Something Is Out There (7 page)

From the doorway, she watched them climb on the bus, hauling their book bags. They waved to her from the windows, as they always did, and she waved back, and the motion of her own small hand crossing the plane of her vision seemed to swipe the ordinary feeling away. She felt the truth, a shock, though it was thrilling, too. Clutching her blouse tight at her throat against the slight chill, she watched the bus move off. Then she went into the living room and sat with her hands clasped tightly over her knees, waiting for him to finish shaving and dressing.

When she heard the bathroom door open, she hurried into
the kitchen and pretended to be just finishing there when he came down the hall. He kissed her on the cheek. “Have fun,” he said, as he had said every morning for going on twelve years.

“You, too,” she told him.

She watched him cross the shady lawn to the car. He waved, going away, and she held up one hand. She was in this now, and she did not feel guilty. After the car turned at the end of the road, she closed the door and went through the rooms, making sure the place looked right. She took some personal items of his—hairbrush, cologne, a Bible concordance—and put them in the hall closet, along with a wedding picture and several family photographs. At last, taking a deep breath to ease her trembling, she made the call.

“I’m alone.”

“I’ll be right over.”

“Where are you?”

“Midtown. I looked up the directions online. Can’t wait to see you.”

She breathed into the line. “Hurry.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and hung up.

She headed for the bathroom, slipping out of her clothes as she went. It was all delicious action, bright with purpose and anticipation. In the bathroom, she folded the clothes and set them on top of the hamper. On the wall opposite the shower stall was a print of four Indian maidens washing clothes in a stream, the pristine rush of blue-white water over stones. Behind them was an orderly procession of trees, mountains, and sky. She looked at the picture as if it belonged to someone else. Everything was under way; it was going to happen. She turned to the mirror and put a dash of light-pink lipstick on, standing naked at the sink, and, with a few soft strokes of her fingers, arranged her hair.

In the bedroom, she opened the closet, brought out a robe, and draped it over herself. She stopped in the hallway, held on to the wall, inhaling and letting it out slowly, repeating this five times, counting.

Movement was best. She went into the living room and lifted a blade of the closed window blinds only a fraction of an inch to look out at the street. Phyllis Copperfield, crazy Phyllis, a woman who lived by the clock, had come out of her house with the baby in a running stroller. She wore spandex slacks, and had a bandanna around her head, her hair tied in a ponytail that swung from side to side when she walked. At the top of the street, she began to run, and she was gone.

Phyllis had been one of her chief worries. They had been friendly, and Phyllis knew things, had gleaned something of Diana’s dissatisfactions. Phyllis herself was by her own account going slowly crazy. Her husband was often out of town—sometimes for weeks at a time—and she was alone with a baby whom she hadn’t wanted and whose demands made her miserable and sleepless. She would say terrible things about her husband, her mother, the baby, neighbors, herself, and they would have been off-putting if they weren’t also funny. About the husband, whom Diana had seldom seen, she was particularly brutal: he was a man whose sex appeal improved the farther away he was; on the telephone, calling from another time zone, he was astounding. Up close, you wanted to think up a trip for him to make. A thousand miles away, he was rockets and flares. Home, he was slippers and boxer shorts with a pattern of clover on them, and beers, burps, and the rest, too. Away, he was all the primary colors. Up close, he was beige.

It was disturbing how often Phyllis’s jokes about her life struck through Diana as containing truths about her own.

•  •  •

Now she poured coffee for herself, and sat on the sofa in the living room, one leg crossed carefully, languidly, over the other, slowly sipping the coffee. He would be no more than twenty minutes. And abruptly she decided that she wouldn’t greet him like this, drinking coffee, so she hurried to finish it, put the cup and saucer in the dishwasher, and returned to the bathroom, where she ran her fingers through her hair again, and brushed her teeth.

