The Last Time They Met Page 2

  —It contains all theatrical possibilities. Passion, jealousy, betrayal, risk. And is nearly universal. It’s something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.

  —Not fashionable to write about love, though, is it. This from Seizek, who spoke dismissively.

  —No. But in my experience, fashion doesn’t have a great deal to do with validity.

  —No, of course not, Seizek said quickly, not wanting to be thought invalid.

  Linda drifted to the edges of the talk, assaulted by a sudden hunger. She hadn’t had a proper meal (if one didn’t count the small trapezoidal carton of nachos) since breakfast in her hotel room in a city seven hundred miles away. She asked the men if they wanted anything from the buffet table, she was just going to get a cracker, she was starved, she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. No, no, the men did not want, but of course she must get herself. The salsa was decent, they said, and they wouldn’t be eating for another hour anyway. And, by the way, did anyone know the restaurant? And she reflected, as she turned away from them, that just a year ago, or maybe two, one of the men would have peeled away, followed her to the buffet table, would have viewed the occasion as opportunity. Such were the ironies of age, she thought. When the attention had been ubiquitous, she had minded.

  Small bowl of colored food left the guest to guess at their identity: the green might be guacamole, the red was doubtless the decent salsa, and the pink possibly a shrimp or crab dip. But she was stumped as to the grayish-beige, not a good color for food under the best of circumstances. She reached for a small paper plate — the management had not provided for large appetites — and heard the hush before she understood it, a mild hush as if someone had lowered the volume a notch or two. From the corner, she heard a whispered name. It couldn’t be, she thought, even as she understood it could. She turned to see the cause of the reverential quiet.

  He stood in the doorway, as if momentarily blinded by the unfamiliar. As if having been injured, he was having to relearn certain obvious cues to reality: pods of men and women with drinks in hand, a room attempting to be something it was not, faces that might or might not be familiar. His hair was silver now, the shock of that, badly cut, atrociously cut really, too long at the sides and at the back. How he would be hating this, she thought, already taking his side. His face was ravaged in the folds, but you could not say he was unhandsome. The navy eyes were soft and blinking, as if he had come out of a darkened room. A scar, the old scar that seemed as much a part of him as his mouth, ran the length of his left cheek. He was greeted as a man might who had long been in a coma; as a king who had for years been in exile.

  She turned around, unwilling to be the first person he saw in the room.

  There were other greetings now, a balloon of quiet but intense attention. Could this be his first public appearance since the accident, since he had taken himself into seclusion, retired from the world? It could, it could. She stood immobile, plate in hand, breathing in a tight, controlled manner. She raised a hand slowly to her hair, tucked a stray strand behind her ear. She rubbed her temple softly with her finger. She picked up a cracker and tried to butter it with a crumbly cheese, but the cracker broke, disintegrating between her fingers. She examined a fruit bowl of strawberries and grapes, the latter gone brown at the edges.

  Someone said, too unctuously, Let me get you a drink. Another crowed, I am so pleased. Still others murmured: You cannot know, and I am such.

  It was nothing, she told herself as she reached for a glass of water. Years had passed, and all of life was different now.

  She could feel him moving toward her. How awful that after all this time, she and he would have to greet each other in front of strangers.

  He said her name, her very common name.

  —Hello, Thomas, she said, turning, his name as common as her own, but his having the weight of history.

  He had on an ivory shirt and a navy blazer, the cut long out of style. He had grown thicker through the middle, as might have been anticipated, but still, one thought, looking at him, A tall man, a lanky man. His hair fell forward onto his forehead, and he brushed it away in a gesture that swam up through the years.

  He moved across the space between them and kissed her face beside her mouth. Too late, she reached to touch his arm, but he had retreated, leaving her hand to dangle in the air.

  Age had diminished him. She watched him take her in, she who would be seen to have been diminished by age as well. Would he be thinking, Her hair gone dry, her face not old?

  —This is very strange, he said.

  —They are wondering about us already.

  —It’s comforting to think we might provide a story.

  His hands did not seem part of him; they were pale, soft writer’s hands, hints of ink forever in the creases of the middle finger of the right hand. I’ve followed your career, he said.

  —What there’s been of it.

  —You’ve done well.

  —Only recently.

  The others moved away from them like boosters falling from a rocket. There was conferred status in his knowing her, not unlike the Australian writer with the good review. A drink appeared for Thomas, who took it and said thank you, disappointing the bearer, who hoped for conversation.

  —I haven’t done this sort of thing in years, he began and stopped.

  —When are you reading?

  —Tonight.

  —And me as well.

  —Are we in competition?

  —I certainly hope not.

  It was rumored that after many barren years, Thomas was writing again and that the work was extraordinarily good. He had in the past, inexplicably, been passed over for the prizes, though it was understood, by common agreement, that he was, at his best, the best of them.

  —You got here today? she asked.

  —Just.

  —You’ve come from . . . ?

  —Hull.

  She nodded.

  —And you? he asked.

  —I’m finishing a tour.

  He tilted his head and half smiled, as if to say, Condolences.

  A man hovered near Thomas’s elbow, waiting for admission. Tell me something, Thomas said, ignoring the man beside him and leaning forward so that only she could hear. Did you become a poet because of me?

