A Bigamist's Daughter by Alice McDermott

really is very tired. And although she doesn’t want to end up in bed again, she doesn’t want to be left alone in her apartment at eleven o’clock on a Friday night either, and so: All right, she says, a back rub sounds nice and yes, one more glass of wine. And his hands are strong enough and there is just enough pain in the way he grips her shoulders and her neck and kneads her back and sides. So it is another reversal—the literal back rub now feeling like making love, but now, with him fully clothed and her only clinically undressed, only her blouse off, her front hidden against the mattress, the back rub is somehow more desirable, exciting.
    And so she turns, feels his soft sweater against her, his face, the almost imperceptible beard. Then the slow undressing. This will be the last time, she tells herself, the kiss good-by, the graduation drunk, the bachelor party, Fat Tuesday.
    “Where in England was your father born?”
    “London, I think.”
    “You think?”
    “Well, I wasn’t there. But, yes, I’m sure it was London.”
    “And he came over here when he was fifteen?”
    “About that.”
    “And he lived with an aunt?”
    “Yes.”
    “What was her name?”
    “I don’t know. Betty, I think.”
    “How can you not know?”
    “She died before I was born.”
    “Didn’t he ever talk about her?”
    “A little. Not much. Anyway, he always called her his aunt.”
    He gets up, shaking his head. Goes into the kitchen. “There is more wine,” he yells. Comes back with the open bottle. Her bottle. The one she’d bought on the way home. To seduce him with, maybe.
    He pours two glasses, puts the bottle on the end table. Sits cross-legged, opposite her. His body is all primary colors: white, red, blue—no muted shades. Especially his feet, which could be sketches from a medical book, an encyclopedia. White from the ankles to toes, red around the side, blue veins crossing through it all. The hair on his pale legs seems blond enough to be transparent, his genitals are red, almost an angry red, veined in blue; his hairless chest is pure white without even a freckle or a beauty mark to contradict what seems to have been chosen as his color scheme. Surely, she thinks, even a medical illustrator would have added a brown freckle or two.
    “Was she married?” he asks. “Aunt what’s-her-name?”
    “Yes. That’s why she lived out there, on Long Island. It’s where her husband was from.”
    “Was she born in England too?”
    “No. Ireland, I think.”
    “How can you say, ‘I think’? She’s only one generation away. Gosh, I can name all my relatives back four or five generations.”
    “Probably because you’ve got huge oil paintings of every one of them hanging all over your mansion. I bet you’ve got headless ghosts in gray uniforms, too.”
    “I don’t live in a mansion,” he says. “And all our ghosts wear heads and frock coats.”
    “Even the lady ghosts?”
    He nods. “The Daniels women,” he says, in an exaggerated Southern accent, “were never above perversity. Some of our loveliest belles are transvestites in the hereafter. We all have our own idea of heaven.”
    She laughs and he looks at her severely, “What’s yours?”
    She shrugs. “I don’t know. Typical Baltimore catechism stuff. God with a long white beard and a dove on His shoulders, angels with curly blond hair and blue wings instead of bodies. Lots of clouds.”
    “And where do you fit in?”
    She looks down at herself, lounging so casually against her pillow, naked, her legs outstretched, spending an intimate evening with someone she hardly cares about and barely knows. With an author, of all things.
    “I guess I’m in the crowd just under God’s feet, right below the clouds, reaching up.”
    “Hell?”
    She smiles. “No, purgatory. Not quite bad enough for hell, not quite good enough for heaven. Just kind of mediocre. I have a feeling everybody I know will be there too.”
    “Your father?”
    She looks at him,