She imagined Jake would go to sleep afterward, but instead he propped himself up on one elbow and told her about his first college girlfriend, a woman who tied him to the bed and left him there an hour, which was something he thought about all the time, and he hated her for it, but it was also the reason he still wasn’t over her. Pillow talk, good God. Fiona wanted to kick him out, but it was only ten o’clock, and she couldn’t imagine Richard and Serge returning for a couple more hours. She’d need him gone before then; not that Richard would judge her, but he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to tease her, either. And she was fifty-one, and she didn’t quite believe Jake was thirty-five, and she couldn’t bear for the age difference to be a topic of prurient interest.
Jake said, “Tell me about your first.”
“What,” she said, “are we bonding?”
He laughed, not hurt. “This is one of the best parts. It’s like, there’s foreplay, and there’s afterplay.”
She rolled toward him. What the hell. “I lost my virginity to my cousin’s science teacher. I’d already graduated high school, just barely. Different school.”
“Damn.”
“I don’t know, all my friends were much older. They were my brother’s friends, and then they were mine. It was hard to get excited about someone with acne.”
“Did you ever sleep with your brother’s friends?”
The laugh that escaped her was embarrassingly gooselike. The idea of her younger self with Charlie Keene or Asher Glass! She’d been madly in love with Yale, but that was different. Without expectation, without hope, a crush could remain pure and platonic. It was never lustful, never selfish. She was always just looking for excuses to touch him, talk to him, lean her head against his arm.
“Not so much?” he said.
“Not so much.”
“So what I don’t understand about that triptych, about the guy in the triptych, is that—”
“My God, shut up. Come here.” She tried to kiss him, just to stop him from saying another word, but he pulled back. “Didn’t I already cut my hand over this? You’re being kind of . . . vampiric.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I’m being a journalist. But also, like, isn’t it something you should talk about? To process it?”
“I’ve been processing for thirty years,” she said. “I’ve been processing since you were watching Saturday morning cartoons in your pajamas. I have a shrink for this stuff. I don’t need a journalist.”
“But you don’t have sex with your shrink. I mean, do you? Because seriously, when you talk after sex, it’s different. I think it’s why Freud had everyone lie down.”
“Did Freud sleep with his patients?”
“I think so.”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Fine. Julian died—God, I don’t even know how long ago. You know, depending how close you were to someone . . . There were some people who drew you in, leaned on you, and you spent more time with them in those last months than you ever had before. And there were people where if you were outside their closest circle, they shut you out. Not in an unkind way, it’s just they didn’t need you. You’d have been an interruption, you know? And I wasn’t in Julian’s tightest circle. And anyway, in the end, he shut everyone out.”
Jake looked like he didn’t follow. “Okay,” he said.
“There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. Not that they had bad intentions, just . . . you always want to believe you’re important in someone’s life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren’t.”
Jake ran his tongue down her ear and then along her clavicle. “One more time,” he said.
She didn’t like the way he looked at her, staring deep like he was trying to get their pupil dilation synced up. The point had never been for him to get more attached, especially not with everything else going on.
There were sounds out in the apartment.
“Shit,” she said. “If it’s just Richard he’ll go to bed soon. You can sneak out then, okay?”
“Alright,” he said, and closed his eyes. “I’m not an alcoholic. That was a joke.”
“How is that funny?”
“I don’t know. I was drunk.”
Fiona must have fallen asleep, because she was on a bus in Chicago with Richard, looking for Corinne’s house. Her hand was on fire.
When she rolled over in the middle of the night, Jake, thank God, was gone.
1986
Bill had decreed that everyone had the afternoon off. Yale lugged his bag on the El, and then to Briar and up the two flights. He’d been away long enough to induce that wonderful coming-home-after-a-long-trip feeling, the way you’re hit with the smells of your own building, the dimensions of your own hallway, which have somehow readjusted themselves so the place feels dreamlike, off by a few vertiginous inches in every direction. He was hungry, late for lunch. He thought he might make a grilled cheese, and he wondered if there was tomato soup in the pantry.
When he opened the door, Charlie’s mother stood there in a gray dress, her feet bare. He’d thought she was coming next week. Yale dropped his bag and said “Teresa!” and went to hug her. As he did, he heard the bedroom door shut. He assumed Charlie was coming out to see him, closing the door to hide the unmade bed from his mother. But Charlie didn’t appear. He’d gone in, not out.
And when he pulled back from Teresa, she had the strangest face. She smiled, but only with her mouth, and she said, “Yale, we need— Shall we go for a walk?”
He felt as if the room might tip sideways, or already had.
“What happened?” Charlie was having a breakdown. Julian had died. The paper had folded. Reagan had—
Teresa put her hands on his arms. He still had his coat on, his dressy coat. “Yale, we ought to take a walk.”
“Why would I want to do that? Teresa, what the hell?”
Her eyes were filling, and he saw now that she’d already been crying, that her face was a mess. Her hair was a mess.
He put his hands into his coat pockets. Fiona’s necklace was there, transferred from his pants, and the wings stabbed his palm. It was a cameo with birds on each side, birds holding up the frame of the cameo. Sharp metal wings. Something was very wrong.
Teresa drew a breath and very quietly said, “Yale, I’m going to walk you to the clinic and we’re going to get you tested.”