  She remembered that Thomas’s questions were often startling and insulting, though one forgave him always. It’s how we met, she said, reminding him.

  He took a longish sip of his drink. So it was.

  —It was out of character for me. That class.

  —In character, I think. The rest was fraud.

  —The rest?

  —The pretending to be fast.

  Fast. She hadn’t heard the word used that way in decades.

  —You’re more in character now, he said.

  —How could you possibly know? she asked, challenging him.

  He heard the bite in her voice. Your body and your gestures give you the appearance of having grown into your character, what I perceive to be your character.

  —It’s only middle age, she said, at once devaluing both of them.

  —Lovely on you.

  She turned away from the compliment. The man beside Thomas would not go away. Behind him there were others who wanted introductions to the reclusive poet. She excused herself and moved through all the admirers and the sycophants, who were, of course, not interested in her. This was nothing, she told herself again as she reached the door. Years had passed, and all of life was different now.

  She descended in the elevator, which seemed to take an age to reach her floor. She shut the door to her room, her temporary refuge. The festival packet lay under her coat, tossed there as one might have abandoned a newspaper, already read. She sat on the bed and scanned the list of festival participants, and there it was, his name, the print suddenly bolder than the typeface of the other names. In the flap opposite, tucked behind a white plastic badge with her name on it, was a newspaper clipping announcing the festival. The
photograph with which the editors had illustrated the piece was of Thomas, a decade younger. He had his face turned to the side, not showing the scar, evasive. Yet, even so, there was something cocky in his expression — a different Thomas than she’d once known, a different Thomas than she’d seen just moments ago.

  She stood up from the bed, replacing mild panic with momentum. Their meeting after so many years seemed a large occurrence, though she knew that all the important events of her life had already happened. She considered the possibility of simply remaining in her hotel room and not attending the dinner. Surely, she had no serious obligation to the festival beyond that of appearing at the appropriate time for her reading, something she could do by taxi. Susan Sefton might worry, but Linda could leave a message at the restaurant: she wasn’t feeling well; she needed to rest after the long flight. All of which seemed suddenly true: she wasn’t feeling well; she did need to rest. Though it was the shock of seeing Thomas after all these years that was making her slightly ill. That and an attendant guilt, a nearly intolerable guilt now that she had known order in her life, responsibility, had imagined from the other side how inexcusable her actions had been. Years ago, the guilt had been masked by a shamefully insupportable pain — and by lust and love. Love might have made her generous or selfless, but she had not been either.

  She walked into the bathroom and leaned into the mirror. Her eyeliner had smudged into a small, humiliating circle below her left eye. It was one thing to resort to artifice, she thought, quite another to be bad at it. Her hair had given up its texture in the humidity and looked insubstantial. She bent and tousled it with her fingers, but when she righted herself, it fell into its former limp shape. The light in the bathroom was unflattering. She refused to catalogue the damage.

  Had she become a poet because of Thomas? It was a valid, if impertinent, question. Or had they been drawn together because of a common way of seeing? Thomas’s poems were short and blunt, riddled with brilliant juxtapositions, so that one felt, upon finishing a collection, buffeted about. As though one had taken a road with many twists and turns; as though a passenger had jerked the wheel of a car, risking injury. Whereas her work was slow and dreamlike, more elegiac, nearly another form entirely.

  She wandered into the bedroom, a woman who had momentarily forgotten where she was, and saw the telephone, lifeline to her children. She read the instructions for making a long-distance call. There would be outrageous surcharges, but she couldn’t care about that now. She sat at the edge of the bed and dialed Maria’s number and was disappointed when Maria was not at the other end. Linda opened her mouth to leave a message — people who called and did not leave messages annoyed her — but though she dearly wanted to say something to her daughter and, more important, wanted to hear her daughter’s voice, she could not find the words. A man you’ve never heard me speak about is scratching at the surface. Illogically, or perhaps not, Linda thought of ovum and sperm and of a single cell poking through a delicate membrane. She replaced the receiver, feeling unusually mute and frustrated. She lay back and closed her eyes.

  She pictured her daughter and her son, one sturdy, the other not, and, oddly, it was the boy who was the more fragile. When she thought of Maria, she thought of vivid coloring and clarity (Maria, like her father, spoke her mind and seldom thought the consequences would be disastrous), whereas when she thought of Marcus, she thought of color leached, once there, now gone, though he was only twenty-two. He, poor boy, had inherited Linda’s pale, Irish looks, while Vincent’s more robust Italian blood had given Maria her sable eyebrows and the blue-black hair that turned heads. And though Vincent had sometimes had shadows on his face, particularly under his eyes (and had those shadows been early signs of disease they might have read if only they had known?), Maria’s skin was pink and smooth, now that the mercifully brief ravages of adolescence had subsided. Linda wondered again, as she had often wondered, if it was her own response to her children’s coloring that had determined their personalities; if she had not, in fact, mirrored her children back to them, announcing that Maria would always be direct, while something subterranean would form beneath Marcus’s skin. (How Marcus all these years must have thought himself misnamed — Marcus Bertollini confounding everyone’s expectations of him, he who looked so much more a Phillip or an Edward.) She did not regard these thoughts about her children as disloyal; she loved them in equal measure. They had never competed, having learned at an early age that no competition could ever be won.

