CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Bit of Temporary
Abandon
It was the first
unseasonably warm afternoon of the early spring. The kind of
weather made for irrational behavior. As had become a habit in
recent months, since I had no classes on Fridays, I came down from
Emerson for the long weekend. I’d only realized a few weeks earlier
that I was doing this to spend more time with Iris and Chase. And
particularly to spend more time with Iris. I was no longer kidding
myself that I was fascinated with her. That bit of self-delusion
had ended on the drive back to Boston after Chase told me that
their weeklong breakup had ended. I’d finally admitted to myself
that, during that entire week, I had been intrigued with the notion
that Iris was a free agent, even as I counseled my brother on
trying to get her back. Still, I was aware of the boundaries and I
never intended to cross them. I could never have done that to
Chase, no matter how much Iris filled my thoughts.
On this particular
Friday, Chase came back from school, grabbed a beer with me while
we caught up on the week, and then left the house again. He told me
that Iris would be by soon and asked me to entertain her until he
returned. He’d been doing this with increasing frequency and it
didn’t feel like an imposition. I’d even begun looking forward to
it. I would get Iris something to drink and sit with her on the
couch exchanging clever thoughts about school, politics, and her
boyfriend until he returned. When Iris and I were together like
this, I could almost imagine that she had come to see me. I even
began to sense that she liked having a little time with me before
Chase swept her back into his world.
On this day, though,
whether it was because of the air, or my increased consciousness of
my attraction to her (exacerbated by the tank top and short skirt
she was wearing to celebrate the warm weather), or the fact that
Chase didn’t come back for a very long time, things were different
between us. I found myself nervous around her, more aware of what I
was saying and what I looked like. My eyes kept traveling furtively
to her knees, and even when I wasn’t looking at them, I envisioned
the curve of her calves. And I thought I sensed, though I was sure
I was imagining it, that she seemed a little more nervous around
me, that she was aware that something was passing between us that
hadn’t been there before. I had absolutely no idea what to do with
these feelings and wondered if I needed to prepare better for them
in the future.
“Where did he say he
was going?” Iris said after an uncertain silence.
“Chase tells you
where he’s going?”
“I guess that was a
silly question.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “The two of you are
so different.”
“You’ve noticed. Of
course there is no one in the world like the singular entity known
as Chase Penders.”
“You’re right about
that,” she said amusedly. She offered me another meaningful glance,
though perhaps at this point, I would have considered any glance
from her to be meaningful. “You do okay, though.”
“Hey, everybody needs
a straight man.”
She leaned slightly
in my direction and her expression softened. I’d seen her look at
Chase this way when she was trying to convince him to take
something seriously and I always thought that I would have taken
anything seriously if she looked at me that way.
“You don’t really
think that’s all you are, do you?”
“Did I say it like it
was a bad thing?” We had never talked about me in this way and I
wasn’t entirely sure how to handle the attention given everything
else running through my mind.
“Yes, you did,” she
said, smiling. “And if you’re just doing the modest thing, that’s
cool. But I sometimes think you really don’t get it.”
“What am I
missing?”
“The caring, the
sensitivity, the intelligence, the wavy brown hair. Hugh, you’re a
great package.”
“You mean like
Doritos?”
She laughed. “I mean
like a really interesting guy that lots of people would want to
know and some people would want to know really well.”
Hearing this from
Iris when I was feeling the way I was feeling was all too
intoxicating. I stood up and walked around the room.
“Okay, this is
getting a little more intense than I can handle,” I
said.
She smiled at me and
leaned forward.
“Do you really not
like to talk about yourself that much?”
“I’m fine with
talking about myself. I just think that talking about myself – like
this – with you is a little tough.”
“Why?” She tilted her
head and I could swear that her eyes got a slightly deeper shade of
blue.
“Let’s talk about
something else.”
“No,” Iris said with
a cajoling laugh. “What did you mean by that? Really.”
At that moment, I
realized I’d been waiting for this opportunity. I had fantasized
situations where I told Iris how I felt about her. In every one of
those fantasies, Chase was not a factor. Perhaps the only time in
my life when that was the case. If I thought of him at all, I
imagined that he had moved on from Iris, in fact condoned what I
was doing.
