The Last Time They Met

  They walked up a street between wooden cottages, Thomas with his jacket folded over his arm, like a colonial improperly dressed in the heat. It might have been Nairobi or Lamu after all. She wore her coat over her shoulders, not wanting to imitate that masculine gesture.

  —Was there a baby? she asked.

  —False alarm.

  For a moment, the street spun, and Linda struggled to reclaim her bearings.

  —What an irony, she whispered.

  —What?

  She wouldn’t, couldn’t, tell him of the ordeal at the Catholic hospital. Of the hostility of the nuns. Of the kindness of the Belgian doctor who had declared the abortion a necessity. Nor of the undisguised malice of Sister Marie Francis, who had brought the fetus in a jar for Linda to see. She would not be the one to cause Thomas any more pain.

  —You must keep writing, she said breathlessly after a time. However difficult.

  For a time, Thomas was silent. It’s a struggle I lose more often than I win.

  —Does time help?

  —No. He seemed to have the conviction of long experience.

  They walked up a hill and left the road and sat upon a boulder. For a long moment, she put her head against her knees. When she looked up, her hands were still trembling. She was better dressed for this occasion than Thomas and was reminded that they’d missed, together, the great dressing-down of America. She’d never seen him in a T-shirt, and, not having seen it, could not imagine it. His dress shirt, she saw, was crisp, of excellent quality. She had a sudden longing, instantly disowned, to put her hand to his back. Desire sometimes came to her in the night, unannounced and unwanted — an intrusive presence in her bed. It made her restless and fretful, causing her to realize with renewed finality what she’d lost.

  (Vincent and she, lying face-to-face, the surface of their bodies touching at half a dozen places, like electrodes. Maria and Marcus out with friends on a Saturday afternoon; the luxury of time and sunlight on the bed. Vincent saying, his eyes dark and serious, as though he’d had an intimation of mortality, I hope I die before you do. Her eyes widening: this from Vincent, who was not a romantic. I’d have to destroy the bed, he’d said. I couldn’t bear it.)

  And she, who had once been a romantic, now slept alone in that very bed and couldn’t imagine wanting to destroy it.

  —Why did you do it? Thomas asked.

  He was looking resolutely toward the skyline of the northern city. He would have been wanting to ask this question for years. Twenty-five of them, to be precise.

  She could not, at first, answer him. They watched together a movie of pleasure boats and tankers going into port.

  —What difference did it make, she asked. In the end?

  He looked at her sharply. We might have worked it out.

  —How, exactly?

  —Maybe with time, we’d have found a way.

  —You delude yourself.

  —But the way it happened, he said. You left no possibility. Perhaps he felt his daughter’s death entitled him to be accusatory, she thought.

  —I was drunk, she said. She who did not normally look for excuses.

  —Well, yes, he said. But it was more than that. You meant to hurt.

  —Who? she asked sharply. Myself? Regina?

  —Regina, certainly.

  But she hadn’t meant to hurt; she’d meant only to convey what seemed like some great truth, as cosmic in its way as the laughter that would shake her years later. That she should have been so appallingly cruel had always shocked her.

  —It was the most selfish moment of my life, Thomas. I can only think I must have wanted it over. All of it.

  —Oh, Linda, he said. Of course, I’m just as guilty as you. More so.

  Her face burned with the memory of that terrible evening. It’s hard to believe that anything could have meant so much, she said.

  She’d been drinking scotch straight up. Against a wall, Peter had stood, not comprehending at first what the fuss was for, but knowing something irretrievable had been said. He’d seemed a minor player then, only a witness to a larger drama. That, too, had been unforgivable on her part. Not to have seen how shamed he’d been. How good he’d been not to make himself the point. Until later that night, in the privacy of their hotel room, when he’d wept for her betrayal, so absolute, so public. And she’d sat mute beside him, feeling only terror that she’d lost her lover.

  It was better not to remember.

