58.
The homecoming festivities were intense and extended, and Pearl was visibly annoyed at being shut out of Susan’s bedroom for so long. It was three o’clock in the morning when she was able to join us. Susan had a bottle of LaurentPerrier pink champagne, and we drank some of it, sitting up in bed, with Pearl sprawled between us.
“Whew!” Susan said.
“Whaddya think?” I said. “Love or lust.”
“For us,” Susan said, “it’s a meaningless distinction.”
“For everybody?”
“If they’re lucky,” Susan said.
“Like us.”
“And they work at it,” Susan said.
“Like us,” I said.
“Sometimes it’s been hard work,” she said.
“And sometimes no work at all,” I said.
She nodded and sipped her champagne and looked at me over the rim of the glass. To be looked at by Susan, naked, with those eyes, over a glass of pink champagne, was all I knew on earth, and all I had to know.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
“Keats,” I said.
She smiled.
“Truth is beauty, beauty truth. . . ?” she said.
“Something like that.”
She kept smiling.
“Only you,” she said. “After hours of carnal excess with the girl of your dreams . . . thinking about Keats.”
“I’ll bet other people think of Keats,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure, probably right in this neighborhood . . .”
“If carnal excess occurs in Cambridge,” I said.
She ignored me.
“But none of those thinking of Keats look like you,” she said.
“Their loss,” I said.
“And their companions’,” Susan said.
Pearl rolled onto her side and stretched out full length, which took up a considerable amount of bed space. Probably revenge.
“Do you know what you’re going to do about Perry Alderson and all of that?” Susan said.
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Are you going to tell Epstein what you’ve learned?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell Epstein?” Susan said.
“I’m thinking about it,” I said.
“And you do not plan to discuss it with me tonight.”
“Exactly,” I said.
I filled my champagne glass and reached across Pearl to pour for Susan. She drank some. I drank some. We looked at each other. Pearl’s breathing was the only sound. Susan reached across the dog and traced one of the scars on my chest. There were several.
“It’s just a scar,” she said. “Just a kind of physical memory.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said.
“No.”
“It did,” she said.
“True.”
“But now it doesn’t.”
“Are we getting metaphorical?” I said.
She smiled again and nodded.
“Yes,” she said.
“This, what we have,” I said, “is an earned relationship. Of course there would be scars.”
“And the time when we were separated? When I was with somebody else?”
“That’s a big scar,” I said. “But it’s also when we both did the most to earn what we’ve got.”
“You truly know that?” she said.
“I do. I’ve never liked it much, but I know what we got from it.”
She continued to trace the scar on my chest. Then she looked at me again. Her eyes were luminous.
“No pain, no gain,” she said.