Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

“Oh, my,” I said. “Like kids at the movies?”

“I’ve missed you. I thought about you a lot. If you’d gotten my letters …”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I thought you were dead, somewhere. Or not dead, but not coming back. I didn’t think you were a German spy. None of us did.”

“Good. Thanks. So, you don’t have a husband.” He narrowed his eyes. Like, I maybe didn’t have a husband, but I had a lover. Like, I may have said I didn’t have a husband but probably I was an inveterate liar. I asked how the dinner was coming along and he went back to the kitchen. We ate the spaghetti and the burned meatballs and our two salads and Gus poured us the whole awful bottle. We found ourselves back on the ugly couch, drinking brandy.

“I really wish you’d gotten my letters,” Gus said.

I AM NOT AN expert in normal sexual behavior. I’ve had my crushes, flaring and fading in a week, and most nights I dreamed about sex with everyone from Ozzie Patterson to General MacArthur. Despite that business with Dr. Snyder, things had stayed pretty quiet for me in that department. I had Danny and a man who loved me and shared the cooking and I was surrounded by married people. I wanted something slow and romantic and even a little frightening. I wanted us to hold hands and find ourselves unable to let go. I wanted Gus to kiss me on the neck up to and around my ear (which I always thought I’d like) and back down to the nape of my neck, under my ponytail, and then a string of warm kisses along the top of my shoulder, where he pushed my sweater aside. My head would fall back against the yellow brocade and slowly, slowly, like opening a present, Gus would undo the buttons of my cardigan. He would carry me to his bed, never mind his bad leg, and unzip my pants and I would slip out, naked and smooth as the day I was born. He would kiss every part of me, my breasts and between my legs, and at last my sensible body would surprise me. It would do new, wild things that were as different from cooking and comforting and managing as can be. Waterfall of desire, is what I was hoping for.

In the event, Gus was drunk, following his own uneven tune. He kicked over the brandy bottle and we righted it and mopped it up and the whole room smelled like a French accident. Gus pulled my sweater over my head and it caught on my earring. I sat upright with my hands in my lap, like a woman on a bus in a bad neighborhood, except that I was just in my bra. He kissed me frantically, not always connecting with my actual skin. He had trouble with my bra and I thought he would tear it, so I unhooked it myself and let it drop to the couch. He tossed it on the floor, onto the brandy stain, and he kissed my breasts. He rubbed his face over them. I said, Ouch, a couple of times and he stopped. He looked at me, his eyes still unfocused, and I put my hands over my breasts. You scratched me, I said. He saw my face and my bare breasts and I think he did see me. He put his hands over his face and then he stood up. He handed me my sweater.

“You should go now,” he said. “I’m sorry. You should go.”

I pulled my sweater over my head and stuffed my damp bra into my purse. Gus was crying.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was sorry.

He opened his front door.

“I won’t bother you again,” he said.

FRANCISCO WAS SITTING UP when I came in.

“Awful,” I said.

“You or him?”

I DID BETTER THAN average on my med school exams. I sent in my impressive transcripts and my stellar letters of recommendation and, waiting to become, I busted out as a psychic. I picked up M. Croiset’s habit of saying things out loud, naming the creatures of the world, just because I liked the sound, and my clients leapt up, like trout, to agree with me, and see their happy futures unfolding. I was doing five readings a day, putting money in the bank, and I rented a saxophone for Danny so he could join the sixth grade jazz band. He wore a red vest every Wednesday evening for band practice. A friend of Ruthie’s told Ruthie that Danny was cute. Wednesday nights, Francisco went to Society for Human Rights meetings, which were, as he said, lousy with old Reds and old Scotch and some new Judy Garland records and on Wednesdays, I couldn’t settle down until they were both back home.

IT WAS WARMER THAN usual. The snow had left a few narrow white strips on the slick bright-green grass, as if spring were right around the corner. I had put away Danny’s things and lain down to read the newspaper and fallen asleep. I dreamed that my father, younger and healthy, was in white tie (which would have suited him), carrying bottles of Champagne down a flight of glossy marble steps. They were slippery, so smooth light bounced off their rounded edges, but he walked confidently, with his shoulders back. He didn’t look down. He tossed the bottles into two big ice buckets and looked in my direction and winked. I came toward him and the white flotsam of wherever we were brushed past me like tumbleweed.

“One’s Champagne,” he said. “One’s egg cream. And I brought sandwiches.” And floating near the ice buckets were dear Mrs. Gruber’s fried-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, each in a soft white nest.

“Everything you need, as the chorus girl said to the vicar.” He tapped his show-biz silver-topped cane a couple of times.

IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT and I was in my pajamas and Gus was at the door.

I made us tea and we sat in the kitchen, saying nothing, watching it steep. I put out a plate of cookies, not that I wanted to.

“Are you mad at me?” Gus said, in the tone of a man who is sure he has every reason to be angry and the other person has none.

I was. I was as angry at him as if he’d been standing me up, night after night, in some fancy restaurant on Northern Boulevard.

“I don’t know what you want,” I said. “I don’t even know you.”

“You know me,” he said. “I know you.”

YOU KNOW ME.

I don’t think the best beginning is loneliness or the memory of a man making you laugh while your sister is kissing his wife in the backyard or the strong feeling that if you do not leap now, unprepared and inept as you are, onto this buckling train, you may be sorry, but I don’t think it’s the worst.

Gus took my hand at the kitchen table and came forward to kiss me. I put my saucer over my teacup to keep it warm and Gus laughed. He did kiss me, not on the lips, but below my ear.

“Everyone’s asleep?” he asked.

“I hope so.”

We went up to my attic room and lay down on my bed.

“No one’s seen me without my clothes for a long time,” he said. “It ain’t pretty.”

I never wanted anything the way I wanted to see Gus without his clothes on and then to have him see me.

“Oh,” I said, “please let me.”

It was the end of winter and we were in layers. I put his sports jacket on the little wooden chair in the corner and then I came back to the bed. He kept his eyes on the ceiling.

“Look at me,” I said. “I’m so glad to be seeing you.”

“I hope so, kiddo,” he said, and he closed his eyes.

The white shirt and all of its buttons, the undershirt, the belt, the pants, and then I was down to his boxers and shoes and socks, in which I’m pretty sure no man looks his best. I untied his black shoes and pulled off his socks. I had seen my father like this, and Danny. I had seen pictures of Michelangelo’s David. Gus looked nothing like that.

“Getting cold here,” Gus said.

I put my mouth on his smooth chest. He tasted like coffee. I kissed him from one shoulder to the other and down the dark line of his belly and I stopped, to gather my thoughts. I said his name.

Gus opened his eyes. He leaned up on one elbow and took off my clothes, one piece at a time, until I had on nothing but my underpants and socks. He kissed my breasts. Sorry for last time, he said. He kissed me through my underpants. I didn’t take my socks off until the middle of the night. Everything surprised me and nothing frightened me.