The Sabbathday River (57 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“And what did you say?” Naomi asked.
“I said there was no problem with the interrogation or the confession.” He considered his own hands. “That was a lie.”
So, she thought. So.
“There was a problem with the interrogation. It wasn't clean.”
“I see,” she said softly.
“The confession wasn't clean.”
“Okay.”
They sat for a moment like this. Nelson took small sips of his beer. His legs were crossed, the corduroy worn and shiny where they met. He
looked, suddenly, flushed. She thought that she ought to say he should take his sweater off if he was hot, since she would have asked him to take his coat off by now if he'd come in wearing a coat, but that seemed awkward, so she said nothing. He was looking past her at the dining table, and beyond to the Eliot Porter poster on her wall, the same one everyone had, with the pink-tinged woods. Then he was looking at her.
“I'm sorry, Naomi.”
She nodded, though she felt somewhat fraudulent accepting an apology that was more appropriately due Heather. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“Because I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to do what I should have done last fall.”
“You're calling Warren, then?” she said, her voice full of incredulous hope.
“I've already done it. This afternoon. When Heather collapsed like that, I felt like such a colossal piece of shit. And I never dreamed, all this stuff they said about her in court. That doctor talking about her, and the shrink saying she was a psychopath. And Ashley! Who gave it to just about every woman in town, pretending he was a family man! I knew I could have stopped this. And I'd lied, which I was miserable about. On the stand. So it's over for me, anyway. A police officer who commits perjury … Well.” Unaccountably he smiled. “I mean, they do, of course. But a police officer who
admits
to committing perjury, that's the end of his life as a police officer, do you see?”
She looked at him, amazed and admiring. “I see. I'm sorry.”
“My decision.” His voice was thick, though he nodded when he said it. “I'll tell Judith to recall me. I'll say what actually took place.”
Naomi swallowed. “You're really a decent man, Nelson.”
“No. A decent man wouldn't have let it get this far. And that girl in jail all this time. And the little girl.”
“It's all right. The important thing is, you're doing it now.” She touched him. She touched the back of his head. He let his head sink back against her hand.
And there they sat for a moment, neither moving, both testing the weight of this contact. Finally, he turned his head, still in her palm.
“Naomi. Can I please stay a little longer?”
She kissed him. Her mouth remembered his mouth, her tongue his
tongue. She felt his hand against her face.
So he does,
she thought vaguely. It wasn't only she who had wanted …
“I wish,” he said, though somewhat indistinctly. His fingers were beneath her hair, lifting it. He seemed to pull it over his own face, burying himself beneath it.
Now he took off his sweater, and he was hot, after all, she saw, with dark spots under his arms that smelled sharp, though clean, as if he had washed before coming here to sweat. She wished she had done the same. She let herself imagine she had bathed with Polly, the two of them as they sometimes did, lapped in bubbles, but then thought how even more afraid she might have been if she had been naked that way and the car came down her drive, how vulnerable to cross the bathroom floor dripping water and bubbles to the telephone, how she would not want him to see her like that, barely wrapped in her towel, because she was not beautiful. “I didn't know you were coming” was what she managed to say at the end of this.
“You look wonderful,” Nelson said, his weight across her. “I love how you look. You smell wonderful.”
The mechanics of first sex, she was thinking. That compulsion at the outset to just get it done. And the debate over whether a finger's insertion made you a non-virgin, and how the clutch of a breast was supposed to give either party any pleasure. Matthew Kaufman explaining why a French kiss was not the same as an ordinary kiss in the spare room of his father's weekend house in Pound Ridge. The terror of being thought a prude (
What are you, hung up
?) or worse, a romantic, and the determined we're-way-past-that nocturnal meanderings in the college house she shared with three men and two women. The shock of coming with another person in the room; then, all too soon, the tedious politics of orgasm, and Daniel, and their efficient, egalitarian fucking: one for you, then one for me. And Ashley, whose excuse was that he loved women and what was the matter with that? And now this.
“Can I?” Nelson said, but already he was. Her clothing unfurled, his face to her chest, and Naomi forgot herself in the slip of his skin over her skin. How thin he was for the weight he made, and how pale he was not, though he was light in that pristine, Aryan way—hairless men langlaufing through the Nordic forests, surfer blonds, ice-pick blue in the irises, men who were not Jewish—
the unsnipped
, as her friend Shura had once called them. The purr of a zipper, his or hers? She really
ought to be more on top of this, she thought, but then it was so sweet to lie here and be touched this way, so gently and with such focused intent. His mouth closed over her navel and she heard, as if from some great distance, the sounds she made.
“Wait.” Naomi sat up. “Just wait.”
“I'm sorry,” he said quickly. “I should have—”
“No, it isn't that,” she told him hurriedly. “I just, I don't want Polly …”
“Of course.”
They both got up and walked away from their clothes. The light was on, four harsh bulbs. She brought him into her bedroom, where it was dark, and they fell over the bed, her mess of blankets. Nelson's big hand where her legs met, without delay, opened and touched her. Was she a non-virgin? One finger, then two. She could barely remember what Daniel looked like suddenly, though she recalled the feline tautness of Ashley's long thigh, the pucker of his little ass. And of Nelson, who in his way had really loved her; this was the only memory she had taken away: the top of his rosy head, with its skein of silver-gold hair, bobbing in concentration as he stroked her and kissed her, reverent and courteous at once. “Naomi,” he said now, “I did miss you.”
