Thirst (13 page)

“You’re a pretty smart kid,” Lucy told him.

“Dad says I’m a
pedant.”

“Have you heard from Josh at all?” Tom asked.

Josh was Lucy’s ex-boyfriend. The question startled her. She took a large draw from her drink.

“It just so happens I called him before I left Boston. I hadn’t spoken to him in months.”

“What’d he say?”

“‘Have a nice life.’ What was he going to say? It was a dumb conversation. I couldn’t explain why I called. It’s not like I’m still in love with him. I hadn’t even thought of him in a long time, at least not in any serious way. But I met him the week I moved to Boston, and I lived with him most of the time I was in Boston, and he more or less meant Boston to me. So I guess I figured I should say good-bye to him.”

“I’m impressed,” Claire said. “I wouldn’t have done it.”

“I see now I can never go back there to live,” Lucy said. “The place is just too connected to our history together. To think, the guy ruined a whole city for me. Did I tell you I ran into him on the T, before that? It was a few months after we broke up. His girlfriend was with him. He was his usual shleppy self. Half his shirt collar was sticking out over his jacket, and she was made up like something out of
Dynasty.
Heels, stockings, spandex mini, Giorgio Armani blouse. And tits I’d kill for. I mean serious knockers, out to here.”

She straightened her posture and cupped two imaginary breasts well in front of her.

“So we chatted. When they reached their stop, I shook her hand, kissed him on the cheek, and, I don’t believe this, nearly fixed his shirt collar. It was pure reflex, I had been doing it for so many years. And then
I realized I would never do it again: that his shirt collar was now foreign territory, like the shirt collars of all other men. How he looked meant nothing to me. I pulled my hand away. They left and I was standing by myself in the middle of the car. I felt like such a fool, like everybody on the train was staring at my tits.” She brought her hands against her chest. “Such as they are.”

Adam, who was studying a collection of
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
cartoons on the steps of the porch, looked up for a moment and then returned to the book.

Claire told a story about a conspicuously buxom woman at work, while Tom pondered the invitation to consider Lucy’s breasts. Was she obliquely flirting with him? Not if she was sincere in her belief that her breasts were unattractive. On the other hand, from what he could determine, they were not unattractive at all. He had often seen their shadows, rising up against her shirt. Now, when she touched them, his fingers had tingled.

 

They played Monopoly that evening. After Tom bought Park Place and Boardwalk, Claire and Lucy were ready to concede defeat. Not Adam, however: he declared that it was not important who won or lost, but that the game be brought to its destined conclusion. Otherwise, it was like not finishing a book or leaving before the end of a movie. With a single low-rent monopoly, two utilities, and an uncanny knack for landing on Free Parking, Adam kept himself solvent for hours. Then at a little past ten he suddenly wound down, burying his chin in his chest like an old man. In exchange for a stay at Tom’s
hotel on Ventnor Avenue, Claire assumed the task of putting the boy to bed, on a cot in Lucy’s studio.

Tom and Lucy were sitting on the floor, their backs against an upholstered chair, their legs in front of them, their shoes off.

“You surprised me when you asked about Josh.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that we got along well.”

“I know. The two of you were very much alike.”

“Can I take it then that I’m your type?”

She smiled and shifted position. Tom’s left foot accidentally grazed her instep.

“I may not have a type. I think I’ve had it with men: their fantasies, their fears, their demands, their housekeeping. Most of them aren’t even good company. I’ll tell you, Tom, it’s a relief taking a break from romance, even from sex. I got tired of the uncertainty, the insecurity. Does he love me? Does he want me? Did he really like it the last time we fucked? Love is such a disappointment.”

“Is it?” The word
fucked,
flung out between her top teeth and lower lips, pulled a string in his gut.

“It becomes another measure of age, of the passing of time. Your gums recede, your skin dries out, your love gets overused. It requires maintenance, compromises. Eternal love, my ass—it’s the most ephemeral thing in the world. In the end, it diminishes into just another responsibility. Do you know what I mean?”

“Well, I have a wife and kid.”

