Keeper of the Light

  “Oh, well.” Annie swept her arm through the air. “I don’t think she meant to hurt me. She just…I guess she has her own problems. Anyhow, I really panicked when I got to high school and there were zillions of new kids to meet. I knew candy and toys weren’t going to work anymore. I had to find some other way to get people to like me.”

  “Did you find a way?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I found a way to get the boys to like me, anyhow.”

  “Oh, Annie.”

  “Don’t hate me.”

  He stroked her cheek. “I love you. You don’t have to do that anymore. You’ve got me.”

  “I know.” She snuggled close. “Hold me tighter, Paul.”

  He did, loving that she would confide in him, and he thought the time was right to ask her the question that had been on his mind since the first time they’d made love.

  “Something bothers me, Annie,” he said. “Do you ever come when we’re making love?”

  He felt her shrug. “No, but it doesn’t matter. I’m content just to be close to you and see you enjoying yourself.”

  He was disappointed. Embarrassed. “I must be doing something wrong.”

  “It’s not you, Paul. I never have.”

  He leaned away so that he could look at her. “You’ve made love since you were fifteen and you’ve never…?”

  “I truly don’t care. It’s never been important to me. I’d see a guy and want to hold him, to feel good that way, warm and loved. If sex was what I had to do to get that, so be it.”

  He pulled her close again. “If you really want to make me happy, Annie, then let me make you feel good for a change.”

  “You do,” she said. “You make me feel wonderful.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She shrank away from him. “I figure it must not be possible for me,” she said. “I think it would have happened by now.”

  He was unwilling to talk to his friends about something so personal, so he spent the next afternoon in the library hunting for a solution to Annie’s dilemma. He found a book filled with advice and illustrations which he couldn’t bring himself to check out from the wizened old gentleman behind the desk. So he sat in a secluded corner and read it, from cover to cover.

  That night in her dorm room, he sat down on her bed and patted the space next to him. She joined him, wrapping her arms around him and planting a wet kiss on his neck.

  “I read a sex manual today,” he said.

  “What?” She jerked away from him. “Why?”

  “Because it’s your turn tonight.” He reached for the hem of her T-shirt, but she stopped him.

  “No,” she whined.

  “Annie.” He held her by the shoulders. “Do this for me if not for yourself, all right?”

  “What if it doesn’t work? You’ll be disappointed in me… You’ll…”

  “I’m not going to be disappointed in you or stop loving you or anything else you’re worried about. It’ll be fine. But you have to relax.”

  She bit her lip. “Turn off the light,” she said.

  He did as he was told, and then returned to the bed where he undressed her, rather methodically, and sat behind her with his back against the wall.

  “What are we doing? Aren’t you going to take off your clothes, too?” she asked.

  “Nope.” He spread his legs wide and pulled her back against his chest. The illustration from the manual was burned into his brain. All day he’d thought of how it would feel to hold Annie this way, to touch her, to finally feel her respond. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her shoulder. She was shivering.

  “This is nice,” she said. “You could just hold me like this. I’d rather do this than…”

  “Shh. Rest your legs against mine. That’s it.”

  “This is stupid. I feel ridiculous.”

  He stroked her arms, her shoulders. “You have to tell me what feels good,” he said, moving his hands to her breasts. “Let me know if anything hurts.”

  “That doesn’t hurt.” She giggled and seemed to relax in his arms, but she went rigid once he lowered his hands to her thighs.

  “Come on, Annie, relax.”

  “I’m trying. I just don’t like all the attention being on me. I don’t see why… Oh.”

  His fingertips had found their mark. Annie drew in her breath and her legs suddenly opened wider, pressing hard against his own, her hands grasping the denim that covered his thighs. He slipped a finger of his left hand inside her and she shuddered.

  “This feels good to me, too, Annie,” he said, encouraging her, but it was unnecessary. She was letting herself go, letting herself take. When she came, he had one sudden pulse of terror that she might be faking, but then the waves of contractions circled his finger, and he felt her go limp.

  That night was a turning point for them, not just that it made sex better—she continued to refer to sex as a “by-product” of being close—but that it shifted their relationship to a different plane, one in which Annie allowed things to be done for her. The addiction, though still an addiction, was mutual now.

  His family adored her. He and Annie visited Philadelphia twice that year, and Annie slipped right into that female dominated household as easily as if she’d been born into it.

  “Your family’s so warm, Paul,” she told him. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  She would not take him to meet her own parents, however, even though they lived no more than a half hour’s drive from school. After much arm-twisting on his part, she finally agreed to take him home with her on her father’s fiftieth birthday. “You talk about him all the time,” he said. “I want to meet him.”

  She did talk about her father a great deal, her voice often swelling with her pride in his accomplishments as a physician. She worked for a month on his birthday gift—gold cufflinks she had designed herself—showing Paul the progress she was making on them each time he came over.

  Paul held the small package containing the cufflinks on his lap as he and Annie turned onto the tree-lined street leading to her house. She had been quiet during the entire trip, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel of her red convertible.

