All My Relations by Christopher McIlroy Page A

choose.”
    â€œDon’t you think maybe I’d like to be compelled by you, for that to make my choice?”
    â€œI’m not much for coercion.”
    â€œIt’s persuasion I’m asking for,” Julia said. “I don’t want it to be all the same to you whether I say yes or no.”
    Philip prepared an evening of tantra, “a true yoga, serenity in motionless sexual union.” He positioned himself on the mat, thehalf lotus. Setting Julia on his lap, hooking her feet around his back, he entered her. Within minutes his breathing had subsided to a dilation of the nostrils, sigh. His eyes shut, the blue-veined lids unclenching. The forehead smoothed.
    Julia’s skin burst with excitement and frustration. When finally he stirred, she choked her limbs around him, mauled his chest with her teeth. Quick-quick-quick she moved, bouncing her rear on his ankles, beating against him.
    â€œI have to beg off tonight,” Philip said over the phone. “My feet won’t get me down the stairs.” He’d been complaining.
    Julia covered the hot dishes in foil and drove them over. “This place may have had its day,” she said. “If you were closer at hand, I’d be more available.”
    â€œIs that a suggestion that I move in?”
    â€œI suppose it is. The shambles is charming”—she gestured around the apartment—“but why not live graciously for a change?”
    â€œCan you imagine us rattling around each other twenty-four hours a day?”
    â€œIt’s not so outlandish,” Julia said. She’d keep the top floor, he’d have the bottom, more territory than he was used to.
    â€œJulia, your forays tire me.”
    â€œMe, too, Philip, I couldn’t agree with you more. Please do me the one favor. Meet Tim.”
    A day later Philip said, “A concession on my part is called for. I’ll come.”
    Philip was due at six. Tim and Linda arrived an hour early to help set up. Linda, diminutively voluptuous in a tight sheath, hair coiled, arranged the snack tray. Acting out family stories, she revealed a flair for mimicry. Tim had prepped for the evening to the extent of dredging up college lit notes. He discoursed on symbolism in
The Mill on the Floss
. Dusting the London broilwith garlic, he quoted verbatim passages from
Anna Karenina
in the dog’s point of view.
    â€œSweetheart,” Julia said. “I’m really moved by this support.” Tim kissed her.
    A glass of sherry, intended to calm, made them giddier. Picking at the hors d’oeuvres, they had nearly emptied the tray when, at six sharp, the phone rang.
    â€œI’m sorry, it’s wrong. I feel coerced. We need to talk,” Philip said.
    Julia turned to Linda and Tim. “You guessed it.”
    â€œ
Shit
,” Tim said. The explosive “t” made the word particularly ugly.
    Julia and Philip stood at his kitchen counter half an hour, as if sitting hadn’t occurred to them. They conversed with a distracted fluency, statements already thought through that they now borrowed from themselves. Neither referred to a purpose for the meeting.
    Julia asked why Philip no longer wrote.
    He did, but rarely, nothing to keep. “I won’t write depressed,” he said. “That’s ego, not poetry. I have no affinity with the vogue of inflicting one’s every hidden recess upon 80 million readers.”
    Why so depressed? “Your feet,” she joked.
    â€œYes.” He laughed. “And my wife.”
    â€œYour ex-wife.”
    â€œI’ve resumed with her.”
    Julia rejected the attempt to believe she had mis-heard.
    Vera was fifty, Philip said, still beautiful, copper hair and cream skin.
    â€œWhere do you go?” Julia asked numbly, as if interviewing.
    â€œHere in town. Unfortunately, she’s hopelessly unstable.” After leaving him, Vera had jumped off a bandshell roof during a rock concert.