The Tenth Gift Read Free Page A

never be put back together again, I was livid with him and did not speak to him for the best part of two years.
    How ironic. For shortly after that I met Michael.
    How well I remember it all. Anna, a little breathless, flushed, embarrassed. “Julia, come and have a drink. There’s someone I want you to meet. My fiancé, in fact.“
    Well, she’d kept that quiet. I was astonished, and rather hurt by the secrecy and suddenness of it all. She’d never even had boyfriends at college. When the rest of us were making the most of our newfound freedom, Anna was writing essays, researching, revising. While I was cheerfully experimenting with sex, Anna stayed focused and celibate. She took life a lot more seriously than the rest of us. After college she had plowed her energies into her career: She had a plan, she said, and it certainly seemed to be working for her. “I’ll marry in my thirties,” I remember her telling me, “once I’m properly established at the magazine and can take time off to have children.” And at the time I’d scoffed and reminded her how John Lennon had said that life was what happened to you while you were making plans. So there she was, at thirty-one, announcing her engagement, the next step in her life scheme.
    “Are you pregnant?” I’d teased her.
    She was indignant, but went very pink. “Of course not,” she said.
    I wondered if she had even slept with him.
    There had to be a flaw, since there is no such thing as perfection, in life or art or anything else. Perfection tempts fate. I remember reading that ancient Japanese potters always worked a tiny flaw into each pot they created, for fear of otherwise angering the gods, and Anna must surely have tempted some impish spirit somewhere in the pantheon, to have been punished for her hubris with Michael. And in having me for a friend.
    Unfortunately for all of us, the attraction between Michael and me was instant. We made electric eye contact, and at one point during that first evening at a crammed little bar in Covent Garden, he brushed his hand, quite deliberately and with devastating effect, against my bottom. Three weeks later, after a lot of meaningful looks and some furtive touching, we slept together.
    “I can’t tell Anna,” he said to me that same afternoon, as if it was a foregone conclusion, and I, missing my first and best opportunity to unravel the developing tangle, lay there concussed by sex and guilt, and agreed. After that it became increasingly unthinkable to admit our treachery.
    I was maid of honor at the wedding.
    As we lay together on snatched Wednesday afternoons in Michael’s Soho flat when he wasn’t teaching, summer sunlight slipping through the louvered blinds, slicing our bodies into lit and shaded slivers, he would confide to me, “She’s not very physical, Anna. I always feel I’m imposing myself on her.” At the time I felt triumph, but my confidence was misplaced. Anna’s cool distance intrigued and challenged him: She remained an unseized prize, an elusive country he had only fleetingly glimpsed but never claimed as territory. Whereas me he had staked out, explored, tied down—often literally. Sometimes when we made love, Michael would wind my long, pale hair in his hands, using it like reins. Once he tied me to a hotel bedstead with it. We had to use the pair of miniature sewing scissors I kept in my handbag with my embroidery kit to cut me free, he had made such a mess of the knots.
    I recalled that particular incident now, four years later: It seemedan apt metaphor—an omen perhaps—for how things had turned out. Michael had knotted my life into a vile tangle and then cut me free. I was angry with him, furious in fact, before admitting to myself that I had to take at least as much of the blame for the situation. Anna was, after all, my friend. I had felt ashamed of the affair, my betrayal of our friendship, from the start. But shame is an uncomfortable emotion, one we don’t much like to