  —A comedic writer would make of it a farce, Thomas said. The confessions in different rooms, and so on.

  —The comedic writer might not be a Catholic, she said.

  * * *

  They negotiated a path that ran between low scrub. The cottages were boarded up, waiting for summer owners to return. No cars were allowed on the island, and she wondered how such houses were built. Did walls and tiles and chimneys come across by boat?

  —Islands always remind me of the Isles of Shoals, Thomas said. A hellish place.

  It was a moment before she remembered and understood. The realization stopped her on the path.

  He turned to see where she had got to. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been back there any number of times.

  It was a kind of bravery, she thought, the ability to look the worst in the face. Would there be a grave, a marker? How could such a sight be borne?

  —What happened to Regina? she asked when they had walked on.

  —She’s in Auckland now, and has two children.

  —Auckland, New Zealand?

  —We write occasionally. She works for a pharmaceutical company.

  The difference in air pressure between the disastrous and the mundane was making Linda light-headed.

  —Her husband owns a sheep farm, Thomas added.

  —Not permanently scarred, then.

  Thomas began to roll his shirtsleeves. Well, who would know?

  They stopped at a small white house with bright blue shutters that had been turned into a teahouse for those who had made the journey on foot across the island. Linda, surprised that she and Thomas had walked as far as they had, was perspiring inside her silk-like blouse, its synthetic material seeming considerably less clever a purchase in the unseasonable heat. She untucked the blouse and let it billow over her jeans. She felt a coolish breeze stir around her midriff. Her hair was sticky at the back of her neck, and she freed it with a swipe of her hand.

  —Hungry? Thomas asked.

  The choices were a table with a cloth inside the shop or a bare picnic table outside. They took the latter, anchoring napkins with glasses and a ketchup bottle. They sat side by side, looking out at the water, which was brilliant apart from shadows cast by a few scattered benign-looking clouds. Thomas sat close to her, either deliberately or having no awareness of private space. Their arms touched here and there from elbow to shoulder, a proximity that distracted her. She saw the interior of a car, a Buick Skylark convertible, white with red leather interior. She would not have known the year. The top up, the windows steamed, a policeman shining a flashlight through the wet and opaque glass. Did every teenager of that era have such a memory?

  —I’m supposed to be on a panel, Thomas said. I’m playing hooky from an interview right now.

  She did not have interviews, apart from a phoner in the morning.

  —When is your panel?

  Thomas looked at his watch. At four o’clock.

  —There’s a ferry at two-thirty, she said. What’s it on, the panel?

  —“The Phenomenal Ego of the Contemporary Poet.”

  She looked at him and laughed.

  He turned slightly and raised a foot to the picnic bench, leaning an arm on his knee. Thomas had always had trouble with leverage, had developed back problems, even as a boy. Something to do with the ratio of his height to the width of his bones. His slouch had always given him an appealing lankiness.

  A teenage girl came shyly to the table to take their orders. The menu was limited: cheeseburgers, fish burgers, and hot dogs. Linda didn
’t trust the fish. She ordered a cheeseburger. I haven’t had one of those in years, she said.

  —Really? Thomas asked, genuinely surprised. Did you ever have a lobster again?

  —Oh sure. You more or less have to in Maine.

  She wanted to move apart from him, simply to dispel the tension. She was aware of physical flaws: her own, which didn’t bear thinking about; nicks in the table; a support that was slightly loose; a crust of dried ketchup below the white plastic cap. Boats that had come around the lee side of the island were hitting boisterous waves, the spray explosive, jarring. She noticed that some sort of predatory birds seemed to be reproducing themselves even as she watched, creating a phalanx at a discreet distance, waiting for scraps. Canny birds with long memories.

  —If you want to talk about your daughter, Linda said, understanding the risk of her invitation, I’d love to hear about her.

  He sighed. Actually, it would be a relief. That’s one of the problems with not being with the mother of the child. There’s no one to bring her alive. There was Rich, but we’ve exhausted his memories.

