if anything, too well
maybe that’s what makes you feel lonely
because you feel like they don’t understand you back
Upstairs, he sat her on his bed and unzipped her boots, then sat on the floor looking up at her.
This is so crazy, he said.I’ve just really wanted to be close to you.
She pulled up her shirt and he climbed to his knees and placed his hands on either side of her stomach, which twisted sick with wanting something too much.I just need a minute, she said, forcing a smile, scampering into the en suite, where she has now taken off the rest of her clothes and is trying to come to terms with the fact of herself.
She turns on the sink, exhales, braves the mirror. Her face is flushed, her hair too big. She twists it around, ties it back tight and high on her head, hates it, lets it down again. Her small breasts, her articulated rib cage. How many hours of running have fought against excess?Will he find her unwomanly? Will her body know what to do?She thinks of the whiskey abandoned downstairs, feels overexposed. Has she been blinded by his easy familiarity? Is that something he can affect with anyone?
More than once she has asked herself why he has chosen her. Has told herself, hopefully, that it is because she is beautiful to him, because she can make him laugh, because she can soothe him when his work is too much. That her heart is enough. That her mind is enough. But perhaps Susan is the only reason she has held his attention. It is possible, when he looks at her, he is looking for a woman she has never known.
She emerges, backlit, and Orson can see her heart is racing too. His phone is in his hand, stupid, a nervous tic, and he thrusts it back toward the sideboard.
“Jesus,” he says under his breath.
If you could only see her, bare hip against doorframe, the bounty of her curls parting over pert handfuls, you’d be dumbstruck too. He’ll never get used to it, the sight of a naked girl. But this time he’s in too deep.
“This is going to be embarrassing for me.” He throws a hand on his stomach. “They made me pack it on for this one.”
“Stop it,” she says. “You look the same as you always have.”
He knew the moment he saw her; he was doomed. Susie but not Susie. Stunning, funny, clever. Vibrating with the same absence he has carried all these years. It takes nothing, a smile, the way she tilts her head back, her laugh for God’s sake, and he’s twenty-seven again, the last version of himself that he can truly recognize. He’d forgotten that tenderness, that level of concern and interest in anyone. He’d struggled to feel it in decades. She became immediately singular. Immediately necessary.
Christ, what would Susie think?
“I didn’t mean to make you nervous,” she says.
“Imagine such a thing,” he says.
“I can.”
He shifts back on the bed and they gaze unblinking into each other’s eyes, overwhelmed by the unlikelihood of it all. He’d worried it would be too much: that in the moment he would be unable to separate them, that he would mistake what he was doing as a perverse kind of displacement instead of—well, an act of discovery. But it was wasted concern. She is so specifically, strikingly herself.
Tentatively, she moves from the doorway and places herself next to him, and suddenly it all feels so serious. It’s possible she’s never been serious before. God knows he’s a selfish prick to pursue this, but she wants him too, right? Even the ancient state of him? He only wants to take care of her.
“Viola,” he says. “Look, we need to take this slowly.”
“I know.”
“No getting hurt.”
She’s not a child, he reminds himself, but maybe it doesn’t make adifference, really. You never know what kind of effect you’re having on people. What kind of ideas they might have about you. So often he feels people just want to please him, like he has a hold over them he never asked for.
“Can you just tell me before we do this… If there’s anything I should know. I mean, anyone else.” She looks embarrassed and adds, “So that I can kill them, I mean.”
Oh, Viola.He shuts his eyes. It’s crushing, the thought of her reading them, all those tatty articles calling him a womanizer, speculating on the thinnest gossip. Is she willing to think that? To fear him?
Or does she just know what it’s like to be abandoned?
“I swear,” he says. “It’s only you.”
She reaches her hand to his face, his lip, and moves to him, saying, “Good,” and slowly allows him to trace his finger over the patch of vitiligo on her rib cage, charting the perfect map of her skin.
1991
