Consequences of Desire

The Consequences of Desire

The Consequences of Desire He stood in the shadow of an awning, watching a woman in a green dress waiting to cross the street, and in a characteristic way he calmly considered opposing courses of action—stepping into the sunlight and calling her name, remaining in the shadow until she crossed the street and faded from sight. Although he hadn't seen her for years he was certain that she was the girl he had marched with down this very street, the girl whose hand he had held while singing an anthem whose words he didn't care to recall , the girl he had lived with briefly in a commune deep in the woods. Shewas heavier, he thought, and softer than the girl whose image was that of a fairy dancing in firelight, dark and lithe and uninhibited. He observed that her face looked slightly drawn, as if by permanent tension or anxiety, and finally he abandoned the shadow, reached out to touch her arm and say, "You remember me, don't you?" She stared at him. The street corner, the parallelogram of sunlight that formed an enclosure in which they stood, the blue metal rectangle bearing the words TELEGRAPH and AVE, the handful of strangers waiting for the green permission of "Walk" all receded beyond the memory of an intimacythat took sudden and insistent possession of her senses, like a loud noise or a peculiar odor. She stared at smooth cheeks rounded by the breadth of a smile. The face was unfamiliar but the voicetapped on the door to a room full of embarrassing secrets. She felt a sudden pressurebehind her eyes. "Boyd Carroll," she heard him say, allowing her hand to be The Consequences of Desire 139 squeezed with fingers that had touched, she suspected as a tingle of ambiguous energy flowed up her arm, other parts of her body. When he spoke he exposed teeth and a glimpseof tongue, possibly insidious things. "I remember a few times you wrote your name and people assumed you'd put your last name first. Thought you were Carol Boyd." "I'm sorry," she said. He appeared professionally calm, unrattled by that which startled and made her feel the breathlessness of lurking panic. "David," he said, and an image rushed into her head, the cleft chin invisible within a dense aureola of beard, the brown eyes slightly distanced by circles of glass. "David Remington." He laughed as at a joke told to himself, a characteristic so deeply interred in her subconscious that its appearance shook loose a torrent of memories that caused her vision to blur. Their bodies drifted together and as he felt her contour and mass he saw in brief, photographic detail the faces of his wife and children. She sniffled. She found a tissue in her purse and blew her nose. Once more she said, "I'm sorry." "No need to be." "It's something about that time." She felt resistant to conferring upon him any power, because this appearance of a man she had never expected to see again, a man she hadn't thought about in years, made her feel unfree. "The other day I saw these boys and girls with long hair and beads and I got all choked up. Isn't that silly?" "Not at all." She continued to stare, as if he were in some way deformed, a freak. "It's incredible. I mean, after all this time . . . do you live here?" "No." He observed her with a directness that was both a matter of professional reflex and a reiteration of a way he remembered that they had been. "Business. I had some time to kill so I thought / 40 The Consequences of Desire I'd do this nostalgia thing." He recognized her uncertainty and diffidence of manner, and like a curl of smoke from embers the memory of a distant event arose; he saw himself read a letter, place the letter in a drawer, then later, months perhaps, a year, clean out the drawer and reread the letter and let it drop into a stack of things consigned to the trash. He could not remember anything specific in the letter, nor could he remember how it made him feel, and yet he could see himself as clearly as if it were yesterday, taking the letter out of a drawer and reading it and then dropping it with other discarded things...