Читать книгу Private Means - Cree LeFavour - Страница 8

He tried not to compare the woman he’d fallen for all those years ago—outdoorsy smell, bad-girl black jeans, highbred WASP confidence, quirky, geeky mind—to the woman he now knew. When they’d met, the seven-year age difference in his favor conferred a romantic seniority with what he hoped was a daddy-tinged sexiness of the older man heating her brain. The boon of a younger woman found its locus for him in what he’d quickly discovered was an unmarred body at the peak of physical perfection: sizable breasts high and taut, dimple-free ass that always seemed to hang halfway out of her too-small white cotton underwear, and the glorious, clean, fragrant cunt. He was evolved enough to know he must use the word only in his mind, and he did so with the greatest affection. To him, cunt captured a schoolboy’s fear, ignorance, and lust for the forbidden object. When he went down on her he did not want to think of the urethra, labia majora, labia minora, Bartholin’s glands, vulva, vagina, clitoris, and anus. But cunt, yes, that was a word.

The reckoning of her beauty, even now, was not insignificant. Of course he would not have married a beautiful but stupid woman. He wouldn’t have even married a beautiful but uninteresting woman. Alice was complete—a brainy biophysicist out of his league—at least he’d thought so at the time. They’d had just three years of what had felt like an inevitable coupling. It is written, he’d whisper to himself in jest when stray moments of doubt fogged his optimism. She moved into his apartment on Bleecker Street, they mingled their debts and assets, introduced each other to their respective parents, and, within a year, were engaged and then quickly married.

Alice got pregnant too fast. What a tired cliché that was. Or should he say he got Alice pregnant too fast? It hardly mattered. A mistake? She was a scientist for fuck’s sake—and he a doctor. He’d been hoping for years of blissful coupling, time for him to further establish his practice and time for her, most of all, to finish her research on the internal dynamics of starling flocks. He’d hoped she’d land a plum university or think tank job, but there hadn’t been time.

When Alice, her face puffy from crying, told him she was carrying not one but two fetuses, he’d heartlessly gone out without her and gotten flat drunk on gin. Later, they talked about it but agreed an abortion wasn’t for them even though Alice had already had one in college. The pregnancy of their shared future babies had felt different. As a couple they were fearful that in course, when their living children arrived, they’d be shadowed by the twins’ ghosts endlessly hinting at the possibility of unknowable lost charm, intelligence, and talent. They feared the absence might cast doubt as much on their ruthless decision as on the children they chose to keep.

The twins were the end of the financial trajectory he’d vaguely wanted for himself. Whatever it involved, its focus was on nicer things—a bigger apartment with a view and no street noise, tasteful furniture he chose rather than found or inherited, luxe hotels and restaurants, and not ordering the second-cheapest bottle of wine on the list. Through his practice his father had made a good life for himself and his two children. That’s all Peter wanted. Security. Sometimes he felt he’d attained it, but somehow the concept had morphed.

Alice wanted things he didn’t understand. Sure, there were nicer things to have now than there were in the 1960s and ’70s. Back then there had been a standard of quality that, once attained, need not be exceeded. There was such a thing as enough. Now there were seemingly unending tiers of quality, each claiming greater integrity and intrinsic value than the next. Did Alice need the $400 (at 50% off) organic duvet cover made from heirloom cotton in eco-friendly Italian mills she’d recently purchased for Bette’s (now her) bed? Eight hundred dollars for a twin duvet cover? It seemed impossibly expensive, but he was humble enough to acknowledge the possibility that he simply lacked the sensibility to appreciate fine things.

Just the night before, Alice had gone on about the repulsive juiciness of a pinot noir, its lack of finish and dimension. Tossing the wine down the sink, she’d been just about to pour the remainder in the bottle down after it when he stopped her. It tasted just fine to him. He drank it happily. Alice could and would buy something better and more expensive. It never occurred to him to object. He provided for his family. It was such an old-fashioned way to think of the purpose of his work, but it was accurate. He worked to supply his family with housing, food, wine, education, clothes, and, yes, even a $400 duvet cover and a $36 bottle of pinot.

