The Last Time They Met Read online

  Despair and irritation grew in equal measure. She looked around at the empty room, its luxury fading with this news from home. She stood up from the bed and began to pace, her arms crossed over her chest. She talked to herself, and to Marcus and to Vincent, pale imitations of what was needed. She paced until she had exhausted all her words and thought, I have to leave this room. Or I’ll go mad.

  * * *

  The configuration of the hospitality suite seemed different when she entered late into the event; it was nearly time to assemble for dinner. The noise was louder than it had been the night before — more drinking on the last night of the festival? No, it was something else: the festive temperature in the room had been raised a degree or two with a sense of importance that had previously been missing. There was a woman, diminutive and dun-colored, in the center of the largest group. A flashbulb popped, and Linda strained to see, but felt disinclined to join the crowd, a natural diffidence taking precedence over curiosity. She went to the bar and ordered a beer, but then remembered Marcus and changed her mind. She ate instead, cheese and crackers, pickles from a side dish. Her mouth was full of Brie when the Australian, now neglected, appeared at her side and addressed her.

  —You’ve heard the news.

  —What news? She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin.

  He looked the healthiest of anyone in the room: fit and tanned — more like someone who wrestled with horses for a living, not with words. It would be fall now in his own country.

  The news did indeed take her by surprise: while she and Thomas had been on the ferry, a diminutive, dun-colored woman had won a prestigious prize.

  —Festival lucked out, I’d say, the Australian offered pleasantly. Linda turned and noticed, as she had not before, the bottles of champagne in buckets on the table.

  —I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of her.

  —You’re not alone. Plucked from obscurity. She’s meant to be very good, I’m told. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she? I’d venture there aren’t two people in the room who’ve read her.

  Linda shifted to get a better view. There were more photographers now, asking others to move apart.

  —She uses “fuck” a lot, the Australian said.

  A memory was triggered. Maybe she had read this poet after all. It’s the Age of Fuck, Linda said, though she herself did not use the word.

  —There are so many flowers already in her room, she’s had to ask the bellman to take them down to the front desk.

  Linda felt a touch of envy. She and the Australian smiled, each knowing what the other felt. One could not admit to envy, but one could silently acknowledge it. It would be disingenuous not to.

  The Australian’s smile faded. Beside her, Linda sensed a bulky presence.

  —Too bad your boy didn’t get the prize. Robert Seizek’s lower lip was fat and wet, his sibilants loose and threatening.

  —He’s not mine, and he’s not a boy, Linda said of Thomas.

  —Odd thing is, said the Australian, there weren’t a dozen people at her reading last night. Now they’re trying to get her to do a special appearance tonight.

  —I’m pleased for her, Linda said, trying to ignore Seizek.

  —She’s a librarian in her day job. From Michigan. The Australian collaborating.

  —You’re pretty tight with Thomas Janes, Seizek said too loudly, unwilling to be dismissed.

  Anger, so successfully tamped just minutes ago, stretched its limbs inside her chest — a caged animal to Seizek’s lion. She turned to face him and was daunted (only momentarily) by his excessively large head.

  —Thomas Janes has not published any work in years. She spoke in as controlled a voice as she could manage. And therefore cannot even have come to the attention of any prize judges. Though I’m sure if you were at his reading last night, you’ll agree that future publications might win prizes in any number of countries.

  —And if you were at Mr. Janes’s panel this afternoon, Seizek said, not missing a beat, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that your boy made a perfect ass of himself.

  Linda glanced at the Australian, who looked away.

  She knew that she was behaving like a schoolgirl whose friend had been insulted on the playground. But she couldn’t leave now; she was in too deep.

  —I for one, Linda said, would rather have the brilliant words of a man who may or may not have embarrassed himself in public than the watered-down prose of a drunken would-be novelist who seems to be itching for a fight I will not give him.

  And Seizek said, sotto voce, so that only she could hear, thus trumping her in battle etiquette as well, I didn’t know such fire could issue forth from someone whose bland exterior is matched only by the dreariness of her poetry. I suppose there are women who read this stuff? The kind of women who regularly read romance novels, I should have thought. I suppose there might be good money in it? No?

  Linda matched his sotto voce. Don’t fuck with me, she said, trying the word on a stranger.

  Seizek looked startled, even if only for an instant; Linda counted it as a victory, nevertheless. She glanced again at the Australian.

  With deliberately slow movements, so as not to appear to be fleeing, Linda turned and made her way to the door.

  She liked the word, she thought as she left the room. It sounded good. It felt good.

  * * *

  She took out the rest of her anger on the elevator button, which seemed to retaliate by refusing to fetch a car. An elderly couple came and stood beside her. From a room somewhere in the hallway could be heard the sounds of lovemaking: a woman’s rhythmic grunts, strenuous and lengthy. The elderly couple were rigid with embarrassment. Linda felt for them and wished a clever remark would come to her to put the couple at ease, but instead, their embarrassment became infectious. Moving toward the stairs, she thought, What reservoir of guilt has Thomas tapped?

