The Better to Hold You (2 page)

The station agent stared at me for a moment, as if weighing her options. In the end, she redialed the number, using a pen to protect her inch-long nails.

Hunter, I prayed, please wake up and answer the phone. I hadn’t been expecting him for another week, and had nearly jumped out of my skin when he walked in the door as I was eating day-old Thai food from the carton with my fingers. He’d been sick with a stomach bug, he’d explained, and had changed his ticket. No, he didn’t feel up to giving me the details just yet, and yes, if he needed a doctor he’d call one. His tone implied we were having an argument, and mine implied I hadn’t noticed.

I’d gone to bed at eleven and actually fallen asleep fairly quickly, an unusual occurrence for me. I had no idea when Hunter joined me, but at three A.M., when I woke up, he was on my right, snoring lightly from his attractively once-broken nose. For a moment I had wished him gone again, so I could pamper my chronic insomnia without restraint—turning the lights on, surfing the television, eating breakfast cereal in bed.

Then he had spooned his body around mine, a rare intimacy, and I had felt his warm breath on the back of my neck. Savoring the closeness, I had remained motionless while my left arm fell asleep and he began to snore again. I hated to bother him now, and knew he’d probably be irritated at first, but he’d understand once I explained what had happened.

“Still not home,” said the station agent, hanging up the phone. “You want to talk to the police about the theft of your personal possessions?”

“No,” I said, disconsolate. “Could you just let me back through the turnstile so I can go home?”

The station agent buzzed me through and I retraced my steps in a sort of daze, making my way to the downtown platform, then to the crosstown shuttle, which took me back to the West Side, where I could catch the Broadway local. It took me three trains and forty minutes during rush hour to get to work each day. Most of my fellow interns had taken housing near the center, but Hunter hadn’t wanted to give up our brownstone apartment on the Upper West Side.

Wishing that there were some way to call my team to let them know why I was so late, I emerged from the subway and headed for Riverside Drive. An unseasonably cool wind was whipping in from the water. It had been the coolest summer in over one hundred years, and now fall seemed ready to bring the curtain down on a lackluster performance.

As I quickened my pace to a jog, I felt a twinge of cramp low in my left ovary. I was about twenty-five days into my cycle, but I’m not all that regular; I’m one of those women who skip months, then get their periods every three weeks for a while, then start going into a six-week cycle. Still, I felt that sort of warm looseness in my abdomen that usually heralds the start of things.

My gynecologist said that I might find it difficult to become pregnant. I told my husband this last year and he said, It’s probably for the best. I should explain that there is a history of mental illness in Hunter’s family: His mother’s sister became schizophrenic at the age of nineteen and his mother committed suicide when he was a teenager. Hunter is moody, the kind of moody people expect from writers, but he always says he’s not sure he should have children. He spent most of his adolescence wondering if one day madness would explode in him like a time bomb; and I think he worries that if we had a baby, he’d spend the next twenty years waiting to see what might detonate in his offspring.

I suppose I’m ambivalent about becoming a mother. I’m not sure I have the vocation for it, and I think my own mother is a good example of what can happen if you have a child without one. I mean, Mom wasn’t quite in the “Mommie Dearest” league, but she did like making scenes. Maybe it’s something to do with being a film actress. Perhaps movie stars, even “B” ones, shouldn’t propagate.

In any case, my schedule wouldn’t allow for a baby. I had this year of internship to get through, a residency to apply for, and a husband who was away more often than he was home.

Nervously checking my watch, I turned the corner on Eighty-fourth Street and finally reached our building.

Hunter and I had spent the past four years living in one of those modest turn-of-the-century mansions that had been subdivided into small apartments, so that the whole structure is like one big dysfunctional family. We lived on the second floor, in the only apartment without a bricked-in fireplace. But we did have a balcony of which we were inordinately proud, even if it was barely large enough to accommodate two chairs and a portable mini-barbecue.

What our building didn’t have, of course, was a doorman to let me in. I buzzed our intercom repeatedly, to no avail. I tried the friendly couple of middle-aged men in the garden apartment first, and then the angry family who had the nicer duplex above us. Also not at home.

