The Year of Fog (18 page)

The bed is at the top of the staircase, and beyond it the door leading into the darkroom. We’re standing at the foot of the bed. My back is to the mattress and Nick is facing me, holding me by the shoulders, but keeping a polite and brotherly distance. Bed or darkroom? Bed or darkroom? Instead of choosing, it simply happens; my body seems to fall of its own accord onto the bed. Nick just stands there, hands at his sides.

“Can I get you anything? Aspirin?”

“No thanks. Just a minute. I’ll be fine.”

He looks around, presumably for somewhere to sit, but there are no chairs. “Here,” I say, patting the bed beside me. “Have a seat.”

The mattress sinks slightly with his weight. The clock reads 4:25. It is that precise time in the middle of the night when no one in her right mind is awake. At 3:15, the most energetic partygoers are just getting home. By 5:00, the most diligent workers are reaching over and turning off their alarm clocks. But at 4:25, just about everyone is in bed. Surely this is the witching hour, when strange and unpredictable things happen. Surely things that happen at this hour can be forgiven, or at the very least forgotten.

I don’t move away when Nick’s hand brushes my thigh, or when he leans over to kiss me. His kiss is soft, lingering, not too insistent. Maybe this is what I need. Maybe this is the thing that will help me snap out of the strange, stunned state I’ve been in since Emma disappeared. Is it possible that sex with this man could break the cycle of my paralysis? Could making love to him wake me up, help me retrieve the lost threads of my sanity? Could one simple act rearrange my memory, set things straight?

As he’s kissing me, three words thump around in my head:
Situation, Participation, Extrication.
Three words straight from the mouth of Sam Bungo, who led the sex addiction sessions my parents forced me to attend when I was seventeen. Sam was no psychiatrist; he wasn’t even a certified therapist. He was just a Christian counselor with a lowercase
c
, but he was the best my parents could afford. He’d once been a youth minister at a small Baptist church in Montgomery, but had left the church under mysterious circumstances. By the time I met him, he’d been leading the sex addiction classes for three years, and he had the answer to temptation down to a formula. He made us chant those words several times every session.

Situation, Sam said, opened the door to evil. The first defense against sex was to avoid compromising situations, those circumstances in which you would be most vulnerable.

Participation, he advised, was the enemy. Christians must hold themselves apart from sinners, and in doing so they would be protected from sin. “You should not be unequally yoked,” he said.

Finally, there was Extrication. Say you took a wrong turn and found yourself in a Situation, and it was clear that you were headed straight for Participation. Your only option then was Extrication: snap your bra, zip up your pants, and get out of there as fast as you can. “Don’t look back,” Sam used to say. “It’s no accident that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt.”

Sam wasn’t smart, but maybe, it occurs to me now, he was right. Maybe his slogan was divine inspiration masking as idiocy. I broke the first rule, Situation, by letting Nick come over. Kissing him would certainly be considered Participation. But it isn’t too late for Extrication.

“We shouldn’t,” I say.

“Right, sorry.” He leans back on his elbows, sighs, gives me a sad little smile. “What’s his name? The fiancé?”

“Jake.”

“Nice guy?”

“Very.”

I get up and open the door to the darkroom, flipping on the overhead light. “Come in here,” I say. He follows me, perhaps thinking that I’ve had a change of heart and am planning to continue the romantic interlude among the chemicals and drying trays. One glance around the room, though, and his face changes.

“What’s this?” he says, taking in the photos of Emma, dozens of them, papering the walls. Emma at the zoo, Emma at the beach, Emma in Jake’s backyard on the Slip ’N’ Slide. Emma standing in front of her school, holding hands with Ingmar, a boy she loved briefly in kindergarten. Emma and Jake standing in the sunlight at Tsunami Town in Crescent City.

I tell him the story of Emma. I tell him how I lost her. I tell him I might very well be losing my mind, and he reaches forward and takes me in his arms. There’s nothing sexual in his touch this time, no hint of desire; he’s just doing the only thing he can think of to do. He ends up putting me to bed in my clothes. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to just go downstairs and plug my laptop in for a bit and try to prepare for my meeting,” he says.

“Stay as long as you like.” Part of me hopes he’ll climb in my bed an hour from now and put his hands all over me. The more rational part hopes he’ll leave before I have a chance to do something stupid. I fall asleep to the sound of his fingers clicking over the keyboard of his laptop.

