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They wish Carol’s colleagues goodnight and leave the Oak Room, together, shortly after one in the morning.
It’s raining steadily when they step out onto the sidewalk and Carol accepts the doorman’s offer to hail them a cab. “Come,” she says, taking up Therese’s hand and helping her into the back seat. Therese slides across the worn leather to the streetside window and Carol ducks in after, tucking in her skirts and pulling the door shut behind.
“Address?” The cabbie asks over his shoulder as he resets his meter.
In the slanting streetlight, Carol catches Therese’s eye and wordlessly tips her head toward the driver. She watches as Therese swallows, then leans forward to give the driver her address. Carol remembers the street from her brief visit the year before, how jealous she was at the time of the tiny signs of Richard’s casual, entitled presence. She wonders what the space is like now, and whether Therese will invite her in.
Therese settles back as the cab pulls away from the curb, eyes on the quiet streets, the parked cars, the lights that flicker from yellow to red, then back to green, as they cross Manhattan. She looks everywhere but at Carol, though she leaves a hand resting on the seat between them in silent invitation. Carol allows herself to reach out, sliding a gloved hand, palm up, beneath Therese’s gently curving fingers. She closes her eyes and lets herself feel the way the seams of soft leather caress Therese’s bare palm, trace the underside of each digit to the tip, then back again until they’re palm to palm, her fingers tucked beneath the pulse point of Therese’s wrist.
Therese swallows again, a slight catching sound in the silence. She flexes her own hand in return, fingertip grazing the gap between the glove and the sleeve of her coat that leaves Carol’s wrist bare. She finds, by touch, the delicate gold bracelet Carol is wearing, slipping her index finger beneath it and downward until she’s encircled Carol’s wrist in a light, possessive grasp.
It’s Carol’s turn to swallow, a soft click in her own ears, as she looks anywhere but Therese’s daring touch.
The swish of tires on wet pavement, the click click click of the turn signal, the low mumble of the radio that will keep the driver company through the long, wet night. In the headlights of passing cars, the yellow pools of streetlights, Carol studies Therese’s face out of the corner of her eye.
They haven’t spoken, yet, about what Therese means, coming for her at the Plaza tonight: Carol had invited her, yes. Hoped she might appear. But nevertheless Therese is (as she has been from the beginning) unexpected. It had gone so poorly at the Ritz that evening, Carol’s own desperation driving her to say things she knew would only push Therese further away. Come and live with me . I love you . They weren’t lies: She’s through telling lies, to herself and to Therese most of all. Come live with me . She wanted her so. I love you . She did. But Carol knew she’d lost the right to speak either of those truths truth aloud the day she’d slipped away from Therese in the early morning hours, half a continent away, in and boarded her flight to New York.
Losing Therese had, at the time, seemed as painful and as necessary as the chasm that has opened up between herself and Rindy. Rindy, who won’t smile in her presence and refuses to look Carol in the eye.
Carol had left Therese for the sake of Rindy; she had left Rindy for the sake of herself. Someday, perhaps, Rindy will understand.
Writing to invite Therese to the Ritz Carol had refused to hope. But hope had risen, unbidden, the moment she had walked through the door of the restaurant and seen Therese seated, waiting, the soft brown curl of her bobbed hair brushing the nape of her neck. The pain of it -- the pain of hope -- had made Carol desperate and brittle: Come and live with me . Said as if she were indifferent to the answer.
As if they weren’t both exquisitely aware of how many hours they had sat, together, an open telephone line stretched between them, weeping soundlessly.
No. Therese had said. No. I don’t think so .
Carol had assumed, in that moment, that the no was rejection. That Therese was politely reminding Carol that she’d had her chance -- chances, actually, Therese had been generous to a fault -- and Carol had failed as miserably at this, at loving Therese, as she has with everyone else she’s truly cared for.
And yet mere hours later here they are, pulling up at the curb by Therese’s apartment building.
“Are you coming up?” Therese asks, quietly, in a voice that Carol can’t parse. She opens her handbag and pulls out her pocketbook.
“I’d like that. Let me--” she fumbles in her handbag for the fare. They get out of the cab on opposite sides, meeting on the sidewalk as the car pulls away. Therese fumbles in her handbag under the harsh bulb above the stoop, pulling out keys and letting them into the hall. Somewhere above them, a radio is playing, an infant fretting. Carol’s heels echo on the stairs as they climb.
While Therese unlocks her apartment door, Carol glances over at the telephone that hangs, accusingly, on the wall. The sounds of this landing are familiar to her. In her purse, right now, is a worn scrap of paper with this number printed on it. Abby had given the number to her, scrawled on the back of their restaurant bill, the first time they met after Carol walked out on Harge and the lawers. Before then, to have Therese’s number would have been incriminating. After, Carol had known that she had forfeited the right to use it.