  The numerals on the clock brightened as the room darkened. Poets and novelists would be convening now in front of the hotel, like schoolchildren embarking on a field trip. I will go down, she decided suddenly. I will not be afraid of this.

  * * *

  At the horizon, the clouds had parted, the pink light a promise of a better day tomorrow. Linda registered everything: the way a woman, stepping up to the bus, could not put her weight on her right knee and had to grasp the railing; the pretentiously scuffed leather portfolio of a poet with fashionable black-framed glasses; the way they all stood in raincoats, nudging and nudged slightly forward, hands in pockets, until they’d formed a thickened cluster. But she willed her antennae not to locate Thomas, who must have been behind her or absent altogether. So that when she was seated at the back of the bus and watched him board, she felt both surprise and embarrassment, the embarrassment for his sudden emasculation, his having to ride a bus as schoolchildren did. He was, in his trench coat, too bulky for his seat, his arms tucked in front of him, his shoulders bulging above his torso. Robert Seizek, more drunk than she had seen any man in years — his face looking as though it would spout water if pinched — needed to be helped up the steps. The authors who had to read that night seemed preoccupied, excessively self-conscious about appearing relaxed.

  They drove through graying streets, deserted at this hour, more businesslike than charming. Linda tried not to look at Thomas, which was difficult to do. He seemed disheveled, so unlike Vincent, who’d always appeared impeccable, compact and neat, like his body. She’d loved the way the cloth of her husband’s shirts had fit tightly against his shoulders, the way he’d trimmed his beard, always a perfect sculpture. He’d worn Italian leather belts and custom trousers, and in Vincent this had not been vanity, but rather habit ingrained by immigrant parents anxious to have their child succeed in the new world. What might have been foppish in another was, in Vincent, routine and even elegant; Vincent, who did not believe in treading upon the innocent wishes of one’s parents; Vincent, who was often baffled by the generalized insolence of his children’s friends.

  The bus stopped, and Linda was determined to hang back. She would simply find an empty seat in the restaurant and introduce herself to a stranger. But when she emerged from the bus, she saw that Thomas was hovering near the door, waiting for her.

  He contrived, by small movements, to seat them apart from the others. It was a small bistro that was, possibly, authentically French. The festival participants had been put into a narrow room with two long tables and benches at the sides. Linda and Thomas sat at the end nearest the door, and this, too, seemed the gesture of the man she remembered, a man who had always favored easy exits. She noted that the paper tablecloth, stained already with half-moons of red wine, did not quite reach. Thomas was doodling with his pen. The acoustics of the room were terrible, and she felt as though she were drowning in a sea of voices, unintelligible words. It forced them to lean together, conspiratorially, to speak.

  —It’s something of a resurgence, isn’t it? This interest in poetry?

  —But not a renaissance, she answered after a moment.

  —I’m told there are ten of us here. Out of a roster of sixty. That must be something of a record.

  —They’re better about this abroad.

  —Have you done that? Gone to festivals abroad?

  —Occasionally.

  —So you’ve been on the circuit for a while.

  —Hardly. She resented the barb. She moved aw
ay from the conspiratorial bubble.

  He leaned in closer and glanced up from his doodling. You try to do too much in your verse. You should tell your stories as stories. Your audience would like that.

  —My audience?

  —Your verse is popular. You must know your audience.

  She was silent, stung by the implied criticism.

  —I believe at heart you are a novelist, he said.

  She turned her face away. The gall of him, she thought. She considered standing up to leave, but such a theatrical gesture would show her to be vulnerable, might remind him of other theatrical gestures.

  —I’ve hurt you. To his credit, he looked repentant.

  —Of course not, she lied.

  —You don’t need me or anyone else to tell you your own worth.

  —No, I don’t, in fact.

  —You’re a wonderful writer in any form.

  And he would believe the compliment. Indeed, would not even think of it as a compliment, which implied something better than the truth.

  The food arrived on plates so large that adjustments had to be made all along the table. Linda tried to imagine the appliance that could manage the oversized dishes; and to what end, she wondered, since they only dwarfed the food: Indonesian chicken for herself and salmon with its grill marks for Thomas. Returning pink-eyed from the bar, Robert Seizek bumped the table, jostling water glasses and wine. Linda saw the furtive and bolder glances in her direction from the others. What prior claim did Linda Fallon have on Thomas Janes?

  Thomas took a bite and wiped his lips, uninterested in his food, and in this she saw that he had not changed as well: in half an hour, he would not be able to remember what he had eaten.

  —Are you still a Catholic? he asked, peering at the V of skin above her ivory blouse. It was a sort of uniform, the silk-like blouses, the narrow skirts. She had three of each in slippery folds inside her suitcase. You don’t wear the cross.

  —I stopped years ago, she said, not adding, When my husband, who knew its meaning, asked me to take it off. She lifted her glass and drank, too late realizing that the wine would stain her teeth. One is always a Catholic. Even when one has lapsed.