The years following the birth of the girls surprised him as their tiny presences erased their identity as a couple. From the day of their birth, Emile and Bette created a massive void of need that they—but mostly Alice—instinctively filled with all the time and energy they could spare without destroying their own selves entirely. The shock that the two of them no longer existed as an essential entity wasn’t nearly as terrible as how little that loss mattered next to the magnetic force of the two live humans they’d made. The babies became the center of any room they occupied, commandeering the conversation before emitting a gurgle. What a marvel of human evolutionary design that even ugly babies were impossible to ignore.

On hiatus from her research and writing, the biological inevitability of nursing her young further transformed Alice from a cerebral creature into the most physical of beings. The tedious procedures of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and nurturing two small children exacted a material cost. Peter, an intimate witness, tenderly perceived devastating loss as the girls needs whittled away at the fiber of the woman he remembered.

The extended office hours of his busy practice freed him to experience the life of his family as an all-female domestic performance with guest appearances from him in the evening and on weekends. For the first five years he was cast as the fool—he’d arrive home in the evening to gently chase the girls, his monster antics calibrated to provoke that uncanny fleeting fear that elicits a child’s screeching delight while stopping short of terror and tears. He’d then bathe his little putti, as he liked to call them, in towering masses of bubbles, their sexless bodies slippery in the warm water. Snuggling them into the bed they insisted on sharing, he’d give dramatic readings of the same books again and again.

In the years of their girlhood—when they still wanted as much of him as they could have—he played the easy hero by taking them to movies, plays, the ballet, and concerts. What began with Pixar and Disney films, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan onstage, The Nutcracker and Cinderella in toe shoes and tutus, evolved into standard grown-up fare by the time they were teenagers. By then he had a firm bond with them around all this fancy culture—shared tastes, memories, regrets, events to anticipate. When the girls became adults in miniature, forcing their independence by closing their bedroom doors, he’d taken the parenting lead by offering himself as a more reasonable, steadier alternative to Alice. Plus—he had the ritual of all that shared culture topped off with drinks and dinner.

When the syrupy Shirley Temples had been replaced by bracing gin and tonics before the performances and buttered pasta and chicken breast after the show had become ambitious meals of dumplings and organ meats, the bit part had vanquished the lead. It was cheap on Peter’s part to swoop in as the authority when Alice had thanklessly done the hard work for more than a decade—and still did much of it—but she left him no choice. By then she had frayed, the edges of her personality and sense of purpose having dissolved or moved inward after more than a decade of neglect. Peter was steadier, with a greater lust for life and a more purposeful, rewarding profession.

Peter refused to face the incongruity between the energetic potency of his love for the girls and his subdued affection for Alice. It was an uneasy truth made mentally palatable by the enduring value of loyalty and gratitude. Years of married coexistence had been cruel. His regard for her, the place she occupied in his thoughts, had been dulled by his belief that he thoroughly knew her. Peter could no longer see his wife clearly any more than he could see himself. He’d given up trying. Bored with Alice, bored with himself, it was only the girls that elicited a fierce longing in him.

The twins’ departure for college nine months prior had left him isolated with Alice, and now that they’d landed prestigious internships in Berkeley, they wouldn’t even be home for the summer. The winter months had been lifeless; he felt as though he were trying to breathe underwater in a toxic, oxygen-starved dead zone. Their best friends, the Donnes and the Darlings, were busy the way people were always busy these days. He and Alice attempted to make a routine of dates—movies, Chinatown, Jackson Heights for Indian food—but they struggled to sustain a conversation for more than fifteen minutes. He periodically swore to himself he’d stop looking at his phone when she was speaking, but there was vitality and excitement in the warm little device. His phone assured him he was alive. The virtual social connections he involved himself in, those communicated through photographs and one-liners, news and opinion, contained the real materiality of his and others’ lives. He needed this rich substrate to sustain him beyond Alice’s remote musings about work, what she was reading, or, for the past week, Maebelle.

To avoid conflict they’d become brittle and overly polite. It was a blow when Alice set up an office-bedroom in Bette’s vacated room. The separate beds were the inescapable physical evidence of the state of their crippled marriage. They joked about the Lucy and Ricky arrangement, but he felt a hypocrite. How could he maintain a viable position in relation to patients struggling with their own marriages and long-term relationships? The truth of the situation humiliated him.

