Where or When

  When he walks to the car, his legs feel loose, boneless. He’s aware he’s moving too quickly, but he does not want to leave her alone, even for a minute, as if, after so brief a reunion, she might disappear again. He has few conscious thoughts, no plans. In his ears there is a pounding, a kind of desperate beat. His fingers tremble as he unlocks the trunk. The glasses are plastic, bought in the deli. He minds now that he didn’t think to bring champagne glasses.

  When he returns, she is standing at the edge of the porch, leaning against a stone railing, looking down toward the lake. She has the collar of her coat up, her arms wrapped around her. Before her, there is a sloping lawn, then a thicket of trees. Beyond the trees, they can see the far edge of the lake, a thin silver oval.

  “The path is here somewhere,” he says.

  “Yes, I remember it.”

  “Can you manage in those shoes?”

  “I think so. I can give it a try anyway.”

  She puts her hand on the railing, balances herself as she descends the stairs. She has a slight limp, and she explains: “My knee. From a skiing accident.”

  (He adds then another image to his mental collage—she’s in a ski outfit, her poles dug into the snow. But whom is she with? Her husband? A friend?)

  He walks slightly behind her and to her right, the bottle in one hand, the glasses in the other.

  “Do you think they mind us drinking our own champagne,” she asks over her shoulder, “walking all over their property?”

  “This is America. We can do anything we want.”

  She looks at him and smiles. They are on the lawn, and he is at her side. She seems brighter now, more relaxed, the sadness in the restaurant momentarily dissipated.

  “Well, we know that’s not true,” she says quickly. “I hope you’re not going to tell me you’re a Republican.”

  “I knew you were going to ask me that. Is it important?”

  “Yes, of course it’s important.”

  “Well, I’ve never voted, so I guess that lets me off the hook.”

  “You’ve never voted?”

  “And another thing you’re going to hate.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I drive a Cadillac.”

  The backs of her heels are sinking into the lawn. When they reach the lake he will offer to clean them for her.

  “So it was you in the parking lot,” she says.

  He laughs. “You looked right at me. I couldn’t believe you looked at me and walked so quickly away. I thought I’d scared you off.”

  “Well, I didn’t really look at you, and even if I’d known it was you, I can promise you there wasn’t a chance on God’s earth I was going to walk across that parking lot and introduce myself.”

  “I thought you were the hostess.”

  She seems taken aback. “The hostess?”

  “You drove in so quickly, as if you were late for work. As if you knew the place.”

  “I was just nervous.”

  “Why?”

  They reach the pathway in the woods, the one that will lead them down to what was the outdoor chapel by the lake.

  “I was just about to call you Cal,” she says. “It’s hard to think of you as Charles now. I had the tape on. Roy Orbison. ‘Crying.’ A wonderful song.”

  “He not only sang all those songs, but he also wrote most of them.”

  “I don’t know much about that music. But I do remember it.”

  “I went to a concert of his once. In Providence. An incredible concert. Now, there was a man with a lot of pain in his life. He was riding motorcycles with his wife, and his wife was hit and killed instantly. And I think he lost at least one and possibly two sons in a fire.”

  As soon as he has spoken, he realizes what he has said. She is in front of him, walking single file along the path, watching her feet so that she will not stumble.

  “Jesus Christ,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugs slightly as if to say it doesn’t matter. They walk along the path in silence for perhaps a hundred yards. Overhead are tall pines, their tops swaying in the wind. Down below, on the path, it is quiet, with few sounds—the rustle of an animal in the bushes, a flock of geese he can hear flying and calling somewhere out of sight.

  They emerge to a clearing of simple rough-hewn wooden benches on a carpet of pine needles. The clearing opens to the lake, an expansive view across gray rippling water. In the center of the clearing, at the edge of the lake, is the place where the cross—a wooden cross vaguely a man’s height—used to be.

  “I remember this,” she says beside him.

  He steps ahead of her and walks to the bench closest to the lake. He sits down and looks out. He puts the two plastic glasses on the bench, works the top of the champagne bottle. She sits, her hands in the pockets of her coat, on the other side of the glasses. The cork pops, flies toward the lake. He catches the spill of champagne in a glass, hands it to her. He fills the other glass, takes a sip. He wants to make another toast, looks out at the water instead. The water seems to be moving, an optical illusion. He wants to say the word “destiny” but does not. He remembers their sitting there as children, can remember holding her hand as if it were yesterday—the deep, sexual thrill of that gesture.

  “What I tried to tell you in the restaurant and couldn’t,” she says, breaking the silence, “is that somehow a death keeps you together, even if you shouldn’t be. . . .”

  He waits.

  She waves a hand outward. “To help remember, is what I think I’m trying to say.”

  “That’s the pain in your poetry?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “That’s a hard question to answer. And I’m not sure it’s pain exactly.” She takes a long swallow of champagne. He raises the bottle to fill her glass again, and she lets him.

