Accelerated (19 page)

He held on to her tightly, tasting the salt on her neck as they caught their breath. Dropping her would definitely be a deal breaker and putting her down was not something he wanted to do.

By the time they made it to the bedroom, they’d had sex twice, stopping on the living room couch for an encore.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” she said, sprawled next to him on the bed. The glow of daylight was pushing at the dark sky outside.

“You’re not feeling bad about this, are you?” His hand traveled from the curve of her hip up to the curve of her shoulder. “Because I’m not at all.”

“That feels so good,” she said, closing her eyes.

He looked at her body, trying to burn the image into his brain. “What about … what’s his name?” It was stupid, inane, to conjure the fiancé at this particular moment. What made him so self-destructive?

She hesitated. “I don’t know.”

He should keep touching her but stop talking. It was only going to get him in trouble.

“Something changed. It’s hard to explain.”

Change sounded bad. Which, of course, was good for him. “Mmm,” he said, running his hand back down from her shoulder to her thigh.

“Have you ever had sex with someone and, suddenly they’re not, well, themselves?” She didn’t seem to want an answer, which was good, because he had no idea what she was talking about except that it involved sex with someone other than him. “There was one night right after summer, when Chris and I were, you know. He looked like Chris, smelled like Chris, he
was
Chris—but something about him was just essentially different. Like in
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
. It was über-Chris. God, do you want to hear about this, I mean, maybe I should just …” She cut herself off.

What was he going to say? He wished he could rewind and delete, but he’d brought it up. “No. Go on. You can tell me.”

She sighed deeply. “It was like I wasn’t even there. I remember thinking that as far as he was concerned I could have been anyone, or anything—a blow-up doll from a sex shop. He didn’t hear me or feel me or see me.”

This forced Sean to imagine the guy on top of her pounding away, which stirred up an unaccountable possessiveness.

“It was a really shitty feeling.”

“For the record,
I
feel you, and you feel extremely good.” He kissed the crook of her elbow, the back of her kneecaps, inside her thigh.

“I do,” she said. “I feel really good.”

He explored her ankle bone and her toes. It seemed that over the course of the night, her entire body had been transformed into one giant erogenous zone. The third time they had sex was slow and sweet and possibly more exciting than the first two times. When she climbed on top of him, everything started to slip away. The last coherent thought he had was that there was no blowup doll anywhere that could even come close.

The next morning, he was smiling before he opened his eyes. He hadn’t smelled sex on his sheets in a long time. He rolled over and muscle groups he hadn’t used in months cramped up. Flashes from the night before, his own personal porn flick, were getting him worked up all over again. He reached out for Jess, but she wasn’t there. He opened his eyes and saw the sheets on her side of the bed peeled away. How could she leave after the night of mind-blowing sex they’d had? It was dumb to think she’d been interested in him, that she’d want to stick around for coffee and who knew what else. When he heard the water running in the bathroom, he calmed down. Everything was going to be okay. She was still here. He got up, grabbed a pair of boxers from the dresser and knocked at the bathroom door.

“Just a minute.” Her voice was tighter, more formal than it had been a few hours ago. She opened the door wearing her backless dress. She’d pulled her hair, which he’d helped work into a sex-induced tangle, into a ponytail. “I should go,” she said, avoiding his eyes.

She definitely should not go. “Why?” He sat on the bed and patted it for her to sit, too.

She sighed and sat next to him. “It was amazing last night,” she said. A smile flicked across her features and was gone. “But … I can’t. It was a mistake. A big, huge mistake.”

“No,” he said. “It was one of the three best things to ever happen to me.”

“One of three?”

“I thought it would sound too pathetic to say it was the best thing.”

“I woke up this morning to a nightmare of Chris—my fiancé—and the Bradley Ethics Committee stoning me in the auditorium during morning assembly.”

“What were you wearing?” He used his most lascivious voice, which he thought would have to make her smile.

Without missing a beat, Jess made a fist and hit him in the arm, harder than necessary.

“I promise I won’t tell. Just stay.”

She shook her head sadly, then started rooting through the sheets.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for my underwear.”