Great. Sinking down onto a floor littered with Chinese take-out menus, I blinked back tears of frustration. Clearly, I should have just gone on to work, but now I was here and unless Hunter let me in I didn’t have the money to get back to the Animal Medical Institute.

Of course, I could hike a few miles across the park, but I was probably going to get my period today. Call me prudish, but I don’t feel comfortable going up to other women in a quest for pads or tampons. I don’t even like sitting in a stall talking to another woman, particularly if there’s going to be any grunting involved. I blame my mother. She was so intent on my not being ashamed of my body and its functions that she instilled in me a fiercely beleaguered sense of privacy.

And Hunter was in there. All I had to do was rouse him out of his coma. Feeling more than a little desperate, I pressed all the buzzers one last time, then went outside and shouted “Hunter, it’s me” at the top of my lungs while searching around for a rock to throw against our window.

And then, looking up at our balcony, I thought: I can just climb up there. Not by going straight up our building—the first floor was faced with 1940s flat yellow brickwork, which didn’t offer a hand-or foothold. But the Victorians who’d designed our neighbors’ place hadn’t worried much about crime. Whoever had built the entrance had arranged foot-long concrete rectangles into a pattern around the black iron-and-glass doors, giving the house a vaguely medieval look. Right under their first-floor terrace was a little black iron lamp, a perfect handhold. Their terrace was only two feet away from ours.

A twelve-year-old would have seen this in an instant. Most adults stop looking at the world as something that can be climbed, unless they’re of the breaking-and-entering persuasion.

But back before I sold my soul to the Animal Medical Institute, I used to do some rock climbing at the Chelsea Piers gym. I’m good at anything that requires methodical attention to detail, and I actually got to the point where I was developing a few muscles in my legs and rear, and was looking a bit less like a loaf of white bread. Then AMI accepted my application for an internship and I lost all semblance of a life.

The only obstacle to climbing the ten feet to our balcony was my outfit. Hunter had always said that he had never known a woman who spent as much money on sacks as I did, but I like comfortable clothes in rich fabrics, the sort of thing you could wear to a medieval fair and pass as a rich guildsman’s wife. That day I happened to be wearing my Eileen Fisher wide-legged pants in soft brown cotton paired with a deep gold cotton tunic, not ideal for scaling the facades of buildings, even small ones. I tucked my pant legs into my socks and looked around to make sure no one was watching. Luckily, ours is pretty much a block of opera singers and older people, so the police don’t cruise by too often.

It was almost as easy as I had thought. The footholds were generous, almost two inches wide, and I was about twelve feet up, right under the balcony, when I reached the lamp. It was bolted in, solid enough to step on. I suppose I looked like one of those graceless little girls you see in the playground, heaving their sturdy little bodies up the monkey bars, but I got myself over the wrought-iron terrace railing. There was only one bad moment, where I had to balance on the neighbors’ railing before jumping over the two feet onto our balcony. I was about to step over when I heard a dog barking.

I looked down to see an overexcited dachshund with a dapper old man attached. The man looked familiar, and I realized he lived in our building. You couldn’t have come home two minutes earlier, I thought sourly.

“And what do you think you’re doing, young woman?”

“It’s my apartment,” I said. “I live here.” His dog kept yapping.

“I should call the police!”

“Please don’t. I’m Abra Barrow, your neighbor in 2B.”

“Wait a minute, don’t I know you?” He pointed his finger up at me. “The girl. The actress.”

“The vet. I’m a vet. My husband didn’t hear the phone, and I lost my key.”

“The what?”

“The key! Lost the key!”

“Thickey?”

Another old man, thinner and bearded, joined the first. “What’s she doing? Breaking and entering?”

“Nah, nah, it’s her apartment. Husband trouble.”

“Hey! You! Girl!” The bearded man sounded angry.

“Look, it’s really okay …” I started to turn to face him better, lost my grip, and reached over to grab the railing of our balcony. Unfortunately, this left me in the awkward position of having my feet on one building and my hands on the other.

“Get your leg over! Your right leg! These kids don’t know how to climb trees, is the problem.”

“As a boy, I climbed trees, houses, barns. In Ukraine.” The dachshund gave a little bark of agreement.

