She nodded.
“I feel bad about what happened.”
“Probably not as bad as me,” she said. She cringed inwardly. What a weird thing to be competitive about.
“Hard to imagine feeling worse,” he said.
God, they were alike. Going overboard even at this stage.
“It makes me realize what a mistake it is for me to be away from my family for this long. I lose sight of what they mean to me, you know?”
She did know. She knew exactly. He was canny and he was hungry in all sorts of ways. He lived in the present just as she did.
“You’re probably right about that,” she said, also knowing that he was missing the deeper solution.
He grinned at her. “It could have been worse.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You think so?”
“We could have rolled down the hill.”
At that point, it would have just been gravity, but she didn’t say so.
“I think back on that night. I feel like we dodged a bullet,” he said.
She looked at him without saying anything. No, they hadn’t. They hadn’t dodged a bullet. The bullet had dodged them.
She thought of Eric, and for the first time in a long time she could actually begin to picture him. The set of his mouth when he concentrated on something. The crumple of his forehead when he was worried. The slightly jaunty overlap of his front teeth when he smiled. He came to her in little bursts, and she could feel, achingly, what it was to miss him.
She had gone to some lengths not to feel this, she realized. In spite of the sweetness and reliability of his e-mails, she had guarded against her feelings for him. She had long ago instituted a personal policy against missing people, based on the fear that you would spend your life missing people if you really got going on it.
The time had come to rethink that policy. You blocked the pain and you blocked everything.
Eric loved her. She trusted him more than she trusted herself. She appreciated the wisdom of loving someone built so differently than she was. She was stupid to let him go, even in her mind, even for a day. It was her loss.
As she said good-bye to Peter, she suddenly felt sad for him. He would do this same thing again. At some other place with some other misguided girl. He was already looking forward, shaking off the past—a past that now included her.
She made a vow to herself not to do that.
Tibby called her mother. Sad but true.
“Have you heard anything?” she asked. She had no pride. None. This would be unthinkable if she had any.
“Honey, no.”
“Have you seen them together?”
“No.”
“You know something. I can tell.”
“Tibby.”
“Mom. If you know something you have to tell me.”
Her mother sighed in exactly the way that everybody Tibby had talked to had sighed. “Your father saw them at Starbucks.”
“He did?”
“Yes.”
“Together?”
“Seemed like that.”
“Brian doesn’t like Starbucks!”
“Well, maybe Effie does.”
That was the worst possible thing to say. Tibby felt the need to pout for a while.
“Tibby, sweetie. You sound like you are really upset about this. Why don’t you tell Effie to lay off? Why don’t you tell Brian how you are feeling?”
Typical her mom. These were the worst and least practical suggestions Tibby had ever heard in her life.
“I have to go,” she said sullenly.
“Tib. Please.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
“You know what your dad said?”
“No. What?”
“He said that Brian did not look happy.”
Tibby breathed out. That was the first and only good thing her mother said the whole time.
“Hey, Carmen?”
“Yes, Andrew.”
“What’s going on?”
It was just the two of them in the empty lobby of the theater. Andrew Kerr seemed to have recognized that public humiliation didn’t work, so he was trying to reach Carmen privately.
“I don’t know.” She put her face in her hands.
“Carmen, darling. Just relax. Just tell me what.”
“I don’t know what.”
“You were doing so beautifully with this role. Even Ian said it. ‘She’s a miracle,’ he said, and do you know what I said?”
Carmen shook her head.
“I said, ‘Let’s not jinx it.’ ”
“Thanks a lot, Andrew.”
“Carmen, I know what you are capable of. I believe in you. I just want to know why you are not doing it.”
“I think I’m thinking too much,” she said.
Andrew nodded sagely. “Ah. Very bad. Don’t think too much. Don’t think at all.”
“I’ll try not to.”
“Good girl.”
Ten minutes later she was back onstage with flowers in her hair, trying to say the line about hostess-ship.
“Carmen!” Andrew thundered. “I hope you are not thinking again!”
“Are we on for Sunday?” Leo left the message on her answering machine.
“Are you there? Are you okay? Do you want to have dinner? What’s up?” was his message on Saturday.
“Please, please call me, Lena,” he said on Sunday morning.
So she did. When he asked her how she was, she couldn’t quite figure out what to say.
“Can you pose today?” he asked hopefully.
Could she? An echo of the old terror sounded at the thought, but it was far away, more like a representation than the real feeling. “Okay,” she said. She didn’t have the stamina to think why not. “I’ll be over in half an hour,” she said.
She took a shower. Her skin felt cool and clean, a strange coating for her strange soul. She didn’t try to organize her impressions or her anxieties. She just walked to his building and rang 7B.
Upstairs at the door he pulled her into the loft and hugged her and kissed her as though he’d been starved of love for his entire lifetime. Failure to return calls was a depressingly effective aphrodisiac, she thought fleetingly, even among decent guys.