Call her , Abby had said. Carol had shaken her head, wordlessly, but folded the number all the same and slipped it into her billfold.
“You’ve painted,” Carol says, when they step into the apartment. The walls that had once been eggshell white are now a cool mint, faded rose, pale yellow. “What lovely colors.”
“Do you think so?” Therese asks, as she toes off her flats and hangs her coat on the hall closet. “I needed a change but I don’t know now whether I shouldn’t have gone with something bolder.” She holds out a hand for Carol’s coat and Carol relinquishes it, setting her bag and scarf on the hall table next to Therese’s handbag and what looks like the previous day’s mail.
“Coffee?” Therese is already crossing the hall into the kitchen. “I only have instant, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, please,” Carol responds. She steps out of her own shoes and follows, leaning against the doorjamb to watch while Therese fills the kettle and strikes a match to light the gas. Once the flame is steady under the kettle she opens a cupboard and pulls out two mismatched mugs and a jar of Nescafe.
“Did you have a nice time, at Phil’s party?” Carol asks, to break the silence between them before it becomes even more strained. It’s the wrong question, she knows, the moment the words are out of her mouth. She never had been good at finding the right questions.
“Not especially, no.” Therese says. Her back is turned and Carol wishes she could read the line of her spine. “I hadn’t planned on going but --”
“-- I made a mess of things. Therese, I’m --”
“No -- no! Stop.” Therese turns, back to the counter, fingers gripping the edge of the worn vinyl countertops. “Carol. Please. Just-- stop.”
Carol digs her nails into the flesh of her own elbows and wishes for a cigarette.
“You said.” Therese takes a breath. “You said you loved me.”
“I did. I do.”
“You said you loved me, Carol. And then you sent me away. ‘You should go ahead,’ you said. To Phil’s party. Like it didn’t matter . Like --”
“Therese --”
“-- like you were doing me a favor, Carol. Is that what you thought it was? Some sort of act of benevolence to let me go? Leave Abby to pick up the pieces? Let me call you, night after night, and --” her voice catches. “-- hoping I’d convince myself you didn’t care ?”
“Therese, I --”
“I had to hear from Abby, Carol. Abby had to tell me you had stopped seeing the psychotherapist. Abby had to tell me you’d given up custody Rindy. That you were moving to the city. And then. After months of silence, you invite me for drinks. And after barely five minutes of -- of ‘how well you’ve done for yourself. I’m so proud. You’re so much better without me’--” she says it in a mocking tone that makes Carol flinch. She knows all too well the social fictions she retreats behind whenever she wants what she knows she can’t have.
“ That’s when you ask me to move in with you?”
“That was wrong of me,” Carol whispers.
“Yes,” Therese says. “It was.” She turns back to the counter and unscrews the lid of the coffee jar so she can spoon the instant coffee grounds into the awaiting mugs.
Carol wonders if she should go.
“I didn’t want to be at Phil’s party,” Therese says, quietly, to the counter top. “I wanted to be with you. It’s what I’ve wanted since -- since Ohio. Since Pittsburgh. Since Christmas. Except you keep pushing me away.” She sets the spoon down, leaning her forehead against the cupboard door in front of her. “Carol, I can’t--”
The kettle on the stove begins to whistle. Therese goes to the stove and turns off the burner. Then picks up the kettle only to put it down again and turn to face Carol.
“That’s why I left Phil’s and came to find you. Because I’m an adult, Carol. I’m a grown woman who gets to make her own -- her own fucking decisions about who and what she wants.” Carol flinches at the word; a word Harge would have used, when he was drunk. A word she’s never heard on Therese’s lips before. “And I’ve chosen you. So you don’t get to sit there -- sit there in the fucking Ritz and tell me I’ve ‘blossomed’ without you. You do not get to tell me you love me and then send me off to a party with dull people who are. Not. You.”
Carol realizes, then, that she’s begun to cry. She puts a hand up as if to stifle a sob -- although she’s shaking in perfect silence -- and lets herself slide to the linoleum floor. She’s not even sure why she’s crying. It’s just all too much .
Then Therese is kneeling before her, pulling Carol into her arms, and Carol clings to her, sobbing even harder into Therese’s shoulder. Because Therese has looked at Carol as though Carol can hide nothing from her. And still Therese wants her.
“I never-- I never, don’t think --” she tries, “--darling.”