  Vincent’s apartment in Boston was unlike anything she had ever seen before — unadorned and architectural, like a schoolroom, its centerpiece a draftsman’s table that cranked up to different angles with a winch. He had black-and-white photographs on the walls, some of his prodigious family (it would be months before she learned all their names), others of windows that had captured his imagination: austere colonial twelve-over-twelves; vast, complex fanlights set deeply into brick; simple sidelights beside a paneled door. His rooms were clean and masculine, curiously adult and oddly Calvinist in their sunny moral rectitude. Sometimes, when he was gone for brief periods on weekends, she would sit at his draftsman’s table with a pad of paper and a pen and write simple paragraphs that functioned as letters to herself, letters that Vincent would never see. He did not know her as troubled, for he had met her laughing; and she discovered that she had no desire to taint the happiness she’d found with him with sordid stories of her recent past. And consequently — and partly as a result of expectation — she rose to his image of herself: sensible and practical (which was largely true), drowsy and easy in bed, and prone to laugh at the foibles of others and of herself. The first night he took her back to his apartment, he made her a meal — spaghetti with red gravy — impressing upon her the fact that he was Italian to her Irish. The sauce was smooth and thick and seemed to have little to do with any tomatoes she had ever seen or eaten. Yet, she, who had been carelessly starving herself, ate ravenously, furthering the impression that she was a woman of appetite, an impression that was not altered in bed when she (who had been starved there as well) responded to her new lover with an almost animal greed. (Was it Vincent’s sleek pelt that made her think of seals?) And it was not a lie, this presentation of herself as healthy, for with Vincent she wanted to be and therefore was. And she thought it was probably not so unusual to be a different person with a different man, for all parts were authentically within, waiting to be coaxed out by one person or another, by one set of circumstances or another, and it pleased her to make this discovery. So much so that when, at the end of that first glorious weekend together, she returned to her ro
oms on Fairfield, she recoiled from the sight of the bathtub on its platform, the single Melamine plate on the dish rack. And immediately she went out and bought more dishes to put in the drainer and a Marimekko spread for her bed, so as not to frighten Vincent away, nor allow herself to be sucked back in. When Vincent first came and stood in the doorway of her apartment and looked around, he fit the surroundings to suit the person he knew (like designing a house, she later thought, only in reverse). And she, too, began to see them differently as well — as unadorned rather than bereft.

  Maria had come easily, but Marcus (prophetically) with painful difficulty. By then they were living in a house in Belmont that challenged Vincent at every corner with its banal design and shoddy workmanship. (Vincent, the son of a contractor, was a man who knew improperly mitered trim when he saw it.) Linda wasn’t teaching, and Vincent had started an architectural practice of his own, sinking whatever money he made back into the business (as was right, she thought), leaving them little at home; and if they had any stressful times together, it was then, when babies and unpaid bills stole their good tempers. But mostly, she remembered those early years as good ones. Sitting in their small backyard in Belmont (the grill, the swing set, the plastic turtle pool), and watching Vincent plant tomatoes with the children, she would be filled with amazement that, against all the odds, this had been given to her, that she and Vincent had made this family. She could not imagine what would have become of her had she not, for she saw the alternative as only a long, throbbing headache from which there would have been little relief.

  One morning, when Marcus was sleeping and Maria was at Montessori, Linda sat down at the kitchen table and wrote not a letter to herself, but a poem, another kind of letter. The poem was about windows and children and panes of glass and small muffled voices, and she found over the next few days that when she wrote and reworked the images and phrases, time passed differently, lurching ahead, so that she was often startled to look up at the clock and realize she was late to pick up Maria or that Marcus had slept too long. Her imagination began to hum, and even when she was not writing, she found herself jotting down metered lines and strange word pairings; and in general she was preoccupied. So much so that Vincent noticed and said so, and she, who for months had written in secret, got out her sheaf of papers and showed them to him. She was shredded with worry while he read them, for they revealed a side of Linda that Vincent was not familiar with and might not want to know (worse still, he might be curious about who had known this Linda, for some of the poems were about Thomas, even when they seemingly weren’t). But Vincent didn’t ask, and instead said he thought they were very fine; and he seemed genuinely impressed that his wife had secretly harbored this talent he’d known nothing about. All of which was a gift to her, for she wrote with redoubled energy, and not just when the children were away or asleep, but late into the night, pouring words onto paper and reshaping them into small objects one could hold in the mind. And Vincent never said, Don’t write these words about another man (or even later, about himself), thus freeing her from the most potent censorship there is, the fear of hurting others.

  She joined a poetry workshop at night and was stupefied (and secretly heartened) by the dull and overly confessional work of those around her. Emboldened by this, she sent out her first contributions to small literary journals, all of which, in the early months, rejected her work (once misdirecting another’s letter to her, so that she was able to quip that they’d started rejecting poems she hadn’t even written). To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose to see not as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game. Until one afternoon she received a letter from an editor who liked a poem and said he would publish it. He couldn’t pay her anything, he added, but he hoped she would give him the honor of being the first to put that particular verse into print. Far from minding the lack of payment, Linda was too thrilled to speak; and when Vincent came home that night, she was still clutching the letter to her breast. Months later, when a poem was accepted by a magazine that did pay, Linda and Vincent celebrated by going out to dinner, Vincent noting that the magazine’s check covered the cocktails.