Peter hesitated to admit the sensual pleasures of gaining solo command of the sixty-inch-wide queen mattress. The freedom reminded him of being in his first apartment when, like all doctors in residence, he’d endured an erratic schedule. The bed in that studio apartment, the same one on Bleecker Street he later shared with Alice for three short years, had served as a haven from the brutality of his psychiatric residency at Bellevue Hospital. The quality of his sleep on that bed, pre-Alice, had been close to a sacred coma of oblivion. Twenty-three years later his solo bed in their shared apartment was once again his escape.

Too bad his sleep was so disturbed that all he had left of the sort of rest he’d experienced in those days was nostalgia. Each night, after expending the oblivion gifted to him by the booze he’d consumed, he’d wake at the pointless hour of 2 AM. After failing to return to oblivion, he’d concede to the inevitable, first opening Twitter and then the New York Times, Slate, Instagram, and finally long-form political pieces in the New Yorker when things got very bad. His brain alive with outrage at the messy world, he’d eventually turn off the phone and try again for sleep. But he couldn’t lock himself in alone with his spiraling worries behind eyes forced closed for long. Without fully admitting it to himself, he feared he’d begun to doubt the utility of talk therapy; the imperfect bed was his best refuge from what he suspected was a looming moral failure at the core of his existence.

Google Maps had him arriving at 8:03 PM. Settling into another two hours in the car, Peter recalled his last session of the day. It had not gone well. Ben, a currency trader with what most psychiatrists would have diagnosed as intermittent explosive disorder (IED), had appeared in his office for the first time three months prior. He was there at his wife’s insistence—a common but still less-than-ideal premise for treatment. Ben’s resistance, already a formidable challenge in any course of therapy, was blended with explicit resentment directed at his wife and Peter as the instruments of his punishment.

What Peter couldn’t quite sort out—and he should have been able to without any trouble—was how to circumvent the man’s defenses. His directive as a therapist was to enter into the patient’s psychic reality and then move gently along the route to positive change—allowing them, always, the lead. It should have been straightforward: outbursts of anger were frequently maladaptive reactions to fear and stress.

Ben had begun his session that afternoon with a complaint.

I can’t believe I’m pissing away my time here. Again. The market’s on a bender today. My position’s totally gummed up. Business as usual.

Is something particularly bothering you about being here today? Peter replied. You’ve chosen to come—in fact, you’ve chosen to be on time for every one of our sessions.

Don’t do late. Never have. You know, I’m just one of those people who’s never late. Why are people late? Tabitha. She’s late. Always fussing over something. I’ll be damned if I let her make me late. I go right on ahead without. That gets her out the door.

What would happen if you were late—say, for an appointment here?

Hell if I know. Waste of money. How is that relevant? I just said I’m never late. Never.

You just said you feel you’re losing money by coming here. So perhaps in the larger calculus you’d be better off coming late. But you don’t. Peter wasn’t at all certain where he was going with this, but there it was. It was always safe to keep a session in the present.

Damn straight I’m losing money. Every minute. And I don’t mean your damn fee. That’s nothing. Like I said, the market’s junked up. Christ. And where am I? Here. Talking to a shrink. Now that’s funny. Meanwhile, my assistant’s handling thirty peak accounts. Asia’s fucking off the rails today, and my positions there are more vulnerable than I’d like. You know what I mean?

Peter ignored the question as well as the insult regarding the insignificance of his fee. The closest he’d come to concerning himself with the value of the yen over the South Korean won over the Malaysian ringgit was for a fourth-grade social studies project. The best part of it had been drawing and coloring in the flags with his Lyra Aquarelle set.

Have you recently discussed how you feel about coming here with Tabitha?

She won’t. I’ve told you that. It’s either this or divorce court, and I’ll be damned if I’ll have my book split in two. Fuck-you money. Gives that expression a new meaning. Whatever the number is, that’s the only way I’m out. What I’d give for a proper prenup right about now. What I was thinking I have no idea.

You’ve said you want to stay married, and in fact you’ve said you love Tabitha. There are other reasons to stay with her.

Fine. So?

Can you come up with other reasons for staying in your marriage? Set the money aside for a moment.

The guy was the opposite of most of the unhappily married patients he saw. They bemoaned their sexless, emotionally empty, anxiety-inducing relationships but were too delicate to admit that the real reason they wanted to avoid divorce was to protect their assets. It was funny how people lied to themselves. He supposed the mercenary impulse had its limits—even in New York.

