Five Days (30 page)

‘You are hardly self-pitying. You just made choices that were fueled by guilt and a sense of obligation. Just as I did.'

He looked directly at me.

‘I don't have a marriage,' he said. ‘I haven't had one for years.'

He didn't have to tell me more – or to underscore the subtext of that comment. I too was so conversant with this territory: the slow, quiet death of passion; the complete loss of urgency and desire; the sense of distance that accompanied occasional moments of intimacy; the intense loneliness that had installed itself on my side of the bed . . . and, no doubt, on his as well.

‘I know all about that,' I heard myself telling Richard, realizing that another forbidden frontier had just been traversed.

Silence.

‘May I ask you something?' I said.

‘Anything.'

‘Sarah. What happened to her?'

‘Within a week of me receiving that letter from her she was gone out of Brunswick. Off to Ann Arbor – as her friend did find her a job in the university library there. Divorced her husband who did get tenure at the college and is still with – in fact, married to – the Harvard professor. Around two years after she left I got a letter from her – formal, polite, somewhat friendly – telling me that she had met an academic at Michigan. He was a doctoral candidate in astrophysics, of all things. And she was seven months' pregnant. So she did decide to take the risk again. As desperate as this news made me feel, another part of me was genuinely pleased for her. I didn't hear from her again for another five years – when her first volume of published poetry arrived in the mail. No letter this time. Just the book from her publishers – New Directions, a very reputable house. On the dust jacket there was a biographical blurb, saying she lived in Ann Arbor with her husband and two children. So she'd become a mother twice over again.

‘Since then . . . we've dropped out of each other's lives. But that's not totally the truth, as I have bought her five subsequent books of poetry. I also know that she has had a professorship in the English department at Michigan for the past twenty years, and that her last volume was a finalist for the Pulitzer. She's done remarkably well.'

Silence.

‘And she
did
love you,' I said, ensuring that this statement didn't sound like a question.

‘Yes, she did.'

I touched his hand, threading my fingers in his.

‘You're loved now,' I said.

Silence. He finally looked back up at me.

‘Let's get out of here,' he said.

NIGHT HAD SERIOUSLY
fallen. It was cold outside. Cold and dark, with a low mist coming in off the nearby bay. As we stepped out onto the street I felt another jolt of doubt course through me: that reproaching voice telling me I was entering a true danger zone.
Make that move and all will change. Change utterly.

What melodrama. What a good child I had always been. What a responsible young woman, an intensely responsible adult. Faithful, loyal, always there. And though I doubt that Dan has ever cheated on me, I'd come to see his isolation as a form of betrayal.

Will you listen to yourself. The ongoing endless, sad negotiation you conduct all the time. The blockades you are putting up now in the nanoseconds after you've just declared love for this man. A man who also knows a thing or two about lost love and self-entrapment. A man who is telling you what you are telling him: we are so right for each other. There is a chance here, if only we can both keep our nerve and . . .

‘Shall we head over to the water?' he asked me. ‘Unless you want to try for the gallery?'

‘I want—' I said.

In an instant we were in each other's arms. Kissing passionately, wildly, grasping each other with such desire, such need. It was as if there had been, between us, a mutual detonation. A sudden eradication of all those years of longing and inhibition and frustration and emotional washout. How wonderful to feel a man's hands on me again; a man who so clearly wanted me. As I so wanted him.

He broke away from our mad embrace for a moment, took my face in his hands, and whispered:

‘I've found you. I've
actually
found you.'

I felt myself tighten. But this tightness wasn't due to any reticence or fear or some sort of ‘I wish he hadn't said that' reaction to what he had told me. On the contrary, that moment of internal tautness was just a direct, instantaneous confirmation of everything I was sensing; everything that was overwhelming me right now.

‘And I've found you,' I whispered back, and we began to kiss again like a couple who'd been separated for an age – and had been envisaging this moment of passionate reunion for weeks, months, years.

‘We should go somewhere,' I finally whispered.

‘Let's get a room.'

‘Not the rooms we have at that hideous hotel.'

‘My thought entirely.'

‘Glad you're a fellow romantic.'

‘A fellow romantic who has looked for you his entire life.'

Another long, wild kiss.

Then:

‘A cab is necessary, I think,' he said.

Still holding me tightly with one arm he put up his hand and a taxi stopped. We climbed in the back.

‘Ninety Tremont,' Richard told the driver. As soon as the cab took off we were kissing again wildly.

Richard's hand had slid up the back of my turtleneck. His skin against my bare skin. I stifled a little groan of pleasure; the same pleasure that shot through me as I felt his hardness against my thigh, and the way he was grasping me with such barely controlled ardor. I wanted him in a way I had wanted nobody since . . .

The taxi pulled up in front of an entrance to a hotel. Within moments we were in a lobby. Chic. Modernist. Executive. Cool. My hand in his, Richard led me to the front desk. The clerk was a woman in her twenties – and studiously blasé.

‘We'd like a room,' Richard said.

She gave us the once-over and I saw her take in the wedding rings on both our hands. Just as the way we were holding hands – and the way we had arrived off the street, without baggage, clearly in a hurry to get upstairs and slam the door on the world – must have told her:
They may be married, but not to each other.

‘Do you have a reservation? she asked, all disinterested.

‘Nope,' Richard said.

‘Then I'm afraid the only thing I can offer you is our King Executive Suite. But it's seven hundred and ninety-nine dollars per night.'

I could see Richard try not to blanch at the price. Certainly I was appalled at the cost. It was almost one week's salary for me.

‘We can go elsewhere . . . or even back to the airport hotel,' I whispered in his ear.

Richard just kissed me, then reached into his pocket and brought out his wallet.

‘We'll take the suite,' he told the clerk, slapping his credit card down on the countertop.

