Read Online Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens - Free Book Online Page A

“In the front or the back?”
    Lore startles. The pain? Ah. “The back. All in my back.”
    â€œI can massage there for you. Along the spine, especially, and right above the sacrum. You can direct me.”
    â€œI think we should call Dr. Elspeth-Chang again.”
    â€œSoon. Let’s see how quickly the next one comes.”
    Lore puts down the cup of ice. Her mouth aches with cold. She watches the clock. Six minutes since the last contraction. Seven. She needs me more , Asa said to her, the night that he told her about himself and Julia. He sobbed, saying that he couldn’t deceive Lore any longer, it was too wrong, Lore was the best thing that had ever happened to him, but things with Julia went way back, he didn’t claim it was healthy or right, just that it was. They were like siblings, like twins, but even more than that. They understood each other, they saw the world through the same eyes. It was as if someone had married them, long, long ago, before they could even know what that meant. He didn’t know what to do! He loved Lore! But Julia!
    Lore cut him off. How long had he been sleeping with her?
    Nearly three years.
    Asa said: “We all love each other. I know we can work it out.”
    â€œNo,” said Lore. “We don’t all love each other. Work it out ? ” She now saw why he had confessed—not so he could make a choice, but to get her permission not to. He wanted things to go on just as they had, but with Lore knowing and agreeing to it. He wanted Lore’s reliability and sanity, the ease of their life together. And he wanted her so that Julia would not leave him again for the fourth or seventh time. Oh, Asa and Julia did go far back. Asa had kissed her behind the piano in kindergarten. They had slept in each other’s rooms when they were in grade school. He had dropped her half a block from her apartment one night. She needs me more . Julia had bought Lore as a pimp might, made a gift of her to Asa, to them both. How stimulating it must have been, Lore thought, the three of them strolling along Columbus Avenue or sunning at Jones Beach or driving up to Bear Mountain for a hike, how Lore’s love for them must have acted like a revivifying draft for their old, tangled romance. How deliciously illicit it must have made their need. And how stupid and arrogant Lore had been, to believe that she could take her pleasure of both of them, yet Asa could remain completely her own. The bliss, for so long, of that self-deception. Julia and Lore spooning atop a pile of coats at a party, dozing, while Asa talked on in the living room. Or Asa would say something that annoyed Julia, and Julia, slender Julia, would tackle him; he’d fake a fall, Lore would pile on. They’d roll and punch at each other like preschoolers, laughing, grabbing hair, baring teeth. Asa’s hand on Julia’s belly, Julia’s fingers grazing his mouth: were these knowing promises of what would be redeemed on another day?
    Imagine having spoken of any of this to Diana or Marjorie. Lore would have seen, behind their careful words, how appalled they were: could she really have been so clueless? But it had been exquisite: the touch of her lover, the touch of her friend. Before this her heart and her hands had been devoted to the body of a sick and dying woman, with its bruises and sores and bad smells. She is proud of having cradled and eased her mother until the end. But it had left her so very hungry.
    She had colluded, in short, and all Asa was asking was that she continue to collude with eyes open. It struck her that Julia might have urged Asa to make his confession. Perhaps she had been growing bored of their stealth affair and was looking for a new drama. “Do this for me, for us,” she might have said, daring him.
    And why not? Wouldn’t it be natural, this next step? But Lore recoiled. Not, she realized, because of any great moral objection. She could