Sliding Past Vertical (22 page)

“It wasn’t ridiculous,” she said,
nearly a whisper.

Not for a glimmer did his
eyes leave hers. His skin felt cool and smooth. She wished she could hold him,
and kiss him, and offer the comfort of her body, to soften the blow from the
pain she was about to inflict. She’d done it so many times, to Emerson, and
others—offered herself as a kind of anesthesia, when words hadn’t seemed
like enough.

She let her hand fall onto
the void between them and broke free from his liquid gaze. She drew in a deep
breath, considering what should be said next.

It had to be a sin of
omission, of course. In the name of honesty, why hurt him more by saying she didn’t
love him like she loved Emerson?
 

“I’m really sorry,” she began.
“You’ll probably make a great husband, I’m just not ready to get married. But
it was so sweet of you to think of me that way.”

He hid his face in his hands.
“And it was very wrong that I did so,” he wailed. “I wish I’d never said what I
said.”

In her mind she saw the
wedding dress fall to rags. Seed pearls broke off in her clumsy, six-year-old
fingers. Her voice sounded small and weak to her ears. “No. Please don’t take
it back. No one’s ever said that to me before.”

He drew his fingers down his
cheeks. His mouth had fallen open, his eyes disbelieving. “Never? Not even...”
He pointed upward.

Sarah tilted her head quizzically.
For a second she wondered if he meant God and then realized he was referring to
Emerson. Not even Rashid could think she was that saintly. She shook her head.

“I’ve given you something no
other man has given you?”

She thought a moment. “I
guess you have.”

She’d never seen a man with a
broken heart look so happy.

* * * * *

“I can’t do this anymore!”
Emerson yelled to no one, shredding the latest aborted title out of the
carriage. He wadded it up and hurled it at the window shade. The satisfying
crash he required merely came out as an impotent “tink,” and the paper bounced,
improbably, into the garbage can.

“So don’t do it,” Sarah would
say, as simply as that. He stopped in the middle of his rage, feeling a wave of
warmth wash over him. Just her voice in his mind calmed him. He ached to see
her, to talk to her, to close the distance between them.

But he couldn’t do that to
himself. He wouldn’t allow her to hurt him.
Never
again
.

She was probably still downstairs.
They could talk. He’d tell her about the new story he planned to write. Not
about Dirk or anything for the magazines. He didn’t want to do that anymore.
He’d meet this deadline, because he’d made a promise and didn’t like to break
promises. Then he would resign and hang up Dirk’s leather jacket forever. He’d
write real stories. Stories he could give to his mother. Stories he could put
his own name on. Sarah would be happy, because she’d wanted him to do this for
so long, and she’d no longer look at him and wonder if he was co-opting their
privacy.

He’d been so absorbed that he
hadn’t noticed the darkening sky. He wondered what kept Rashid, and poor Sarah,
waiting for him for so long. He headed downstairs, ready to drive her home. Then
he saw two figures on the porch, in silhouette through the window. One was
Sarah; how well he knew her contours. The other he didn’t immediately
recognize. He froze, watching, listening. He heard nothing but a softness of
two different pitches, back and forth.

Then the two figures merged
into one. Something stabbed through Emerson’s gut.

Slowly the two shapes drew
apart. The doorknob turned and Emerson flattened himself against the wall. In
walked Sarah, her cheeks flushed, her hair windblown.

Rashid followed, a hand on
her shoulder, looking disgustingly smug. “I’ll just get that book you loaned
me,” he told Sarah. “Then we can go.”

He saw Emerson and smiled,
too hard. “Look, Sarah, here is Emerson. The writing has gone well?”

Emerson thought of the wad of
paper he’d hurled against the window and the typewriter that almost followed.
But Rashid would do. “No. The writing has not gone well.”

“That’s too bad. Well. In
just a moment I’m going to drive Sarah home. Perhaps when I return, we can go out
for some dinner.”