“I don’t,” Therese says, voice thick with tears of her own, “I never did. Not really. I know. I know why you. Why you had to --”
“I didn’t. I couldn’t.” Carol pulls back and gropes for the edge of her sweater. The mascara is going to stain, even if she sends it to the cleaners, but her face is a mess. “God, Therese, I couldn’t. I thought I could, for Rindy. But it would have killed me.”
“I know.” Therese pulls open a drawer to the left and gropes blindly for what turns out to be a wad of paper napkins. She offers half of them them to Carol and then blows her own nose and wipes her own eyes with what’s left. “I thought about it too. With Richard. I thought about saying yes to him. I thought maybe I could make everyone happy. But I knew -- I knew in the end it wouldn’t make anyone happy, especially not me.”
Carol coughs, damply, letting her head drop back against the wall. “God. If I’d been half so brave, at your age --”
“Do you wish --” Therese looks down at her own knees, picking absently at a run in her stockings. “Do you wish things had gone differently with Abby?”
Carol rolls her head against the wall in a shake of denial. This, at least, is a question she can answer. “No. Abby and I -- for all that we grew up together, we wanted -- we want different things from life. I was Abby’s excuse to be always on the move, traveling, seeing new places, new people. I married Harge because I wanted to have a home . And Harge wanted someone to make a home for him. I knew at the time -- some part of me knew -- I wouldn’t be able to make the kind of home he wanted but --” she lifts a shoulder. “Anyway. Even without Harge, Abby and I would have realized sooner or later we weren’t right for each other.”
Therese nods, pulling her legs under her and pushing herself to her feet. “I can see that.” She goes back to the stove and opens the box of matches to relight the flame under the kettle.
“I missed you,” Carol lets herself say, watching Therese move around the kitchen, returning the jar of coffee to its place, setting the coffee mugs by the stove as the water reheats, pulling out a small glass bottle of milk from the icebox humming in the corner. “I would watch the telephone ring and know it was you. I would pick it up and listen, even when I knew they were wire-tapping my phone and I couldn’t respond. I would leave the phone off the hook and sit there, listening to you breathing. To the air between us.”
She pulls in a careful breath, weighing her words for truthfulness. “Abby and I -- when it ended, we -- we settled into -- it works well, for us, what she and I have. As a friendship. I didn’t --”
The kettle begins to whistle again, and Therese pulls it off the heat, pours the boiling water into the cups, and stirs.
“I missed you every. Damn. Day. In a way I never missed Abby. I tried. I tried -- after the divorce was settled I thought, ‘She’ll have moved on.’ Abby told me about your job. Your photographs. I saw your show at Galerie de Lumière back in March. I thought it would be enough, knowing you were living -- living well . But I miss you. I reach out for you in the street when I see something I want to show you. I wake up expecting you to be there beside me. I miss you the way I miss Rindy and not at all the way I miss Rindy. I love you and I want -- I want to try . I know I’m not -- I know I’m a mess. I know I can’t --”
“Here.” Therese bends down to press the cup of coffee into Carol’s hands, steaming and tan with milk but bracingly unsugared -- the way Carol prefers it. When Carol reaches up to take the mug from her hand, Therese releases the mug into her grasp and straightens her back. “I’m going to make up the bed.”
Carol closes her eyes and sips her coffee, listening to the unaccountably soothing sounds of Therese moving about the bedroom. A closet door opens, then shuts again. She hears the soft sound of a blanket being shaken out. The scrape of a dresser drawer opening, then closing again.
She is so tired. Her eye sockets and sinuses burn from her storm of tears. She feels raw all over; her skin under her stockings itch and the strap of her brassiere pinches sharp beneath her breasts.
Her eyes are still closed when Therese’s footsteps sound in the hall and Therese’s hands unfold Carol’s fingers from around the half-finished cup of coffee.
“Mmm,” Carol murmurs, unwilling to open her eyes and too exhausted to ask whether Therese is planning to ask her to sleep on the couch.
But then Therese takes one of Carol’s coffee-warmed hands and pulls it forward, folding it around the back of her own thigh, so Carol’s fingertips brush where her garters hold up her nylon stockings. “Carol. Take me to bed?”
Carol blinks open her eyes to find Therese standing over her.
“To bed -- or to sleep?” She brushes the pads of her fingertips across the bare skin on the back of Therese’s thigh and feels Therese shiver.
“Either. Both. I’ve been missing you, too.”
Carol kneels up, pressing her face against Therese’s belly, then pulls herself to standing with her hands on either side of Therese’s narrow hips. Therese sighs, happily, and buries her face in Carol’s neck. Carol presses her own face against Therese’s cheek, listening to her own heartbeat and breathing in the scent of Therese’s shampoo and powder.
“Take me to bed, then,” Carol whispers into Therese’s hair.