I was all nervous
energy at this point. I’m not sure I even realized right away that
I had moved to sit next to her or that our knees were
touching.
“Because – I can’t
believe I’m telling you this – I think about you a lot. More than I
should, frankly. And when you say things like you’re saying about
me, it makes me think things that I really shouldn’t be
thinking.”
Her smile softened
and the look of amusement left her eyes. But that other look was
still there.
“I know what you’re
thinking,” she said quietly.
“I really don’t think
you do.”
“Yeah, I do. Hugh. I
think about you, too. It’s weird for me because I’m so in love with
Chase, but I do think about you. It’s impossible for me to be
around you as much as I am and not think about you.” She paused for
several seconds. “Can I tell you something?”
“I’m gonna have to
reserve judgment on that.”
“When Chase and I
split up a couple of months ago – for reasons I still don’t
understand – I was feeling really awful. I just completely didn’t
understand what happened. But in the middle of it, I realized that
one of the things I was feeling awful about was that I missed you.
Not being with Chase meant that I wasn’t going to see you anymore
and that shook me up. I seriously thought about calling you, but I
thought you might think I was calling for a different reason.” “I
almost called you,” I said, my throat a little dry.
“I wish you had. It
would have meant a lot to me. I needed you.”
I didn’t want to wrap
my mind around what she was saying. I didn’t want to consider the
implications. Any of them. At that moment, all I wanted to do was
kiss her. I leaned toward her and she moved toward me at the same
time. Our lips met tenderly and we kissed in slow motion for a long
time. It was the moment in my life when I realized that it mattered
who you were kissing when you kissed like this. My hand found its
way to the bare knee I’d been admiring since she walked in the door
and I pulled her closer. Everything was unhurried. From my
perspective, I just wanted to live in this space and I didn’t care
what came next. But there’s no chance at all that we would have
stopped there if we hadn’t heard Chase’s car pulling up the
driveway.
The sound jarred us,
as though a stage hypnotist had snapped his fingers. As we sat back
on the couch, Iris looked at me with an expression that spoke of
both embarrassment and regret. She didn’t need to tell me that she
didn’t know what came over her, just as she didn’t need to tell me
that we couldn’t allow it to happen again. To her, she had only
surrendered to a bit of temporary abandon, nothing
more.
I don’t think that I
ever felt emptier than I did at that moment.
It was cool for early
July. As I got out of my car for my midtrip stop (I didn’t really
need a break on the drive to Lenox, but I liked that diner I’d
found in Enfield and the woman who always helped me there – it had
become part of the process for me), I wondered if I should have
brought a sweatshirt along. Iris and I were planning to see an
outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream that night and it would be considerably cooler in the
Berkshires. As it turns out, it didn’t matter.
Neither of us was
pretending that we hadn’t had that middle-of-the-night phone
conversation. Iris held me just a little bit longer than she
usually did when I kissed her hello and as we walked and drove
through the afternoon, we each mentioned numerous times how much we
enjoyed this weekly foray. For my part, I wanted to make sure that
Iris understood that she was important to me and that, regardless
of any awkwardness from our talk on the beach, I still considered
her a critical part of my life. I’m assuming that she felt somewhat
the same way, because she was more openly affectionate with me than
she’d been in the past, touching my arm while we spoke, at one
point grabbing me around the shoulders and at another gently
bumping me while we walked.
She made dinner for
me that night, keeping it simple because we had to be at the
theater by 7:30. One of the rituals that had evolved between us was
that we didn’t debrief each other on the events of the week until
dinner on our first night, turning our first afternoons into a
running set of observations about whatever we might be doing. While
we ate, I told her about firing Tab and the others and about the
progress I’d made on the display cases. She talked about the
beginning of rehearsals for the Ensemble’s September production and
about a mildly traumatic trip to the veterinarian. I’d come to
appreciate these conversations because they indicated how much we
had drawn ourselves into the fabric of each other’s lives. She
could tell me that Tab was taking up space without ever having met
her and I could anticipate her dog’s response to an unnecessarily
aggressive vet.
Toward the end of the
meal, Iris became quiet and seemed more focused on her
wine.