“Maybe it would be good for
you to get out.” Sarah smiled at Emerson and touched his arm. He felt a
weakening down to his toes but couldn’t erase the image of the embracing
figures in the window. Or stop seeing the triumph on Rashid’s face. He could
only imagine what it meant.

“I have a deadline,” he said,
and went upstairs to call Daisy.

Chapter 36

When Sarah’s boss normally
asked her to type a focus-group transcript, she keyed the words into the
computer and didn’t think much about the big picture, unless there was
something particularly interesting about the group dynamic or something she wanted
to save for Emerson. But this—a study for a new kind of instant iced
tea—was the first focus group she’d been allowed to participate in, from
start to finish, from planning the demographic to preparing the questions to
helping interpret the data, so she had more invested in the results.

The words weighed more
heavily.

“I would not serve this to my
husband,” a woman said in Sarah’s earpiece. Her haughty voice, tinged with a
slight British accent, came across clear and bold, even on the
many-times-overwritten tape, and made Sarah crawly with guilt. She remembered
the Indian woman sitting across the table, red
bindi
on her forehead, peacock blue sari wrapped around a short-sleeved
white blouse, snug on her pudgy upper arms. She’d taken a sip of the stuff and
then, disgust pickling her face, shoved the glass away.

Sarah was glad to have the
tape. Many times during the actual focus group her attention had drifted
because she’d been watching this woman and thinking about Rashid. She wondered if
the woman who was supposed to have been his fiancée was anything like the woman
in the blue sari. If she would be so meticulous about what she served her
husband. If she knew Sarah might be responsible for her husband’s not being Rashid.

Sarah hadn’t heard from him
in two weeks, which didn’t surprise her. She’d torn his heart out and hadn’t
been expecting a follow-up call. Although he’d taken it so graciously, she
suspected the brave face couldn’t last forever.

She called him at the lab. He
seemed pleased to hear from her, although there was hesitation in his voice,
perhaps because she’d called him at work. Sarah forced some small talk about
the Winter Olympics and Katarina Witt’s chances of winning gold for a second
time, but then she felt a need to define a purpose for her call. She improvised.

“I think I lost an earring in
your car.”

“What does it look like?”

She tried to remember what
she’d been wearing that day. That was the trouble with lies. You had to work
harder to appear consistent. “Um, gold. With little hearts.” The pair had been
a gift from Emerson for her twenty-fifth birthday. As she reached up to touch
an earlobe, she realized she was currently wearing them. Both of them.

“I will turn it inside out.”

She pictured him taking his
whole car apart. “No! It’s...well, not that important. Just if you happen to
see it.”

“Yes, I will do this. If I
find it I will return it to you immediately.”

A long stretch of silence
followed. She’d never realized, until one was plunked on her desk a few weeks
ago, how loudly computers hummed. The cursor blinked on the Indian woman’s
name. She felt the piercing eyes as if the woman knew—one more Indian son
seduced by American decadence.

“I should let you get back to
work,” Sarah said.

“No, it’s all right, I’m
taking a break. I’ve been thinking of calling you myself.” He lowered his
voice. “I’ve been missing you.”

“Rashid...”

“I know you aren’t ready to
be married,” he said. “I accept that. But because of this, must we not even
remain friends?”

She leaned back in her chair.
Don’t say it
.
Bad idea. Very bad idea.
But it came out anyway. She couldn’t
crush him again so soon. “I don’t see why we can’t.”

“Then you will let me make
you dinner some night when I am less busy?”

“Yeah, I guess.” She remembered
what Emerson had said about a man who offered to cook for woman. “But I don’t
want to make a big deal out of this.”

 
“Two friends having dinner?” Rashid said.
“What is a big deal about that?”

Chapter 37

Dirk Blade’s sudden
retirement gave Emerson more time and mental space than he was accustomed to
having. For the past three weeks, he’d been using this precious commodity not
to write legitimate stories or to earn extra money at the infirmary, but to
torture himself with introspection.

Usually it was about Sarah
and Rashid.

