He added milk and sugar to Martha’s coffee and joined her at the table. Only on sitting down did he remember he had, all this while, been wearing the blue blanket as shawl. He must look like a man considerably older than he was, or perhaps even like an old woman.
“Thanks,” he said, “for thinking I might be cold.”
She touched his fingers with her own, which were warm from the sides of the mug: he had never known why she often avoided the handle nor how she could endure the heat.
He covered her hand. Because he loved her, he wished there were a means by which he could share his alternative lives with her at least as entertaining narrative, but it was also because he loved her that that could never be done: he could not alter her sense of him at this late date.
But he could ask, “Have you ever thought about what might have happened in your life if you hadn’t met and married me?”
“Only when I was considerably younger,” Martha said. “There was a time when I did it a lot. Oddly enough, it was right after having Elliot. You might not think that would occur to a new mother, but it did to me. I had moments of sheer panic: I thought, God, I’m really trapped and forever!”
Hunsicker was warmed now and stood up to take the covering from his shoulders. Martha rose with him, reaching for the blanket. “You never fold it right. I can’t stand it when the corners don’t square up.”
“Yet you never make a bed good and true at the corners.”
“I wasn’t in the army. And I’ve told you throughout the years that I hate to get in between tightly stretched sheets and have to fight my way down inside with my toes.”
“We agree on a lot though,” Hunsicker said uncertainly. He withstood an urge to embrace her, for it would have been physically awkward with the blanket clasped to her body, and he was too morally fastidious so to beg his case.
“As a child I wanted to be a dancer,” said she. “Then later on, in college, I wrote what I thought was poetry. Does anyone still want to be another Edna St. Vincent Millay?”
Hunsicker tenderly assured her, “You could have been either.”
“No, I couldn’t have,” she said with spirit. “I fell over my own feet as a young girl. And it took no great courage when I got only slightly older to see that my poetry was silly stuff.” She looked at him with her fine eyes and said proudly, “I have no regrets. I did what I should have done, am what I should have been.”
“So did I,” stated Walter Hunsicker, “so am I.” But something still remained to be said, and he said it. “I couldn’t even imagine another life.”
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Copyright © 1988 by Thomas Berger
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Thomas Berger, The Letter Left to Me
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