“You know what I’ve
been thinking a lot about lately?” she said. She smiled, eyes
downcast, almost bashful. “That time when we kissed on the
couch.”
“You’ve been thinking
about that?” I asked tentatively. We had never once talked about
this.
“I have. I mean it’s
not like I haven’t thought about it before. It’s just that it’s
been on my mind a lot the last few days.”
I took a sip of my
wine, thinking that not responding might be the only appropriate
response.
“That kiss had a lot
in it, didn’t it?” she said. “It was illicit. It was innocent. It
was warm. It was intense.”
“It was over much too
soon,” I said, surprising myself that I would be this
candid.
She looked up at me.
“It was?”
“For me it
was.”
“Chase came
back.”
“I know. I was never
less happy to see him.”
She began to inscribe
lines in the condensation on her wineglass. “That was a strange
day,” she said. “Chase noticed that I was a little preoccupied, but
I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about. I think that
was the most dishonest thing I ever did to him.”
I nodded. I wrestled
with myself over telling her how much that kiss meant to me, how
much it redefined kissing for me. But I wasn’t sure why she’d
brought this subject up and I felt like I needed to wait to find
out.
“I’d imagined kissing
you before then,” she said.
“You
had?”
She shook her head.
“A few times. It would just come into my head. I really liked you,
Hugh. I always did. I liked talking to you, especially on those
afternoons when you would babysit me for Chase.”
“I loved that
time.”
“You know what I
thought about after that day? And I thought about it a lot. I
thought about what we were going to be like over the course of our
lives together after that kiss. I really believed that Chase and I
were going to get married. I imagined you and me dancing at my
wedding. I imagined you coming for dinner while Chase was away on
business and the two of us taking the kids for ice cream. I
imagined the four of us – me and Chase and you and your wife – at
some lakefront resort when we were in our fifties.
“And in all of these
cases, I imagined that we’d have a little thing that passed between
us that acknowledged that kiss without ever saying a word. Didn’t
quite work out that way, huh?”
I was feeling a true
loss of equilibrium. I had believed in the moments after we kissed
that Iris had made every effort to erase it from her memory. And
even after what we’d begun here – whatever it was that we’d begun
here – I was still convinced that she would have preferred it if
that kiss had never happened.
“I obsessed over it,”
I said.
“You
did?”
“Truly obsessed over
it. The first couple of weeks after, I could hardly think of
anything else. It was just so confusing.”
“Why?”
I paused for several
seconds, looking down at my dinner plate, looking up into her eyes.
“Because I was crazy about you. And the kiss brought so many things
into focus. It confirmed so many things I was feeling. And none of
it really mattered because you had Chase – and I had Chase – and I
just had to live with that. I was actually angry with him for a few
days before I came to my senses enough to realize how irrational
that was.”
She reached out and
squeezed my hand. She left a tiny patch of moisture from where her
index finger had been playing with her glass.
“Our kiss this spring
was different in a lot of ways,” she said. “At first I had to ask
myself if I’d done it because you were Chase’s brother and I was
trying to reach out to him a little. I convinced myself that wasn’t
it. But that left me with something that was a lot
scarier.”
“By stopping the way
you did, you probably saved me the anguish of having to go through
that myself.”
“I guess I did.
Though I’d be lying if I said I was doing it with you in
mind.”
“And I’d be lying if
I said I understood it at the time. It took me a little while to
catch up to you.”
She tightened her
lips and then took another sip of wine. I felt like I’d said the
wrong thing to her, but I couldn’t understand what I’d
done.
“Needless to say,
I’ve thought about that one a lot, too. Especially since we see
each other every week now.”
For a moment, I
thought she was going to tell me that it was too hard to keep
seeing me this way and I felt a wave of sadness. I knew if she said
this that I would have to fight desperately to change her
mind.
“We have a good thing
here,” I said.
She smiled at me.
“It’s a very good thing. A very good thing. I’ve kinda come to
depend on it.”
I think in that
moment I realized that I would never be living in Tucumcari or
anywhere else in New Mexico. I had no idea where I was going to
wind up next, but it had to be somewhere within driving distance of
Iris.
“Me too,” I
said.
