Strange Fits of Passion by Anita Shreve

his things pale-blue air letters from women in Madrid or Berlin.
    It was my hair, he'd say, teasing me; it was a flame that had drawn him to me like a moth. But no, really, he'd add later, coming toward me, backing me up against a wall, it was my feet. He liked small feet, and mine were white and neat, and had I ever noticed that before? Or later still, and in a more serious mood, he'd say it was the way we worked together: We had minds that thought alike when it came to putting words on paper.
    But once, when we were in a taxi late at night, speeding uptown from the office on a rain-soaked street, the lights swimming on the wet pavement, I asked him why, and he said lightly—his hand was resting on my thigh, his smile had started at the corner of his mouth—
You let me have you.
    ***
    I wrote my mother. I wrote that I had met a man and that I loved him. I said that he was smart and well respected at the magazine. I said that he loved me too. I told her that he was tall and dark and handsome, and that when she met him she would find him charming.
    I knew that she would like this letter.
    The things I wrote were all the truth, but they didn't tell her anything like the truth, did they?

    The truth was that we drank. There would be the drinking in the bars, with all the world around us. And then there'd be the wine, the open bottle and the glasses beside the bed. Or champagne in a bucket; we often had champagne. The drinking then was festive: Every night was a celebration. The empty rooms in his apartment would be lit with candles, and I would find, in the morning, clothes in a hallway, delicate glasses beside the tub. I cooked in a robe he gave me. It was navy cotton terry cloth, too big for me and I felt small and lost inside it. There was a round table in the kitchen—a wrought-iron table with a smooth glass top. Around it there were dark-green metal chairs such as you'd see in France. And there would be the red wine on the table for the meal, and it seemed to me that we would drink until the fevers, both erotic and mundane had burned their of us and we could go to sleep then.

    I had had a lover in college, but he was just a child by comparison. He had no dark secrets that he let me see. Of course, I was a child then too, and though we drank sweetened drinks on weekends, it was an innocent pastime, meaningless.
    With Harrold, the drinking was different: We were drowning.

    I have memories. I remember this: We were in the bedroom after work. It was late, a hot night, and I was in my slip. He lit a cigarette and leaned across the darkness to give it to me. I did not smoke often, but I sometimes smoked with him. His cigarettes were foreign, and I liked them. He bought them on his trips, and they had a dark and fruity scent, like flowers in a damp woods.
    He was still dressed in his clothes from work. I remember particularly the cloth of his shirt, a stiff blue oxford weave. He had his tie on, but he had loosened it. We smoked together and we didn't speak, but I had the sense that soon something would happen.
    I was sitting on the edge of the bed, my legs crossed, my feet bare. He was sitting not far from me, slouched a bit in his chair, his legs crossed too, one ankle resting on a knee. He was watching me, studying my face, examining my gestures as I smoked, and I felt self-conscious under his scrutiny and wanted to laugh to deflect him.
    But then he stood and took my cigarette from me and put it out. He lifted me under the arms and laid me down on the bed. I remember that he was hovering over me, hovering in that way he had, and that he hadn't taken his clothes off. He raised my wrists to the brass bars of the headboard. He undid the knot of his tie. I felt the small stab of his belt buckle against my rib cage, the cloth of his shirt against my face, the silk of his tie against my wrist. I inhaled the cloth of his shirt—I loved the smell of him through the weave. And later, when he was saying that he loved