In the morning when I wake, I can hear him moving around in the kitchen. I quickly change into fresh clothes, brush my teeth, rinse my face, and go downstairs. He’s sitting at the table fully dressed, hair combed, sipping coffee. I pour some for myself and join him. “The two-day beard suits you,” I say.

“Thank you.” There’s an awkward pause, both of us staring into our cups. “Sorry about that thing last night,” he says.

“You have nothing to apologize for.” I slide the envelope containing his great-grandmother’s photos across the table. “Here’s what you came for.”

He lays his manicured fingers on top of the envelope. “Kind of you to pretend this is the only reason I showed up at your door in the middle of the night.”

“Kind of you to be such a gentleman. I’m afraid my willpower might not have held up under pressure.”

“I wish I’d known you under different circumstances,” he says. He goes to the sink and washes his cup, sets it on the dish rack, dries his hands, and pulls a checkbook out of his coat pocket. “What’s the damage?”

“Two hundred seventeen.”

“A bargain,” he says, jotting the numbers on a check with his Mont Blanc pen.

“I gave you the sleepover discount. Aren’t you going to look at the pictures?”

“I trust you,” he says, handing me the check.

And then he’s gone, and I’m alone, and the sun through the big loft windows is too bright, too intense, like the sun on the beach in Alabama in the summer, when every body, every object, bore a hazy gold outline, and it was impossible to see anything with definition or depth, because the light made everything waver; it made everything untrue.

41

N
O KIDDING
,” Jake said the first time I told him about Sam Bungo’s sex addiction classes.

It was a warm day, Emma was at zoo camp, and Jake and I were at Java Beach. He dipped an almond biscotti into his coffee and said, “I know you’ve got quite a sex drive, but I never figured you for an addict.” A guy at the neighboring table glanced up from his
Bay Guardian
, gave me a quick once-over.

“I wasn’t. My parents got this idea in their heads, and there was no convincing them otherwise.”

“I guess we’ve known each other long enough now that I can ask this question,” he said. He was wearing a Giants hat and a fitted black T. He looked good, really good, and I wanted to go to bed with him. We hadn’t done that yet. We’d come very close, and we both knew it would happen soon, but we were waiting for the right moment.

“What question?”

“The old how-many-partners-have-you-had question.”

“Let’s not,” I said.

“What’s the harm?”

“Okay. You first.”

The table was littered with crumbs, his and mine. Jake used a plastic knife to scrape the crumbs into a little pile. “There was Betsy Paducah when I was fifteen—her father owned horses in West Virginia, and she was in San Francisco for a summer arts program. Then there was Amanda Chung when I was seventeen, Deb Hipps during my freshman year of college. Janey, forget the last name, the same year, then a serious girlfriend from sophomore year to graduation, Elaine Wayne.” He kept going for a couple of minutes, finishing off the list with Rebecca Walker from a few months before.

“Where did you meet Rebecca?”

“At the high school.”

“Was it a relationship or just a fling?”

“Three months, if you call that a relationship. She’s the only woman I’ve dated since the divorce. Being a single parent doesn’t leave much time for socializing.” He clinked my coffee mug with his own, a toast. “Until you, of course.”

“Who broke up with whom?”

“At the time, I thought it was mutual, but Rebecca kept leaving bitter notes in my box at school for several weeks afterward, so I guess I probably came out as the bad guy.”

“Does she still teach there?”

He nodded. “English lit, conversational French.”

I imagined Jake sitting across the table from Rebecca Walker in the faculty lounge, trying to concentrate on his sandwich—turkey-bacon-Swiss—while she slid a loafer-clad foot toward him under the table, whispering saucy French words.

“Twelve,” I said. “A very reasonable number.”

“You counted?”

“I thought that was the point.”

“Your turn. First to last.”

So I began with Ramon. Ramon who taught me about oral sex and f-stops, simultaneous orgasm and film speed. Ramon who took photographs of me, hundreds of them, which my parents got hold of after he died in the motorcycle accident. “He had a sister who found the photos and my address after he died,” I explained. “She took it upon herself to mail them to my parents.”

“Quite an age difference,” Jake said.

