A Stolen Summer. Allegra Huston

placed his hands on her upper arms. She allowed it, without protest, but without moving closer herself—keeping her route of excuses clear. As his face neared hers, she shut her eyes and thought, Here it comes. This changes me: from a boring wife into . . . What? Perhaps just a different kind of boring wife, the kind who cheats. But I am not cheating, she insisted silently. I’m just reminding myself what it feels like to be wanted.

      The man kissed like a camel. When she thought about it later, she couldn’t help giggling. There was something prehensile about his upper lip. It snuffled at her. Her mind went to the camels in the zoo—when Allan was little, she’d taken him to the Bronx Zoo for four birthdays in a row—the way they scooped up tussocks of hay, their upper lips twisting and curling in a way that had struck her as almost obscene. They always looked mangy, too, with their hair (or was it fur?) falling out in tufts. She’d understood it might be due to the time of year, since Allan’s birthday fell in May, but still she held it against them.

      That this man was, in that way, very un-camel-like—perfectly groomed, someone who made the most of every iota of his good looks—didn’t help at all. Clearly, he considered himself an excellent kisser. Maybe other women love this, she thought. She endured it until he stopped to invite her inside for a lunchtime glass of wine, which, she understood well, would be drunk, if drunk at all, naked and horizontal. No, she said, I’m so sorry, I’m running behind schedule already. The rush of walking away from him was more thrilling than the kiss.

      Letting the warm water of the shower run over her, she plays back in her mind the quantum leap she took: the beautiful young man, the slow sunset, the gargoyles grinning at them, the hundreds of feet of deadly fall behind her. As the scene takes on shape and detail, it seems to be happening to another woman while she, Eve, watches from above. But she can still feel the imprint of Micajah’s hands on her body, his cells on her skin. She got into the shower to wash them away. They are not going.

      Eve used to like the way Larry would get up and shower after sex; she appreciated his cleanliness, and it gave her minutes of solitude, which she came to hold precious. She’d become so used to faking orgasm that she was hardly conscious of doing it anymore: moaning at appropriate intervals, digging her fingers into his back, saying his name, giving a little cry and shuddering when it was all getting long and she hoped he’d finish soon. The act had come to include the acting too. She didn’t think of it as faking—simply as participating, “not just lying there,” convincing herself by these sounds and movements that she did still love Larry. Yet some part of her needed to recover, to reunify her spirit without his energy there to intrude. The sound of the water while she lay in bed helped her bring her split self back together.

      Now, she finds it hard to shut off the running water. As long as she stays in the shower, unable to hear the door open or the phone ring, she occupies a lacuna in time, with no demands and no necessity to corral her identity into a user-friendly package. When she turns off the water, she will have to decide who she is: a woman, with all the potential the word suggests, or a wife. She will have to accept that she has cheated on her husband, and that all effects have a cause, and all causes have effects.

      I need to have more fun, she thinks aimlessly, as she waits for sleep to take her. Then I would not be so quick to lose my head.

      Micajah called it fun, and she agreed. But that’s not what she means, in her drowsy state. What does she mean? Bumper cars? Bridge? Line dancing? When she was twenty-two, before Allan was born, Eve might have described herself as “fun-loving,” if “fun-loving” hadn’t meant being what her mother called loose, an easy lay. Probably nobody uses that term these days; it sounds so quaint and innocent. It must mean “someone who loves fun” again, since there’s no such thing as loose anymore. What used to be loose is normal; it’s called hooking up, friends with benefits, things like that. Eve used to laugh at her mother for dividing girls into “good” and “bad,” but even though the crude moral judgment seemed antiquated, there was still an uneasy distinction between girls who slept around and girls who didn’t. Those who didn’t, like Eve, looked down—with distaste or contempt, envy or frustration—at those who did. Those who did looked down at those who didn’t with pity and maybe contempt—and, Eve realizes now, at least sometimes with envy too.

      Eve feels sad for these girls, herself included, all wishing to be what they weren’t. As a teenager Eve longed for a clothes-hanger body, while her flat-chested friends stuffed their bras and later went under the knife. The shy girls longing to be outgoing; the loud girls wishing they could be the hunted rather than the hunters.

      Men too. Larry is a sheep who wants to be a wolf. Did I marry a sheep? Eve wonders hazily, and the thought lands like a muffled punch. Certainly she didn’t marry a wolf in disguise. The wolf skin fits Larry awkwardly, but he is determined to grow into it. I need to sleep, she tells herself firmly. Count sheep. Count Larrys. She giggles, punch-drunk. Separate the sheep from the goats. Is goatish better than sheepish? Everything is better than sheepish. Larry is not goatish—that’s what satyrs are: ravening for sex, hairy, dirty. Who, or what, is Larry? He gets more insubstantial by the day. It’s not only that she knows him less, but there seems to be less of him there. As if he’s shape-shifting himself gradually out of existence.

      I am shape-shifting too, she thinks. But we can’t both do it. Someone has to hold the fort. If one of us flies out too far, the other has to be the tether. That’s a marriage.

      “You have got to be kidding.”

      It’s six p.m. Deborah’s store is closed. Deborah herself, skinny and angular, reclines on a curvy Victorianish sofa, her bobbed white-blonde head thrown back against the gold velvet upholstery. A bottle of chardonnay sits on a fake marble column capital beside her. She sips from an antique cut-crystal glass.

      “It’s a beautiful decorative object.”

      “It’s a catastrophe in a case. Even the case is a catastrophe. What the fuck, Eve?”

      “I couldn’t resist. It needed rescuing.”

      “Go volunteer at the animal shelter. Or find a therapist.”

      “You really don’t think any of your clients would want it?” Eve is enjoying this. And so is Deborah. They both know there was never any question whether Deborah would want this broken thing.

      “Honey, my store does not run on mercy bucks. Those decorator queens are flattery-operated. Every one of them wants to be told I kept back something special just for her. And if it’s smashed up, it ain’t special.”

      With her left hand she takes a swig of chardonnay, while with her right hand she tops up Eve’s glass—another antique, which doesn’t match Deborah’s.

      “Killer score on the birdcage, though.”

      Deborah’s shop is schizophrenic. At first glance it’s a conventional mix of grandmotherly furniture, silver and knickknacks, amusing needlepoint, and a riot of cushions. Above head height it is crammed with chandeliers, some antique, some new, and some strange mutations that she creates herself out of pieces of other chandeliers, bed frames, pot racks, old gates, and birdcages, covering them with gold and silver leaf and hanging them with crystal drops, feathers, Christmas ornaments, Mexican tin milagros, and anything glittery she can find. Mostly she sells them online, and to interior designers from New York.

      “I think it’s special,” says Eve.

      “Well, chiquita, of course you do,” says Deborah, patting her hand in a condescending way.

      “Seriously. I went to the New York Public Library and I couldn’t find anything like it.”

      “You think it could be one of those million-dollar violins that people murder each other over?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe.”

      “Any bloodstains?”

      “None