The Sabbathday River (22 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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He had a hand in the back of her pants, but there wasn't much room. She felt immense next to him, and ashamed. He was pulling at her. The other hand made a fist at her crotch. “Wait,” she said, “I just …” She just wanted to lie flat, she thought, so she wouldn't seem so, so her body wouldn't be so …
“Come on.” It was a litany. He pulled her down. “I want to see you. I've never seen you.” It was incredible how he moved, given this room to move. He was feline with claws, but sheathed claws, and everywhere he bared her skin it became as beautiful as his own. She felt herself twist off her pants, but he wanted to take off her underpants himself. She was still sticky from the car, from the walk. He made his hand hard and put it between her thighs. For the second time in an hour, he dragged her bra across her nipples and went for them, his mouth tender but frantic. Her milk let down instantly. The bra, the last scrap of fabric between them, he threw away across the room.
So this is what it looks like,
Heather thought a moment later, this thing she had always done by heart, by touch. Always before, this sensation of lying beneath him, of being fucked, of reaching across his back or farther down, pulling him into her, had made its own kind of image—of something encased, she thought, and dark, and tightly wound. But now she could see the individuality of Ashley's limbs, the hands moving at will, the legs searching separately for purchase. And she saw that she was not only lying under him, not just blankly receiving him, but that she had an agenda of her own, and a talent, and a grace. She had always loved to touch between his legs at just this moment, for instance, to heft the tiny but limitlessly meaningful weight of his scrotum, but now, for the first time, she could see how her hand was touching him in its accustomed ways; she could see the elegance of her hand as it moved, and its confidence, and the sight moved her deeply. She saw how, fully naked, he became a whole, a single form united in purpose, and that this purpose was herself. She was moving faster against him, but he kissed her and pulled away. Heather watched him, bereft but waiting. “Turn over,” Ashley said.
It made sense, she thought, when her shock passed. This made perfect sense, because wouldn't he want to make some gesture of novelty, to do something never before attempted—at least by them—to signify that they were setting out anew together? That everything was different now? She let him guide her. She didn't say no, though it hurt this way, though it wouldn't have occurred to her, on her own, to suggest this. “Do you mind?” he said hoarsely, after a moment, and she shook her head no, because she was finding, gradually, that she didn't, that the tightness of his front against her back felt good to her, that even in this most intimate of her openings the sensation he made was one of safety, and even,
somehow, pleasure. She closed her eyes in amazement and pushed back against him, which took his breath away. There was nothing at all between them, Heather thought, and there was everything between them. She came in his open hand, elated and lost.
And then, in the luxury of this space and warmth, they stretched out, side by side, in silence. Outside, the river was muted to the point of imperceptibility, but she liked to think of it there nonetheless, as the barrier they had crossed to find this good place. Ashley had one arm thrown across her chest, the other crooked beneath his own head. The bag of fabric beneath her was soft, but the plastic felt sticky against her bare back. She turned her face to him. “I'm so happy,” she said. Her voice was soft, sated and heavy. “I love you so much.”
He smiled vaguely. His eyes were closed.
“I can't believe you did that for me.”
“Yeah?” he said. “If you'd wanted it, you could have asked before.”
“What?” Heather said. Then she laughed. “No. I mean, I can't believe you chose me that way, in front of them.”
Languidly he turned his head to her. “What do you mean?”
“You know.” She brushed his long hair back off her face. She loved his hair, though it smelled faintly of paint. “Instead of Sue.”
“Sue was wrong to follow us,” Ashley said simply. “She can be such a bitch. She knew when she married me I wouldn't put up with that.” He was quiet for a moment. “Still,” he said thoughtfully, “it's clear that this is really getting to be too stressful for her. Maybe for us, too. Tonight's made that clear.”
“Oh, I agree,” Heather said. “It's a turning point.” She waited. In the gloom she watched her own chest rise and fall beneath Ashley's arm. Say it, she was thinking.
Say the words
. She was willing them into the realm of the audible, conjuring them out of silence. Tell me, she thought.
But he didn't. For long moments he said nothing at all. His profile frowned up at the rafters. Outside, a car drove by, and then another. The sounds faded. “Good,” she heard Ashley speak. “I'm glad you agree. I've been wondering how to end things.”
“I'll help you,” said Heather eagerly. “I'll do whatever I can.”
“Your support is the main thing. Just knowing you agree with me, that's what's important. And we'll be friends, of course.”
“Of course,” Heather said. “Of course. There's a child, after all.”
“Well, yes,” said Ashley. “Heather. You're really great, you know.”
She nodded. She was crying, but quietly. She was full of joy.
“I didn't think you'd react like this,” he said. “I thought … I thought you might be upset.”
A nagging idea at the back of her throat. She shook it away.
“Oh no. Never upset. I would have been happy to go on as we were. But I love you. And of course I want to be with you. I want—” She stopped herself. He hadn't said this, precisely. But hadn't he meant it? “I mean, if you want to, someday maybe, not necessarily soon, but when we're settled and everything, I'll marry you.”
That nagging thing. In the small moment that followed, it came back.
Ashley pulled himself up. He seemed weary suddenly, but his face was taut. He looked down at her, wary and amazed. “Heather.” He shook his head. “Heather, I'm already married.”
She considered the meaning of this. She couldn't make it out.
“Well, I know that, but after.”
“I'm
married
. Married!” He sounded unaccountably angry. Heather frowned.
