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I handed her the keys to the Prelude.
22
By the time Lindsey returned, Peralta was gone. She set a large bag down on the desk where I was working.
“I want to see the garage apartment.”
I wasn’t sure that was a good idea for either of us. That had been Robin’s space, where she had lived with us after coming back into Lindsey’s life following a long absence, lived for two years rent-free after she lost her job as curator of a man’s art collection. He lost it all in the real-estate collapse and she was looking for her next adventure. I hadn’t been up there since her death.
“I want to see it,” Lindsey insisted.
I tried very hard not to sigh. We walked up the staircase, bookshelves on one side and a wrought-iron railing on the other, to the landing that overlooked the living room, then across the walkway above the interior courtyard where Lindsey’s garden had sat neglected. I fumbled with the keys and opened the door.
&nbs
p; Heat greeted us so I turned on the window air-conditioner. It was a simple space, one large room with a bed and a couple of chairs, an alcove for a little kitchen, and a bathroom. A back door led to an outside staircase on the north end of the building. Grandmother had kept her sewing room up here when I was a child. Robin had added several social realism posters—her specialty in art history—and two of her own oil paintings, abstracts with geometric lines and vivid colors, illuminated by the afternoon sun. Her easel stood in one corner, an empty canvas on it.
Lindsey walked around, lightly touching the edges of the paintings. Opening the closet, she examined Robin’s clothes, holding a blouse up to her face.
Her dark hair grew fast and it was now down to her shoulders with bangs added. It fell thick and pin-straight. Women would kill for Lindsey’s hair. The edge of it brushed around the nape of her neck as she ran a hand against Robin’s clothes. They would kill for her fair skin and the lovely contrasts between dark hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. She looked familiar and yet a stranger. In so many ways, I did not know my wife.
So many times, I had imagined what was next for us, wondered whether I even wanted her to come back. It was a terrible thought, but she had left me once before, when we were first dating, and it had lacerated my heart. She had come back on Christmas Eve and that lyrical return had become a part of our story.
This time when she left, after losing the baby and taking the job offered to her by the governor of Arizona who was becoming Secretary of Homeland Security, the story turned darker. I tried to understand her need to grieve. She had to get out of this house, she had said at one point she didn’t know if she could ever stand to be here again, and yet here she was. I tried to understand and yet I had been hurting, too. It was our baby that was dead, not only hers. In the blurred months she had been gone, we had talked nothing out and I had given up trying. I didn’t know if I wanted her to come back because I didn’t know if I could open up to the pain of another abandonment. The fortifications I had built against her were not strong.
She turned and studied me, a big smile playing on her sensual lips. In her eyes was a nothing look that was densely underlain with meaning. It lasted a few seconds.
“Did you fuck her there?”
She nodded toward the bed.
Before I could answer—the answer was no—she strode quickly over and slapped me. The blow was so hard it brought little lighted planets and asteroids to the edge of my vision.
“Did you fuck my sister in that bed?” The smile was gone and her eyes were burning violet with emotion.
She was about to deliver another blow but I caught it. She was strong as hell. With her other hand, she shoved me against the wall and mashed her mouth roughly against mine. You could call it a kiss if you called knuckle-breaking a handshake. I twirled her around and slammed her back into the plaster and our tongues fought. She was making sounds that were half whimpers, half snarls. We were both sweating. Buttons were popping off my shirt. I was jerking her jeans and panties down despite the fact that not a millimeter of space separated our half-wrestling, half-embracing bodies.
We both fell on the floor and the rest of the clothes came off. What happened next was the angriest lovemaking I could ever imagine. The hardness of the floor was apt. A bed would have been out of place. Her hair fell into my mouth.
Usually there was a part of me standing outside every interaction observing. That me fluttered on the perimeter for only a few seconds, managing to remember Chrissie Hynde lyrics about love and hate and the thin line, wondering if I was taking my woman back or she was taking her man back, noticing that my formerly inhibited Lindsey had been practicing moves and not with me, or if any of this even mattered beyond these minutes and that rough floor, and then the observer was sucked back inside our primal bout and lost. She moaned “fuck me” among many untranslatable sounds.
Her orgasm was more intense and longer lasting than any I ever remembered, and finally she collapsed on top of me. The only familiar gesture was her tucking her feet under my legs.
In the silence, I could only hear the fronds of a palm tree brushing against the window. Spasms ripped through my back as my San Diego dive caught up with me, and my face was still stinging from her slap. All other thoughts had been torn away like our clothes.
My shoulder was suddenly wet. And then she started sobbing, in heaving, loud convulsions that seemed too big to be coming out of her slender body. All I could do was hold her and stroke her hair. She initially resisted even as she mashed herself against me, until she finally gave in and held me too. Her arm wrapped so tightly around my neck that I almost passed out. It was a long time before she was simply crying.
Afterwards, we lay side by side, one of her long legs over mine. The room was finally cooling down. Somebody could have come in and killed us right then and it would have been okay.
She retrieved a pack of Gauloises out of her wadded up jeans and lit one, then exhaled a long, blue vapor trail. Tobacco mingled with the pervasive scent of sex.
I followed the smoke out into the room, down her lovely body, past our reddened knees, and noticed the tattoo on the top of her right foot. The word “Emma” was surrounded by brambles.
It made me smoke one of her French cigarettes, too, even though it would probably make me slightly ill. I am an old guy, so in my mental world body art is confined to Melville’s whalers, real sailors and enlisted Marines, and trailer trash. It is elitism out of step with the age, but I find tattoos barbarous. And here was one on the perfect fair foot of my wife. True, she had worn a small stud in her nose when we had first dated, but that was years ago and Lindsey was no longer twenty-eight. This made her feel more alien and distant from me.
The tattoo’s provenance was no mystery: Emma, at least for Lindsey, was our lost daughter. Emma wasn’t a name I would have chosen. We didn’t even know the gender of the baby.
It was better to make light conversation as she lay against me, both of us staring at the ceiling.