  “What time is it?” she asked, as they passed one enormous mansion after another.

  Paul looked at his watch. “Ten past four.”

  “Oh, God. My mother will throw a fit.”

  “We’re not that late.”

  “You don’t understand. She has this thing about time. When I was little and she promised to take me someplace, she wouldn’t do it if I was even a minute late getting ready.”

  Paul frowned at her. “You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head. “Let’s tell them your last name is Macy,” she suggested.

  “Why?”

  “Just for fun.”

  He stared at her, confused. “It’s not my name,” he said.

  She stopped at a stop sign and looked over at him. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Paul, but my parents are very prejudiced.” She lowered her hands to her lap and began kneading them together. “Do you understand? I mean, unless you’re just like them, they… They’ll like you better if they think you’re…”

  His cheeks burned. “Do you want me to lie about what my parents do for a living, too?”

  She looked down at her hands. “This is why I didn’t want you to meet them.”

  “I won’t lie, Annie.” Back then he never did. She said nothing, pressing her foot once more on the gas pedal.

  “I thought you loved me,” he said.

  “I do. I just want them to love you too.” She turned into a long driveway, and he caught a glimpse of a Tudor-style house far down the expanse of manicured lawn before it disappeared behind a row of pines. “They have my life planned out for me, Paul,” she said. “I’m supposed to be majoring in something useful—we had a terrible fight when I told them I wanted to be an artist—and I’m supposed to marry one of the eligible son
s of their elite little circle of friends. Do you understand now why I didn’t want to bring you here?”

  Yes, he understood, but she was a little late in telling him her reasons.

  An elderly woman dressed in a dark uniform and white apron let them in. She kissed Annie’s cheek and led them into the living room. “Your mum and dad will be down shortly, dear.” The woman left the room, and Annie smiled at him nervously. He shivered. The living room was huge and cold, like a cavern.

  “You get used to it,” Annie said. She was perspiring despite the chill.

  Her father walked into the room first. He was a thin, good-looking man, tan and fit and stern. His thick hair was mostly gray. He bussed his daughter’s cheek.

  “Daddy, this is Paul,” Annie said, avoiding the surname issue altogether.

  “Paul…?” Dr. Chase shook his hand.

  “Macelli,” Paul said, the name sounding suddenly dirty to his ears. He shook the man’s hand with a sense of defeat, imagining that he was already being ruled out as a serious candidate for the hand of his daughter.

  Annie’s mother made more of an attempt to feign warmth, but Paul felt the coldness in her hand when she touched her fingertips to his. She was a plain-looking woman, perhaps even homely, despite the heavy use of cosmetics. Her red hair was drawn back under serious control into a bun.

  He could barely eat the slab of roast beef a second servant put on his plate after they’d sat down to dinner. He didn’t balk at the probing questions about his family, however. Instead, he began to enjoy them, making it clear to Annie’s parents that they had the son of blue-collar workers eating off their fine china, perhaps even sleeping with their daughter. He talked at length about the fireworks business and he told them about the time his mother cleaned the house of the mayor of Philadelphia.

  During dessert—a birthday cake in the shape of a tennis racket—Annie presented her father with the set of gold cufflinks. “Why, thank you, princess.” Dr. Chase leaned over to kiss Annie’s cheek and then set the box next to his plate. Paul had the feeling the cufflinks would find themselves in the back of a drawer somewhere, if not in the trash.

  “Annie’s jewelry instructor says she’s the best student he’s ever had,” Paul said.

  “Paul.” Annie blushed.

  Dr. Chase looked up from his cake. “Well, Annie’s quite bright when she puts her mind to it,” he said. “She could be anything she wants to be. She has the brains to do a lot more than twist little pieces of metal into jewelry.”

  Paul glanced at Annie. He saw the shine of tears in her eyes.

  Dr. Chase set down his fork and looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to run, kids.”

  “But Daddy,” Annie said, “it’s your birthday.” Her voice came very close to breaking. Paul heard the splintery little catch in the huskiness, but her parents didn’t seem to notice.

  Her father stood up and leaned over to kiss the top of her head. He nodded toward Paul. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Macelli. I’m sure we’ll all think of you the next time we see a good show of fireworks.”

  Paul and Annie left shortly after dinner, and Annie was crying by the time they reached her car.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” he said.

  “It’s not you,” she said. “I always leave there in tears.”

  “I hate them. I’m sorry, Annie, but they’re abominable.”

  “Don’t say that, Paul, please. It doesn’t make me feel any better. They’re all I’ve got. You have your sisters and everyone, and I’ve got them. Period.” She opened her car door and looked up at the house. “He never has time for me. He didn’t when I was little and he doesn’t now.”

  They spent the summer after their freshman year in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Paul living with a friend he’d known from high school, Annie with two girls from Boston College. Paul worked as a waiter during the day and in the summer stock production of Carousel at night, while Annie worked in a gallery, where she learned the basics of stained glass. It was a wonderful summer, both of them doing things they loved and spending their free time together. They were just nineteen, but Paul felt a maturity in their relationship. They talked about the future, about having children, little red haired Italians they would name Guido and Rosa to torment her parents. “Guido and Rozer,” Annie would say, in her Boston accent, which sounded strange to Paul’s ears now that they were no longer in New England.