But he grew weary of that brand
of pain. He didn’t need Dirk’s one-track imagination to figure out what must
have happened between them—what else made a man act so smugly possessive
of a woman?—and didn’t want to know a single detail more.

That night, Emerson tortured
himself with what Sarah had said about his propensity toward youthful
girlfriends. He’d never given her teasing much credence before. When he did
take the odd moment to reflect on the issue, it was to convince himself that
the reasons were proximity and convenience. If you lived in a college town, you
met college girls; if you worked at an infirmary, you met nurses’ aides and
patients’ granddaughters.

And all, with few exceptions,
had been under twenty-one.

Lying awake in
curtain-filtered street light hours after nineteen-year-old Daisy had gotten
dressed and gone back to her dormitory, he considered the possibility that his
choices might be deliberate. He thought about something he once wrote to Sarah
when yet another rogue had broken her heart, and he was trying to make her see
the error of her ways: one is an adventure, two is a coincidence, three is a
pattern.

He did a quick count and
discovered he had a pattern three times over.

His first impulse was to call
Sarah, queen of relationship déja-vu, to get her take on this revelation of his
and to offer some sort of backhanded apology for the abuse he’d heaped on her
over the years concerning her own choices.

But it was late. She had work
in the morning. They’d moved on to other people, and he had to get over this
compulsion to call her whenever he felt sorry for himself.

He would just have to stuff
it down further.

The stairs complained in
monstrous creaks as he headed down to the kitchen. He made cocoa and sat at the
kitchen table for a long time, listening to the wind howl, the windows rattle,
and the faint, happy rumblings of a party next door, which only made him feel
lonelier, older, and more pathetic. He ran a hand through his hair and a
disturbing number of strands came out. One of them was suspiciously whiter than
the others.

He grabbed the phone.

“I’ve become a walking
cliché,” he told Sarah’s startled greeting.

“Em?”

“Who else would call you at one
thirty in the morning and tell you they’ve become a walking cliché?”

“What’s wrong?” she sighed, a
beautiful sleepy purr. He heard the rustle of sheets, the creak of bedsprings.
He imagined her turning over, getting comfortable for a long conversation. It reminded
him of their late-night talks when she lived in Boston, the blissful
frustration of having her voice so close to his ear and her body never more
inaccessible. Yet with no eyes staring back at him, he could easily tell her
anything.

Almost anything.

“I’m losing my hair,” he said.

“You’ve been losing your hair
since you were twenty-five.”

“I have not.” He examined his
hairline in his reflection in the kitchen window. “Have I?”

“Just a little,” she said.
“But you can hardly notice it.”

“Well, it’s even more now.
I’m losing my hair and sleeping with teenagers.”

Silence. Then she said,
“Hence the walking cliché thing?”

At this unfortunate moment, a
pretty girl who looked no more than sixteen spilled out of the house next door,
giggling, obviously drunk. She was wearing a short, low-cut dress and one of
the resident undergrads.

It was exactly the kind of
dress that women so often allowed Dirk to push out of his way.

The boy backed the girl
against a shed in direct view of Emerson’s window. His hands disappeared inside
her dress. Emerson snapped the blinds closed, distressed that he’d become
aroused. But he could still hear them, imagine them, and feel his own hands on
the girl’s soft, white flesh.

As if he’d become Dirk Blade.

Sarah’s voice drifted back to
him, small and a little odd.

“Em...everything all right?”

“Huh?” he breathed.

“You want to talk about it?”

He already had the car keys
in his hand.

* * * * *

Sarah had been dreaming about
diving for the third time in the past two weeks. Only this time, she didn’t
know that the diving board was out the window of an eight-story building until
she’d jumped. Halfway to the pavement, the telephone rang, waking her. Just from
hearing the tone of Emerson’s voice and those awful silences, she’d been too
scared to let him go on facing the night alone.

Not when the diving board was
pointing out the window.

A few minutes later, Emerson stood
at her door, silent and disheveled. She hugged him. His return embrace was
tentative, unengaged. Daisy’s cloying young fragrance made Sarah sink with
despair.