“I know, but it wasn’t like it sounds. He was ready to marry me.”

I told Jake how, on the phone from Mobile to Knoxville during the last month of his life, Ramon had said, “I can’t live without you.” And I had said, “Sure you can. I’m in college, I can’t do this right now.” The last conversation I ever had with him.

“What kind of photographs?” Jake asked.

“You can guess.”

“Creepy.”

“It wasn’t like that. I mean, sure, he was too old for me, but he really was a nice guy.”

“If Emma ever got involved with a guy like that,” Jake said, “I’d have to chase him down with a shotgun.”

I didn’t tell Jake how Ramon used to pose me. How he’d undress me, item by item, in his downtown apartment, bright light flooding through the high windows. How I’d stand naked in the center of the room and after a while the warm floorboards would seem to shift beneath me, and I’d feel dizzy, unbalanced, while Ramon’s camera clicked. There were the close-ups—an elbow, a knee, the white skin of the inner thigh, the arch of the foot, my ears with their twin ruby teardrops, a gift from him. Much later, my mother laid those photographs out on the glass coffee table and said, “And what, pray tell, is this?”

I’d never seen her so angry. She was crying. She really thought I’d gone to the devil. My father couldn’t look at me. He sat in the rocking chair in the corner of the room and stared at the piano, for lack of somewhere else to rest his gaze. The piano had been polished to a yellowish shine. On top of it there was a statuette of a bluebird with a tiny gold crank that made it sing, a row of Russian nesting dolls, and photographs of me and Annabel from when we were much younger, wearing matching gingham outfits my mother had made. And on the coffee table those other photos, my body laid bare, my pleasure so obvious and humiliating.

“It isn’t natural,” my father said.

“Sex is a sacred act between a man and a woman whom God has brought together in marriage,” my mother said, as if quoting from a religious textbook.

My father nodded, rocked back and forth, didn’t look at me. It was the same chair he had used to rock me to sleep in when I was small.

“When you do that with someone, you give them your soul,” my mother said. “Forever after, that disgusting man will own a little piece of you.”

I was thinking about the motorcycle, wondering how much Ramon had felt as he slid over the wet road, if there was a lot of pain or just a sudden blankness. At the funeral in September, he had an open casket. I stood there with his sister, whom I’d just met. She looked like him, with olive skin and green eyes, messy eighties hair. “Too much blush,” she said, taking a Kleenex out of her purse to wipe his cheeks. The tissue turned pink. I couldn’t help thinking how unhappy he’d be about wearing makeup.

While my parents lectured, the TV was on low, tuned to CNN, Christiane Amanpour reporting on the situation in Syria. I wanted to be like Christiane, on the other side of the world, doing something that mattered.

I didn’t tell Jake how the guilt washed over me like a wave, how I felt somehow responsible for what had happened to Ramon. Instead I said, “They took me out of school for a whole semester. I had to go to group therapy three times a week with this weird dude named Sam Bungo, who was very fond of slogans.”

“Pretty rough for a seventeen-year-old kid,” he said, and I was grateful to him for not saying anything bad about Ramon. Grateful that he didn’t make me finish the game, that after he’d tallied his partners I didn’t have to tally mine.

Jake looked so wholesome sitting there in his baseball cap, so willing to trust me. “So,” I said, “do you find my past a bit too checkered? It’s not too late to back out.”

“That stuff makes you more interesting. Besides, maybe it will turn out your parents were right and you really are a sex addict, lucky me. Whatever happened to Sam Bungo?”

“Odd story. I met his sister by coincidence about ten years ago. This FBI agent named Sandy Bungo visited my political science class at the University of Tennessee. It’s an unusual last name, and there was definitely a resemblance, so I went up to her after class and asked if she was related to a guy named Sam Bungo. She asked how I knew him, and without thinking I blurted, ‘I used to take these classes he taught.’ She got this funny look on her face and said, ‘Yikes.’ I asked how Sam was doing. Turns out he was serving fifty-six months for some crime she didn’t care to identify. I just stood there looking kind of stunned, then I asked her to tell him hello for me.”

That was the first and last time Jake and I talked about Ramon, or about anyone we used to date. Even the subject of Lisbeth rarely came up. One thing I liked about Jake was that he was content to leave the past in the past; with him, everything felt like forward motion.