  They took leisurely strolls around the little town of New Hope. Annie fell in love with a small blue cloisonné horse she found in one of the shops. Although she stopped by the shop to look at the horse every few days, Paul knew she would never buy it for herself. So when he had finally made enough money, he bought it for her as a surprise. It cost him nearly every spare cent he’d earned, and at first she wanted to take it back. He insisted she keep it, though, and she wrapped it in a soft cloth and carried it around in her pocketbook, taking it out to show anyone she met. She named it Baby Blue, after a Dylan song.

  Her parents visited her in mid-July, and for three days he didn’t see her. He finally went to the gallery where she worked, and he knew right away that she wasn’t herself. She had circles under her eyes; her giggle was gone. He hated the way her parents poisoned her.

  “They want me to change majors,” she said.

  “To what?”

  “Something more useful than art.” She straightened a picture on the wall. “If I don’t change majors, they won’t pay for me to stay in school. But I can’t give up art. I’ll have to lie to them.” She looked at him. “I lied to them about you, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told them I’m not seeing you anymore. I never did tell them you were here. They’d never let me stay here if they knew.”

  “But what about the future? What happens when we want to get married?”

  Annie nervously wrapped a strand of her hair around her finger. “I don’t know. I can’t worry about that right now.”

  “Would they disinherit you if you married an Italian?”

  “I wouldn’t care if they did,” she snapped. “It’s not money I want from them, Paul. Don’t you know that by now?”

  It was true she didn’t care about money for herself. She made her own clothes out of what looked like rags to him. She bought cheap shampoo that left her hair smelling like laundry detergent, and Paul could not go into the laundromat without thinking of her hair. Money was important to her only because it allowed her to help other people. She’d lay awake for hours at night, trying to determine who could use her money the most. At the end of the summer, she took the money she’d earned from her job at the gallery and threw a party for the kids at a nearby hospital.

  Annie went off the pill just before they returned to school in the fall. She’d been taking it since she was fifteen. “It’s bad to be on it for so long,” she said. “I’m going to try this new sponge thing. It’s more natural.”

  “I could use rubbers,” Paul volunteered.

  “No, you may not,” she said. “You wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much.” He knew better than to try to argue with her. Thus started Annie’s long line of peculiar birth control methods, and there were times he secretly prayed they would fail. He loved the thought of having a child with her, of strengthening the bond that already existed between them.

  When they returned to school, Paul moved into her dorm, one floor below hers. The placid tenor that had marked their relationship in New Hope followed them back to Boston and lasted nearly until the end of the year. That was when her parents received some forms from the school and discovered that Annie was still very much an art major. When they called her at the dorm to confront her with the lie, it was Paul who answered the phone in her room. He unwittingly identified himself, thinking it was one of Annie’s professors calling. By the time Annie called her parents back that evening, they were in an advanced stage of fury. The phone battle went on for a good hour before Paul left the room, unable to tolerate Annie’s meek apologies. A few h
ours after she’d gotten off the phone with them, her mother called back. Her father’d had a heart attack, she said. He’d collapsed shortly after talking with Annie and was now in the hospital. The doctors were not certain he would pull through.

  She wouldn’t let Paul go home with her, and she was gone a full week. She didn’t return his calls, although he wasn’t at all certain his messages were being delivered.

  She was different when she came back to school. There was a distance between them which she wouldn’t acknowledge, making it impossible for him to fight. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Paul. I’m out with you, aren’t I? I’m talking to you.”

  They went through the motions of their relationship—talking, going to the movies, eating together in the cafeteria, making love—but a part of Annie was missing.

  Finally one night, very close to the end of the school year, Paul blocked her exit from his dorm room. “You can’t leave until you tell me exactly what’s going on in your head,” he said. He sat her down on his bed, while he sat on his desk, far enough away from her that she would not be able to seduce him into touching her to avoid talking.

  “My father almost died, Paul.” She played with the silver bracelet on her wrist. “I caused it by making him angry at me, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll have him. He’s so frail now. I can’t bear seeing him like that. He said a lot of things to me in the hospital. He said he loves me… Well, not those words exactly. But he said I’m the most important thing in the world to him. He actually said that.” Her eyes misted over. “He said he doesn’t understand why I set my sights so low, that it disappoints him so much. ‘Art’s nice, honey,’ he said, ‘but you’ll never be Picasso.’ So I’m going to change my major. I’ve already filled out the forms.”

  “Change to what?”

  “Biology.”

  “Biology. You have no interest whatsoever in biology.”

  She shrugged. “I think I could get into it. It would prepare me for nursing or maybe even medical school. Some career where I could help people. And my father would be so proud of me.” She looked down at the bracelet again. “I’m going to give away all the jewelry I made.”