Again, she reached
out for my hand and this time she held it. After a few beats, she
looked at her watch. “I’m not really in the mood for Shakespeare,”
she said.
Instead, we refilled
our wineglasses and moved to her living room to watch her DVD copy
of The Graduate. About twenty minutes
into the movie, she leaned against the opposite side of the couch
and put her feet up on my leg. I massaged them for a while and then
just held them for the rest of the film.
When I went to bed
that night, I tape-looped our dinner conversation. In the past few
hours, I’d seen two new faces from Iris: first, the tentative one
as she drew her finger along the wineglass, and then the contented
one as she lay on the couch and I rubbed her feet. Both were of
course beautiful, but both suggested that there was so much more of
her to see than I’d seen already. I wanted to know all of her
expressions. I wanted her to continue to surprise me with her
observations of the past. But more than anything, I wanted her to
share a future with me. That future might be nothing more than DVDs
and walks through farmers’ markets, but I needed it.
Since I was playing
all of this in my head, I wasn’t asleep when Iris came into my room
a couple of hours later. She opened the door and I propped myself
up on one arm.
“Is everything okay?”
I said.
I sat up and she sat
down next to me on the bed, reaching a hand up to touch me gently
on the face. She ran her fingers slowly down my cheek and let them
rest on my lips.
“I need to kiss you
again,” she said.
I kissed her fingers
and then she pulled me toward her. She kissed me hungrily, as she
had that night in Amber. Unlike that time, though, I was eminently
aware of how much I wanted her, how much these kisses – and her
desire to give me these kisses – meant to me. Without moving away
from her, I pulled myself out from under the sheets and we were
lying together, our bare legs intertwined, my hand rubbing her
T-shirted back while her fingernails played over my naked
shoulders. She moved both hands to cup my face and she dotted me
with quick, deep kisses.
I was nearly
senseless with desire, but at the same time, these kisses – their
urgency and their tenderness – held me fast. The sensation of her
lips mesmerized me, as did the look in her eyes in the moonlight as
she pulled back from me and then kissed me again. It was the first
time I’d really noticed her eyes while we were kissing and it was
perhaps the proximity of our eyes together that was the most
dizzying feeling of all.
Eventually, I reached
under her shirt to run my fingers up her spine, to massage the
small of her back and then to reach under her panties to gently
squeeze her closer to me. She drew up against me, our eyelashes
practically touching. I kissed her nose and cheekbones softly. I
wanted to say something, but was afraid that anything I might say
would be overwhelming to her. Instead, I pulled her tighter and
kissed her face and the nape of her neck.
I could feel Iris’
body go slack as she put her forehead down on my shoulder. Knowing
immediately that she didn’t want me to continue, I pulled my hand
above the waistband of her panties and rested it on her hip,
tilting my head to nestle hers.
“Do you think you
could just hold me?” she said.
I moved my face down
to meet hers. She wore yet another new expression, one that I
couldn’t entirely interpret at that moment.
“Anytime you want,” I
said.
She touched my face
again and then rested her forehead against mine. Without saying
another word, she pulled the sheets on top of us and we settled
onto a pillow.
“Can you sleep like
this?” she asked.
“It might take me a
few minutes,” I said, smiling, “but, yeah.”
She kissed me one
more time softly and then said, “Thanks.” We repositioned ourselves
so that her head was resting on my chest. Surprisingly, I fell
asleep almost immediately.
I awoke in the
morning when Iris moved off me. She was getting out of bed when she
noticed me stirring. She leaned back and kissed me on the
cheek.
“Did you sleep okay?”
she asked.
“Extremely well,
actually.”
“I’m glad I didn’t
keep you up. I’m insanely hungry for some reason. I think I’m going
to make waffles. Sound okay to you?”
“Waffles would be
great,” I said.
She smiled and turned
to get off the bed before turning back to me. “Last night meant a
lot to me,” she said. “All of it. Is it okay if we give this some
time?”
“Of course it is,” I
said.
She reached over and
squeezed my hand before leaving the room. In that simple gesture, I
understood that this wasn’t going to be like the last two
times.
And yes, we both
needed to wait a bit to understand where we were going to go from
here.