We’re on the Walnut Street bus and stuck in the Saturday night traffic at Rittenhouse Square. The bus shakes when it’s idling, so it’s shaking, and there are advertisements above the windows. One reads: Leaking Roof? Another reads: Vigilante Lawyer. Another reads: SEPTA 4th of July Routes. It’s September.
We left Christine and Thomas, at their apartment with the piano, a half hour before. Thomas said he had to have a piano even if he was only staying in Philadelphia for five months. I thought that was the best thing I’d heard in some time.
Anne didn’t want to leave Christine and Thomas. She didn’t want to leave that night and she hadn’t wanted to leave other nights.
“Ask anyone,” I say, not looking at her.
“I don’t care about other people,” she says, staring out the window.
“You shouldn’t say that to me. People don’t say those things.”
“It’s just a thought, maybe you’ve grown up.”
“It wouldn’t be any different.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know, Anne. Jesus fucking Christ.”
The bus driver keeps inching forward and then hitting the brakes. I lean forward and try to see the sign for Butcher and Singer across the park, but all I see is Anne’s reflection: her wide-set eyes and the buttons of her dress. I don’t know why I want to see the sign. The one time my parents were in the city they took us there for dinner and Anne hated it.
“You ever notice how hairy Christine’s arms are? I can’t believe your arms aren’t hairy. You’re hairy everywhere.”
“You shouldn’t say things like that to me,” she says, her eyes still locked on the window and her orange dress coming back at us. “Remember when you told me to shave my stomach before we went to the beach?”
I nudge her and point toward the window across the aisle. “This is where Sarah’s office is,” I say. “That building.”
“Who’s Sarah?”
“She’s my psychologist.”
“You don’t have a psychologist,” she says, squinting, trying to see through the window.
“Not right now, but later, before I leave.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She crosses her arms and rubs them with her hands. “This bus is freezing.”
“I’ll go on Wednesdays. I won’t teach that semester on Wednesdays, so I’ll see Sarah on Wednesdays.”
“That’s nice, Ben. Who’s going to pay for it, your parents?” she says, grinning, still rubbing her arms.
“Probably,” I say. “We’ll have one, too. He’s a big black man and his name is Tim. And you’ll have one for yourself. He’s Indian and you like to say his name. We both get really sad. I can’t quit crying and you hate me for it.”
“That’s because you’re a baby.”
“So you believe me?”
“Sure. You’re writing the story.”
“Your stomach can be hairy if you want it to be,” I say and smile although I know I shouldn’t.
“And you can be a stupid alcoholic if you want. That’s what you are anyway.”
I sit there for a beat or two thinking about Christine. I’d never met such a small, blond, French girl. Anne said she was perfectly French. I had my doubts. There couldn’t be many like her. Thomas was the same. The two of them charmed me every damn time I was around them.
“You know I fell in love with Christine the first time I saw her,” I say, the bus inching and braking and inching and braking. “She was dancing at Café Clave with that gray-haired guy and I was standing outside with you and you had just introduced me to Thomas. Can you believe that I fell in love with her with you standing right beside me?”
“I can believe it,” she says. “You wrote that in another one of your stories.”
The bus starts to gain speed and we pass Holy Trinity Church. Anne looks at the brick and the stone and I wonder if she’s even seeing it. I wonder if she knows that it’s where I go for the AA meeting on Monday nights. Right there in the basement. Right there.
We start up the incline toward the Walnut Street Bridge and then the Schuylkill is below us and a building to the north tells us in green lights that it’s 12:46 am. Anne hated that I wanted to leave at midnight and that the second bottle of wine was only half finished.
“I thought I was in love with Thomas, so I got you back,” she says, and the reflection of her orange dress is even brighter against the black over the river. “But you already wrote that, too.”
“And you also touch yourself and think about that skinny professor of yours.”
“That’s harmless.”
“Well I’ve never thought about Christine by myself. I have thought about your little sister, though.”
“That’s enough,” she says, shaking her head.
“Do you think buses can get tickets?” I say.
“Maybe.”
“He must be going fifty.”
“Good. I’m tired,” she says, then pauses and looks over her shoulder at me. “My little sister, really?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry about that. I won’t do it anymore.”
“Well good. She’s too young.”
“But never Christine. She’s too skinny. Maybe it’s because she’s French. I don’t know. Do you think of Thomas?”
“No. He’s too sweet. I’m not in love with him anymore.”
“Because you’re in love with me?”
She shrugs and looks back out the window at Penn’s campus as it passes. It’s dark beyond the florescent lights that turn the sidewalk whiter than it is. And past the dark locust trees and the stomped grass in the quad is a four-story brick building the color of the trees’ bark when it rains. That’s where the professor’s office is and I try to picture it, but all I can see is Anne’s hand reaching back and pulling at my thigh trying to force all of me into her.
“Do you do it in his office?” I ask.