She was waiting at the door when he pulled up. He parked down the street a little and walked back, carrying a small briefcase, keeping to the sidewalk. There was a stockiness about him that hadn’t shown in the photographs online. He wore a gray sport coat, light-colored jeans, a black T-shirt. She opened the door and stood back for him, and when he came through, she experienced a coursing of blood to her head. She closed the door and engaged the deadbolt, watching her own trembling fingertips. She had never felt such excitement. He put the briefcase down and faced her where she leaned against the door. For a moment, neither of them spoke. His eyes trailed down her body and then back up. “You’re taller than I thought you’d be.”

She breathed, “I told you how tall I am.”

He smiled. “You look taller.”

They moved together into the living room and he looked at everything, removing the sport coat. “Nice house.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “My God, we’re actually together.” She couldn’t catch her breath.

He sat down on the sofa and rested one arm on the back of it, and she saw that he was nervous, too. “Took me just less than three hours. I was eighty-five miles an hour all the way.”

“I’m sorry about not wanting to meet you in a motel.”

“Forget it.”

“It’s just that I’d have felt cheap.”

“This is more fun—there’s an element of walking along a high cliff. We could both get busted—crash and burn.”

“Not likely. The kids are at school and he’s never home before five.”

“What about the neighbors?”

“The whole street empties out before nine o’clock. Everybody works except Phyllis Copperfield across the street, and she’s a friend. She knows about you. She doesn’t know about
this
. But she’s off on a run and then she’ll come back and nap with her baby.”

They looked at each other. There was an inevitable, though unspoken, element of evaluation about it. They had told each other so much on the telephone. She knew of his childless marriage to Marta, a good woman who was ten years older than he, and of his searching for someone, seeking to feel passion again. And she had told him of Warren’s essential prudishness, a religious man for whom lovemaking was a very specific kind of performance, with such elaborate trappings of romance that she felt stifled by it all—poor Warren never got beyond his sense of the kiss and the fade-out. She had told him all of this over the telephone, several weeks ago. They had established that both of them loved their spouses, and that this meeting would be nothing more than what the Internet site on which they had met claimed to provide: people mutually looking for extramarital excitement without commitment.

“What does this Phyllis person know about me?”

“Just that I have a friend online.”

“Jesus—you told her? Did you say what the site was?”

“No, no, no, no, no. I would never tell anyone a thing like
that. You’re the only one who knows about that. I just told her I’d met someone I liked talking to.”

“You didn’t name me.”

“No. God, no.”

“Well, really.”

“You haven’t talked to
any
friend about me?”

“Not one, no.”

“Well, Phyllis doesn’t know anything.”

“Look,” he said. “Is it safe here for us?”

“Yes.”

“And he suspects nothing.”

“Nothing,” she said. “Believe me. I pay the bills. I take care of everything.”

“I still worry about the e-mails. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“They’re in a file on my own computer, buried in code. Trust me. It takes three different passwords to get to it.”

“And you’ve never done this before.”

“We’ve been through all that.”

“I’d like to hear you say it, anyway.”

“You’re the first and only,” she said.

His gaze went around the room. “I drove like a crazy man, getting here.”

“You’re nervous,” she said. “Me, too.”

“I was your first hit on the site.”

“Nathan,” she said.

“I don’t guess it makes much difference.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, I make it a regular practice. I’ve seen five hundred different women this way.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m scared,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d be so scared.”

This was one of the things she liked about him. That he could talk this way so simply and honestly about his feelings.

“Nathan,” she said.

His smile changed everything about his face. She liked that, too. “Here we are,” he murmured.

Again, they were simply staring at each other. She felt the breathlessness she had experienced earlier. She held still.

He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “I’ve dreamed about this. You’re even prettier than your picture.”

“You sound even sexier in person,” she got out.

“Those wonderful phone calls—I never would’ve believed people could do those things over the telephone.”

“Me, either.”

He said nothing for what seemed a long time. He sat there, staring, another evaluative pause, as if the two of them were waiting to recognize each other. His eyes were slate dark, and big. They looked past her own, into her.

She began to speak, asking if he wanted a cup of coffee, but he was rising, coming toward her, and she opened her arms.

