their daily work. And this connected in ways she could only guess at to idealism in politics, the insistence on equality, the plainness of it, and thus too, somehow, to the power of the spectacle of troops in Little Rock escorting a black girl to the ordinary activity of school. She understood then, and even more later, that others, the beautiful perhaps, would laugh if she were to confess it, but sitting fully clothed on that window seat, never having touched a hair on Eric’s body, she felt more sexually alive than ever in her life. She would have walked into a bedroom of that apartment, closed the door on the party, and made love to him at once if he’d asked.
As it happened, they made love on her couch the next night after dinner, the heat of his chest on hers and the smell of his flesh a blessing she’d thought she might never receive. Before they even climbed in the bath together, before he even raised himself from her and stood, naked and wet, looking down at her in surprise, she already feared the power of her wanting. She was twenty-nine and a fierce social independent, a position that had cost her a sense of future safety. They’d said nothing about anything between them, how could they? And yet even that first night, every time he touched her, there in the soapy water, lathering her hair, cupping her breast in his hand, it felt to her like a promise.
Had God foreseen the subtlety of your modern devils, Sam began, raising his blunt face from the carpet, he might have added a Commandment: Thou Shalt not Pity thy Self. In the case of Sorrow for a Dead Friend: Suppose, I were Dead; would I have my Friend mourn for me, with an Excessive, Oppressive, Destructive Sorrow? No, sure. Why then let my Sorrow for my Friend be moderated. You dwell in Memory like some Perversity of the Flesh. A sin against the gift of Creation it is to harp so on the dead while the living still suffer.
She wouldn’t be chastised like this. Not in her own house. Not by Sam. Lying there with his fine pale coat and superior manner. It was no great mystery who he had come to fancy himself as. All that pure breeding and King James diction. As though each day she walked Cotton Mather over the golf course on a leash. Did he really expect her to believe that was the case?
Across the room, the television stood mute, its glass a dull, greeny gray. The reception had grown steadily worse over the years, though she’d changed nothing, until finally the static had grown so thick it was hardly worth it, Jim Lehrer’s voice muffled beneath the hiss. She’d preferred MacNeil, in any case.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator shuddered off and the quiet of the house was once again absolute.
Eric’s place had been much like hers, a studio apartment over by the water on Bethune Street. A mess of books and papers, barely any shelves to put them on, a small wooden table, one chair. The previous fall, he’d enrolled to study philosophy at the New School and had been overwhelmed by the amount of work. He was late wherever they went, unkempt, often tired-looking. Charlotte loved him for it and even more for their hours of conversation and for his letting her kiss him whenever she felt the urge, Eric being happy to let her lead the way, telling him when they would study and when they would stop, when they would sleep and eat. Those first few months he’d get up early and go to his apartment a few hours each morning to get ready for his seminars, he said, and she’d usually find him back at her place napping when she returned in the late afternoon. She’d sometimes sit watching him as he slept, his legs curled up toward his chest, his mouth slightly open against the pillow. Her first guess at his age had been right. He was only twenty-four. The youngest of seven. His mother’s choice for the priesthood. Yet the only one of his siblings who hadn’t ended up living within a quick drive of the house back in the working-class section of Philadelphia where he’d grown up. Charlotte had been surrounded most of her life by people who’d sauntered to their place in the world, coming to it as if by right. This hadn’t been the case