VICTORIA MOON
On the Water
Anne called before Independence Day with an invitation to stay for the week. It wasn’t odd, just unexpected. The heat was too familiar and bullying. Hanna fanned herself limply and looked at her watch. David would not be back from his sociology conference for another two hours. As it was, they hardly spent any time together, between his expanded teaching engagements, and his wife and two children in Connecticut; they had four weekday nights from six to six: dinner, sex, then bed. Fridays were always rushed. Breakfast, a shared subway ride to Penn, and then the mildly anticlimactic goodbye, watching the back of his head as it slowly descended down the escalator to the commuter train idling underground. Hanna promised herself that it was just for the summer. She would live rent free at David’s city apartment, quit her copywriting job, and spend the weekends alone, fully focused on her thesis. David would know what to do. He had been delighted by her peccadilloes. On their few first dates Hanna remembered the way his eyes would perk up at the mention of other men. He would put his fork down or at least stop chewing and gaze intently at her. It seemed the more debased the better. She had enjoyed it as well, learning to elaborate on her past experiences, dressing up each moment in lurid detail. Somehow, held up to the gaze of David’s eyes, each experience gained weight, added importance. It seemed she was reaffirming something very dear to him, that beautiful women were whores, that they should be whores. He spoke with great pride of his wife, whom he rescued from a life on the streets. And look at her now, the lady of the house in a Connecticut suburb. There was one story about her brother-in-law, Gerald, which David particularly liked and somehow got in the habit of making her repeat before sex. Featuring a drunken Hanna in the summer before college, on the kitchen counter with
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VICTORIA MOON