"Do I still resemble her from this angle?" she asks, her head dipped back in the nest made by her pillow. His forearms shift uncomfortably on her hips as he lays prone diagonally to her naked form.
"Who?" he asks in a poor purchase of time. They never forget the slips, he thinks. It makes him wonder how people stay married for forty years. There must be a lot of lying involved, Oscar-worthy performances from the altar to the grave. Was he drunk and spilling his guts when he told her two years ago? Of course; he must've been. Why did he always fall into that trap? Dimitri Karamazov indeed, beard and scars to prove it.
"Becky," she answers coolly without looking down at his quivering brow, perhaps out of pity for a man on the run.
Her butchering of the name bothers him like it always does when someone fouls it up casually as if they knew the girl, but didn't. Not Becky, not Rebecca, but Beck. That was how she referred to herself eight years ago when they were young and in that first form of amateur love, and that is how she's to be addressed now as long as he has a say in the matter. There was something less feminine about her version of her name that made the two of them seem even more alike in addition to their dark features, sarcastic humor, and similar taste in music. She could take the Jack straight better than he could, though. He attributed it to her father, but neither of them spoke about it. Her career has probably moved her towards Rebecca status, but that doesn't matter now in the dim light of the apartment in which he still holds a candle. He remembers seeing a parochial school dedicated to Our Lady of Pompeii and laughing at its morbid implications. That's who Beck's become to him: a patron saint of Better Times buried in yards of ash. Eight years. God, has it been that long? he asks himself.
"You mean..." he begins, quickly realizing that correcting her nominal mistake will only make it worse. The vague opening words make it easy to recover. "...to tell me that you don't think I'm over her?" Brilliant. Masterful. Bond at his best.
Her eyes finally peel from the ceiling and stare down at his waiting countenance. Did she buy it? For that matter, did he? Only the coming reaction will tell. Eight years of locking a child in his heart. It seemed like yesterday, yet also eternity. The lovely, long-haired girl that made him who he is today, for better and worse and mostly unintentionally, still has a hand in his daily affairs. It makes him breathe more deeply. It relieves his troubled ghosts. They're still with us when they're gone. It's all an illusion, this passing of time and faces. We're not alone. If we'd reach out far enough they'd still be there in some way, shape, and form. The problem is that we're too afraid of what we'd find now, so we wait. We wait for something, not knowing what. Deliverance. Salvation. Another turn up at bat.
"I know you are, silly boy," she says with a half-hearted smile. "I just want to be as beautiful to you as she was."
The bait won't be taken, as tempting as it is with the current rush of nostalgia coursing through his veins. That's too rich for his blood, not worth an afternoon of apologies. She knows he hates this kind of fishing, but they're also both aware of who's got the upper hand.
He parries with a compliment he'd been saving for a rainy day, neither of which worth mentioning. She coos and gives a childlike kiss on his forehead.
When the smoke clears they make love in the lazy haze of the afternoon, neither of them saying names for some hours. It's a hell of a life sometimes, but someone's got to live it.
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