Sam shrugged into a long cashmere overcoat and turned to me. “Why hello, Miss Bigelow,” he said, determinedly ignoring the fact that I was crying so hard that I was gasping for breathand snot was running out of my nose. “Okay. We can go now. Would you like to have something to eat while we talk?”
I said, “Okay.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten anything.
“I could cook,” he said. “I was going to cook tonight anyway. For myself.”
I said, “Okay.”
In silence, we drove to his austere, immaculate small house near Vilas Park. He unlocked the door. He turned to me, and I stepped into his arms. We didn’t leave that house for seventy-two hours. For most of the first forty-eight, we didn’t talk about Felicity nearly as much as I would have imagined. The present seemed to elbow the past and the future aside. We talked about common ground: how disgusting to eat carryout from the carton, even if you used chopsticks, that afternoon naps for adults should have remained a sacrament even after the Edwardian era, that the best historical record was mostly good gossip, that audiobooks were wonderful but did not constitute reading. We drank apple-cider mimosas from his grandmother’s blue cut-crystal flutes. We talked about where we would go when this was all over, a verdant somewhere drenched in saltwater and light, maybe Portugal.
Because of a blizzard, the fireworks traditionally held on New Year’s Eve had been postponed and then postponed again. Wrapped in quilts the second night on the porch, we watched the fireworks break like falling stars over the capitol dome. I was startled when I heard what sounded like lions roaring. He lived right near the zoo, Sam explained. The lions I heard had been born in captivity, but fresh air was essential to their health, no matter what season, so the zoo had installed heated rocks that melted the snow. The lions liked to loll there even as spiraling snow spattered their coats.
There was nothing sad about this image except insofar as allzoos were sad. And yet I started to cry again, bringing the total of times I’d cried over the past several days equal to the number of times I’d cried during the previous two years. Although these lions would never see the sunbaked savannah where they were meant to live, it lived in them, and they would proclaim their wildness to the night. If I sound like a sentimental fool, I was. I leaned against Sam’s shoulder, and he pulled me to him, with me grateful that, although not a particularly big guy, he was taller—enough that I could feel tucked in.
“Are you always this emotional?” he asked.
“Probably. But I don’t show it.”
“Why are you sad right now?”
He was relieved that it was about the lions. He knew that it wasn’t about the lions.
An owl hooted softly, experimentally, as if sending forth a tentative question; from far off, another answered, then the same exchange again, the distant owl moving closer.Do you want me? Am I the one you want?The seeking-out of a being by another being, the longing for union and reunion, was not only primal, but it was also not just for primates—and, as evidenced by the owls, we weren’t the only ones who talked about it or wrote songs about it. Baudelaire wrote of dark owls “by twos and twos” meditating under overhanging yews. I told Sam this.
“You are the obscure poetry factor. How did you memorize all this stuff at your age? And anyhow, what is your age?”
“Twenty-seven, nearly twenty-eight. I have sort of a sticky memory. Mostly for useless stuff like poetry. But it’s sort of seductive. Men like to be impressed—” I ran my thumb down the inside of his hip bone “—by more than big boobs and a... lot of energy.”
“I think you have a ton of energy. I don’t know much poetry, so you can say anything you want and I’ll believe it.”
I said then, “I have to call my parents.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe except that!”
“Only because I’m living with them right at this moment, in Sheboygan, or at least part of the time with them and part here with my sister. This story is going to take months for me, obviously, more research even after the trial. And then the writing of it. My place in Chicago is being sublet.”
I told Patrick and Miranda I was staying in Madison with a friend. Any other explanation seemed to require, well, too much explanation.
He was the middle brother of four, two in college in Madison, the eldest a structural engineer in Sydney, Australia. His mother was the senior partner in his law firm. His father was a vet. We huddled on the couch and watchedArsenic and Old Lace, which in context, it didn’t occur to me until later, was a stunningly inappropriate choice. I could not keep my eyes or hands off him.
Certainly, in Sam, and in the most unlikely circumstance, I had found that person, the one whose body was my anthem, who would make me wonder why anyone ever did anything except have sex. My romantic history, admittedly, rose from dismal and leveled off at uninspiring, and true, that was mostly from lack of trying—but not from lack of caring. I did want the man of my dreams. I devoutly did not want to do all the gruesome things that seemed necessary to find him. I didn’t want to speed date, submit a profile to a web sink, or visit a yenta—not even for the magazine, although Ivy had brought this story idea up more than once. I didn’t want to be bored, disgusted, disappointed, or worse, required to escape from the romantic equivalent of a house fire.
There had been my doomed, contested crush on Lucius McCool in senior year of high school, literally a couple of half-decent guys in college, and then my grad school classmate, Davis, a music journalist, with whom I briefly fantasized a life of twocrowded desks at opposite ends of a vast, sunny Brooklyn living room... but that ended when his once-lost true love came back from her posting as a maternal health specialist in South Africa. From that time on, regardless of what Sam suspected, I felt that I was destined for a solo life—and I had further resolved that I would not compromise: If I didn’t like the way he chewed, he was out; if his beloved father was a casual racist, he was out; if he believed in the slimmest possibility of extraterrestrials, he was out. And then came Sam. The way Sam’s mouth felt on mine—firm, clean, urgent—just the thought made my pelvis clench. My mother would once say that I was “sexually hypnotized,” but the truth was that I was hypnotized in other ways as well. Most of the time, I could predict within days when I would tire of a guy or when he would tire of me or when the connection just wasn’t robust enough to last. There were times I could predict the finale within fifteen minutes. With Sam, I couldn’t see the finale. From the first moment, I never imagined it would end.
And then, immediately, it did.
“We have to talk about this, Reenie,” he said.
“I thought we were,” I said, adding, “And I thought only the girl said that.”
“I mean, we can’t do this.”
“We can’t do this because you’re Felicity’s lawyer and I’m writing about this, and I’m her friend,” I said.
“That’s the gist of it.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, although I couldn’t see how there was any real impropriety. It wasn’t as though I was a lawyer on the other side or even a court reporter or police. “I’m not a lawyer but I don’t see how us having... whatever this is, could be actually illegal.”
“Not illegal at all. Certainly unethical. There doesn’t have to be a real instance of impropriety, just the perception of it.”
