Cul-de-Sac Read Free Page B

from a shopping center. “It’ll be nice in the morning, to be awakened by the sun.”
    After moving her away from the window he went over and turned out the overhead light … the room now illuminated only by the light from the bathroom.
    “What’s wrong?” She chastised herself for asking it again, he obviously wasn’t ready to talk yet. “I’ll go take a shower.” Annie stepped into the light from the bathroom doorway and turned, made sure Paul was watching, then slowly raised her dress. Once in a rare moment of sexual candor he had told her that the image of a woman slowly raising a hem and eventually revealing she was wearing no underpants … he found it powerfully arousing. Annie had used this information to great success on several occasions.
    But now Paul watched her blankly. When he finally understood what she was doing he looked away in embarrassment. Annie felt ashamed of herself. She went into the bathroom and closed the door, realizing only later that she’d left Paul in the dark.
    After showering quickly Annie wrapped herself in a towel and came into the bedroom to find that Paul had turned on the little lamp by the mattress … he’d also torn off a six-foot length ofshade and had taped it to the window as far up as he could reach.
    Before she could speak he pointed to the exposed upper portion of window and said, “See, you can still have the morning sun.”
    She smiled but also wondered what was out there he didn’t want looking in. Cul-De-Sac had no neighbors within sight.
    A section of water-stained window shade was still on the floor, Annie holding Paul by the arm and telling him the shade was an ancient map scroll, brown and rusty-red stains forming islands and isthmus-connected continents on a yellowing fabric sea.
    Usually enchanted by Annie’s fanciful stories he listened now with dull expression.
    She kept talking, hoping to lighten his mood. Encouraging him to his knees she took her husband by finger on circumnavigations that led to encounters with parrot-feathered natives, escapes from nose-boned cannibals, to islands where the women were beautiful and bare-breasted and the men wore only the briefest of loin cloths.
    He began softly crying.
    She wrapped him in her arms. “Is it the money?”
    He didn’t answer.
    Early in their marriage she withdrew everything she’d saved over the years to invest in Paul’s dream of buying old buildings, renovating them, then reselling at a profit … the dream failing on that crucial third point. Creditors had shut them down in North Carolina and Annie still wasn’t sure where Paul came up with the down payment for Cul-De-Sac, this decaying former hotel-hospital-asylum, this sixty-room monstrosity in the Virginia exurbs of Washington, D.C.… but when he left North Carolina a month ago to start the renovations he promised that this time he’d make them rich.
    “If we have to,” Annie said, “we’ll declare bankruptcy, I’ll go back to work, we’ll start over again.”
    Paul had stopped crying but wasn’t replying to anything she said.
    “Nothing matters as long as we stay together.” After Annie’s father died, her mother married and divorced three times, eachmarriage more hateful, each divorce more acrimonious … Annie pledging herself not to repeat the pattern. She was with Paul for life.
    He apologized.
    She went over and opened a suitcase, bringing out a bottle of white white. “It’s not champagne …” Annie produced two plastic glasses that had an unnerving tendency to lose their stems. “And these aren’t crystal but—”
    “Our anniversary,” Paul said, closing his eyes and looking as if he might start crying again.
    “Three years tomorrow … and another reason I pulled this silly stunt of coming here to surprise you.”
    “It wasn’t silly.” He sat next to her on the mattress.
    “I even brought a corkscrew,” she said, bending to search through the suitcase.
    Paul touched her dark red hair and