Ben, on the other hand, was terrified his wife would leave him, but he could never admit he wanted her to stay for anything other than financial reasons. As far as Peter could see, the two had developed a comfortably familiar pattern of mutual complaint; it was what passed for a relationship in many marriages that outlasted a decade. If the routine trades across foreign currencies sustained Ben with a comforting familiarity as much as his relationship with his wife did, Bitcoin was his sexy fantasy mistress and just as unattainable. So Ben fumed as the value of the highly volatile cryptocurrency flashed on computer screens across the globe with the unpredictability of a much-too-pretty, pouty twentysomething.

Ben had jeopardized his easy marital arrangement by screaming at his wife too often about the state of the summer house or the market or the traffic or the noise coming from the apartment above. But Peter suspected the real trouble was that he’d jeopardized his financial future by playing the cryptocurrency game when nobody quite knew how. The idea of financial ruin stimulated Peter’s interest in a man whom he instinctively disliked.

Okay, said Ben.

Then the air was empty. Okay was not a reason to stay in the marriage—it wasn’t an answer at all—but Peter had grown tired of the standard shrink lines: Can you say a bit more about that? Can you expand on that a bit? Any further thoughts? Instead, he’d changed tack.

We talked last week about what you might be avoiding and gaining by exploding in anger at Tabitha. We discussed how you may be directing your frustration at her over your inability to control volatility in the currency markets.

—I’m avoiding her. Did I mention what a bitch she’s been lately? Now what? You tell me, doc. Fix me up and send me on my merry fucking way. I have a lot on my mind. Whatever you might be thinking over there in your cushy chair, the market’s still open in Hong Kong.

Peter wasn’t sure what to say. Ben was quite possibly incapable of the empathy necessary to perceive his own behavior from anyone else’s perspective. Ungenerously, Peter wished he’d never walked in the door. But he had. Go to the fundamentals, Peter told himself. What was happening between them in the room was a typically male impasse, which told Peter a great deal about how Ben operated in the world. The tension and opposition they were experiencing during their sessions was likely repeated with variation in most of Ben’s relationships. Ben was trying to push Peter around, intimidating him, challenging him to take his side against his wife. It was an antediluvian form of male bonding Peter particularly disliked.

Ben feared losing his wife, his job (he’d been warned twice for violent outbursts at work), and his money (he took huge risks with each one of his trades, he was playing with Bitcoin, and his wife would probably do a number on his bank account if they were to divorce). But his inability to enter into these legitimate fears, to articulate them as human problems that affected him just as they did, in various forms, everyone else, made the fears unreal. Denied their existence in his mental landscape, they took on fantastic proportion in his subconscious mind. By refusing to admit that his somewhat ordinary fears were real, by pretending nothing was bothering him and the problem was everyone else, Ben allowed himself to remain in an artificially safe, icy space walled off from any genuine emotional response—until the outburst. His distorted perception of his wife as his persecutor fueled his desperation. Nobody behaved all that well when they were just hanging on, isolated and defending an untenable position.

After years of practice, this simple case of what was really just anger management should not have merited another thought beyond the hour. But it did. Peter prided himself on his professionalism, his steady publishing record in the Psychoanalytic Review, and his full roster of patients. As the Saw Mill became the Taconic, Peter entered the oppressive tunnel of greenery that made the drive north on any one of Moses’s parkways numbingly monotonous. With nothing to distract him but the explosive chlorophyll of the freshly leafed-out trees, he mulled over how to bring Ben out of his resistance. The guy wasn’t a sociopath even if he behaved like one. It was time for Peter to humanely state his own frustration with how the sessions were going and use that to break down the resistance Ben had been mounting since his first session. He must try to muster his compassion; it was not a thing he usually had trouble with.

Trying not to think about work, Peter focused on his weekend ahead with the Donnes. The pool, only recently filled for the season, would be unbearably cold. But he would swim. It was a point of pride to enter cold water. He and Alice always made the girls join them for the first swim of the season just as they insisted on entering Maine’s icy waters in August. Avoiding cold water indicated character weakness. Submitting to the anticipated discomfort and then discovering its pleasures was a life lesson worth reinforcing.

