“Whoever does end up with you is going to be seriously lucky,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“I’m serious! You’re a total catch.”
Too-frank compliments can have an effect on a conversation like too-frank insults. We hadn’t said much for a minute when the waiter brought the check, and when we finally started to stand up she said, “I love these afternoons when they both have lessons,” and that, if I had to pick a moment, was when it was decided. In the corner the woman was still breast-feeding, this white veiny watermelon hanging out, and that may have had something to do with the mood too. I pretended I was walking up the block with her because I felt like getting some fresh air (the rain had picked up again); she pretended this sounded reasonable. Within fifteen minutes we were together on her large white bed, my jeans were around my ankles before my shoes were off, my coat was on the floor in the corner of the room, the lights were on, we were making the noises that people make, she was whispering the things that people whisper. I was distracting myself by trying to make words out of the letters in middle-aged mistress.
This, I thought, tugging a bra strap here, feeling myself yanked and squeezed there, is actually what’s happening! The person who this morning couldn’t stop thinking about Claire is right now scrambling around on his knees, reaching across to …
Afterward I settled down with my head on her chest. We’d known what we were doing, apparently.
“See?” she said. “I told you people would want you.”
She petted my head and I looked around the room, thinking of Nicholas running out of that bathroom in his Cars pajamas with his hair still wet. The radiator pipes knocked and knocked. Anna smelled not at all bad but very noticeably like skin and sweat and person. I looked into the dark window next to the bed and thought, Cold (in fact there were now goose bumps all along my arms and legs) but not alone. My heart seemed to have become slow and loud and enormous, as if I’d just come out of a long bath.
I told her I needed to get home to get ready for another appointment, which wasn’t true, but I did suddenly feel that I had to get away before what we’d done could catch up with us. Dressing in front of her somehow seemed much more intimate and embarrassing than having sex with her. “Do you want to borrow an umbrella?” she said. She watched me sleepily from the bed and beckoned me over (making me think, very much against my will, of an old lady calling to her children from her deathbed). “Don’t drive yourself crazy,” she said. “We’re adults.” She kissed me on the forehead.
Driving home I didn’t feel crazy, exactly; I felt the way I’d felt after losing my virginity in high school, this strobe light flashing between pride and disbelief. And I thought, like a mantra, Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. A woman came out of her house with her two fat huskies. A boy in a Curious George poncho ran ahead of a mom who was carrying a yoga mat and groceries. Was it really, for the rest of the world, just a regular Wednesday afternoon? Didn’t anyone know or care what I’d been doing? A police car stopped behind me at a red light and I thought for a half heartbeat they might be pulling me over.
By the time I went to bed that night (having gone into the bathroom a few times to check for evidence, having not thought about Claire for whole half hours at a time), I’d decided, first, that I would never tell anyone, including Joel, and second, that this would only happen once, and that if Anna tried to arrange something again I would tell her that she was beautiful and wonderful but that it was just too weird and sorry.
No and no and no. It didn’t work like that at all.
As I’m remembering my friendship with Thomas, it’s hard not to stop here, to plant a flag on the spot in my life when problems meant embarrassments and when I couldn’t imagine someone not being able to sleep through the night. But memory’s like a six-year-old: And then? And then? And then?
By that summer Thomas and I were best friends in the society-of-two, not-necessarily-cheerful way that sometimes happens with kids that age. We had sleepovers every weekend, we spent afternoons walking the bike trail behind his house. My mom sometimes asked me, not quite suppressing her worry, what it was we did in all that time we spent together. At first she’d been thrilled that I’d found a best friend—she’d been in a more or less perpetual state of nervous guilt about having made me leave my school in Baltimore—but maybe she’d seen a Dateline special on troublesome teens, or maybe my stepdad, Frank, had muttered something to her; she may even have worried that we were gay. We weren’t, of course—our desire to find girlfriends was one of the foundations of our friendship—but even if I’d wanted to explain to her why we spent so much time together, I couldn’t really have done it in any way that would have made sense to her. Adult friendship is all talking and laughing and bickering and planning; teenage friendship can be more of a joined solitude, like oxen yoked together. The not-having-to-do-anything can be the whole point.