At the Bottom of Everything(15)

We had sex against doors and on closet floors and in not-yet-entirely-warm baths. We were nearly caught by the UPS man. We took turns in the shower. She claimed to be dazzled by my young mannish stamina, which made me feel, for the first time in at least a year, as if I might actually still be young.

“What year were you born?” she said.

“Eighty-two.”

“Wow. OK.”

“You?”

“Sixty-nine. I know women are supposed to lie or something, but I don’t really care. I’m kind of proud of it.”

One afternoon she said, “You know, I think Peter was always jealous of you. I’m serious! I don’t think he liked having a younger guy around.”

She did turn out to have a streak of craziness (she flipped straight to the horoscopes, she didn’t believe in flu shots) but she also had a streak of hardness, the kind of personality that settlers have, women who till fields with guns strapped to their backs.

She’d grown up in Vermont with just her mother, a school librarian, and three older brothers. She’d never had female friends, because they made her feel feral, with their creams and polishes. Instead she had boyfriends: she was the girl who’d let you practice taking off her bra, who’d explain how to know if a girl was faking. She’d gone to Johns Hopkins for college and then spent a couple of years trying to become a children’s book illustrator (she showed me some of her old notebooks, and her drawings were better than I’d feared; cats somehow given personalities in three strokes, trees with old men’s faces in their bark).

She’d met Peter through a friend at a fancy firm (he was an associate, five years older) and they’d only dated for nine months before he proposed; he seemed so serious and hopeful, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying no. She said that while she walked down the aisle, literally as she was holding her bouquet, trying not to stumble in her heels, she was thinking, This is a mistake, this is a mistake. She got pregnant with Nicholas just over a year later.

“This isn’t the first one of these for you, is it?” I said.

She pursed her lips. “No. Is that a problem?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Tell me if you start thinking you might get hurt,” she said. “I feel like I’m responsible for you. We’re all happiness all the time, OK?”

I didn’t think I’d get hurt (though I also couldn’t really see how this would end well). Mostly I didn’t think about it at all. Instead I kept tutoring Nicholas and Teddy—often on the same nights that I slept with their mother—and while I was with them Nicholas would say, “My mom said I can get an Xbox for my birthday,” and the woman I thought of when he said this wouldn’t be the same at all as the one who’d been clawing at my neck a few hours earlier.

Bit by bit I learned about the men before me, probably more than I should have. There was Andrew, the polite, nervous father of a boy in Teddy’s class, who had eventually asked her to run away with him. And Max, the dumb, handsome guy who worked at the coffee shop in Tenleytown, who performed freestyle rap. Was there really this entire world of affairs bubbling away? Was that the great secret business of adulthood, the way alcohol and parties were the secret business of adolescence?

I kept my resolution about not telling anyone, almost. It was March before I told Joel (by then he’d seen a condom in my bag) and he said, “Are you serious? You’re serious?! Holy shit. Ho-ly shit. Are her pubes gray? Wait, why are you wearing condoms?” That night at a bar he made a toast “to Anna, the cougar who brought my friend back to life,” and the strangers next to us roared and clinked our glasses.

I did imagine, periodically, telling Claire about her, and a couple of times I even started typing an email (leaving the “To:” line blank, in case I sneezed or some craziness overtook me).

You should know I’m thinking about you less than I have since we broke up, and feeling much better than I was. I’ve started sleeping with the mother of one of my tutees, which is not exactly the rebound I had in mind, but what I’ve come to think about happiness is …

I stopped myself and deleted it unsent, but I really was feeling better than I’d thought I would. Sleazy, yes, guilty and jumbled and occasionally in a kind of panic, but also awake; I had enough energy now to go for runs along K Street some mornings (there were still, somehow, patches of gray snow on most of the curbs), and my appetite was back, even if it pushed me mostly in the direction of eating chocolate chips and Saltines while standing at the kitchen counter in my gym shorts.