“Missed
this
,” she said, and what she meant as a tease came out smacking of accusation.
“No, you. And this.”
“But we're too different,” she said, smiling. “At least that's what you—”
“Shh.” He darted up to kiss her. Quite gently, he bit her lips. “Not now.”
Naomi took his hand away. She didn't want his hand. She wanted to feel him push against her. She wanted to feel that again and see if she remembered how it felt.
“I didn't bring anything,” he said suddenly. “I really didn't think about it. I would have. But I didn't think I would need—”
“I'm on the pill,” Naomi said, without thinking. Then she was shocked at the words, though they came in her own voice. She had never been on the pill. She had always had a superstitious notion that if she took a pill to keep from becoming pregnant it might work too well and she would never have children. Last summer she had used her diaphragm, but it had probably crumbled to dust by now, and anyway, she didn't know where it was.
“Oh. Fine,” he said. He put his mouth to her breast. Her nipple rolled against his teeth. Had he done that last year? Did she forget that part?
Or this: Nelson's arm in the small of her back, lifting her up hard against him, or the glancing of hipbone against hipbone, like somebody striking inefficiently a flint against a steel but somehow still managing to ignite sparks. She let her head fall back against the pillow. Let him lift me, is what she was thinking. Let him, since it feels good, and it felt good and she did not have to explain the right way to do it. Obviously I can't take care of myself. Naomi's arms flung up over her head, knuckles against the headboard. He said, “Oh, this is good. Oh, you are.” Each word had its own breath. It took a long time to make sentences. He said other things. She wanted his mouth to be over hers when he came, and it was. And she closed her legs around him—thigh slick on thigh—as if to trap him forever in this happy place, with this sweetness between them. How long could it last before he moved, and got up and walked away?
“Naomi.” A kiss for her ear: friendly, thick with affection. “I don't want to mess up your life.”
“My unmessed-up life,” she said ruefully, feeling him fall out of her: the little sadness after the little death.
“No, I mean … since last time it didn't work out.”
“Well,” Naomi sighed, “I'm not sure I know what it means anymore, to ‘work out' with another person.”
“No, I don't know either.”
He lay on his back beside her, one long leg bent so that the sole rested against her ankle.
“You didn't just …” He turned to her. “It wasn't because I went to Warren, is it? It wasn't a
reward
.”
“No, of course not. Though I
would
give you a reward if I could. I think it's great, what you did. But it's not why this happened. I'm glad you stayed.”
“I should have come sooner.”
Yes
, she thought, though she didn't say it.
After a moment he got up to go into the bathroom. He turned the water on so she wouldn't hear him pee. Sweet, Naomi thought. Then the door opened. “Is this you?” Nelson said.
He was looking at the bathroom wall, over the toilet.
“Yes. My dad brought the dashikis home from Africa.”
“Dashikis.” He tested the word. He had evidently not heard it before. “Is that what they are?”
“Yes. Sort of African shirtdresses.”
“This your brother? And your mom?”
“Yes,” Naomi said. “In front of Grant's Tomb. That's in Manhattan.”
“You were pretty,” he observed. “What were you here, about eight?”
“Yes. Chubby.”
“Plump,” he corrected. “Pretty.”
She thought she looked, in the photograph, about as untidy as she always felt. Now, rather belatedly, she wondered if she didn't always feel untidy because she saw this photograph every time she went into her bathroom.
“And that hair.”
Which was frizzy-brown and down to her ass, caught at midpoint by an orange band.
“Ashkenazi deluxe,” she said, more to herself,
He frowned, but didn't ask. Another new word.
“Where's your father?” Nelson said.
“Oh. He was seldom in the picture, if you know what I mean.”
She saw him look at her through the open door. He didn't know.
“He took that photograph. That's why he isn't in it. But he ran off the next year, with one of his students.”
Nelson nodded. “Sorry.” He washed his hands, then flicked out the light and came back to bed. “They all still in Manhattan, your family?”
“My mom is,” Naomi said. “My dad lives in California, near San Francisco. My brother caught the tail end of the draft. He's been in Canada for the last decade.”
He took this in. She waited for him to get angry, but he didn't. “What does he do up there?”
“Teaches school. He married a Canadian woman and had Canadian kids. They've been down to visit a couple of times.” She shrugged. “We're not that close, really.”
For a long minute Nelson looked at her, the arms still up over her head. Even in the half-dark she caught the warm tone of his skin. And she felt, rather than saw, the warmth in his looking.
“You are a very uncommon woman,” he said seriously.
“In oh so many ways,” she quipped, but he didn't smile.
“I mean that. I haven't met anyone else like you.”
“Well, Judith,” Naomi said. “Judith is like me.”
“I haven't known Judith like this. And I don't intend to know her like this.”
“All right, then. Assuming this is a compliment, I accept your compliment.”
He didn't answer.
“Nelson? Did you change your mind about last year? Is that it?”
This will not hurt me,
Naomi thought, chanting to herself.
Whatever he says will not hurt me.
“Well, that's just it.” He shook his sad head. “I didn't change my mind. I still feel what I felt then. But I also feel this. And there have been times when I just wanted to be here in this house, and of course I couldn't come here. Not only because of what I said to you when we stopped, but because of the babies, and Heather. I couldn't just come and talk to you, or do anything else.”

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