Al ordered the wine in a funny Italian accent. Krista fiddled with her beads and whispered something nice to her mother. Lydia insisted Christina try a bite of her “divine” corn-and-lobster salad.
Carmen felt flushed and warm with pleasure as she looked around at the animated faces. This was her family, weird as it was. She’d gone from a dysfunctional three to a completely haywire six.
Paul looked at her. It’s all good, he seemed to say.
She smiled. And the real bonanza was, she’d gotten Paul in the deal. Paul, who was the kindest, most patient person she knew.
She thought back to last summer, the day she’d met Lydia and Krista and Paul for the first time. She’d been furious at her father. She’d thought it was an ending, but it had turned out to be a beginning.
She looked at her mother, bearing up gracefully. Al and Lydia were a couple; Christina was alone. Christina always bore up gracefully. As a single mother with a full-time job. As a person with a broken heart.
Her mother deserved a beginning too.
At 9:15 the phone rang, and Lena pounced on it. The phone was her worst enemy and her best friend, but she never knew which until she answered it.
“Hello?” she said, barely disguising her eagerness.
“Hi.”
It was her best friend.
“Kostos.” How she loved his name. She loved just saying it. “Where are you?”
“At the subway station.”
Her stomach commenced the spin cycle. She forced herself to pause, slow it down. “In … which … city?”
“In your city.”
“No.” Please, please. “Really?” Her voice sounded squeaky.
“Yes. Can you come and get me?”
“Yes. Yes. Right away. Just let me, um … lie to my parents.”
He laughed. “Wisconsin Avenue side.”
“Bye.”
It was almost too good that she still had the Traveling Pants. She pulled them on and lied hastily to her mother about going for ice cream with Carmen. She flew out the door and into her car, blessing her parents for letting her use it whenever she liked.
He was there waiting for her, a silhouette standing solidly on both feet. He wasn’t a dream or a hoax. She buzzed down the passenger-side window so he could see that it was her. He was hardly in the car when he kissed her big and full on her mouth and cradled the back of her head in his hands. “I couldn’t stay away,” he told her breathlessly. “I took the train right after work.”
He kissed her more and some more until finally she remembered she was at the wheel of a car on a major thoroughfare. She looked up, delirious, trying to bring the streaming streetlights into focus. “Where should we go?”
His face was vivid, locked onto hers. He didn’t care.
“Do you think we should do something besides kiss?” she asked. “I mean, should we keep some semblance of a date? Are you hungry or anything?” Her body was most eager for the making out.
He laughed. “I am hungry. I do want to take you out. But, no, I don’t really want to do anything where I can’t touch you for more than a few minutes.”
Love inspired her. “I think I have an idea.”
She drove to the A&P. She supervised the buying of raw cookie dough and a quart of cold two-percent milk from the refrigerated aisle, a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts with pink icing from the cereal aisle. They found a lot of ways to touch each other—his hands on her waist, her hip pressed to the side of his, his lips, briefly, on her neck—even there under the squinting grocery store lights.
She tried to drive as carefully as possible, speeding along the forests of Rock Creek Parkway, even though he kissed her elbow and touched her hair. She drove along the Potomac River, and the glowing marble faces of the monuments rose up around them like an ancient city. The road was nearly empty but for them. The glittering water and the pale arched bridges were so beautiful they were struck silent.
For once it was a simple matter to park. They carried their bounty in a brown paper bag to the wide white stone steps and gazed up reverently at Mr. Lincoln, floodlit and enthroned in his marble temple.
“This is the most beautiful time to see the monuments, but nobody ever comes,” Lena explained, gesturing at the emptiness around them.
Some people might have thought that the solemn gaze of a great president might cool a person’s passion, but Lena disagreed. They ate and they kissed, deeper and more involved each time. She pinched off pieces of cookie dough and he gazed at her in her green tank top. He considered her shoulders, her neck, her mouth as though in a rapture. Her beauty through his eyes made her take a kind of pleasure in it she’d never felt before.
Was she making him as happy as he was making her? Was that even possible? But then again, could she feel this good, this close, if he weren’t feeling at least some of it too?
It seemed a fitting transition to go from the Great Emancipator to the very stars themselves, but you couldn’t see them when you were too near the lights. So they wandered off the landscaped paths to a dark, private clearing, where they lay on their backs, overlapping one ankle each. It was exceedingly thoughtful of the rest of the world to leave them completely alone.
The warm air was sweet tonight. The thick summer leaves were sweet. Tonight, even the garbage overflowing the rim of the can was sweet.
Some nights the stars winked and teased coldly from a great distance. Other nights they seemed to smolder and urge one on in a personal way. Tonight was the second kind of night. Lena felt grateful that it was summer, and that when they were together they had no ceiling pressing these feelings down.
First just their ankles touched. Then forearms and hands. Then, boldly, Lena found herself, her whole body on top of his, curving into all his parts and places. “Is this too fast?” she asked him.
“No.” He said it forcefully, as though afraid she might stop. “No and yes. Too fast and too slow.” His chest moved as he laughed. “But please don’t stop.”
She let her hands float over his stomach. “Do you think you could take a short break from being a gentleman and start again tomorrow?”
Gently he rolled her over so that he was on top of her, but was suspending most of his weight on his hands. He buried his head in her neck. “Maybe. A little.” It was muffled in her earlobe. An exalted little shiver shot down her backbone.
Relishing her present and her very near future, she watched him bend over her stomach and kiss her private skin. Slowly lifting up her shirt to reveal tiny bits of her at a time, he lavished kisses over her belly button and upward to her ribs. In pure, delicate disbelief at this outer, unimagined possibility of pleasure, she felt him open her bra and sweep the light cotton of her shirt over her head. He looked at her with all the veneration he’d had when he’d seen so much of her in the olive grove last summer. But then she’d belonged only to herself, and she’d wildly covered her body with her hands. Tonight she belonged to him, and she wanted nothing more than for him to see her.
Without waiting she pulled his shirt off too. She pressed her naked self against his naked self.
Memory is funny, and it does tell lies. But tonight, the look of bare Kostos in the moonlight was no less beautiful than the bare Kostos she had seen in the pond in Santorini and had imagined all those times since. Her spirit flooded her body from end to end and tip to tip, and she thought of a line from a song she loved.
All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free.
Carmen liked the idea of baking cookies with Jesse and Joe. As she’d cheerfully grabbed the butterscotch chips and rainbow sprinkles from the grocery store shelves on her way to work, it had seemed to her the kind of project a really fine baby-sitter would do.
But now, when faced with the actual spectacle, it seemed less fun.
“Jesse, honey, lightly. Just a little tap,” she begged him.
Jesse nodded and smashed the egg against the side of the metal bowl. Hundreds of tiny shell bits slid down into the batter.
He looked up at her for approval.