“Yes, so not right away. But after you get …”
Unmarried,
she was thinking. What was that word again? And why did he seem so …
“I won't,” said Ashley. “I'm sorry, but that's just out of the question. I thought you understood this.” He stared at her, his eyes tar-dark. “This is like a basic thing about me, Heather. How can you not have understood this?”
“Fine, it's fine.” She tried to sound soothing, but there was panic in her throat: that nagging thing, working its way into her voice. “We don't have to get married. It's not important. So long as—”
“What?”
he shouted. “So long as
what?”
He was furious. Heather sat up and crossed her arms over her chest. All of a sudden she didn't want him to see her breasts.
“So long as … we're together?”
He reached for his shirt and yanked it down over his head. “But this is what I'm telling you. Christ, are you thick?
We're not going to be together.
This is it, tonight. And I'm sorry. Of course I'm sorry. I should have done it ages ago. So I'm a bad guy, so what! You always showed me you could look out for yourself, Heather.”
Speechless, she gaped at him.
“You always handle things. So don't get crazy on me now.”
“But you said,” she stumbled into speech, “you said you were going to end things.”
“I
am ending things
!” He got to his feet. He yanked his underpants up. “Come on. This isn't doing either of us any good. We're …” He seemed to abandon the thought. Then he shrugged. “I've always liked you, Heather.”
“
Liked
me?” Her entire relationship with language seemed to have abandoned her. Even the parroting of his own words was meaningless.
“Yeah. I liked you. So I beg your pardon.” He seemed angry again. He zipped his jeans with a rasp. “Come on. It's not like I said I was gonna sweep you away or anything.” Ashley peered at her. “Did I say that?”
He hadn't said it, she thought suddenly. He'd only done it.
“
Did
I?”
But she couldn't answer. The expanse of her belly was broad and sickly-white. It felt abruptly obscene.
“Wait,” she whispered. “Just wait.”
“But why?” He was sighing. “I mean, what's the point. Nothing's going to change. Everybody's dug in, you know? And I can't make anybody happy, so there's no sense in trying, is there?” He peered at her again, magnificent in his height. She gaped up helplessly. “And I'll tell you something else, Heather. You've got some share in this, too. Oh, you can make out it's all me, but you're not just some slouch going along with things. You knew what you were getting into. You're strong, even if you're not strong
enough.
And that's not my fault either, by the way.” He glared at her, briefly, but with a clear white heat. “I'll admit to my own shortcomings, sure, but I'm not about to take the blame for your problems.”
He waited for her to ask, but she'd been left impossibly behind by now, dead weight at the roadside. She couldn't even have formed the question, so he did it for her.
“You want to know what your problem is? I'll tell you, if you want to know.”
She didn't want to know. She didn't want to know anything else.
“You act tough, but it's all surface with you. Inside, you're just …” His vocabulary dissipated in disgust. He shook his head. “If you weren't, maybe I
would
leave Sue for you. If you compelled me. If you … I don't know, if you, like, took me and
compelled
me to do it, if you made
me feel I just had to be with you and not her. You understand? But you can't quite do that, can you?” He glared in accusation. “You're not even close, to tell you the truth.” Ashley groped for his sweater and twisted into it. He wrenched his long hair out of the collar and tied it up with the bandanna. Then he looked down at her again. “I could fall in love. I'm not incapable of that. I'm not just some asshole who likes to get laid—that's a little too easy,
I
think. But you want to think that to make yourself feel better? Fine.”
“I—” Heather tried to break in.
Wouldn't,
she was thinking. Even now.
I
wouldn't think that of you.
“But don't ask me to go along with it, because I won't.” Ashley shook his head, his lovely curls impossibly blue in the lunar light. “You know,” he mused, suddenly contemplative, “sometimes I wonder which of you I'm more pissed at. You yank me around, both of you. You just squabble and complain, but you're both too weak to actually do anything about the situation. Each of you, too weak to pull me away from the other one.” He shook his head, furious and put upon. “Then you make out it's all my fault. You poor
women.”
Heather felt, from some impossible distance, the wetness on her face, the cold wetness beneath her arms, between her legs, behind her knees. She was seeping, she thought, like a tree. She would wither away, it seemed to her, another husk in another hayloft. Certainly she would never actually leave here.
“I'm going now,” Ashley said. “Listen, I
am
sorry.”
A tin coin tossed from a gilded carriage. She tried to speak, but it came out a kind of formless breath.
“What?”
He was impatient now. He was on the move.
“Where are you going?”
“Home, naturally. Now I have to deal with my
wife.”
And so he went, agile and light, a small man with beautiful legs and a ponytail flipped casually over one shoulder, the point around which the world would turn if there still were a world. Heather did not move. For the longest time, for minutes made malleable by grief so that they passed with granite slowness, she did not move, but her mind was alive and her thoughts careening. Always, it seemed to her, she had known that there was such a thing as pain—deep pain, and psychic pain—and that people felt it and suffered from it, but she had not had any idea of its dimensions or its capabilities. Now pain infused her, spreading like
oxygen through her lungs and moving freely along each limb, then permeating her skin and leaping out into the air, where she only breathed it in again. It suspended her, this pain. She had never known anything like it, so vicious and so relentless. Her life, the sweetness of her life, was past. Her life was past.
Heather held up one hand experimentally. The fingers moved. She brought them to her nose and smelled, but there was only the cold, which blotted smell, or perhaps the ability to smell at all was gone, too. Not that it mattered. Her curiosity was merely clinical; she just wanted to know what her new demarcations were, what it would feel like, now, to be alive for the many years left that she would have to be alive.

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