I stepped over to our balcony, then turned back to the men, who had now been joined by an elderly woman in a fox-trimmed winter coat.

“I’m safe, you guys. Thanks.”

“Next time ask us, we’ll let you in. Sidney has all the keys to the apartments in that building,” said the bearded man. I waved. People think the city is big and impersonal. The suburbs, where I grew up, are big and impersonal. The city is a patchwork of tiny provincial villages without clear borders, each with its own yenta, postmodern revolutionary, and idiot.

From the street, I heard the old woman ask, “What’s that girl doing up there, Grisha?”

“She’s a veterinarian. With husband problems.”

Maybe I was the town idiot.

I tried our window. Thank God, we’d left it open. I shoved the glass up another foot and climbed inside, and for a moment I stood in our living room, feeling very good about myself. I was the prince scaling Rapunzel’s tower without a hair rope; I was Robin Hood sneaking into the Sheriff’s stronghold.

Then, with a start, I realized how very unsafe my apartment was. During the three months that Hunter had been away, I had often left the window open. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I was within harm’s way whenever harm might take a notion to come find me.

But if a modestly athletic twenty-nine-year-old woman could climb up here and break into her own apartment, then it didn’t take a big bad wolf. Anyone could get in.

Distracted by these thoughts, I didn’t immediately notice the strange sounds coming from the bedroom. My initial thought was that Hunter was having a nightmare. He kept uttering little panting groans, punctuated by a soft whimper that sounded almost like a dog’s. I walked toward the bedroom thinking, Maybe I should wake him. Then I heard the rhythmic slapping sound of flesh, and a chill of gooseflesh traveled down my neck. That wasn’t the sound of Hunter having a bad dream. That was the sound of Hunter on the brink of orgasm.

My first reaction was a prickle of embarrassment and a tingle of desire. Then Hunter’s breathing picked up and I thought, Wouldn’t he be surprised if I just walked in there now?

I didn’t assume, in that first moment, that there was a woman in there. That came a half-second after, when I registered the fact that Hunter had shown no interest in making love to me this morning, despite our not having seen each other for three months. But he had been sick. And I had been expecting my period, which is not something Hunter enjoys. I hadn’t mentioned that I was due, but I’m pretty sure Hunter would have noticed the box of panty-liners I’d set out in the bathroom. He had a journalist’s knack of always spotting the one thing you wish he’d miss.

There were quick, fleshy slapping noises from the bedroom, and I listened for the sound of a second panting voice. Nothing. Of course, some women are pretty quiet. I’ve learned to make my breathing more audible when there’s something going on that I like, even though it feels a little fake. Hunter once told me I made love like a nun in war time.

He said it teasingly, of course.

There was a slight grunt, nothing theatrical, and then silence. I waited a moment in the living room, noticing the thick layer of dust on the Mexican pottery. I hadn’t cleaned under the couch in a long time, either.

“Hunter?”

Silence.

“Hunter?”

Rustling sounds. “Abra? Is that you?”

“It’s me.” I stood there, waiting.

“Of course. Wait a moment—” More rustling sounds. “Yeah, come in, come in.”

I walked in to find Hunter sitting upright against the cherry mission headboard, pale blue sheets pulled over his lap. He hadn’t bothered to close the shutters. There was the faint sea-smell of fresh semen in the room. He was still breathing hard enough that his pale chest showed the deep pattern of ribs on the exhale. His dark brown hair had grown long enough to fall in his eyes and over his neck, and his brown eyes looked darker, sunk more deeply into his face. But he was a handsome man, even when looking wan and disheveled.

“I didn’t hear you come in.” Said with no embarrassment.

“That’s because I climbed in through the living room window.”

“Trying to catch me with another woman?”

I just looked at him.

“All right, let’s try again. Why didn’t you just use the door?”

“I didn’t have my key. A pickpocket stole my bag and you weren’t answering the phone or the buzzer.” I tried to keep my voice from sounding prim and accusatory. The way I felt.

“You’re kidding. Poor Abra.” He gave me all his attention as he said it, and I felt myself being dragged back into the force field of his charm. Hunter has this way of listening to you so carefully that you realize that most of the people you talk to are really just waiting their turn to speak.