The Lovers

Prose 7

Aug 08, 2024

We often spoke in code to one another. For days on end we couldn’t remember the name of the actress in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, a movie we both loved because no one seemed to be who they were in the film, the way neither Lena nor Isaac was who they seemed.

We’d come up with Lee Remick when it was Eva Marie Saint. From then on whenever either one of us couldn’t remember something, the other would say “Lee Remick,” and we’d laugh as code for the problem and the movie we both loved.

***

She jingled her keys at him like a dare, which maybe it was, so he sat down in a mock gesture of defeat. “Me, philosophical? That’s a laugh. My head is like piles and piles of papers that I rummage through. And I like order. I’m accustomed to order.”

“And that’s why you’re with me, I suppose?”

He laughed. “My memory is bad.”

She wanted to believe this was the way he told her he understood how hard it was for her that he’d once rejected her. She said, “You just have selective memory. You choose what to remember. That’s your way of writing your own stories about yourself.”

“And who doesn’t?”

And now he’d made her laugh the way he could when they talked around what couldn’t be said, as if they were so intimate.

***

She was my best friend. I told her things I’d never say to anyone else, couldn’t imagine even saying out loud. I often couldn’t remember what I’d thought versus what I’d told her. In truth, talking with Lena was like having her inside my head.

***

“Maybe I made you up,” she said. “Maybe you’re not real.”

“Me? I’m totally real. Here, poke me, you’ll see. But put those keys away first.”

She dropped the keys into her purse, sat down and gave him a nudge with her elbow. “Yeah, well, maybe I have a trust problem?”

“You think?” He always said this when she asked him something she knew was so, his way of pointing out the obvious with ease. And this had become a joke between them.

They must have had private jokes.

She laughed. “Okay, okay, so maybe I do, but I don’t want to.”

The absence of trust was a fact of their connection.

“I don’t think I’m totally trustworthy,” he said. “Not by nature, but perhaps due to circumstances.”

On the brink of disaster, about to be caught, he kissed her.

She leaned into his shoulder, put her head in that curve below his neck and breathed in the sea-water smell of him—the salty taste when her tongue skimmed his neck and her nose burrowed in his skin—there in the place where she laid her head, there, she took him in, an almost airless breath of him. It was like the sea—when she’d sat at the edge, her feet in the water, her hands in wet sand, her back leaning away from the breezes off the ocean that swirled over her, her face towards the sun, when she’d been overcome by the salt in her open mouth and the briny air in her nose. His scent that aroused her with his presence. Sea and sand and his neck.

He wrapped her in his arms and for this moment she was safe and sure when the key to the front door turned. They heard the pins inside the lock tumble. A familiar sound, merely a click, but they thought, almost as if their minds were one, that they heard the separate mechanisms of the lock moving, tumbling like thunder.