes of her instability had already broken through the bright facade Eve worked so carefully to maintain.

More and more during their time together, she brought up Lily’s name. She questioned him endlessly about her. What had initially drawn him to her? Why had he married her? Was Annelise more like her father or mother? Eve asked these questions as though the answers were of only passing interest, but whenever he said anything even mildly complimentary about Lily, Eve’s face tightened in a way that sent a chill through him. More disturbing, as the days passed, she wanted him to stay later and later at the house. Twice he drove out of the narrow driveway after dark, distressed by the knowledge that Lily and Annelise were waiting for him at home. At first, Eve kept him late by increasing the intensity of the sex as evening approached. But when Waters tore himself away in spite of this, she reversed strategy and drew out the foreplay, so that he stayed late in order to find the release that days before had come in the first hour after his arrival. Beneath Eve’s subtle games he sensed a battle beginning with Lily, and in this Eve truly bore out Mallory’s shadow side. For the Grendel that lived in the dark cave of Mallory’s mind was jealousy, an unthinking possessiveness that could swallow a man whole and not be sated. The fact that Lily did not even know she was in a war began to work on Waters’s conscience in a way that simple sexual betrayal had not. Yet still he returned to Eve, diving ever deeper into the well of her passion, and leaving farther behind all that he deemed precious.

One night, as dusk fell outside the half-moon window on the third floor, he was trying to find a graceful way to make his exit. Sensing his mood, Eve shook her head and began to caress him. He had thought himself spent, but with patient ministrations, Eve brought him back to a state of arousal greater than that in which he’d begun the afternoon. They started with him above, but as he tired, she rolled him over and sat astride, taking control of their movements. Waters hovered in a purgatory between ecstasy and exhaustion, striving for release but unable to achieve it. With tireless rhythm Eve brought him to a point of exquisite torture, a tightrope in the dark, with pain on one side and pleasure on the other. As he strained against her, feeling as though he might faint, her mantra began again.

“Say my name, Johnny…”

He shut his eyes and tried to lose himself within her. Her teeth bit into his neck.

“Say it, Johnny…say it and you’ll be there. It’s so easy. It’s your magic word…”

Blood pounded like drums in his ears, and his muscles burned, but still he could not find release. Panting for oxygen, he opened his eyes and found himself staring at the place of their joining. The crosshatched pattern of scars on Eve’s inner thighs had grown red and prominent with her arousal, scars he hadn’t seen for twenty years.

“Say it, Johnny,” she begged, not even slowing her motion. “Say my name….”

As she repeated her eternal demand, he heard another voice answer hers. Three whispered syllables filled the room as completely as the screamed confession of a heretic.

“Mallory.”

Eve froze above him, her eyes locked onto his. Then she gave a moan riven from the depths of her being.

“Mallory,” he said again.

She gripped his head between her hands. “Say it again! Say it! Save me!”

“Mallory? Mallory, Mallory, Mallory…”

Tears poured from her eyes like rivers of grief and joy. She sat down with all her weight, the tears dropping onto his face, into his mouth, not warm but cold against his superheated flesh. And though she was not moving, something suddenly broke loose in him, and the point he had struggled so hard to reach came without effort, leaving him shivering beneath her like a malaria patient. Eve lay prone atop him, breathing shallowly.

“Do you love me, Johnny?”

Before that day she had often said, “I love you,” but she’d never insisted that he do the same. At those times he’d sensed a careful vigilance over her emotions, as though she knew that moving too fast could ruin everything. Now she had thrown caution to the wind.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I honestly don’t know.”

“I do,” she said. “I know you do.”

As Waters drove up to his house that night, he felt like a man on the verge of madness. Eve had not demanded that he call her Mallory again before leaving, but neither had he called her Eve. And having surrendered this ground to her, he sensed that only one moral redoubt remained: the renunciation of his love for Lily.

The next morning, Cole walked into Waters’s office, sat down in the chair opposite his desk, and asked if he had the new maps ready.

Waters looked blank.

“You said you had a prospect in West Feliciana Parish,” Cole reminded him. “A close-in deal. You said you’d have it ready in a week.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Can I see it?”

“The mapping’s going to take a little longer than I thought.”

Cole gave him a hard look. “What the fuck are you up to, John?”