Michelangelo_s Notebook

24

She went to his bed and found him still awake in the darkened room, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling, perhaps reliving a distant violent past. He turned to her as she stood beside the bed, the moon at her back, unbuttoning her shirt, staring down at him.

“You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I know.” She pulled off the shirt, then reached behind her back to unclasp her bra, tossing it on the floor. She slipped the buttons on her jeans one by one, knowing that he was watching her, trying not to think about what he was thinking, trying not to think of anything at all except the moment. He said nothing more.

She slid off her jeans and the plain white cotton panties with them and stood there finally, naked in front of him, the light from behind her turning her hair into a glowing tangled halo, catching the curve of her hips and the long, strong muscles of her thighs with a soft plain glow. She waited like that for a moment, letting him see her, wanting him to see everything that she was, simple in the moonlight, and then she got into the bed with him, slipping under the covers, remembering the touch of his hand on her thigh at the colonel’s house, knowing this was going to happen even then, the touch like a fist in an iron glove and also as tender as a lover.

For the second time she wondered about the abstract moments and twists of fate that could turn a person’s life upside down within the space of time from one sunrise to another. For a split second she thought about Peter and that final, terrible cry, and bizarrely she suddenly had an image of her mother’s dressing table in the house on Doderidge Street back in Columbus and the wedding photograph in its silver frame.

Her mother and father standing together, somber-faced, her father in tweeds and tortoiseshell-rim glasses towering over her mother-so much younger, bright-eyed in a perfect wedding dress and holding a spray of white flowers in her hand, the tall trees and the rose gardens of Whetstone Park in the background, all in that pale yellow of old black-and-white photographs. For a moment she felt very young as she brushed against the hot dry skin of Valentine’s hip and then it was too late for good and all and he reached out and put his hand on her flat, taut belly and she turned to him and he slipped into her immensely as though he had belonged there from the beginning.

He began to move and she moved with him and none of the other things mattered even though she had no idea if she was doing it for him and his pain, for her father or for herself. Nothing mattered at all except right now and that was enough for both of them.