Stepping by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page B

terribly. Zelda, this won’t work. It’s all wrong.”
    A surge of joy passed through me at the words, and I felt wonderfully warm, wonderfully happy, And oddly triumphant, too: I hadn’t missed Stephen at all these pastthree weeks. I had thought about him during the times I unlocked the crazy closet in my mind, but I hadn’t missed him desperately, I hadn’t pined.
    “Oh, Stephen, I miss you, too,” I said. “But we agreed—nine months is not a very long time to think over such a major change in all our lives—”
    “Nine months is too long,” Stephen said. “Nine weeks is too long. I don’t need to think any more. I know exactly what I want. I want you.”
    “Oh, Stephen, think of Ellen. Think of Charlie; he’s your friend. Think of all the children—”
    “They’d survive, we’d all survive. There’d be a month or so of crying and screaming, and then life would continue as usual. Can’t you see that it’s worse this way, living with Charlie and Ellen when we love each other?”
    “But I can’t do it now, Stephen, I just can’t. I have to have more time to think, I have to.” My wonderful warmth slid away. I wanted to cry, “Don’t make me plead, don’t make me beg, don’t make me ask yet another man to let me do what I want and need to do. You’re ruining it.”
    “I’m coming to Helsinki,” Stephen said.
    “What? What?” I screeched, and in the transatlantic time lapse our voices suddenly echoed and crossed over one another.
    “I said I’m coming to Helsinki.”
    “What? What?”
    “There’s a conference in New York I can say I’m attending. I know someone there who will cover for me. I already have my reservations. I’m arriving at eleven-thirty in the morning, your time, on BEA #270, on November twenty-ninth. Can you meet me at the airport, or arrange a hotel for me?”
    “Stephen, I can’t handle this! You can’t come here. Please .”
    I must have sounded desperate enough; there was a long expensive silence, and then Stephen said:
    “I promise I won’t make a scene. I won’t try to force you. I won’t even discuss the future. I just want to see you, be with you. I’ll stay only two or three days. We’ll eat together, hide in my hotel, talk if you want to. I just want to see you, Zelda, I want to touch you again. Low key. No pressure. Is that all right?”
    I was weak with fear and delight and sorrow. “All right,” I said. “All right.”
    “Goodbye then till November twenty-ninth. Write me, Zelda, here at the university.”
    “I will. All right. Goodbye.”
    “I love you, Zelda.”
    “Goodbye.”
* * *
    “Oh, I love you, I love you, Chocolate eyes, Chicken Feathers,” I would say to my dark-eyed son, to my fine-haired, fair-haired daughter. “I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU!” I would shout at them in ecstasy, wrestling with them on their beds, nipping at their sweet flesh. “I could eat you up!”
    “I love you, Charlie,” I would say to my husband so many times during our lives together. And I meant it.
    I loved, too, three or four women who were important to me, who were more than friends or mentors. I loved my parents, I loved my two surviving grandparents, who sat blithering away in rest homes. I loved, in a way, my stepdaughters.
    But now, for the first time in my thirty-four years, I loved unmistakably, best of all, finally, at long last, ME. It was a great feeling.
    I wasn’t so sure about Stephen. Perhaps I loved him, perhaps not. That was one of the things I was trying to sort out. How much of it had been a challenge, how much of it was gratitude, how much of it was simply that I hadn’t slept with a man other than Charlie for over thirteen years?
    We had met Stephen and Ellen several times at university parties, and it turned out that Stephen was the new head of the English department. Ellen had—actually, of course, Stephen had, too, but one always thinks of children as what the mother has because she is home with them—children