Two minutes later we were in an elevator, heading to the top floor. My hand was still in his, our gazes firmly locked. But we had both fallen silent. Desire and fear: that's what was so engulfing me. But the longing, the immense carnal need, was shoving whatever dread I was feeling away. I wanted him. I wanted him now.

The elevator arrived on the top floor. We followed a hallway down to a large set of double doors. Richard used the key card. There was a telltale click. He pulled me towards him. We fell into the room.

I took in very little of my immediate surroundings, except for the fact that the suite was capacious, the bed was in an adjoining room, the lights were preset low. From the moment the door shut behind us we were locked in an unrestrained embrace, and falling backwards into the bedroom, and pulling each other's clothes off, and kissing wildly, and tumbling together headlong into the sort of unbridled passion that, if you are lucky, you have experienced once or twice in your life – and which might just be the closest thing to raw love imaginable.

Time meant nothing now. All that mattered was the two of us together on this bed, submerged in each other, silently overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all.

And then, in a moment of quietude afterwards, he took my face in my hands and whispered:

‘Everything has changed.
Everything
.'

Sometimes the truth is a wondrous thing.

LOVE.

I woke with the dawn. The room was dark, festooned with shadow. Early-morning light creased in from the drawn curtains. Though I had only been asleep for a few incidental hours – sleep finally overtaking us in the wee small hours of the morning after hours of making extraordinary love – I felt wildly, profoundly awake. And wildly, profoundly in love.

Is this what's meant by a
coup de foudre
? That huge overwhelming realization that you have finally met the man of your life, that individual for whom you were destined? Years ago, I thought that man was Eric. But one thing had struck me so forcibly over the past twenty-four hours: the Eric I so cherished and adored was, like me, such a kid when we came together. What did we really know about ourselves or each other? Everyone is, I suppose, a work in progress up until the day they are no longer part of the world. But when you're nineteen you are still so unformed. Still so deeply naive (even though you do your absolute best to convince yourself otherwise). But you really know very little about life's larger profundities. And even if you have – as I did – experienced the worst sort of loss at such an early stage of adulthood, your deeper existential understanding of loss won't gain purchase until you have reached the halfway point of your temporal existence. It is then that you start to reflect on everything still not achieved, everything that underwhelms, everything that gives your life the undercurrent of an ongoing letdown. And it all congeals to remind you that time is now a diminishing commodity, that standing still (though the easier option) had rendered you static. And you quietly tell yourself:
Life must be grabbed.

But then you throw up manifold excuses for staying put, accepting the cards dealt, telling yourself:
Things could be far worse.

Until, out of nowhere – at a moment for which you are not prepared, in a situation which is so
not
designed to be conducive to such things – you meet a man who changes everything for you. And within twenty-four hours . . .

Love.

And the man in question . . .

I think it was the moment we started trading synonyms that I began to fall for him. And the way he told the story of his son without an ounce of self-pity. Then showing me the place he wanted to buy on Commonwealth Avenue. That's when I knew. Standing in front of his future place, his new life, I understood the subtext behind this side trip. And just a few hours ago – when we were finally thinking about getting up after the evening in bed, entwined with each other, sharing the sort of intimacy that I never considered possible in my life – he took my face in his hands and said those extraordinary words:

‘Everything has changed.
Everything
.'

After I remarked that the truth was occasionally rather extraordinary he then said:

‘When I showed you the apartment today this crazy idea was rattling around my head:
Laura and I will move here together.
Of course I didn't dare articulate such a thought at the time. Because I had no idea then if you were feeling what I was feeling. And because—'

‘I'll move to Boston with you tomorrow,' I heard myself saying. As soon as that statement was out of my mouth I didn't have a stab of regret. Or a moment thereafter when I thought:
Are you insane, uttering such a drastic, life-altering comment like that . . . especially as you have only known this man a little more than twenty-four hours
?

But the truth was, I now possessed the sort of certainty that I had never thought possible. This certainty was as bemusing as it was absolute. Just as the rational side of my brain was telling me:
You are convincing yourself of a future after just a day together
. But this ultra-cautious voice was trumped by an equally logical voice, reminding me:
What Richard said is veracity itself – everything has changed.

I'll move to Boston with you tomorrow.

That wasn't wishful thinking. That was a declaration.

Love.

We were both so apprehensive at first. Once in bed, desire was initially checkmated by fear. Richard was so apologetic, clearly mortified. I didn't mouth all the usual clichés –
It happens to all men at some juncture . . . the less you think about it the more likely it will happen.
I just kissed him deeply and told him I loved him. And he told me he loved me. And we talked, in hushed voices, lying face to face, about how lonely life had been for both of us and how what we both wanted was a chance. A chance at love. Real love. It might not be the answer to all of life's complexities, all the struggles within. But it would be . . . a chance. And what I have so longed for, what Richard said he has so yearned to find. That prospect of possibility. Of a happier life.

Then we began to kiss even more deeply and passionately. Within moments he was inside me, fear having been banished. The sense of completeness was so immense. I had only slept with two men prior to Richard. I so remember the initial virginal awkwardness with Eric, and the way Dan and myself were, at first, clumsy – and how our sex life settled into a pleasant routine, but largely devoid of anything approaching real passion, real intimacy. But once Richard had entered me, once we began to move together – our bodies immediately, instinctively, attuned to what became, at once, a shared rhythm – the delirious sensuality of it all was heightened by an even more overwhelming sense of fusion.

Love.

I buried my face in his shoulder the first time I climaxed. And was astounded when I climaxed again just a few minutes later. Richard was determined not to rush things (this too was new for me) – and held off for such a long time. And when he came the shudder that ran through him, through us, was accompanied by another declaration of love.