The Piano Room
She leaned over and covered his mouth with her hand. She didn’t want to enter into any discussion of what he believed, what his personal ideology might be. The man’s life would never fit him again, that’s all she knew for certain. She passed the hand that was not covering Leland’s mouth over his chest. His broad sweaty chest opened like a landscape before her. Little tufts of black hair swirled like bushes in that landscape that went on opening and opening before her as she moved her hand across it. After a moment she brought her other hand down from his mouth, freeing him then to speak if he chose, to tell her what he believed and still believes, what rules or code he lived by. But Leland did not speak. He simply drew her down onto the bed and held her against him and allowed her to pass her hands back and forth across his chest and over his shoulders and up and down his arms that felt like tree trunks to her, and around to his back as far as she could reach, which, because of his size, wasn’t very far, but she tried, she reached her arms as far as they would go and moved her hands over as much of his back as she could, kneading and caressing his flesh with her fingers, clawing her fingertips along his skin to move them an inch, a fraction of an inch further onto his back, to take in as much of him as she could, for she loved him, yes, she loved him, and he her, of that she felt certain, for he had told her so and she believed him, why shouldn’t she believe him, even though she couldn’t prove what he said? For how was anything ever to be proved? Certainly not beyond all doubt, and she understood, despite the wife and three children and golden retriever in Westchester, there were vast places on her lover’s large frame that had never been and never could be touched.
As usually happened after lovemaking, she returned a little to herself. “It’s like with that blond actress who plays that woman with cancer on TV,” she said. “You ever watch that? Millions of people across America want her to die.” She turned on her side and pressed her cheek to Leland’s chest. She had to raise her head a little so she could speak, but she kept one arm stretched across his chest. “The viewers with cancer. They want her to die. They go on week by week, episode by episode, hoping to see her sink closer and closer to death. They want her to have her pain because it’s their pain. They want her to have her tortuous treatments because those are the treatments they endure.” She kept reaching out her fingertips, kneading his flesh, taking in as much of it as she could. “They want her to teach them how to die. They watch, hoping to find some comfort, some peace in dying through her death. And then, last week, she goes into remission. You see that? It seems she will recover. Not be cured, but live. And they would kill her now with their own hands, for she has betrayed them. They have loved her, wished for her death, but she went into remission and left them behind. Left them! They hate her now.”
But who is she to Leland? He to her? A petite, slender woman, nearly forty-six years old, but with a figure that still looks good in jeans and T-shirts and tight sweaters. And he, a large man, six-one or -two, one hundred ninety pounds, she estimates, with vast reaches of needy flesh, flesh she loves to gather in her fingers, knead and tend, a man several years her senior, five or ten, she’d never asked, not wanting to appear nosy, intrusive. Intrusive? But was he not her lover? Did they not come here to this pied-á-terre, their hideaway, he called it, several times a month, sometimes as many as eight in one month, or two in one week, and did they not both take off their clothes, each of them wearing business suits, as was required, and hang them, careful to leave nothing of themselves behind, neatly in the closet where no other clothes hung and none would remain after they had gone?
When he left her, as he would, to return his full attention to the wife and three children and golden retriever in Westchester—“Yes, I knew,” she would say when he protested that he had never implied anything differently, that she knew it would come to an end, “Yes I knew,” she would say, for of course that was true, she knew like any story in any book, any play on any stage, it would come to an end—she would have her memories of all that had transpired between them to do with what she liked. The façade of the brownstone on East 53rd Street, the staircase on which they never encountered a single other living human being, the upscale restaurants, the suits worn like costumes, the imposing mahogany desk, the light streaming in behind. The memories would be hers. But even now, before they had become memories, even while she and Leland were eating in restaurants and undressing in the pied-á-terre, hanging up their clothes in the closet and making raw and mostly silent love, their actions, even while being performed, were fading from her eyes. More and more she felt she was not an actor in the play on the stage before her but a member of the audience sitting beyond the stage lights, holding her breath, rapt with curiosity as to what might happen next, and even as she sat there watching and breathless, awaiting the resolution, the lights began to dim and went on dimming until the stage fell into complete blackness and nothing of the action could be seen.