He had to imagine her not wearing any under the dress. He got down on his knees and looked under the bed with her when he had a flash from the night before.

“Front hall,” he said.

They stepped over shoes, pants, socks to get there. He picked up her panties from the handlebar of Toby’s scooter and handed them to her. “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

She shook her head.

“How about tomorrow?”

She balled up her panties and tucked them into her evening purse. He wasn’t sure, but she seemed to be tearing up. Making her cry was the last thing he’d wanted to do.

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m really sorry.” She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, opened the front door, and was gone.

T
HE ARCH OF
C
AMILLE
B
URDOT
’
S EYEBROWS RAISED AND LOWERED
as she made a slow tour of his work. Each of his new pieces was clamped to its own easel along one wall of the gallery. As the damp patches under his arms spread, he concentrated on breathing. It was a bad day to forget deodorant.

He tried to see his work with an objective eye, which was hard, given everything he’d put into it since Toby’d been away. Since his night with Jess. Camille emitted occasional noises of what he hoped were approval but could just as easily have been disappointment. The pieces were interesting, at least he thought so. But if Camille didn’t, he’d wasted his time—and a lot of energy.

His mind wandered to Christmas morning, the heat banging against the radiator, the absence of Toby drowning out even that. Looking at the old Christmas albums had been masochistic. No matter how many more Christmases they’d have, he’d never get this one back. He’d been gloomy, self-indulgent, as he snipped up the worst Christmas photos—and the ones of Ellie—and used them in the piece Camille was now looking at.

“Very nice,” Camille announced, finally. “I will take all,” she said. Her smile was a twisted pout. “You will frame them.”

“You want all of them?” Maybe he’d misunderstood, with the accent and English being her second language. “All twenty?”

“So modest,” she said, with a wink that only a French woman could get away with. “Now go away. Back to work!”

When he hit the sidewalk, he ran west toward Chelsea Piers, not quite believing what was happening. He wasn’t used to feeling elated.

He dialed Ellie’s number and thankfully Toby answered.

“You’re just who I wanted to talk to. Guess what? The gallery lady liked all my work. She’s taking it all.”

“You rule, Dad,” Toby said. “Hey, Mommy and me are painting snow later. But I’m not going to use white.”

Ellie had given him a set of acrylic paints and an easel. “That’s a great idea, Tobe.”

Sean had decided that telling Toby about Calvin would wreck Christmas. He didn’t need to do that. He’d wait until Toby was home, where Sean could keep an eye on him and help him understand. It could take days, weeks, months for something like this to sink in.

“I just got to the basketball courts,” he told Toby. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you in a few days.” He felt good as he strutted onto the court.

“Sean!” Walt and his buddies were warming up. “Get out here. We need your height.”

The other players didn’t look too intimidating. They were all a good ten or fifteen years older, most had guts, and fewer than half had full heads of hair.

“Meet the guys,” Walt said, and introduced Sean to an elite splinter group from
Who’s Who
that included the chief counsel for the
New York Times
, the minister of The First Presbyterian Church, the head of Orthopedics at the Hospital for Special Surgery, a bigwig at the ACLU, and a couple of hedge-fund guys.

The aging, overweight group wasn’t as pathetic as it looked. What they lacked in stamina and basic cardiovascular health, they made up in ball handling, fakes, and excellent use of all that extra body weight. Sean’s team squeaked out a victory, but he was going to be sore for days. At least he’d avoided injuries. The others hadn’t been so lucky. Bobby, the orthopedic surgeon, sat out with a bloody nose for the last twenty minutes, compliments of Gunther, one of the hedge-fund guys. Gunther was wiry and feral and his elbows flew around like Samurai swords. It was a miracle there’d been so few casualties.

“Who’s up for a drink?” Walt was sweaty, cheerful. “There’s a place just up the block.”

The others begged off with excuses ranging from board meetings to wives to a conference call with Japan.

“I’m in,” Sean said. Drinking afterwards was the best part of playing sports, as far as he was concerned.

