Alice McDermott - After This

Annie flushed the toilet and turned the water on in the sink. The guest towels were starched linen, old-fashioned and neat. There was a ceramic clamshell with a small cake of fragrant soap. She wet some loo paper, making a compress of it, and handed it to Grace. “Put this to your lips,” she said. “It will make you feel better.”

But Grace merely held it in her hand, the hand still in her lap. She let her head fall back against the wall, the tears falling freely. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God.” Her shoulders were shaking with her sobs. Her face was terrible, the pale, myopic eyes and the torn mouth, the short forehead and the bloated cheeks. “I love him,” she said. “I’m so in love with him.”

Annie smiled a little. “Oh, come on,” she said, gently, the way you do, the way she’d done before, to a drunken girl crying. “You don’t love him.”

But Grace put her fist to her soft stomach, and then to the space between her breasts, as if the love were lodged there and so there was no denying it. “You don’t understand,” she said, sobbing. “I’ve never had a boyfriend, nothing, no one. I’m ugly and stupid and fat.”

“You’re not,” Annie said. She crouched down beside her. “You’re pretty, you’re brilliant.”

But Grace pressed her fist into her breast as if it were a dagger, leaning over it to bring her face to Annie’s face. There were wet flecks of her dinner at the corners of her lips. “You don’t understand,” she said, ferociously, her eyes both furious and oddly unfocused-or focused, perhaps, on something other than what she saw. She was grimacing, showing her teeth. Annie would not have been surprised if she had punched her. “I’m lonely,” she said; she seemed to extract the words from the place her fist had pierced. “I’m completely lonely.” She slowly tilted her head in that gesture of hers: she wasn’t making herself clear. Her eyes were a blur of tears. “I’m lonely,” she said a third time, and then collapsed back again, into her tears.

After some minutes, Professor Wallace rapped at the door and asked, through it, “Is everything all right?” Annie said, “Yes, thank you,” and Professor Wallace asked, gently, “May I come in?”

Annie began to stand, but Grace grabbed her wrist, looked at her through her red eyes, and then let her go. Annie opened the door and began to say, “Grace isn’t feeling too well,” when Professor Wallace looked beyond her to Grace on the floor and said, “My dear girl.”

She was in the room, touching Grace’s forehead, then helping her to stand. Grace was still crying but more gently now, as Professor Wallace said, “Silly girl,” and led her out. The other Americans had left and all signs of dinner had been cleared away and the couch she and Grace had been sitting on was now made up into a bed, fresh floral sheets and a comforter and a blanket and a crisp-looking pillow.

“Well, you’re not the first,” Professor Wallace was saying, getting Grace to kick off her shoes. “My husband is known to be a bit liberal when he pours. Poor girl.”

Annie stood by the velvet chair as Professor Wallace pulled back the sheet and fluffed the pillow for Grace, who was still crying but seemed weak with it now, not ferocious. “He’s so beautiful,” Grace said, a cartoon drunk. “You’re both so beautiful.”

“Yes, well,” Professor Wallace said. “Drink will do that.” She glanced at Annie, perhaps to assess how sober she was. “If I don’t keep an eye on him, my husband will get everyone who enters blind drunk. He believes he alleviates suffering.”

There was a satin bathrobe thrown over the back of the velvet chair, but Professor Wallace didn’t mention it as she guided Grace onto the couch, between the sheets in her clothes. Grace crawling in like a weary child. “I’m so in love with him,” she said as her head touched the pillow, but now she said it as if he were merely a character in a novel, as if the love were merely a source of comfort and delight. Merely a part of the delight she felt at the moment, with Professor Wallace shushing her like a child and touching her face. “Silly girl,” she said again. “Is the room still spinning?” Grace, the good student once again, shook her head. “Only a little.”

“There’s a basin here,” she said, and indicated the ceramic bowl at her feet. “If you’re sick to your stomach.”

Grace smiled a little, her cheek to the pillow. “Thank you,” she said.

Professor Wallace looked down at her, almost fondly, and said again, “Silly girl.” She turned to Annie. “I can set up a cot for you if you’d like to stay as well. You’re more than welcome.”

But Annie shook her head. It wasn’t that late, she said. She’d get the bus.

“David will walk you down,” Professor Wallace said and as if on cue, David appeared in the far doorway, creeping softly into the room. “Everything all right?” he asked. He looked over the back of the couch to Grace, who Annie knew was only pretending to sleep. “Poor child,” he said, and Annie was certain Grace smiled.

David Wallace walked her to the bus stop, offering her a cigarette as he did. They stood smoking together as they waited. In the wet lamplight, with his collar turned up, he was even more handsome. He chided himself for pouring Grace too many whiskeys, and then praised Annie for handling her wine. “She leans on you a bit, does Grace,” he said gently. “You’re kind to be good to her.” Annie shrugged. At the end of the street there was a large crescent moon, rolled over on its back. She was thousands of miles from home, across a vast ocean, out on a wet night in a strange country, and standing next to a beautiful man whom, in another life, she would have loved. He threw the cigarette into the street as the bus approached. “Or good to be kind,” he said softly, “whichever you prefer.” He smiled at her and she smiled back. He waited until she had taken her seat inside before he turned to walk away, back to the house and the room with the books and the cats and the music and the rugs, pate and Chianti, and a woman whose name alone lights up his handsome face. And Grace, tonight and tomorrow morning when she woke, snug in the middle of it all. No matter who leans on whom, Annie thought, it was Grace who, tonight, had gotten what she wanted.

She put her head against the cold window. She had said Edith Wharton because she saw herself as a woman alone, square-jawed and mannish, making do, but she had been wrong. Edith Wharton had been both married and then, at a later date, madly in love. But it hardly mattered. She had seen tonight that she was a woman alone because their life was the one she wanted and she couldn’t have it. She could imitate: she could adopt Professor Wallace’s wry smile, she could fill her rooms with books and cats, she could find a man with ginger hair, but it would all be just that, an imitation, a diminished version of the unattainable original. Elizabeth and David Wallace themselves, precisely, was what she wanted: his eyes looking over her knees, her clever mind. Their exact lives in that exact place, not some substitute, and suddenly she found her eyes filling with childish tears, like Grace’s tears, tears of utter, miserable despair.

It was a despair she already understood because she had also, once, wanted a life with both her brothers in it.

Suddenly, a boy slid into the seat beside her. He was scruffy-looking, a sparse beard over his pale cheeks, long hair, a long black coat. She had seen him as she got on, his feet up on the seat beside him, his back to the window and his eyes closed; she had instinctively avoided sitting opposite him. He leaned into her. “Are you all right?” he said. Aww right. She looked at him over her shoulder. His eyes were black with long lashes. He smelled heavily of cigarette smoke and beer.