She felt her body curve into him, her lips respond instinctively. Maybe she was starving too.
Leo was a little bit self-conscious when he drew her into his room. He closed the door behind him, which he had not done the week before. She sensed he didn’t want the common rooms bearing witness.
The robe was ready. His bed was carefully draped. The little red couch was pushed against the wall.
“I was thinking…” His feet shuffled in a winning way. “You could be on the couch again if you want. Or…”
“Or?”
“Well, I was thinking maybe…”
She pointed to the bed. She could tell it was what he wanted.
“Right. Because. Well, I’ve sort of been envisioning this painting.” He could not stand still. He was practically bouncing.
She could see how much he wanted it. Whether for her or for art she didn’t know.
“Do you mind? If you are uncomfortable I totally understand.” As he said it, his eyes pleaded with her to get on his bed.
“I don’t mind,” she said. For some reason, she didn’t. The way he’d set it up was lovely. She could see how he wanted the painting to be. She was happy for him.
He politely disappeared and she shed her clothes, not bothering with the robe. She lay on her side on the bed. She laid her head on her arm. She loosened her hair over her shoulder and back and let it fan out behind her on the sheet.
Leo knocked timidly. He came in with the close-held expression of a man who didn’t expect his desires to work out. But his face changed when he saw her.
“That’s exactly, exactly what I imagined,” he said, awestruck. The energy in his long limbs made him seem young to her. “How did you know?”
“This is how I would want
to paint it,” she said honestly. She wondered where all her millions of layers of self-consciousness had gone. It was strange. Where were the coiled muscles, the purple cheeks, the inability to follow a single thought?
Maybe it was depression. Maybe after the horrible incident with Kostos, she’d lost her will. Maybe she’d held the old hopes so tight that once they were gone, nothing much mattered anymore.
But she didn’t feel sad, exactly. She would probably know if she were truly sad. She’d certainly known in the past.
She felt old, she realized. She felt tired. She felt like she’d lived a long time and could see her coquettish self of last week from a very far distance. She felt she hadn’t the same things to hide. Or maybe she just lacked the energy to try.
Maybe she cared less. She looked at Leo gazing at her, poised with his brush. Maybe she cared differently.
Maybe it was just a relief to know that the epoch of Kostos was finally, finally over.
“Beautiful,” he murmured.
She wasn’t sure if he meant her or the painting. Maybe it didn’t matter. In a strange way she felt as though she was off the hook.
She watched him paint. She listened to the music he’d put on. More Bach, he said, but this time orchestral and choral. She almost felt like she might fall asleep. Her mind unwound into drowsy thoughts about the sea and the sky as it looked outside her grandmother’s kitchen window in Oia.
She might have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes the light was different. Leo had put down his brush and was studying her.
“I’m sorry. Did I fall asleep?” she said.
“I think so,” he said. His eyes were intense, but in a way particular to painting. He was gathering his impressions, transferring them to his canvas without holding on to them.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“It’s—I don’t know. I’m afraid to say.”
That meant it was going well, she understood. “I think I should take a break for a couple minutes,” she said. Her arm was prickly all the way down to her fingers. She sat up and moved to the edge of the bed before he could put down his brush and his palette.
He paused halfway to the door. “Do you want me to go?” he asked.
“You don’t have to,” she said.
Leo watched her stretch and yawn on the edge of his bed. He was as unfamiliar with her behavior as she was. He drifted back to his canvas in some disbelief.
“What time is it?” she asked, shaking out her sleeping arm.
There was a clock on his desk. “Almost four.”
Her eyes opened wide. “God. I really did fall asleep.”
He nodded. “You sleep very still,” he said.
Silence had fallen over Tibby’s life. Lena claimed to know nothing. Tibby’s mother claimed to know nothing. Carmen claimed to know nothing. Bee claimed to know nothing, but Bee was in Turkey. Bee was the only one Tibby believed.
In a low moment Tibby found herself on the phone with Katherine. She couldn’t help herself.
“So have you seen Brian lately?” Tibby asked casually, hating every word as it came out of her mouth. And also hating her mouth and the weak body to which it was attached.
“Yes,” said Katherine. Tibby suspected she was watching cartoons.
“Did he take you to camp on Friday?”
“Uh-huh.” Now Katherine was chewing on something.
“Did you see Effie?” Oh, the shame.
“Huh?”
“Did you ever see Effie with Brian?”
“Effie?”
“Yes, Effie.”
“No.”
Tibby felt the relief flood through her body. Maybe Lena and everybody else were telling her the truth after all. Maybe there really wasn’t anything going on.
“But she picked up Brian in her car,” Katherine mentioned over the opening song of Blue’s Clues.
“She did?”
“Two times.”
What? What? “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. You know what I think?”
“What?” So intense was Tibby she had practically shoved the phone into her ear cavity.
“She has big boobies.”
In the last hour of his light, Leo grew agitated.
“When’s your mom coming home?” Lena asked, moving her mouth but not her head.