  “What did you mean by ‘the shit’?” she asks. “You said in your letter you were trying to ‘transcend the shit.’”

  “It’s not important,” he says. “It’s just financial stuff. I’m not in particularly good shape at the moment.”

  “No one is these days.”

  “I suppose that’s true. I didn’t like it when you went to England.”

  “You’re funny. You don’t even know me.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. I loved the postcard you sent.”

  “You’d have loved the pub.”

  “The forty kinds of malt whiskey. It was your birthday.”

  “Yes.”

  “So how old are you now? Forty-six?”

  “Yes. When’s yours?”

  “New Year’s Day.”

  “So you’re . . . ?”

  “Forty-five now.”

  “Then I’m older than you.”

  “By two months. An older woman.”

  “Did we know that then? I wonder. My sister named a goldfish after you. Cal.”

  “And you think I’m funny.”

  “I guess I talked about you incessantly when I got home from camp. When did you give up the name?”

  “Sometime in high school, I think.”

  She looks out at the water, as if at an apparition there. He looks to see what she is seeing.

  “Charles, what happened to us that week?”

  “I think it’s simple,” he says. “We fell in love.”

  “Is that possible, for two fourteen-year-olds to fall in love?”

  “What do you think?”

  She looks off to the side, into the woods beyond the clearing. “Where is it? Do you know?”

  “I think it must be in there, where you’re looking.”

  “It’s strange. For months afterward, possibly even longer, I thought that I would marry you.”

  “I cried all the way home in the car,” he says. “My mother never let me forget it. It was a three-hour car ride. I told you what she said when I told her I’d given you the bracelet.”

  “I wish I could have found it.”

  “It probably disintegrated or turned green. I thin
k I paid a dollar and a half for it at the camp store.”

  “That was a lot then.”

  He laughs. “I remember that summer I saved up twenty-four dollars from my paper route and bought a turntable and a bunch of forty-fives.”

  “The songs you sent. They were from then?”

  “Most of them. ‘Where or When’ was from the summer we met. I played it endlessly.”

  “The lyrics . . .,” she says. She takes a sip of champagne, swallows thoughtfully, as if pondering the words of the song.

  “They’re extraordinary,” he says. “Though what’s more extraordinary is how I can possibly have understood them then. I suppose . . .” He looks out over the lake—a flat surface of sterling. “If I played it so often after I met you that summer, which is what I did, I had to have been envisioning a future reunion. In other words, I wasn’t experiencing the song as it’s meant to be experienced—a man remembering a former love—but rather I was the boy already imagining meeting you again after some time had elapsed. For instance, the line ‘The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore . . .’ I’d have been thinking of finding you one day, and you’d be wearing the thin cotton dress that came just below your knees.”

  “Or Bermuda shorts.”

  “Or Bermuda shorts.”

  “‘It seems we stood and talked like this before . . .’”

  He looks at her, adds another line: “‘We looked at each other in the same way then . . .’”

  “‘But I can’t . . .’” She seems unable to finish.

  “‘ . . . remember where or when,’” he says quietly.

  He sits, one leg crossed at the knee, a glass in his hand. He wonders if these are the exact same benches they sat on when they were kids. He shakes his head. He knows he will never understand this. They are, simultaneously, the children they were then and the man and woman they are now. As the water itself, this ancient lake, is the same and yet not. As the trees overhead are the same and yet not. He has never been able fully to comprehend time, now knows it is infinitely more mysterious than he ever imagined.

  “There’s another line I like,” he says after a time. “It’s in the original version, but not sung by Dion & The Belmonts. ‘Things you do come back to you, As though they knew the way.’”

  A flock of geese flap noisily overhead. She bends forward suddenly, her face in her hands.

  He puts his hand on her shoulder, tries to pull her up toward him, but she resists.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  His heart is tight, his chest in a vise.

  He is going to lose her, he is thinking. After all these years of not even having her.

  “Oh, God,” she cries.

  “Charles will do.”

  She sits up quickly, her mouth in a sudden, wide smile. Her eyes are wet.

  She looks at him. Her eyes dart from his eyes to his mouth to the top of his hair, as if examining him for the first time. Back to his eyes. She seems to be trying to find him. To read him.

  He knows he will not be hard to read, that it must all be there on his face.

  He puts his hand at the side of her chin, holds her face steady and kisses her.

  Her mouth is soft and large. He can feel her give. A loosening along her spine. He puts his arms around her, pulls her toward him, and she comes, so that her face is against his shoulder, inside his coat.

  She inhales deeply into his shirt. “I can smell you,” she says with evident surprise. “I remember how you smell.”

  He kisses the top of her hair. She puts her mouth against the weave of his shirt. She slides her fingers through a gap between the buttons of his shirt, touches the skin there. He wishes she would unbutton his shirt, thinks if she doesn’t, he might do it for her. Instead she takes hold of his tie and loops it twice so that it is wound around her hand.

