Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,75

up. ‘Mmm,’ he says. Our bodies are lying down alongside each other for the first time and it doesn’t feel as good as it does when we are standing up with more clothes on.

I don’t know what I want. It’s nothing like lying next to Luke or kissing Silas in his car. Fireworks or coffee in bed, I hear Fabiana saying.

‘Are you nervous?’ he says, grinning and kissing me. ‘We can take it slowly. This is nice just like this. This is what I want. And it’s been so long since I’ve wanted anything.’

His tongue is cold. He moves to one of my breasts. My mind is full of people in chairs at the bookstore and Vera Wilde leaning against the restaurant table. He slides his fingers into my underwear but they don’t go in the right places and he has a couple of sharp fingernails. I imagine him bringing Vera Wilde home and going down on her on the living room rug. It helps. I shift away from his fingers and press my butt against him and we find a rhythm and he is breathing hard at my neck and we move faster and he tenses and stops breathing and I feel the pulse against me through our underwear and when it’s over he says he feels like a teenager and laughs loudly in my ear.

He puts on a fresh pair of boxers and pulls me close. ‘“But O that I were young again/And held her in my arms,”’ he says in my ear. Three minutes later he’s asleep. I try to follow him there, try to imitate his long sleep breaths and trick my body into it, but I’m awake. I lie there a long time. After an hour or more I get up and go downstairs.

There are a few extra chairs pulled up around the coffee table from the workshop the night before. It’s clear where Oscar sits, in the walnut chair with the leather seat, pulled back from the others, a bit higher. I take the seat I would sit in if I were in the workshop, in the middle of the couch, protected by people on both sides.

I should have wanted to be him, not sleep with him. I don’t seem to want to do that either, though.

My body won’t stay seated so I walk around, past the front door, the closet, the bathroom, the TV nook, the fridge, the island, back around to the living area. There’s very little clutter. No photos. A bookshelf neatly organized by author. One copy of each of his own. I open the closet: parkas, boots, tennis rackets, a wiffleball bat. In the kitchen is another closet: broom, mop, bucket, slender vacuum cleaner, and a recycling bin. There, on top of a stack of papers, is a story called ‘Star of Ashtabula.’ It’s been typed on a manual typewriter so it has a faded, irregular look to it. Silas’s name and address are in the top left corner. I shut the door. I go sit on a chair near the window. I shuffle a deck of cards near the TV. I go back to the closet with the recycling bin.

It’s a clean copy. Oscar hasn’t made a mark. I bring it to the couch. Star is a woman trying to save an old tree from being chopped down in the town center. She goes door-to-door to a series of oddball neighbors, and when the men with a backhoe come there is a protest with all the people she has mustered, awkwardly holding hands around the big tree. It turns out Star’s ex-husband proposed to her under the tree, extemporaneously, with few words and no ring. She hadn’t liked the proposal at the time and made him do it again properly a week later by the lake with a diamond and a dozen roses, but it is the first proposal beneath the strong branches of that tree that she remembers and that moves her, years after they have divorced, at unexpected moments of the day.

I wonder how the discussion of the story went. Muriel is in Italy, so I have no mole. I wonder where Silas sat. I can imagine how people might talk about it, how it lacks narrative tension, how there are unnecessary adverbs in the tag lines, like ‘she said pleadingly,’ how we don’t find out if she saves the tree. It seems like it was written in a rush of feeling, as if the writer were