On the bus, after I ask her this, I see her hand in my mind, and then later, after I’ve left, I will see it. After we’ve fought over the drinking countless times. After I threw a coffee mug against the wall. After I broke the lamp her mother gave her. After all of this, and I am back in Kentucky, what I will see is her hand. That, and her walking across our bedroom in nothing but a pair of blue knee socks.
“He asked me to his study.”
I’m not even sure if she owns a pair of blue knee socks. I think the hand is the truth, but I could be wrong.
“You already told me about that. You didn’t go because you are all talk.”
“I know,” she says.
“Would you go if you weren’t in love with me? Did he really say, study?”
“He’s too old. And, yes.”
“So how does he get you wet?”
“Don’t say things like that. It sounds horrible.”
“It does. I won’t say it anymore.” I pause, and place my hands under my thighs to warm them. “Do you remember the third or fourth time we fucked at your place back in Chicago? The place on Clark? The first one? The one with the purple room?”
She doesn’t answer. The bus stops at The Lofts and the three college girls sitting in the front, two in baby doll dresses and one in pencil-thin jeans, stumble forward and laugh and then walk down the steps to the too-white concrete. I watch them and know that Anne is watching me in the window watching them.
I turn to Anne and smell her neck and put her thin silver necklace into my mouth. It tastes of salt and I push it back out with my tongue and let it fall against her neck again.
“Well do you remember when you reached back and grabbed my thigh?”
She turns from the window and sits up straight in the plastic seat and I’m thinking that her back is probably bothering her because she was slouching and I’m wondering what it must feel like to be so pretty that the world never seems to be enough.
“So you don’t remember or you just don’t want to answer me?”
She rests her head against my shoulder and laces her fingers though mine.
“I’m not sure if it happened either, but it’s all I’ll think about when I’m gone. For months I’ll see your hand and you in those blue knee socks. When this is all over and I’m back in Louisville, that’s what I’ll see and I’ll start seeing someone new and when I’m about to fall asleep and she’s there beside me, I’ll have to remind myself not to say, Goodnight, Anne. And then I’ll have dreams with you in them and I’ll be calling your name over and over again, but you won’t turn around. You won’t be in your knee socks or your orange dress. You’ll be in the purple wool coat I bought for you. I don’t know what you’ll be doing. But either you can’t hear me or you don’t want to hear me and when I wake up I’ll be afraid that I’ve been saying your name over and over again in my sleep. Can you believe that’s going to happen?”
“Why do you keep talking about it?”
I jerk at the sound of her voice and she straightens. I lean back and study her for a second, the dark curls against her neck, the end of her eyebrow and how close it is to her hairline.
“Did you hear everything that I said?”
“Most of it. All of it, I think.”
“I thought I was just writing.”
“That’s all you ever did around me. That’s why I wanted you to leave.”
“It’s just what I do.”
“I know. And it’s annoying. Girls don’t like it when all you do is write instead of talking to them and taking walks with them. Even when you do, you’re still writing. It’s the most annoying thing.”
“You’re always annoyed. It’s because you’re so pretty.”
“It makes you want to fuck me,” she says, smiling without showing her teeth.
“Yes,” I admit. “If you weren’t annoyed, I would want to fuck you less. It’s true.”
“And, no,” she says, “I can’t believe that’s going to happen and I wish you would quit talking about it.”
“But I can’t quit thinking about it. There’s no way, if you know it’s going to happen, to not think about it.”
“That’s not true. There are things that you know will happen that you don’t think about. Bad things and good things.”
“I’ve never been good at that.”
“I know. That’s why you have to start seeing Sarah the psychologist.”
“I thought you didn’t know about that,” I say, startled.
The streets are darker and the sidewalks are now brown under the streetlights. The driver keeps looking over his shoulder at us because we’re the only ones left. We’ve passed Holy Trinity Church five times and those college girls are asleep in their expensive apartments in the sky. If we were about to cross the Schuylkill again, we could see the building with the neon time running across the top, and it would read 3:18 am.
“I do. I know about her. And I know that you never think about other girls when you’re fucking me, but sometimes I think about other guys. I’ve thought about that professor and afterwards when I think about someone else I can’t look at you and I wish you wouldn’t hold me. I lie there and count the seconds until you get up and go to the bathroom. You never knew about that did you?”
“Nope. Didn’t know that one.”
“Sorry. We shouldn’t say all of these things.”
“It’s OK with me,” I say. “I’ve already been through the worst of it. You tell me you’re seeing someone after you move back to Chicago. You will tell me and I’ll want to kill him. I’ll want to drive to the city and catch him in the bedroom of your apartment in the bed I let you keep and I’ll want to see that he’s scared before I tell him that he should have never touched you.”
“That’s sweet.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I love you although I never tell you.”
“You should pull the cord,” I say.
“Why?” she says.
“Because it’s our stop.”
“Oh, right,” she says. “I forgot we were going home.”
Lex Sonne’s fiction has been published in the Chicago Reader, Hobart, New Madrid and elsewhere. He currently lives in Bardstown, Kentucky and is working on a collection of stories about Anne and Ben.