“Not till tomorrow. She went to the Cape with friends this weekend.”
“Oh,” Lena said. She began to consider a different explanation.
When the music ended, Leo put down his brush and stowed his palette. He walked over to her, and the fading light showed only half of his face.
“Are we done?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, but he touched her calf lightly with his fingers. He put the palm of his hand against her hip. He waited to see if she would protest or move away, if she would feel around for the robe as she had done before. She considered doing all of these things, but she didn’t. She liked the feel of his hand on her skin. She wanted to know what came next.
He sat on the bed and leaned over her, kissing her. She drew in her breath as she felt his hand find her breast. She resumed the kiss as his hands explored her body, finding out a few things his eyes couldn’t tell him.
He lay next to her and she unbuttoned his shirt. She recognized her own clumsiness, but it didn’t register as shame.
She wondered at the intimacy of the sounds in his throat, the smell of his neck and his chest. She pushed her body against his wide, muscled expanse of skin. It was intimate, but not like what she’d had before. Her mind was peaceful. Her body was stirred and it was curious. She wanted to know how it would go.
This wasn’t like it was with Kostos: the fierce want bordering on anguish, the longing intermingled with ache. It was something else. It was a simpler pleasure. Maybe you didn’t have to go around feeling that much.
Two years ago, she’d stopped when she’d wanted desperately to go. Why not let it unfold? What was she waiting for?
She’d had enough dreams, enough fantasies. She’d read and she’d heard and she’d imagined. She knew what this was about.
“I have something,” he murmured. She realized that he meant he had a condom and that he was asking her if she was ready, if this was what she wanted.
She paused, but only for a moment. “Okay,” she whispered back.
To:
[email protected];
[email protected] From:
[email protected] Subject: home
* * *
I’m flying back to D.C. I’ll be there Saturday.
Maybe even in time for the Rollinses’ bash. I want to see you so much.
Leo wanted her to sleep over, but Lena realized she wanted to wake up in her own bed. He was sorry to walk her home, she knew. He walked her upstairs and to her door, and kissed her until she playfully shut the door in his face.
“We’ll have lunch before class tomorrow,” he said to her before he left. “I’ll bring the sandwiches.”
She sat on her bed for a long time without turning on the light. She considered the different parts of her body and how each of them felt. People said that the first time often hurt or felt bad. It didn’t for her. She’d been lying naked in his bed for many hours, drowsy and stirred among his sheets and his pheromonal boy smells. She was ready when it happened. Her pleasure was tentative and new, but she was also able to take joy from Leo’s more complete rapture.
She was his muse, he told her. The combination of the erotic and artistic had been a revelation to him. She was happy with that. Especially as she thought of her own painting and knew that he was a muse for her too.
Does he even know there is more?
Lena checked herself. She stopped her thinking and went back over the question, unsure of what she’d meant by it. More what? More sadness? More tragedy? More ragged exposure, like you had turned yourself inside out? Was that more?
What if Leo didn’t know? What if he never knew? Maybe that would be a piece of good luck.
With Leo she didn’t feel turned inside out. She was happy about that. She put on an old pair of pajamas, feeling very much outside in.
But when she woke up sometime in the early morning, she was crying. Her face and hair were soaked, her pillow was damp. How long had she been crying?
The crying kept going as she sat up and wondered about it, not seeming to will it. But she knew what the trouble was. She knew her dream self was permitting a sadness her waking self hadn’t allowed.
All this time she’d been waiting for Kostos. She’d always thought her first time would be with him.
Tibby tortured herself for the days leading up to her parents’ anniversary party. But there was a strange comfort in the fact that at least she deserved it.
Brian and Effie were acting like a couple. No one was even denying it anymore.
“They are the only ones left at home,” Bee said.
“Maybe they’re just friends,” Carmen said.
“Brian’s lonely. He misses you,” Lena said.
Tibby didn’t believe any of it.
If Effie had used even half of the tactical brilliance on Brian that she’d used on Tibby, there was no hope. Effie would probably be wearing an engagement ring the next time Tibby saw her. It wouldn’t even matter whether Brian liked her or not.
Silly old Effie, clueless little sister who couldn’t tell time without a digital clock. Ha. In Tibby’s mind, Effie had transformed into the devil herself.
Tibby’s subconscious produced a new anxiety dream just for the occasion. Tibby dreamed it night after night, all night long: Effie doing various bold things while wearing the Traveling Pants. Only once in all those dreams did Tibby get to wear them herself. And when her big chance came, Tibby somehow ended up with her whole body stuffed into one leg.
“Do you want me to disinvite Brian to the party?” her mother asked the week before Tibby was set to take the train home.
“Let me think about it.”
Tibby called her mother back an hour later. “No, he should come. It would be wrong to tell him not to. Anyway, I’m going to have to see him sometime.”
They were quiet for a minute.
“I can’t exclude Effie,” her mom said, naming the very thing Tibby was hoping for.