The bar was designed to look like a roadside joint, but was packed with ambitious twenty-five-year-olds all trying to catch each others’ attention with a studied and animated avoidance. If this was the singles scene, Sean wanted no part of it.

He followed Walt into a booth and ordered an Anchor Steam. With twenty pieces in the Burdot show, Anchor Steam was now in his budget. Or would be soon. From now on, only the good stuff.

“Good game,” Sean said. “Those guys know what they’re doing.”

“In just about every way,” Walt said with a wink.

“Kind of a successful group,” he agreed.

“Compliments of Bradley.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” He tried to imagine Kayla, Dylan, even Toby, as the future decision-makers of the country, the world, but that was still a ways away.

“When I got to Bradley in sixth grade, it freaked me out.” Walt took a sip of his beer. The happy hour white noise surrounding them was deafening. “All that money and power. I constituted the school’s token middle-class child.”

“Yeah right.”

“I didn’t say I was poor. But my family didn’t own islands and run corporations.”

Walt was getting more interesting by the minute. They had some things in common after all.

“In high school I finally figured out it was all about attitude. If you acted like you belonged, you did.” He raised his glass. “Good life lesson, actually.”

“Yeah, well I don’t know if Toby’ll be at Bradley for high school.” He hadn’t meant to drop that bomb.

Walt screwed his face into a question mark. “Of course he will be.”

Sean shrugged so it didn’t seem like such a big deal. “I don’t know if Bradley’s the right place for Toby. He’s a great kid and all they’re doing is giving him a hard time. I’m sick of every little thing being a major crisis.”

Walt was nodding. “You know they do that on purpose, right? It’s part of their thing.”

Sean shook his head. “Bradley has a thing?”

“It’s maddening,” Walt went on. “But I guess I understand why they do it.”

“Why they do what?”

“Okay, so people pay ridiculous sums of money to send their kids there, right?” He was hunched forward intently. “Why do they do that?”

“The education. Obviously.”

Walt was shaking his head. “So their kids don’t fall through the cracks. That’s the whole thing. People can send their kids to P.S. Bumfuck down the street for free. Will they get a decent education? Maybe. It’s hard to know. What we do know is that at Bumfuck, their child is simply one of the pack. There’s no way to keep track of who stinks at math, who can’t really read, who’s dyslexic. For thirty-five grand a year—no, thirty-eight this year—Bradley watches so closely they’re bound to find a problem. From what I’ve heard, parents get nervous if the school
doesn’t
find something.”

Yeah, he thought, they’re watching so hard they let a kid die.

“Personally, I think they’re just trying to get a feel for which parents are committed to making their kids the best they can be.” Walt allowed a selfconscious smile. “I guess that’s the cheerleader in me talking.”

“You really think I’m overreacting?” Had he misread the messages? Was Bradley’s crisis-mode bullshit just their
thing?
He went over the most annoying conversations with Shineman. Did every parent go through some version of the same thing? And if so, why the hell didn’t he know that before? Maybe Walt was wrong. But if he was right …

“When Mikey was in third grade,” Walt said, “we had him evaluated. The teachers recommended it.”

“No shit.” Hearing that it was par for the course helped. A little. “Same thing happened to Toby.”

“I think third grade is the sweet spot for catching whatever’s going on with kids. That’s what they told us, anyway.”

“So … what happened? With Mikey?”

“I love my son, but there’s no other way to say it: Mikey was a space cadet. The doctor suggested we try Ritalin. Said it helped kids like Mikey do better in school.”

“Did you do it?”

Walt’s expression said it for him:
duh
. “Mikey went from a severely average student to Dean’s list practically overnight. He was on Ritalin until he graduated last year. I’m convinced he never would have gotten into Harvard without it. Honest to God.”

“So he had ADD?”

Walt shrugged. “Whatever he had or didn’t have, the medication helped him.”

“But—”

“I know that look. You thinking about it, too? For Toby.”

“It’s a hard one.”

“Welcome to parenthood,” Walt said. “You need to decide for yourself what to do. All I know is that for Mikey it worked. Turned him into an A student, which affected the entire trajectory of his life. It’s a powerful little pill.”