He slipped free and without
taking off his coat collapsed into her flowered armchair.

She waited. Eventually he
raised his eyes to hers. They were pale and a little desperate. “I’m turning
into Dirk,” he said.

The kettle boiled.

* * * * *

Sarah disappeared into the
kitchen. Emerson felt guilty for waking her and ruining her night. He should
have kept this whole Dirk thing to himself. Why tax her when it was no longer
her job to put him back together?

Her emotional responsibility
lay elsewhere.

He sighed. He had to accept
that if Sarah and Rashid wanted to sleep together, it was their choice and none
of his business. She could do worse, and had, by far. At least he wasn’t Jay.
When Emerson forced himself to admit it, Rashid was a nice guy. Honest, with a
good heart. He wouldn’t cheat on her, abuse her, or do drugs. He worked hard
and had a sense of duty and responsibility. Sarah should be with someone who made
her happy, and if it couldn’t be Emerson, shouldn’t it be someone he approved
of?

Yeah,
right.

Wimp,
Emerson told himself. He
should be angrier. His best friend with the love of his life? He should be
furious. He’d been keeping his distance since the embrace on the porch, but it
was nearly impossible to stay mad at someone so guileless, so innocent in his
steadfast belief that Emerson still wanted to be his friend.

Finally Sarah returned, somber,
carrying spiced tea and a huge slice of warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream.
It smelled wonderful. It was exactly what he wanted, or what he would have
wanted if he’d thought about it. She set the tea and the pie on a little table
next to his chair, returned with a mug for herself and sat on the floor in
front of him.

Her focus seemed completely
on him, her gaze brown and inviting.

“I was looking out the window
and—” Flustered by his sidetracked train of thought, he reconsidered his
entry point. If he made the girl the focus, Sarah would think he came over
because the situation aroused him. Which was true, but it wouldn’t be fair to
unload that on her. Instead he told her how he came to stop writing Dirk Blade.
About meeting the last deadline and hanging up the leather jacket.

“I thought it would be easy.”
He warmed his hands on the mug, noticing that there wasn’t a single chip on it.
Or hers. “You know, you’re ready to make a change in your life and the pieces
should just fall into place. But it’s like...he’s torturing me for it. He won’t
let me go.”

He stopped to sip tea and
have more pie before it got cold and the ice cream got too soupy, and because
he couldn’t bear to listen to himself whine.

Sarah looked at him for a
long time with those big, soft eyes. Maybe she was thinking about how pathetic he’d
become and was glad he’d stopped seeing her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have
stopped,” she said.

He raised his eyes from his
fork.

“Maybe there’s a reason you
need him. Maybe you and Dirk just have to find some way to coexist inside the
same person.” She tightened her fingers around her mug. “And anyone who wants
to be in your life is just going to have to get used to it.”

* * * * *

They talked long into the
night, killing the rest of the pie, and Emerson began to feel better, less like
a sexual freak and more like someone who merely needed an outlet for old wounds
that hadn’t healed right. It was a relief to have Sarah’s support, to be able
to discuss Dirk with anyone, and so clinically, instead of the way Daisy liked
to talk about him, which was kind of furtive and disturbing.

He crawled in at five a.m.,
accustomed from his odd work shifts to coming in late and being quiet, but was surprised
to find Rashid in the kitchen, surrounded by breakfast preparations and already
dressed for his day in a white shirt, striped tie, and pressed trousers.

“You were called into the
infirmary?” Rashid looked concerned. “There was a problem?”

“Yeah. But it’s under control
now.” No need to tell Rashid he’d been at Sarah’s, although the temptation
needled him.

“I am making french toast,
can I make extra for you?”

He probably should have a
real breakfast after all that pie, but Emerson had no urge to sit at the table
and watch Rashid stir his tea five times counterclockwise, cut french toast
like a surgeon, and imagine him making love to Sarah with the same tidy
precision. He should probably start avoiding both of them for a while.

“No thanks,” Emerson said. “I
already ate.”