Alice McDermott - After This

“I’m fine,” she said. There was a single tear caught on the edge of her lid and speaking made it fall. She felt it on her cheek and then her chin but didn’t bother wiping it away.

He seemed to watch her for a few seconds and then shrugged. “Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s not worth crying over.” She had begun to recognize the flat sounds of a Midlands accent. He raised his left arm to grab the handrail on the back of the seat in front of them. It became a wall over which they spoke. A safe distance. “Trust me.” She was surprised to see that his fingernails were clean, everything else about him seemed so dirty.

Looking straight ahead, he asked her if she was going back to the university and she said yes. He asked her which hall she lived in and when she told him, he grimaced. “Kind of a convent,” he said. She said, for lack of anything else, “I suppose.” And then he turned his face toward hers, grinning, his arm still between them but their faces as close as strangers could comfortably get. His skin beneath the patchy beard was a bluish white and his face was probably childish without it. His teeth were small. “Speaking of sex,” he said, “I was wondering if I could convince you,” he leaned down to look out into the dark street, “in three more stops, to have a drink with me.”

She turned toward the window; they were still on the residential streets that made up the wasteland between the university and the city. “Where?” she said.

“At my flat,” he said. He was drunk, but she couldn’t tell by how much.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Now he leaned his shoulder against hers, brought his lips closer to her ear. “I have books,” he said and then drew back a little, raising his eyebrows. He might have said caviar or Moroccan gold. “Not just books,” he said. “Fucking literature. T. S. Eliot, Pound, Byron, Coleridge,” he said, as if each one made him more irresistible. “Who do you like? Christina Rossetti? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? You’ve got Professor Wallace, I take it. I saw her husband put you on the bus. Sir Philip Sydney, perhaps? I’ve got novels, too. All the big guys. Tolstoy. Or plays? Euripides, if you like. Shakespeare, of course. Fantasy? Christian allegory. I’ve got Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I’ve got…” The bus stopped and he leaned across her lap to look again through the window. His long hair was tangled here and there, a little dusty-looking. “Two more stops to talk you into it,” he said.

He sat up and brought his face closer to hers. “It’s too early for either of us to go home,” he said. “All alone.” His eyes, bloodshot, looked right into hers, steadily enough, although his lids were at half-mast. He brushed a knuckle to her cheek. “And all tearful,” he said.

She said, “It’s almost midnight,” more flatly than she had intended, sounding, she thought, like Grace. He watched her for a few more seconds. His lips were full and smooth inside the scruffy beard. Then he shrugged and dropped his arm. He slumped down in the seat beside her. She turned to look out the window. The passing, narrow houses, many of them dark, one or two with single lights burning. She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take.

They rode together in silence for a few minutes. He let himself be jostled against her in his dark coat. “One more,” he said at the next stop.

Her eyes fell on his hands, British pale, especially under the dark sleeve of his coat, but soft-looking, faintly freckled. Edith Wharton had been a married virgin until she was forty-five, but Annie hadn’t thought to ask Professor Wallace how anyone knew this. Was it something Wharton wrote about or was there some sexual autopsy performed at her death? Pauline, under her mother’s care, had made her first visit to a gynecologist just last year. The doctor had said he’d broken her hymen to do the exam. Her mother couldn’t understand why he hadn’t kept that information to himself, and Annie had said, unkindly, “I might have asked the same about you, Mother.”

She said to him, falling, skidding. “I haven’t had sex with anyone since high school.”

He smiled without turning to her. The bus was pulling to the curb. “High time, then,” he said.

Walking into his tiny apartment, there was a moment when she stood in the dark as he paused behind her, leaning to turn on a small lamp. All the strangeness, and the danger, of what she was doing appeared to her then, she even felt herself bracing for a blow, or-in this land of Jack the Ripper-a cold blade to the back of her neck. She felt a moment’s pity for her parents. And then, oddly enough, for Grace, who would be the first to come to her room tomorrow, whenever she freed herself from the Wallaces’, Grace who would be the first to know that Annie had not come home. But then the light came on. The room was cluttered with tossed clothes and empty teacups, papers and books (he was a doctoral student, she’d later learn, in engineering, not literature, although the apartment was indeed filled with hundreds of soft Penguin editions that he would later toss on the bed where she lay, like so many pastel rose petals). It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else’s life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable. It made him both less threatening and less interesting. He was as ordinary as anyone she knew. She turned around. He took her face in his hands.

On the five-hour flight over, she had told Grace, quite simply, a younger sister and a brother, and felt the information trail off into the darkness below them-the black ocean, the curved earth, the empty space through which the plane was moving them, away from all that and into another time as well as another place. She would not, she knew, recalling Professor Wallace’s wry smile, be the first American student to seek to remake herself in her year abroad.

The boy was thin and pale and startlingly comfortable out of his clothes. He remained consistently comic in response to both her reticence and her ardor. He did a funny bit, a kind of magic trick with condom as coin, that she suspected was a well-rehearsed routine. He pulled the books from his shelves and tossed them onto the bed like so many pastel-colored rose petals and then climbed over them to land in her lap. When some of the tissue-thin pages tore, he pulled the damaged copies out from under them and set each on the floor. He said she should take the worst of them home with her. “And when you’re old and gray,” he said, “and nodding by the fire, you can take down this book and say, ‘What is this funny stain on this wrinkled page?’ “

When the sun came up, merely a lightening at the single window, a shaded version of the gray that would mark the full day, he let his head fall back, one arm under her neck, the other stretched to the edge of the mattress. His body was white and thin and boyish, it might indeed have been carved out of marble. As if it were carved out of marble, she thought there was beauty in it as well as tremendous sorrow. Because of Jacob, she knew, she would for the rest of her life see the bodies of young men in this way-lovers, husband, her own children, if she were to have them. It was not what she wanted to do, but she had no choice in the matter, it was no longer the life she had wanted, after all.

On the mattress between them, at their feet and over their heads, were the scattered paperbacks. One was pressed uncomfortably into his side, spine up, just under his ribs, and she reached out to pull it out from under him. She held it up to the light, it was Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. She laughed out loud, thinking of Susan: sex and death. Fucking literature. Playfully, she placed the open book on his chest. He stirred a little and then, gently, brushed it away.