Tom immediately regretted his words. They were disloyal; and, also, he didn’t want to remind her of his loyalties.

But Lucy wasn’t listening. “What happens as you get older is that the stakes get raised. Everything becomes more important. When you liked somebody when you were young, you went with them to the movies; it was just a matter of preference. Now you have to live with them the rest of your life. And when you’re younger you think you know this as a fact of life, but you don’t come close to knowing it. So now
this
is what they mean when they call going to work five days a week—week in, week out, no spring break, no three-month summer vacation—a grind. So
this
is what they mean when they complain about getting old. So
this
is what they mean when they complain about death.”

Absentmindedly, or so it seemed, Lucy was rubbing her instep against Tom’s big toe. Her foot was bare and tawny, while Tom wore white athletic socks. To reach his toe, she had to extend her leg a little further than it had been, slightly tensing her buttocks. Her foot rode up over his toe and down again, back and forth, fitting around it perfectly. It required all Tom’s will not to move his foot.

“The first time I took a regular job and got a paycheck I couldn’t believe the amount of withholding,” he said. “The welfare state suddenly looked a lot less attractive.”

“So
this
is what they mean about the loss of love. I had never broken up with anyone I had ever loved before. I had never had the experience of falling out of love. I read the books, I knew all the songs, but I was as unprepared for it as I would have been for a trip to the moon.”

Tom didn’t reply—perhaps he couldn’t have, even if
he wanted to. Lucy’s toes were stroking the bony knob at the side of his ankle.

“Is that silence I hear?” Claire asked, returning.

Lucy didn’t pull her foot away, but she stopped moving it. Tom kept his in place. It all looked perfectly innocent now. Perhaps it
was
innocent. Perhaps it had never happened.

“No,” Lucy said. “I think I hear a bottle of bourbon crying out to be opened.”

“Yes, I hear it too,” Claire said. “A faint, pitiful sound.”

“It’s coming from the cupboard above the fridge.”

“Let’s put it out of its misery.”

“Don’t forget glasses.”

They sipped their drinks in relative silence, Monopoly money strewn around them. A new scenario offered itself: the three of them, in a tangle of love. All they needed was to get a little high, that’s all. Lucy lay with her head on the seat of the chair, her bare neck as inviting as a piece of fruit. Claire’s head was in Tom’s lap, applying a sweet, delicate pressure. As he looked over the rim of his glass, he tried to count every orifice in their bodies and how he would somehow manage to occupy them. A few sips later, Tom became aware of the liquor searing the lining of his stomach.

“Are you okay?” Lucy asked. Her voice was honeyed and warm, so close it seemed inside his clothes.

Unbelievingly, he heard himself say, “No, I think I’ve had a long enough day. I’m going to bed.”

“No!”

“I’m tired.”

“Old men,” Claire explained, helping him up. He
tottered a little. All he wanted now was to be under the covers with his eyes shut. He didn’t want to think about anything for the next eight hours. He didn’t want to think about sex, nor about his family, nor especially about himself.

“See you in the morning,” he murmured.

Regret, or something, flickered across Lucy’s face.

Tom washed and stripped to his shorts, sleepily amazed at the strength of his imagination. He was crazy, no doubt about it. Excess hormones had finally stewed his brain. Claire joined him in bed, innocent of his insanity, unaware of the errant lust that boiled and spat within his head. She grinned seductively and turned off the lamp. “I’m drunk,” she announced.

At the moment he kissed his wife’s lips, Tom thought of Lucy, and how her body would feel under him and how her mouth would taste. Claire fell back into her pillow. As Tom again kissed her, nuzzling the short hair at the back of her neck, he realized she was asleep. He pressed his lips against a shoulder blade. She can’t drink either, he recalled.

A great surge of affection swept away his sleepiness. With his body spooned around Claire’s, his arms wrapped around her chest, he was frustrated that they could not be even closer. He squeezed her. She didn’t wake; she didn’t feel him against her at all.

