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Occasionally after he arrived I found myself smiling at work, not because I was so happy (I was neither more nor less happy than I had been before he came to stay, I thought) but because it was so predictable and also, I suppose, validating. The satisfaction of him and me was the same as the satisfaction that came from stamping someone’s book with a dark, inky due date or from putting current periodicals in alphabetical order, or from meeting someone’s eyes and answering their question about the reference librarian’s hours. It was orderly and, for a little while, it was necessary. We followed a clear narrative, and the narrative was neither better nor worse than any of those that surrounded me at work. It was one day at work while I was smiling that Gale told me that she didn’t remember what the boys had done to land themselves in jail, which I did not believe for a second. But her delivery was so convincing that I thought any further prodding would probably result in awkwardness. The woman who did the most uninteresting of the library’s paperwork looked up when Gale told me that they had done something criminal and looked down at her computer again, pointedly, when Gale said “I guess I don’t remember what, exactly.” So I couldn’t ask her if she knew anything as we passed each other in the hall to the bathroom. I didn’t like her anyway, and I hoped she didn’t know about the boys. She removed my coffee mugs from my desk and washed them when she washed her own, and I felt rebuked. I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask because I didn’t really know anyone else. I had only moved to the town a month before, and I had one friend who didn’t live in the city but she hadn’t lived in the town much longer than I had, and didn’t really seem to like to say bad things about people, which was something that concerned me more generally. It occurred to me to go to work early and look at old issues of the newspaper on microfilm, so one morning I arrived at the same time as the cleaning woman, when the day was still almost cold. I sat at the projector and let whole months whirl by at lightening speed, my finger pressing hard on the little blue button, but I since I didn’t know what year I was looking for, or even, really, what decade, I gave up as soon as people began to trickle in through the big front doors. Besides, I didn’t want anyone to ask me what I was doing. It seemed to me that I should already know. *** One night when John was home we sat at the table and I picked at the little blemishes on my face and ran fingers through my scalp looking for dead skin. After a quarter of an hour of this I felt sort of embarrassed—I remembered that I wasn’t alone, so I got up to do the dishes, hoping that I appeared industrious and clean instead of slovenly and like the type of woman who picked at herself. But it didn’t seem like he’d really noticed (he kept typing away) so at the sink I scratched my calf with my big toe unabashedly. When he came up behind me and turned me around to face him, taking my breasts in his hands and pushing me against the counter I blushed, thinking of the red mark left on my leg. We kissed and I hoisted myself up onto the edge of the formica, ignoring the wetness from the dishwater and grateful for his unusual spontaneity. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said, and I felt a little deflated but led him up to my bedroom hoping that he was watching my ass as it moved up each step. And maybe he had been because when we got to my bed, he fumbled for a few minutes, pushing himself against me, before he finally and decisively turned me over and lifted the dress. I was on my knees and I felt him pushing into me as he pulled me closer to him and I sucked in sharply, finding the wall in front of me and bracing myself against it. I let him push at first because so often it felt like he touched me aimlessly, but it hurt a little bit and so I crawled away after a while and lay down underneath him, holding his cock in my hand, trying to ignore the way the condom smelled like a laboratory. Instead I concentrated on his face, which had the look of utter absorption that confirms movements of the fingers and the tongue. His eyes were closed partway, one more so than the other, and his lower jaw was off to one side, his bottom lip jutting out slightly to the front and to the left. I tugged with my other hand at the zipper of my dress, wanting to be unpeeled and explored but unwilling to give up my grasp on him. Eventually he found my fingers on my side and unzipped me and ran his fingers down the outline of my torso. I took his hands and moved them away, wiggling out of my dress a little gracelessly. I pushed him down on his front and traced the seam of his ass with my finger, pushing only a little bit. He was always so quiet. I dragged my nail across his back, watching the white line turn to a pink one, hoping for a noise. None came, and he turned under me and we looked at each other for a few, almost uncomfortable, moments.
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