  Linda moved away, on the pretense of crossing her legs.

  —But what’s to tell? Thomas seemed defeated before he’d even begun.

  She looked at his long back, the shirt disappearing into the crescent of his belt. For a moment, she longed to run her nails along the cloth, up and down his spine. She knew for a certainty that he would groan with pleasure, unable to help himself. Possibly he would bend his head forward, an invitation to scratch the top of his backbone. Knowledge of another’s physical pleasure never went away.

  Thomas put his leg down and reached into a back pocket. He pulled out a leather wallet, worn pale at the seams.

  —This is Billie.

  Linda took the picture from him and studied it. Dark curls spilled across a face. Navy irises, as large as marbles, lay cosseted between extravagant and glossy lashes. A pink mouth, neither smiling nor frowning (though the head was tilted warily or fetchingly — it was hard to tell), had perfect shape. The skin was luminous, a pink blush in the plump cheeks. Not credible if seen in a painting, but in this photograph one had to believe in it. How had the picture not burned a hole through the worn leather of its case?

  She glanced at Thomas, reassessing him. That Thomas was in the girl could not be denied, even though the father’s beauty had been something quite different. Curiosity, bordering on a kind of jealousy, took hold of her as she tried to imagine the mother: Jean, her name was. Thomas’s first wife, Regina, a woman she herself had once known, had been large and voluptuous, heavy with her sensuality, but somehow not a threat. Never a threat.

  Linda shook her head. That she should be jealous of a woman who had lost everything.

  —That was taken in the backyard of our apartment in Cambridge. Thomas was seemingly unable to look at the picture himself, though its worn edges spoke of many viewings.

  Thomas glanced over at her, then quickly away, as if it were she who now needed the privacy. The cheeseburgers arrived, monumental irrelevance. She handed the photograph back to Thomas.

  —She was very bright, Thomas said. Well, all parents say that, don’t they. And maybe they’re right. Compared to us, I mean.

  Linda’s appetite was gone. The cheeseburgers seemed obscene in their lakes of grease, soaking into the paper plates.

  —She could be stubborn. Jesus, could she be stubborn. Thomas smiled at a memory he did not divulge. And oddly brave. She wouldn’t cry when hurt. Though she could certainly whine when she wanted something.

  —They all do.

  Thomas ate his cheeseburger, holding his tie as he did so. Well, he’d have to eat, wouldn’t he? Linda thought. Otherwise, he’d have starved to death years ago. He glanced at her untouched plate, but said nothing.

  —She was a good little athlete, Thomas said. I used to take a plastic lawn chair and sit and watch her T-ball games. Most of the kids would be in the outfield picking dandelions. Some would just sit down. He laughed.

  Linda smiled. I remember those. Someone would hit a ball to the outfield and all the kids would run to get it.

  —They say it would have lasted less than a minute. The drowning. A child gulps in water more quickly than an adult. And it was always possible she was knocked unconscious. I’ve spent years praying for that. That it was a blow and not a drowning. Amazing, isn’t it? Hundreds of hours of prayer just to spare her that one minute.

  Not amazing, Linda thought. She’d have done the same.

  —It’s awful to think I’m letting go, he said. And I am. I don’t remember as much as I used to. I don’t even remember what I don’t remember.

  She touched him then, on the arm. It would have been inhuman not to. There are just no words, Thomas.

  —No, there aren’t, and isn’t that ironic? We who thought we had all the words. Jean, with her camera, has made us irrelevant.

  A motorboat with a young blond woman at the helm sped around the corner. The girl seemed exuberant with her own beauty and the first warm day of the season.

  Thomas bent his head slightly forward. Scratch up near my shoulders, he said.

  * * *

  On the way to the ferry, Thomas, who was either exceptionally hot or desiring to be cleansed, went into the water. Linda sat on a hillock and watched the way he dove in and stood, staggering with the shock of the cold, shaking his head like a dog, hiking his boxers up to his waist. They hung low on his thighs when he came out and molded his genitals, which had grown longer in the intervening years.