Meanwhile, Lucy was in the next room, probably asleep, possibly not, possibly sensitive to his nearness. He pursed his lips again and sent Lucy a telepathic kiss that moistened the inside of an ear, and then another at the hollow where her neck turned into her right shoulder.
Lucy, are you awake?
Was she?
What are you wearing?
Probably gym shorts and a T-shirt. Or nothing at all, her body stretched naked across the bed, hugging a blanket or pillow. His antennae bristled, awaiting a reply.

How passionate was he? Enough to cheat on his wife? He never had. Was that normal? In literature and in films, illicit love was typical. Yet in real life he didn’t know a single friend capable of adultery. Tom himself had descried opportunity among the women with whom he worked, several opportunities that any protagonist in fiction would have taken, and he had passed them up, to his immediate sorrow and lasting relief. Was he less of a man because of this—or, more seriously (because the question of manhood was trite)—was he less a man of passion? Sex was the least important aspect of this. What was at stake was a matter of character.

Tom stared at the wall that separated him from Lucy. He imagined her on the other side of it, staring back at the wall. And then Tom slept, to wake again, every few minutes, to think how it was that he wanted her in the worst possible way, and then to sleep again.

 

An hour before dawn Tom woke with a thump, his bladder full and his mouth sour. For a moment, he could not remember where he was. When he did, he grimaced. Desire returned to him like a toothache—specifically, an unfilled cavity. He stepped from the bed, tapped the chill wood floor for his slippers, and recalled that he had left them home.

Padding down the hallway to the toilet, he passed the
open door of the studio, where Adam slept in red bottoms and a blue T-shirt, an outfit that Claire had bought him during his Superman phase, when he regularly wore a red cape in the street. Now, thank Krypton, it had been relegated to sleepwear. The boy slept exactly as his father did, with his head buried in his pillow.

Lucy’s door was just across from the bathroom. It was only slightly ajar, and Tom couldn’t see anything inside the room, not in his single furtive glance into the darkness. He closed the bathroom door and urinated by the shine of a gibbous moon behind the curtain.

The relief of one discomfort aggravated the other. From the bathroom he went to the kitchen. He slitted his eyes against the refrigerator light and found a jar of cranapple juice. He poured a few swallows into a plastic cup that had been drying on the rack by the sink, drank it, lightly rinsed the cup, and returned the jar. As he stepped from the kitchen, as silent as a ghost, another specter blocked his way.

It was Lucy in a long peach nightgown, her face awakened by surprise. She stared at him in alarm for a moment, as if she had forgotten other people were sharing the house with her that night. Wrapping her arms around her upper body, she stepped back.

Tom was just as startled.

“I had to use the toilet,” he whispered. “And I was thirsty.”

She nodded in confusion and shuffled past him into the bathroom.

He asked, “Do you want something to drink?”

“All right,” she mumbled, closing the door.

Tom returned to the kitchen. When he opened the refrigerator again, he didn’t have the least idea of what he was looking for, and once he recalled the juice, he couldn’t find it. Within the minute that he left the kitchen, met Lucy, and then returned to it, every item in the refrigerator had been replaced by inedible artifacts from another planet. His mind was blanker than it had been in the deepest abyss of sleep. He stared into the refrigerator light for what seemed like the rest of the morning until, jarred alert by the cheer of the flushing toilet, he finally found the juice. He poured it into the same cup he had used.

Lucy was hanging back inside the shadow of her bedroom doorway. With one arm around her waist, as if she were cold, she reached for the cup. Her arm was bare—a mile of naked skin. Her motion swelled her breasts against the top of the gown. She tasted the juice and offered him a modest smile, the moonlight shimmering on her lips.

There was no good reason for Tom to remain standing there. In fact, he wanted to squeeze past her and return to his room, to flee and hide under the covers. Yet he couldn’t move. In better light, he thought, he would see right through her gown.

She finished the glass and absentmindedly handed it back to him. Her mouth framed her thanks. Holding her eyes, he took a step toward the cup, and then he took another—it was like stepping onto a rope bridge—and, quickly closing the last few inches between their faces, he kissed her.

It wasn’t like kissing her hello. Her mouth remained clenched and she pulled away.