Pictures Of Us

He was silent for a moment too long, and when he spoke, his voice was tight. “You mean it’s too easy to believe that I slept with Sophia?”

I actually whirled around, for possibly the first time in my life, and water splashed over the rim of the pot, splattering my shirt. “No! No, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s just that this kind of thing does happen. You see it on TV and in the movies and on the news, but when it happens to you…I think you’d be the first to admit it’s a little surreal.”

He nodded, and then he was up and out of his chair, dabbing at my shirt with a tea towel, taking the pot from my hand and turning off the tap. His arms were encircling me, hard, his face in my hair, before I could say a word about Sophia’s call to me that morning.

Then Walter woofed at someone in greeting, and the screen door opened as Emma swung through it. Her backpack hit the table with a thud. “God, get a room, huh?”

She was leaning into the fridge a moment later, grabbing a can of diet soda before slouching against the counter. Michael and I separated with a sigh, and as Emma popped open the can, he kissed her forehead. She grunted “Daddy” in a tone of outraged humiliation, but he just shook his head and laughed.

“How was school?” I asked absently, adjusting the heat beneath the beans. I glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Did you have yearbook after?”

“Nope,” she said, hoisting herself up onto the counter, her sneakered feet swinging. “That’s tomorrow. I was doing costumes for the play.” She had inherited my mother’s love of fashion, and her facility with a sewing machine.

“What are they mangling this year?” Michael stepped back as Emma aimed a light kick at him.

“They’re doing Bye Bye Birdie, and they’re not mangling it at all,” she protested. “Or not much, anyway.”

The hair clip she’d been wearing this morning was gone, and the thick blond mass of her hair rested on her shoulders as she leaned forward. Her cheeks were flushed, and the tentative coat of mascara she’d been applying most mornings was long gone. She looked like my little girl again, and very much like Nell, I realized.

Would Drew look like Michael?

“What’s for dinner?” Emma said suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. “You two are probably hungry if you hung around here macking on each other all day.”

Michael snorted, but I hid my reaction by checking on the couscous steaming in another pot.

Once upon a time, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Didn’t all relationships begin that way, curiosity and infatuation making desire more potent, more immediate? After the first time that summer, we’d made love everywhere and anywhere we could, as often as we could, tangled together on the smelly old mattress up in my attic when everyone was asleep, reveling in the afternoon sun that streamed across Michael’s bed when his mother and sister were out. Everything was still new, still a discovery, every sigh or twitch of surprise a victory and a treasure.

Of course, twenty years down the road, we felt that particular urgency less often, and sex was sometimes more comfort and communication than passion. But it was still one of the threads that held us together—I’d treated that bond too lightly all those years ago. And the incredible news of a child of Michael’s wasn’t the only thing rattling me. It was wondering if Michael had believed then, or believed now, that I didn’t love him as completely as I knew I did.

AS I FINISHED MAKING DINNER, I thought back to those years so long ago when Michael and I were moving beyond the exhilarating newness of our relationship and into something solid, even with several states between us.

Surprising everyone, myself included, I’d applied to New York University during my senior year and been accepted. As a student whose grades had always been an afterthought compared with my form in pirouette, I’d managed to raise all my marks during the first half of my senior year—mostly because I had little to do but study, write letters to Michael and lie on my bed, moping and missing him. I’d given up the movie-theater job because the assistant manager was creepier than I could handle, especially when it was just the two of us behind the greasy concession counter on slow weeknights, and had taken a job at a bookstore downtown, instead. The owner was a wry, gentle man in his midfifties, and I was given just enough shifts to keep me busy a few afternoons a week and make some spending money.

Until Michael came home for the summer, nothing truly distracted me from the misery of being without him. When I moved into my Tenth Street dorm at NYU that September, though, it took a mere few minutes before I realized that this year distraction wasn’t going to be a problem.

The dorm was a converted hotel, and the rooms on my floor were former suites, with two generous bedrooms, a bath and several enormous closets. As dorm rooms went, it wasn’t the standard concrete-tiled cell I’d imagined, but I had four roommates. Living with four other girls was a shock of tempers, shower schedules, borrowed clothes and spontaneous bitch sessions about everything from boys to classes to the comparative number of calories in Famous Ray’s pizza versus Sbarro’s.

After a weeklong bout of what had to be estrogen shock, I loved it.

And I loved my classes, too, or at least most of them. The Psych 101 lecture at 8:00 a.m. wasn’t my favorite thing, but my other classes were just challenging enough to keep me interested, and life in the Village was exhilarating. Everywhere I went there were cafés, bars, vintage shops, newsstands, record stores and people. After years of trudging only into Penn Station and then uptown to Lincoln Center for ballet lessons, I found the Village young, alive and more like a small town than I could have imagined. I hadn’t stopped missing Michael, who was back at Harvard for his sophomore year, but the constant sharp pain I’d felt the year before had dulled to a low-level twinge. We wrote letters once or twice a week, although he was more consistent about getting to the mailbox than I was, and we managed to sneak in phone calls once in a while, too.