William and Wendy Donne’s Revolutionary-era house in Chatham, New York, had been restored with a preservationist’s sensitivity to historic detail. The house’s understated atmosphere had been achieved with the lavish application of cash. Wendy was a psychiatrist—they’d completed their residencies at NYU/Bellevue together, bonding over the rigors of managing the city’s indigent insane. Unlike Alice, who seemed to have withered, Wendy had grown stout over the years. The lustiness suggested by her curvy body appealed to Peter as an expression of her acceptance of pleasure: not just food and wine but theater, concerts, books, travel, and, not least, sex. She and William had what struck Peter as a very healthy sexual relationship, with afternoon romps referred to as naps on the weekends on top of a set biweekly routine. The thought of it made Peter at once envious and fatigued. Wendy was loud—her opinions and laughter dominant in the rowdiest groups—while William was subdued, with the entitled air of the very rich that Peter tolerated only for Wendy’s sake.

The two had married ten days after he’d married Alice; they’d had to curtail their honeymoon in Martinique to be back in time for the three-hundred-guest affair at William’s parents’ estate in Great Barrington. Like his father, William was at Goldman. He didn’t make money for doing his job—his job was to make money. It had never crossed Peter’s mind to go into a field with the singular purpose of moneymaking. But why not? Considering the steady, healthy fees he collected, he wondered what it would be like to have so much more. But he couldn’t allow himself to enter a realm that separated him so starkly from his community-minded upbringing. It would feel like a betrayal of his parents, of his desire to help others, and of what he thought he still believed were his more modest values. Still. It just felt shabby not being filthy rich these days when there had once been such nobility in it.

Peter’s long hours in his ergonomic analyst’s chair had added weight to his frame over the winter; the belly was a distinctive feature of his silhouette. The Donnes were as deliberate about the wine they served as they were inattentive about the food they cooked. It hardly mattered. After a few drinks he would find something or other to eat too much of. He ate like a bear when drunk—as if seeking ballast for the passage through winter’s night. Like most men his age, he gauged his weight by his belt, turning the objective measure of his waist into a mental game that determined his physical worth. Just that morning he’d been forced to settle into a new hole—giving his belt more length—four out from his goal, which had become more of a long-lost ideal. As he drove, he straightened his back to prevent the second fold of belly fat from pressing against the first. He liked to think he could cut back easily enough—after the long weekend. It was summer, after all. Bathing suit season.

The tires hummed obtrusively as he passed over the Croton Reservoir, the red metal scaffolding overhead giving an unfinished, inelegant industrial appearance to the bridge against the lush woods. New York City’s famous raw water. Here it was, right out in the open. The idea that the water for New York City was in an open pool in the woods struck Peter as ridiculous—but then, where would it be if it weren’t here? The reservoir began supplying New York City with water when it was dammed and connected to New York’s first aqueduct in 1842. The tunnel and its tributaries snaked their way beneath the streets of Manhattan, crowded by basements, subway tunnels, foundations, and ancient graves. What a world: a whole metropolis of matter flowing unseen beneath the city, a design with intention.

Rounding what he affectionately recognized as the final curve, Peter soon caught sight of the Donnes’ pretty white clapboard perched on the hill across from a pasture where aged horses and young Hereford steer mingled, grazing. Peter looked forward to the distant lowing of the cattle filtered through the eager racket of birds that, unless it was raining, would wake him at dawn. It was a gift to lay there in the supple bed on linen sheets, the window ajar to the outdoor world, listening to the birds carry on as the light asserted itself. He would doze in this luxurious dawn, as he had for years of biannual visits to the house, until called below by somebody scrambling a mess of eggs, their sulfur-tinged buttery richness passing through the ancient beams to his room high above.

As Peter pulled into the shared driveway of the Donne family compound, the cars parked tight at a snug diagonal, he winced at the prospect of his entrance. He could never quite spit out the names of the various friends and neighbors who lurked around the weekend’s edges, their comings and goings from meals and cocktails unnerving, the group briefly distracted as it recalibrated to accommodate their familiar—but nonetheless unexpected—presences.

Gathering his overnight bag but leaving his tennis racket in the trunk, Peter hoisted the neat half-case of wine up on his shoulder and turned toward the warm glow beaming through the screen door. He anticipated them all gathered there in the kitchen, waiting for him. Arriving later than he’d planned turned his entrance into an event and, inevitably, a performance.