  “You’re fond of my tie?” he asks.

  She laughs lightly.

  He puts his hands inside her coat, inside her suit jacket, holding her rib cage, the warmth of her through the silk of her blouse. He kisses her again, finds the inside of her mouth, and feels lost and light-headed, as if he were spinning.

  She makes a small sound.

  He puts a hand on her chin, tilts her face more sharply toward his. He kisses her again. She slips her face slightly to the side, finds his fingers. She kisses one finger, then another. He slides a finger inside her mouth. She closes her lips around it, holds it, then lets him withdraw it. He does it again, explores her tongue. Then again, and again.

  He withdraws his finger. He slides his hand to her breast, feels the breast through the cloth. He unfastens the top button of her blouse, pushes the fabric of her bra aside. He kisses her nipple, licks it with his tongue, astonishing himself with the boldness of this gesture.

  She breaks away, as if they had been tussling like schoolboys.

  It has not been a minute since he first kissed her. How did they get to this point so quickly?

  Her face is flushed, her mouth reddened. Her hair, at one side, has begun to come loose. There is a faint mottling at her throat and on her forehead. Her blouse is open, exposing the top of her left breast.

  “Is this a sacrilege?” she asks.

  He takes a breath. The question is light, from someone who no longer believes in sacrilege.

  “Absolutely not,” he says, matching her apostatic tone. “In fact,” he adds, going her one better, although he really believes this now, “I think God is going to be pretty annoyed if after bringing us together again—finally, after all these years—we don’t do something about it.”

  She smiles, but she withdraws. He watches as she fastens the top button of her blouse, tucks her hair up under an invisible pin.

  “It’s so odd that I remembered how you smell,” she says. She leans toward him, breathes his chest through his shirt, but before he can seize her, she has moved away. “I love your shirt,” she says, laughing. She sits up straight.

  He cannot move.

  She looks at him, but in her eyes she seems to withdraw even further. She frowns slightly.

  “I think I’ve been frozen,” she says, looking away.

  She stands up, gathers her coat around her.

  He stands up with her, flustered, wanting to keep her there, to tell her that surely now she is becoming unfrozen, but he cannot find the right words, does not want to have misunderstood her. He remembers the empty bottle, the glasses.

  He follows her along the path, up across the lawn, and toward the parking lot. He tosses the bottle and the glasses into a bin.

  “We haven’t eaten,” he says, catching up to her.

  “I couldn’t. Not now.”

  “No.”

  “In any event, I have to get home.”

  He nods.

  “You picked a lunch and not a dinner because you had to go home to your wife?”

  He doesn’t lie. “Yes,” he says. “And also I thought it would be easier for you.”

  They reach her car. She stands at the door, looking in her pocketbook for the keys, a casual gesture, as if she were a client, and he, out of politeness, were walking her to her car. When what he feels is a longing and a regret so achingly deep, he wants to bend over.

  When she finds her keys, she turns so that she is facing him. She opens her mouth as if to say goodbye, as if she had so quickly forgotten what they have just done down by the lake.

  “I might not be able to do this,” she says.

  Thursday night, 9:40 P.M.

  Dear Siân,

  I want to pick up the phone. I want my hand held. I want to call you and lie all night with the phone receiver next to me and know that we have an open connection.

  I won’t call.

  I watched you drive out of the parking lot this afternoon, and I felt desolate.

  These letters are so volatile now, I do worry about sending them to you. What happened today was not innocent. I would like to say to you that it felt innocent, but I know that’s not true.

>   I want to make love to you and have it stop time.

  If I call the literary supplement and tell them you kissed a man who drives a Cadillac, your reputation will be ruined.

  Charles

  Friday, 2 A.M.

  Siân,

  I have picked up the phone and put it down fifteen times. I want to call you to tell you to meet me later today back at The Ridge. I want to hand deliver this letter.

  You said you might not be able to do this. I want to persuade you that there is nothing more important in life that we have to do now.

  I can’t sleep. I’ve been up reading. I dug out one of my old philosophy books and came upon a passage. It’s by the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, and it’s about sexuality. “Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa,” he writes, “so that it is impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual.’ There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself.” He also says that no one is saved and no one is totally lost.

  I found that last bit reassuring.

  I think that I have been somewhat frozen too, but I don’t fully understand why.

  Your face is as familiar to me as my own.

  Just think—it could have been worse: We might have met each other again at sixty-five, not forty-five.

  Charles

  Friday, 5 A.M.

  Dear Siân,

  I am still in my suit. I may never take this shirt off. I am going to frame my tie. I look like hell. I’ve been listening to “Where or When” all night. About half an hour ago, my wife came down to my study and asked me if I was sick.

  You and I have lost thirty-one years. I cannot bear to lose another day.

  My study is in ruins. I haven’t been able to find your last book of poetry, and I’ve turned the place upside down looking for it. Now that I’ve met you—again—I want to read each of the poems—again. I want to know everything there is to know about you.