The sense of freedom was so delicious it seemed I could actually taste it with every breath of crisp autumn air. My sophomore roommates, Sydney and Marissa, were more than happy to show me around the neighborhood with fellow freshman Jane, from Connecticut, and Carter, a Southerner who constantly needed reminding to close her mouth and stop staring when we were out in the city between classes and on weekends. Manhattan wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but I’d never before had the chance to make my own mark on it, staking out my favorite coffee shop, the secondhand store that sold the best faded jeans, a diner that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day and made killer scrambled eggs for just a dollar fifty.

Sharing my experiences with Michael wasn’t easy, at least not in letters. He was the writer, not me, and his lazy, detailed descriptions of his Cambridge neighborhood were like something out of a travel guide. So the notion of him visiting didn’t take long to be born—unlike last year, when my parents had looked at me with a combination of horror and amusement at the suggestion I take the train up to stay with Michael one fall weekend, this year we were both free to come and go as we pleased.

“Y’all do know Thanksgiving is just around the corner, right?” Carter had drawled when I broached the subject of Michael’s impending visit.

“So they can’t wait,” Jane argued, folding laundry she’d brought up from the dorm’s basement. “It’s romantic. Which is more than I can say for me at the moment.” She’d had a fling with a junior philosophy student she’d met in the dining hall, which had ended in tears and avowals that Kant had ruined her attempt at a sex life.

In the end, Jane and Carter were both a bit awed that I had a sex life, and Marissa and Sydney agreed to let them bunk in their room when Michael arrived. The countdown began at that moment, after an excited and expensive call to Cambridge, and I spent the next week alternately pacing the confines of my room, daydreaming about what we would do while he was in the city, and feverishly trying to get ahead on my class readings so I could enjoy the weekend without guilt.

I met him at Penn Station on a Friday afternoon, hovering at the Amtrak arrival gate, dressed in my favorite jeans and a new sweater, a scarf looped around my neck that I knotted and unknotted with nervous fingers. When his face appeared on the escalator ascending from the track, blurry with sleep but searching me out with those dark, wide eyes, I nearly yelped with excitement.

The good thing is, when you don’t care who happens to watch you kissing your boyfriend in greeting, you can’t be embarrassed about it. I certainly wasn’t. If anything, it was a little thrilling to give all those gray-suited commuters an eyeful.

That evening is still a blur. There were the introductions to my roommates, a brief walking tour of Washington Square, which was windy and crisp in the fading light and studded with gold light from the main campus buildings bordering the park, and then a noisy, crowded dinner at a local hamburger place.

I was a bit giddy—I can see that now. The excitement and anticipation on top of a grateful rush of love for my roommates, who were being incredibly generous, was heady stuff. I wanted Michael to be part of everything in my life at NYU, and even then I knew that I didn’t sound quite like myself. I was babbling, laughing too loud, my cheeks hot and my pulse racing. But part of that was due to a mounting sense of panic.

Michael was friendly with the girls, and he was as affable as ever about the evening’s plans, but something was wrong. Aside from those initial kisses, some connection between us had shorted out—for the first time ever, being with him felt awkward. The physical space between us seemed bigger, colder, devoid of our usual silent language of expressions and glances.

He was quieter than usual, withdrawn in a way only I would notice, despite his nodded replies to my friends. That dark head was set low, hunched into his shoulders, and his eyes were somehow too bright—they looked nearly as panicked as I felt, I realized as I stared at him across the table while we divvied up the bill for dinner and Marissa and Jane figured the tip.

The others were heading to see An Officer and a Gentleman over on Sixth Avenue, so Michael and I waved them off at the corner of West Fourth and turned toward the dorm. He took my hand as we walked, and I held on, grateful for its warmth in the chilly night air. Upstairs, my room was quiet and dark, the only sound a gentle shush from the filter of Jane’s small fish tank, the only light its fluid blue glow.

I reached for my desk lamp, but Michael stopped me. “Don’t,” he said, reaching for my hand and spinning me so he could shrug off my coat. His worn denim jacket dropped to the floor next, and then we were on my bed, a fumbling, tentative meeting of mouths and hands.

But minutes later, skin to skin, hearts beating in time, everything shifted. Our bodies remembered each other without hesitation, and in those hours that seemed to stretch out endlessly till morning, we were able to find our way back to each other, somehow communicating everything we hadn’t yet been able to say. Sometime long after midnight, we found the words, too: I wanted him to like my new life; he was ashamed to admit that he was slightly jealous of it; we still missed each other; college would be difficult when it meant spending so long apart.

There was more, silly things that no one but us would understand—I called him Hemingway sometimes, and he liked to hum “Tiny Dancer” in my ear to make me giggle—and then the conversation melted into kisses again. With Michael around me and above me and inside me, everything melted away—school, my friends, the world, all gone, subsumed by a rush of sensation and emotion. Michael snored as I lay there afterward, blasted, wrung dry, yet grateful that I could spend the night with him in arm’s reach. It was foolish, and it certainly proved how young I was, but in those moments before I drifted off to sleep, I believed that nothing would ever truly be wrong between us that couldn’t be solved by a night in bed.