They were well into their drinks, a fact most clearly announced by the state of the once carefully composed display of local cheeses, crackers, and Italian olives that had been reduced to an unappetizing scattering of crumbs, masticated olive pits, and waxy cheese rinds. Thanks to his tardiness, the drinking had continued without movement toward the dinner table. The mess of the cheese board would be there until morning, giving the unlucky first to rise a further shock in their state of bleary dehydration as they entered the dispiriting disorder of the kitchen.

In bed, acutely missing the presence of the dog tucked under the covers to her left, Alice listened sleepily to Peter’s postmortem snark. He whispered into the phone from what he called the two W’s guest room in the country, his library voice made sloppy and silly by drink. He studiously avoided any mention of the dog.

Of course they made pasta, Peter whispered to Alice from the dark of his bed. I told you they would. A giant pile of bucatini with nothing beyond a few pine nuts and basil to make it worth eating. I added an obscene pile of Parmesan. I think Wendy thought I was drunk, a giant airy mound of shavings—it was like an anthill of cheese. To hell with a polite dusting. Fuck it. Would it kill them to cook a little protein?

Goodnight, P., she said. Talk tomorrow. Love you.

Alice hadn’t had a decent orgasm in six months. Masturbating with a pet in the bed felt awkward and a shade off, but Maebelle had grown used to the noise and movement and generally slept through the whole proceeding. Now she was gone.

Prone beneath the weightless duvet, warm and clean after her bath, Alice considered retrieving her toy. She might lull herself to sleep but hesitated at the prospect of a mediocre orgasm. Tucked snugly inside a white felt shoe bag on the shelf next to her bed, it was certainly handy. Two years ago she’d bought the slim appliance on Amazon. With its smooth, ballerina-pink silicone exterior and rounded ergonomic handle, it looked and sounded like the Clarisonic buffer she maneuvered over the contours of her face each night before bed.

Peter, spotting the buffer in the bathroom, couldn’t resist saying, Oh, so that’s what you’re up to in there. Alice had rebuffed him, scoffing at his feigned ignorance.

Oh please, she’d said with a laugh. Imagine away, bristles and all.

The real, distinctly bristle-free item was fantastic, no question. But for some reason it had been delivering less-than-overwhelming results lately. The always-waiting porn on her phone rested not even a foot away from her head, the screen still glowing from Peter’s call.

Alice thought back to her first Mac computer, a clunky oversize machine in garish pink that had filled the depth of her broad desk. It had seemed sleek and elegant—back when it was. Then, the cozy bed-bound laptops, phones, and iPads, as easily slipped between the sheets as tucked in a bra, didn’t exist even in Steve Jobs’s expansive imagination. Now the slick devices had taken over, occupying every moment as forcefully as a species of highly demanding house pet.

To soften the edge of her feminist guilt, Alice liked to think her incorporation of the seedy terrain of fleshy images into her mental and physical landscape was fairly innocent. Tentative and incremental, she’d started with Gustav Klimt’s Woman Seated with Thighs Apart, one of the images that populated the margins of the masturbation Wikipedia entry. Another of Alice’s favorites in those early days was Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger’s 1840 watercolor depicting a monk in drab robes fingering a woman, the folds of her green skirt, white stockings, and full thighs rendered in exquisite detail as her left hand grips the erect penis visible at the parting of his robe. Alice was vaguely troubled by the forceful valence of the painting. In her mind, the monk had pursued the woman whose willing acquiescence made the stealthy act so steamy.

Whatever she discovered, googling the word with the purpose of getting off on the text and images lined up to define it had been subversive enough to get her blood moving. It all seemed quaint now. When the utility of the sexually relevant Wikipedia entries had been spent (cunnilingus, sex, pornography), she progressed to erotica. There, selecting the category constituted the most terrifying confession of desire: lesbian, incest, voyeur, bondage, S&M. Forced to make up her mind, Alice confronted her erotic triggers as an array of choices as long as a folio-size laminated diner menu. Deciding on one put her in direct contact with her subconscious; she’d had no idea what excited her until it was revealed by her physical response to the categories. She was more subversive than she’d ever admitted to herself, her taste for public sex and lesbian scenes entirely at odds with her history.

She’d arrived at the porn gala late and, she liked to think, reluctantly, wearing no makeup and a frowsy flannel nightgown. But she had arrived. Now, reaching for her phone and felt bag, she was reminded for the second time that day of her childhood and of hours of naughty pleasure passed eating sweets under the covers with a flashlight and a novel.