Next door was a house, big, gabled, and white, the green lawn constantly being sprinkled. At first, that house had made Annika homesick for Brandy and Leo’s house, and for Teddy, but not anymore; because Luis was not up there, on the bogs and cold water, to pull her into the cool seat.

Forêt, c. 1902-1904
(Oil on canvas, 81.9 x 66 cm)
BY Paul Cézanne
National Gallery of Canada

He drove to Barton Creek, all the way with Annika’s graceful sweaty hand traveling all over his leg. He always said they would take a walk first, and he would show her the gully where low warm water came up quietly over the rocks, and everywhere overhead there were strung silver spiderwebs in an almost continuous canopy between the trees; the sun came down in dapples and lay on the millions of strands like drops of water. They didn’t go for walks, there was only time to pull Luis into the back and put both of her hands on his legs now, then push him slowly against the soft give of the cloth seat until he had to put his hands around her waist to brace himself against her coming at him, and against her ardent rose of a mouth, which was everywhere.

During the day she could hardly bear it. There were metal cabinets in the back of the office where discontinued keys were stored in their small brown envelopes worn soft and broken. Sometimes a copy of one of these old keys would get turned in. Luis had shown Annika how to track down the name of a key no one knew the use of anymore, gauging it with the metal gauge, and knowing something about all of the kinds of keys that had ever been used on campus, even those to buildings that no longer stood. For the second part, she could ask Luis, and stand close to him in his cubicle, though not actually press against him — he had had to put his foot down about that. The computer was always up to a Chilean news site. On the wall were pinned pictures of his boys and the curly-haired Penny, and a postcard from his brother in Brazil.

He always said they would take a walk first, and he would show her the gully where low warm water came up quietly over the rocks, and everywhere overhead there were strung silver spiderwebs in an almost continuous canopy between the trees…

Annika did like to track down a key. She sat on the stool in tight jeans or a short skirt, opened drawers, and matched the strange one up to likely master keys from old doors: locks that had had to be changed because of employees who left badly, and from old buildings that had been entirely demolished. Sometimes she let a key slip out of her hand just for the bright clink it made on the stone floor.

When no one was looking for her, she leaned against the cabinets and dozed. She might wake in a reverie about Luis and crumple to the cool floor and close her eyes, thinking that even if she could get through another entire work day without Luis’s hands on her, she still would not be able to get through tomorrow. Why in the world was she here, by these cabinets, alone? What was it worth, to do anything that didn’t have to do with his body? What was it … that old myth about the ancient lovers who were turned into entangled trees when they died, then they could always be touching — but still they wouldn’t be able to move. So even that old romance became a bloodless torture to her.

Not as often, Annika’s little naps sent her somewhere else. She might remember, in that brief shadowy space, the calm assuredness with which she had walked into this job, because of all she had been able to teach herself in the months leading up to it. For that short time, anyway, she had really felt like an adult. And it had been nice: not boring at all. That adult calm seemed a long ways away from the mess of sleeping with a married man. She comforted herself with the assurance that the passionate experience of her affair was not something she could have missed. It would add a depth to her life that otherwise she wouldn’t have known. She could only justify it because she could not imagine a way in which to give it up.