WE DIDN’T SHARE THE NEWS about Drew at dinner, by tacit agreement. Emma was in one of those rare effusive moods that seemed to come too seldom in fifteen-year-old girls, chattering about the play and her friend Simon’s run-in with their French teacher, and neither Michael nor I had the heart to shatter the atmosphere. She set herself up in the dining room later, books spread across the table and iPod humming in her ears, while Michael and I settled in front of the TV.

There was nothing in particular to watch, but neither of us minded. I flipped channels aimlessly, landing here or there for a few minutes, but what we were both enjoying was our physical proximity. We were curled into one end of the sofa, his arm around me, my head nestled into his shoulder, our hipbones knocking together when either of us shifted. The window over the sofa was open, and the soft night air carried the fragrance of fresh-cut grass and wisteria. For the first time that day, I was content, or nearly so.

We cleaned up the kitchen when Emma took herself off to bed, blowing kisses over the banister and reminding me she needed lunch money for tomorrow. When the dishwasher rumbled to life and Michael had shut off the lights, we went upstairs together, but we didn’t go right to sleep. I slipped into bed after cracking the window to let the breeze wash through the room, and when Michael joined me, I reached for him. I was naked under the sheet, and he fit himself against me, his hard, lean length so familiar, so beloved. I let my body speak to him again that night, and he answered me, every touch tender, reassuring and full of love. It’s all right, his body said. I love you. I won’t hurt you. We’re together here, and forever. What I couldn’t hear was how he felt about having a son. The boy we’d never had. Someone he could talk baseball and beer with, another male in the small circle of our family, where Emma and I had him outnumbered. What I wouldn’t know, unless I asked him, was if he was actually happy about this news.

I fell asleep holding his hand, staring at the pale, fat moon through the maple outside the window, hoping that he had heard I love you and We’re together when I touched him, too.

CHAPTER FIVE

I PICKED EMMA UP AFTER SCHOOL on Friday, another watercolor of a day, soft and bright, made for picture postcards. Jesse Perry had asked her to the prom, much to Emma’s relief, after weeks of phone calls and a few after-school “dates” downtown at Starbucks. He was a junior, with the hugest brown eyes I’d ever seen, the one time I’d met him, picking up bagels downtown with Emma, and he had a distinct bad-boy air despite his honor-roll status. I wasn’t happy that an older boy liked my daughter, but I didn’t have any real reason to deny her the thrill of her first big dance, either. We were dress-shopping today, and I was looking forward to it.

I’d finally shared Sophia’s phone call with Michael, but we still hadn’t told Emma about Drew. Between the prom and the play and the approaching end of the school year, she’d been incredibly easygoing, and neither one of us could bear to share the news with her. Not yet, anyway.

“She might not be as flipped out as you think,” Michael had argued over steaming mugs of tea at the kitchen table the night before. “We weren’t married then. Kids are a lot more sophisticated these days, for better or worse.”

“Kids are a lot more sophisticated about cell phones and fashion and movie sex,” I said wearily. “Real-life stuff is a little different. There’s a lot of child left in her, Michael. She still won’t let me give away her Barbies.”

She had to know, of course. And we were going to tell her, this weekend probably, when we were all at home together, with time to talk. Michael had spoken to Drew again yesterday, and we’d agreed that we would drive up to Cambridge over the Memorial Day weekend to meet him. I hadn’t really faced the fact that the trip was only two weeks away—denial was so easy to slip into, a comfortable old coat I donned every day now. If I pretended that we had all the time in the world to tell Emma, I could almost make myself believe it.

I’d pulled the Jeep up to the curb in front of the school, under an ancient elm that dappled the hood with shadows in the afternoon sunlight. I had the radio on louder than usual, a Springsteen song from my own high-school years, and I felt pretty good—I’d forced myself through yoga that morning, which I’d let slip all week, and I’d finished sorting photos for another chapter in my book. The laundry had piled up again, but I had decided not to care about that. Dirty clothes were the least of my problems this week, and the afternoon was too lovely to spoil with regret—of any kind.

Emma banged through the front doors of the school with a gang of other girls, a rainbow of pastel shirts and short skirts, faded denim and backpacks adorned with key chains and cell phones. I didn’t wave—I knew better. But she smiled when she climbed into the car beside me and slammed the door shut. “Let’s shop,” she said.

I shifted the Jeep into gear. “That’s the plan.”

We decided to start at Lord & Taylor, which would have the widest selection, if not the best prices. Guilt lay at the bottom of that decision, and I wasn’t going to try to deny it. Finding out that she had a half brother, that her dad had actually slept with someone other than her mom once upon a time, when she’d long believed in the fairy-tale, childhood-sweethearts version of our life together, was going to be horror enough that it was comforting to pretend I could buy her understanding with an expensive dress.