  —It’s like electric shock therapy, Thomas reported as he used his shirt to dry himself.

  He shivered on the ferry, despite his jacket. Later they would learn that the lake was polluted. He held his shirt in a ball. She stood near to him to warm him, but the shiver came from deep within and would not be appeased. He seemed oblivious to curious stares, in the boat and at the entrance to the hotel, his hair dried into a comical sculpture by the water and the ferry breezes. He got out at her floor and accompanied her to her room, looking for all the world like a refugee from a disaster (and of course he was, she thought). He stood at the door and finger-combed his hair.

  —I won’t ask you in. She meant it, actually, as a kind of joke, as if they had been on a date. But Thomas, as ever, took her seriously.

  —What’s the harm?

  —What’s the harm? Linda asked, incredulous.

  —Antecedents, he said. Does this exist on its own, or because of what went before?

  —Because of what went before, I should think.

  He studied her. What large drama, do you suppose, will part us this time?

  —There doesn’t have to be any drama, Thomas. We’re too old for drama.

  He turned to leave, then stopped. Magdalene, he said.

  The name, the old name. Nearly an endearment.

  Against her better judgment, she looked for evidence of others before her and found it in a single hair, disturbingly pubic, on the white tile beneath the sink. She was farsighted now and could blur her reflection in the mirror, and sometimes she did that if she was in a hurry. But today, she wanted sight: dispassionate and objective.

  She unbuttoned her blouse in the way that a woman who is not being watched will do, unzipped her jeans, and kicked them from her feet. The underwear, unmatched, could stay. She put her hands on her hips and looked into the mirror. She did not like what she saw.

  She was what was never possible: a fifty-two-year-old woman with thinning blond hair; no, not even that, not blond, but rather no color, a gray if you will, closer to invisible. Invisible at the roots and spreading out to a dirty gold that did not exist in nature. She examined squarish hips and a thickening waist that just a year ago she’d been convinced was only temporary. She’d read about girls who thought they were too fat when in fact they were frighteningly thin (well, Maria’s friend Charlotte had been one); whereas she, Linda, thought she was in general a thin woman when in reality she was overweight. And of course ther
e were her hands, the skin long roughened, announcing her age and then some.

  She turned abruptly away from the mirror, a peevish physician annoyed by his patient. She took the terrycloth hotel robe from its hook and meant to put it on, but instead she froze with it in her arms.

  Was she mad? What had she been thinking? No one would see her body. So why the lover’s examination?

  She tried her daughter again, this time on Maria’s cell phone. Though Linda had offered to pay for the calls, Maria had refused, her independence, even in the face of impressive student loans, no surprise. Whereas Marcus. Marcus needed to be taken care of, had developed charm to compensate for common sense, a nascent charisma to attract someone who might watch out for him. Such as David, Marcus’s lover, who was, at times, excessively protective, monitoring Marcus’s eating habits and sleep in a way she herself hadn’t done in years. Marcus was brilliant and would never use it; indeed, would make a point of denying this advantage.

  Linda lay back on the bed, holding the telephone, hoping her daughter would answer and smiling when she did. Is this a bad time? Linda asked.

  —No, I’m finishing lab reports. Maria was truly happiest when doing two things at once. How are you?

  —I’m at a writers’ festival, Linda said. And quickly thought, One needn’t tell the truth. The truth being that she’d become unhinged by the unexpected.

  The merits of the northern city were discussed.

  —I was just thinking about your father, Linda added. A partial truth, though it had not been thoughts of Vincent that had unhinged her. And for that she felt a disloyal pang.

  —You’re missing him, Maria said.

  Linda could see herself in the mirror over the dresser. She looked better in the softer light of the bedroom — smaller, possibly even desirable in the plush hotel robe. Will you get any time off this summer? Linda asked.