“Where’s the bedroom,” he said. “Where do we go?”

She led him into the spare bedroom, and while she pulled the blanket back he got out of his clothes. The speed of this surprised her. She found it awkward, as close as they had been on the telephone. It had been wild on the telephone. She had lain awake nights, replaying it all in the dark, full of yearning. He flopped onto the bed, rolled to his back with his arms at his sides, gazing at her, waiting for her to remove her robe. She let it drop to one hand, and tossed it against the baseboard. She wanted to talk more, to go slowly. “Beautiful,” he murmured, smiling. It was such a good, wide smile. She crawled in next to him and when he put his mouth on her breast she patted the back of his head. “Easy, baby, we’ve got all morning.”

He looked up. “I’m hungry for you.”

“Can we talk a little first?”

He lay over on his back. “Okay. Of course—I’m sorry.”

“It’s just that it’s so new. I want to enjoy it
all.”

“Okay.” He smiled and nodded. “Me, too. I want to
savor
it.”

She leaned up on one elbow and looked at him. “How are you?”

“I’m on fire.”

“I’m still so nervous,” she said.

He pulled her down, and began kissing her. His hands were rough—the skin was rough, callused—and she felt the power in the fingers, moving on her back and shoulders. He rolled with her, and was on top, kissing her neck, muttering words. She couldn’t hear the words, and she tried to push his shoulders, wanted him to support himself a little so she could catch her breath. He did so, came to a kneeling position, straddling her. “I want to look at you.”

“Yes,” she said. She could feel it now, the excitement, all that she’d ached for and not had, the letting go, utterly.

“Do me?” he murmured, almost shy, offering himself.

“Oh,” she said, sitting up, coming to him. “Oh, yes. I will. I will.”

Afterward, they lay quietly, he with one leg over her abdomen, one hand on the side of her face. “I got married to Warren so young,” she said. “I didn’t know anything.”

“None of us did, at one time, I guess.”

“We were babies.”

“Everybody says just to leave.”

“Well, I won’t—I can’t. I love him.”

He stared. “I’m exactly the same about it.”

“It’s just that you and I need sparks. Right?”

“That’s us,” he said, and kissed her ear.

They were quiet, listening to a dog barking in the neighborhood.

“There’s not much else to say,” he murmured. “But we keep having to say it.”

“Warren told me before that this—that anything other than, well, the normal thing, you know—that it makes him feel sinful.”

“You had no trouble talking about all this on the telephone. Missionary position, right?”

She put her head on his shoulder and sighed.

“Religion,” Nathan said. “It’s killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined, and it’s ruined the pleasure of the rest of us.”

“Let’s not talk about it, now,” she told him.

“I think it’s a sin for him to deny himself the pleasure you can provide.”

“That’s sexy.”

He started kissing her again. She worried about her stomach a little, with the coffee she’d drunk. But she had dreamed of this, of not having to worry or hold back from being curious, the strongest element of herself, wanting to know, to feel it all, and wanting it to go on. As it did go on, and she lost herself in it, reveling in it for the difference from how things had always been. She had known this kind of experience only from books, and from some of the sites she had wandered among on the Internet. He was there for her at every turn; his imagination was boundless. The morning went fast.

Finally, he pulled the blanket with him, removing himself gently and getting out of the bed, and he stood there, looking around the room. “I expected more religious kinds of stuff on the walls.”

She saw the gleam of sweat on his chest and abdomen, and the little lines of where her nails had scratched his upper arms. “No,” she said. “It’s just the Bible for him, you know.”

“A waste.”

“I thought it was sweet when he and I were first together. I did. I thought it meant he’d be true. And he is. He’s sweet. He calls me angel. And I actually like it when he does that. We have a nice family life. A good life—like you and Marta.”

“Marta’s a fool,” he said. “But then so am I.”

“You’re feeling guilty.”

“No.” He turned slightly, still taking in the room. “A little, maybe. I must not be a very nice man.”