  After that, the poems came like water, flooding the bedroom in which she wrote. It was as though she had been pent up, and years of poems had needed to pass through her. Her poetry was printed with some regularity (listing prior publications had a synergistic effect), and when Maria was twelve, her first editor, with whom she now warmly corresponded, wrote to say that he was moving to a publishing house in New York and would she consider allowing him to put out a volume of her verse?

  —You’ve done it, Vincent said when she called him at work to tell him.

  —I think I’ve just begun, she said.

  * * *

  All this she was remembering as she made her way down the hotel stairs. She opened the door off the stairwell (which reeked of cigarette smoke; chambermaids on their breaks?), not certain of the number of Thomas’s room. She thought it was on the seventh floor; had Thomas said 736? But she might be confusing that number with another, earlier, hotel room of her own. She could, she realized, simply go back to her room and call. No, that wouldn’t do. She wanted to see Thomas, to speak to him. She knocked at 736, a confident knock, though she braced herself for a baffled, half-dressed businessman appearing to tell a chambermaid that no, he didn’t need turn-down service. A tall woman in heels and pearls passed her in the hallway and wouldn’t meet her eyes: would Linda seem a woman who had been locked out of her room by an angry husband? Linda rapped again, but still there was no response. Fumbling in her purse, she found a tiny pad of paper and a space pen. These missives, she thought, as she wrote — such old habits, such echoes.

  —My son is an alcoholic, she wrote. And what is the antecedent for that?

  * * *

  Once again, she let herself be herded onto a bus and deposited at a restaurant — this time Japanese, the only food she didn’t care for, having never developed a taste for sushi or for vegetables coated with flour and grease. Still, eating out was better than sitting alone in her hotel room and having to resist the temptation to call either Marcus or Thomas, though she was intensely curious as to where each was exactly. Had Marcus gone to Brattleboro already? Had Thomas left for home? She wanted to ask Mary Ndegwa, with whom she ate dinner, if she knew what Thomas had done during his panel to so scandalize an audience she would have said was scandal-proof; but she worried that such a query might bring on a discussion of Thomas’s history, which she did not want to address just then. Mary Ndegwa and she, though they had never formally met, had a shared history and passed a nostalgic meal together, Linda enjoying the evocative rhythms of the poet’s Kikuyu accent even as they discussed her husband’s release from detention, the banning of her own work in Kenya, the horrendous aftermath of the elections of 1997, and the terrible bombing at the American embassy. Kenya was more dangerous as well, Mary Ndegwa told Linda, and though Linda chose to remember the shimmering green tea plantations of the Highlands and the white dhows of Lamu, she could as well recall the great-coated askaris with their pangas and the horrifying cardboard shanty towns of Nairobi. You must return, Mary Ndegwa said. You have been lost for too long. The African woman laughed suddenly, hiding the gap between her teeth with her hand. Mary Ndegwa, as always, found Americans mysteriously hilarious.

  During dinner, Linda noted that Seizek kept his distance, which pleased her inordinately; and the Australian smiled in her direction twice, conspiracy having made them something more than just acquaintances. There was a moment, during the interminably long dinner (which hurt her knees, unused as she was to sitting cross-legged on the floor), when she mused that had she been available for a brief affair, she might have had one with the cowboyish novelist. But brief affairs had never appealed to her (so little investment, despite the momentary reward; and it was the investment that mattered, was it not?), and then she thought about the word available and
pondered its meaning: Was she truly not available? And if not, to whom or what was she engaged? To the memory of Vincent? To her history with Thomas? To herself as sole proprietor of her own body?

  The returning bus made several stops, and only she and an elderly Canadian biographer disembarked at the hotel, Linda slightly (and shamefully) uncomfortable with the association with greater age; and perhaps she emerged from the bus with a slightly jauntier step than was warranted.

  He was sitting in a chair facing the entrance when she moved through the revolving door. He stood and they faced each other for an awkward second, a second during which they might easily have embraced. But having missed the moment, now could not. Behind them, the revolving door spun with couples dressed for a Saturday night.

  —I know this is highly inappropriate, Thomas said. But would you like a drink?

  —Yes, she said simply. I’d like that very much.

  The mahogany was shiny, without fingerprints. Linda noted white linen cloths stacked high upon a shelf. The bartender was a pro, his movements long practiced, as fluid as a dancer’s. He made a sparkling martini that was like a package she did not want to ruin by opening. She’d thought, briefly, about ordering a scotch, for old times’ sake, but she knew that she could no longer stomach the smoky drink, and she marveled, as she sat there, at how, years ago, she’d drunk them down like orange juice. (All her own drinking seen now in perspective. . . .) Men, sitting at the bar, appraised her as she entered with Thomas; but then she wondered if their glances were, in fact, directed at her at all: might it not be Thomas who had caught their eye? (The men wouldn’t even know they’d looked, she thought, the need to look so ingrained.)