Other People's Houses(9)

“Your boyfriend left, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry if I ruined the mood.” Frances kept an even tone as she stood and went to put her cup in the sink, although it was clear she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the mood.

Anne turned and walked toward the door. “No problem, he’ll be back. Or he won’t, who knows.”

Frances followed her. “Why are you being so cavalier about it? You know you’re going to get caught, don’t you?”

Anne paused, searching her friend’s face. “Are you going to tell Charlie?”

Frances shrugged. “No. He’s not my husband.”

“Are you going to tell Michael?”

“Of course. He is my husband.”

“Do you think he’ll tell Charlie?”

“I have no idea. Anne, you’ve been on the planet for over four decades. You read books. You watch the news. You should have anticipated getting found out, because it always happens. It always happens, Anne, and you knew that going in. You just didn’t care.”

Anne opened the door and stood there for a moment. “It’s not that I didn’t care, it’s that I’ve lost my mind. I really think I’ve gone insane. I don’t feel anything anymore, it’s just a blank white sheet. And the worst part is I don’t even care that I don’t care. I don’t miss feelings at all.” She turned and looked at Frances with cool, tearless eyes. “Horny is the only emotion I’ve felt for the last six months.”

Frances was cutting. “Horny isn’t an emotion, Anne. It’s a glandular condition of the young, which you are not. Depression isn’t an emotion, either, but many people find therapy and medication a lot more effective than having sex with a college student.”

“He’s not a college student. He’s a teacher at the art college.”

“I don’t give a shit what he is, Anne, it’s not like I’m ever going to be his friend.”

A neighbor walked by with her small dog, looking over at the raised voices. Anne and Frances both nodded and waved, and the neighbor nodded back, then paused for an awkward moment while her dog peed on the lawn. She made the classic eye roll that said, Sorry, my dog’s peeing on your grass, what can you do, I can hardly drag him off trailing piss across the sidewalk, and the two women at the door smiled and waited.

As the lady moved off Anne suddenly sighed and walked away, and Frances turned and shut the door. Back to work, everyone, nothing to see here.



* * *



? ? ?

Across the street, Bill Horton looked up at the sound of a door slamming. Anne Porter was walking away from Frances Bloom’s house, carrying a bag of something. He watched her, noting the cool way she moved, the slenderness of her figure accented by the simple jeans and loose sweater she wore. She was one of those women you couldn’t help noticing, whatever the context. They came in all shapes and sizes these women, the women he mentally labeled “alluring.” It was an old word, a word his father would have used, but it worked. All women could be attractive, many women were sexy, lots and lots of them were appealing and intelligent and funny and loving, but only a select few were like Anne, unreachable and, he mentally shrugged, alluring.

Now she was getting into her car, her hand on the top of the door the last thing he saw; her slender wrist torquing as she lowered herself suddenly filled his mind with the thought of seeing that wrist against a pillow as he pushed himself into her. Her car pulled away, carrying the image with it. He sat back from his desk and laughed at himself. In his forties, currently separated from a woman less timeless than Anne, but much warmer, he hadn’t had sex for nearly a year and sometimes the teenage boy who lived in his dick appeared. He didn’t even like Anne very much; there was something mocking that went along with her elegance, but you didn’t need to like a woman to imagine fucking her. He wondered how different human history would have been had evolution selected for that.

The phone rang, and he knew immediately it was his wife, Julie. Right now they were apart, but for Bill the separation was only physical.

“Hello, you.” Her voice was lovely, as ever; it might have been the thing he missed most about her. He’d always loved listening to her talk: to him, to the guy at the grocery store, to their son, even to their lawyer. Deep and melodious, with a laugh always buried somewhere inside it, it was what he’d been attracted to first. He’d heard her talking to someone else behind the library shelves, and managed to wander around in time to see her. He’d found himself staring at books about accountancy, hoping she would notice him. She had.

“Hello, yourself,” he replied now, a dozen years later, still in love.

“How’s today?”

Bill frowned, trying to remember. “Fine. Frances took him off to school. I’m working on twenty-four seconds of music to go behind a dancing . . . hang on . . .” He looked on his desk for a piece of paper. “. . . a dancing Danish.”

“Danish what?”

“No, just Danish. The pastry.”

His wife laughed, then coughed. “What is it dancing about? Is it happily dancing because it’s thrilled by its frosting, or is it drunkenly dancing alone in the liquor aisle?”

“Is your cough worse?”

“No. Tell me about the Danish.”