“I do,” he told her.
He had a waterbed. There were all these motorcycle magazines on top of it. Those, and a Stephen King novel,It.He swept them onto the floor.
“Come here,” he said.
Eleanor had a rule about Timmy Pouliot. Starting with the way she spoke of him, though the only person she mentioned him to was Darla. But when she thought about him—and she did, a lot—she never thought of him as Timmy. Always Timmy Pouliot. It put him in a different category from the other people in her life—her ex-husband, parents of her children’s friends, Toby’s speech therapist, other former softball teammates of Cam’s. She spoke of him the way a person would speak of a movie star or a politician or some famous athlete—some character you knew about, and observed from afar. Admired, maybe. But she wouldn’t have thought of him as a friend, or even—even after they had sex—as a lover. Timmy’s apartmentwas a place she could go, now and then, where she got to step out of her life for an hour or two, and instead of taking care of everyone else, she was the one who got taken care of.
After that first time she’d paid a visit to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment, she figured it had probably been this onetime deal, but a few weeks later he called her up. “I was just thinking about you,” he said. “Who am I kidding? I’m always thinking about you.”
The first thing he did when she got there was to run her a bath. Eleanor didn’t know anything about how people conducted love affairs, but she guessed this was unusual. Timmy Pouliot had recognized that she was a woman overdue for tender care, and it turned out he was very good at providing it. After that first time, he always had bath salts for her, also lotion, and candles, which he lit for her while she soaked in the tub. He had asked if she’d like to be private for her bath, but she liked his company, so he sat on the toilet with a beer and they talked.
It got to be a thing she did Friday nights, after dropping off the children. Going over to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment for her bath, followed by lovemaking on the waterbed, was something she looked forward to all week, but never counted on. Now and then—if the children were with their father for some school holiday, and once in the middle of a weekday when they were all at school, when it had come to her that this was the anniversary of her parents’ accident—she made the drive unconnected to a drop-off or a pickup, just to see him. She played music loud as she drove, and didn’t even mind the time it took getting there. Time in the car on the way to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment always felt peaceful to Eleanor, but also exciting. She loved how he touched her. But equally, the part that came before. The bath.
This was not exactly the kind of bath they featured in the pages of women’s magazines, in articles she’d read and occasionally even illustrated about “me time” or “Create Your Own Spa Vacation Right at Home”—though he always lit a candle for her, cinnamon spice, and put on one of the few tapes he owned that wasn’t heavy metal or country. There was the giant New England Patriots towel hanging from a hook on the door, and on the shelf above the tub, a can ofRight Guard and another of shaving cream, a jock strap looped over a hook on the door, and a poster tacked up that appeared to have been there awhile—the classic shot of Farrah Fawcett, from so long ago Farrah’s swimsuit was totally faded.
He always tested the water temperature on his wrist, as a person might do bathing a baby. He had wine chilling for her, and he had bought a special sponge—a loofah—that he used to rub her back.
That first time, she’d been careful to keep certain aspects of her body concealed from him. She held in her stomach when she got up from the bed. She didn’t like how her breasts sagged now. Then there were the stretch marks.
“You don’t have to be shy with me,” he told her. “I think you’re beautiful. You had kids, that’s all. You’re a mother.”
After that Eleanor felt a surprising absence of self-consciousness taking her clothes off around Timmy Pouliot. She had seen plenty of his girlfriends over the years, with their perfect bodies. But he always made it plain that he loved looking at her, and that nothing about Eleanor’s naked body altered any of that.
Walking out to her car after—sometimes at midnight, sometimes later, the night air so cold on her face it stung—and on the long drive back to Brookline, she told herself that what she had with her former husband’s former softball teammate, these Friday night visits, represented no more than a small oasis of comfort where she’d allowed herself to touch down, just for now.
It didn’t mean anything.
All that summer and into the fall, on Fridays after dropping the children off at Cam’s (it was odd, still, speaking of their old house this way), Eleanor drove to the apartment building with the video store down below. She parked on a side street and walked up the two flights of stairs to Timmy’s apartment. Sometimes she could hear the water running in the bathtub before he even opened the door.
She had questioned what was in it for him, having this woman seven years older than he was coming over to his apartment and getting into his bathtub, but she came to accept that in some odd way, he enjoyed their times together. She might talk to him while she layin the water, tell him stories about her week. Sometimes she’d just lie there while he sat on the edge of the toilet drinking his beer, and sometimes he’d tell her about something that happened on the job that day, or a problem he had with his car, or a fishing trip he’d taken with his brother, or an evening he spent at his mother’s house with her new boyfriend, who was pretty much a jerk but she seemed happy with him so he let it alone. It was not unheard of, at these moments, for Timmy Pouliot to recount the story of something that happened with one of his seemingly endless succession of beautiful young girlfriends. He knew Eleanor wouldn’t be jealous, and she wasn’t.
Sometimes they’d skip a week. She didn’t want to use it up, or leave him thinking she expected anything from him, which she didn’t.
Every time she left the apartment and made her way back down those two long, dark flights of steps, Eleanor considered the possibility that this might be the last time she’d find herself here. Sooner or later he’d get a girlfriend again. It was never hard for Timmy Pouliot, getting a girlfriend. At some point, he’d marry one of them.
“I met this girl,” Timmy said. She was in the tub at the time, with the glass of wine he’d poured for her. Softball season starting up again. He was sitting in his usual spot with his beer. “It doesn’t mean anything. We just hang out. She likes Harleys.”
After that, Eleanor knew not to come by for a while. Then one night came the call. November now. They had just turned back the clocks, so it got dark around four thirty. She was getting ready to bring the children to Cam’s when the phone rang.
“You in the mood for a bath?” They started up again.
She never spent the night with him. But one night she had stayed later than usual. After they made love, she had fallen asleep. When she opened her eyes it was close to morning.
“You should have woken me up,” she said.
“Why would I do that?” he told her. “I figured you could use the rest. Plus I like watching you sleep.”
She surprised herself by how easy it felt, being naked with Timmy Pouliot. She loved his body—solid and thickly muscled, where Cam was lean. The first time he’d touched her naked skin, Eleanor had been startled by the roughness of his hands. “I know,” he said. Hemust have registered her reaction. “That’s what being on the road crew and grunt construction work does to a guy.” He told her he’d pick up some kind of lotion.
When she dressed to go, there was never any discussion of when they’d see each other again. She didn’t invite him over for a meal or bake him one of her pies. They never went out for dinner together, or to the sports bar he frequented. Though he had taken her on his bike that time, the experience was not repeated. Their whole relationship, whatever it was, was played out in the two rooms of his apartment—two places, his bed and his bathtub, and nowhere else.
“My mom was getting after me the other day,” Timmy Pouliot told her one time. Lying side by side in bed, as usual. “She wanted to know when I was going to settle down with someone. Have kids.”
“And when will that be?” Eleanor asked him. Maybe this was the moment he was going to tell her he didn’t think she should come over anymore.It’s been great. Need to move on.
“I told her it would have to be the right woman,” he said. “These girls I always end up running around with. It won’t be any of them.”
Eleanor lay there next to him on his Patriots sheets, saying nothing. She was studying his strong, broad chest, the scar on his right hand from a time when he was just starting out as a carpenter and he’d almost lost a finger to a table saw, the tattoo with the name of his dead father on his bicep, his appendix scar, the one on his thigh from an accident on his motorcycle when he was sixteen. Sometimes, when it rained, he walked with a limp, though most people would not have noticed this.
