Cloudland by Joseph Olshan Page A

hair that added softness to a body that sometimes I’d found youthfully hard and unforgiving when we made love. It had been three months since our final incident, and all I could do was stare back at him before finally managing to blurt out, “ Why  … are you here ?” Then Fiona, in a glance taking him in and saying, “I’ll get going, Catherine. We can always pick up on this later.”
    In leaving, Fiona took an appraising glance at Matthew—and I could tell she found him attractive. And then she looked at me, competitively, I believed at the time, perhaps wondering why this man in his mid-twenties would pursue somebody fifteen years older. As I watched her heading toward the exit, I looked to make sure there were other people around: a few guards were standing in a group perhaps fifteen yards away.
    I regarded Matthew again and shook my head. “You can’t stay, you have to go. You promised you wouldn’t come near me again.”
    “I know, I know I promised … but please talk to me,” he said. “I’m in hell.”
    “You don’t think I am?” Then I noticed the red cardboard top of a Marlboro pack sticking out of his shirt pocket. “Don’t tell me you started smoking again!”
    “I know I promised you I wouldn’t. But I don’t have you after me about it, either. So I started again and can’t quit.” He looked at me with beggar’s eyes, and his large veined hands were shaking.
    This admission pierced through my flimsy armor. I avoided staring at his face directly, a man’s face on somebody so young. His pain was so much more difficult to handle than his fury.
    He reached for the pack.
    “You can’t in here,” I warned.
    He said, “I know I can’t. I just want it—I need something—in my hand.” He took a cigarette out and held it between two shaking fingers. “I continuously feel like shit, Catherine,” he said, but managed to smile again. “Seeing you … this is a break … from it.”
    I shut my eyes and swallowed and said, “Don’t, please!”
    He ran his hand tightly across the top of his head, gathering his hair in a fist and pressing it against the back of his neck. “At least you’re lucky you have somewhere else to be, ” he said. “Everywhere I go in Burlington reminds me of us.”
    “We’ve spent plenty of time down here at my house, too. It’s not like I don’t go around and find things that remind me of you, especially what you left behind.”
    “I guess I need to collect it.”
    “Better to tell me where you want me to send it.”
    I needed to get to my classroom and was about to inform him when he looked at me fixedly. “I’m trying to say, Catherine, that I had a life before you. All I want now is to have that life back.”
    “You sound quite resentful,” I said. “I didn’t take your life away from you.”
    “Well, I was happy until you came along,” he said.
    “And I was happy until you came along, ” I told him.
    Without another word, he got up and left the prison. He had a loping walk in which his shoulders dipped from side to side, an endearing stride that I could have spotted in a crowd; and with a terrible ache I knew I would miss it, I knew it would be a very long time until I saw him again. Shortly thereafter he fled the country for Thailand.
    *   *   *
    When I came into our little shared office in the prison, Fiona was leaning over a paper cutter, shearing large squares out of thick vanilla-colored drawing paper, the precise ripping sound that I always used to love in grade school now raking my nerves. She turned to me with a look of dolorous concern that did not belie her air of blooming happiness. Now she was the one in love, radiantly in love with Anthony Waite. And admittedly I was jealous, wondering what he saw in an attractive woman who I imagined was a lot less interesting than his wife.
    “Catherine,” she said softly, dropping her sheaf of drawing papers and moving toward me. “How are you doing with everything?”
    I waved