The Last Time They Met Page 8

  —You’ve had a haircut, she said to him with her own appraisal.

  He rubbed the short gray bristles, unused to the feel of his own head.

  —It’s cute, she said. Even in high school you didn’t have a crew cut.

  —I thought you’d like me more, he said.

  —You want me to like you more? Daring to flirt a bit.

  —I do, as a matter of fact.

  Together, as was expected, they clinked glasses.

  —Would you like to talk about your son?

  —In a while, she said. I need a minute. Of nothing.

  Thomas, who would understand needing minutes of nothing, sat beside her on a stool. They exchanged glances in the mirror over the bar.

  —You’d think that after all this time, your aunt would forgive you, Thomas said. Isn’t that what the Catholic Church teaches? Forgiveness?

  —She goes to Mass. I don’t know that she necessarily forgives.

  Her aunt spent her days in a cramped and darkened room the family had always called the den, sitting on a sofa upholstered in a scratchy plaid fabric. Two windows were draped with lace curtains; the TV was the centerpiece of the room. A bag of crocheting and a missal lay on the maple table beside the sofa. Linda was grateful for the daily excursions to Mass: at least her aunt had to leave the house and walk.

  —I mind because when I see her, I want to ask her how you are, and I can’t, Thomas said.

  Linda was silent.

  —So how are Michael and Tommy and Eileen and all the rest? Thomas asked, having been denied information about herself. He picked at a small bowl of nuts. He would know her cousins mostly as names with faces attached, though he had played hockey with Michael and had been fond of Jack. But how to reduce six complicated lives, six different lifetimes filled with sorrow and success and shame into six sentences? She thought a minute and then counted off her fingers.

  —Michael lives in Marshfield with a woman who has two boys. They’ve had a tough time of it financially. Tommy, who didn’t go to college, bought Cisco when it was 17, and now he’s worth millions. He never married. Eileen is probably the happiest of the lot. Her husband is a lawyer in Andover. (That made her happy? Thomas interjected.) Vincent and I used to see quite a lot of her and her family, Linda added. She has three children, all through school now. Patty is a banker in New York. Never married, which galls my aunt. Erin is in California. She’s had problems with drugs. She’s spent some time in jail, actually. Linda paused and watched Thomas’s face register his shock; he’d known Erin as only a pretty preteen in a pink dress. I guess you haven’t heard about Jack, then, she said quietly.

  He turned his head to look at her. He who might always expect the worst now. Or perhaps he’d heard a catch in her voice.

  —He died . . . She stopped, surprised by the threat of fresh tears. Of leukemia, when he was forty. My aunt’s never gotten over it. He was her baby. Linda picked up a bar napkin in case she needed it. To think the youngest of us would be the first to go. He left a wife and two babies, twins.

  Thomas shook his head. I taught Jack to ice-skate, he said, disbelieving.

  —I remember. She blinked with other memories. It was a terrible death. It sometimes makes me glad that Vincent went the way he did. So quick. He might not have known what happened to him. She stopped, remembering Thomas’s prayers for Billie. She wiped her nose and sat up. So there you have it.

  Thomas nodded slowly.

  —What are the odds that six children would make it to old age? she wondered aloud. Probably not very good.

  —Better than they used to be.

  —I had dinner with the group, she said. But have you eaten?

  —No. I’m not hungry.

  —What did you do today on your panel? Everyone was all abuzz.

  Thomas put a hand over his eyes. I lost it, he said, only pretending to be abashed.

  —What happened?

  —Some woman in the audience took me to task for exploiting Billie’s . . . He stopped. Which was all right, I suppose. But then Robert Seizek, who was on the panel with me, took the woman’s point and said so, and I was nearly shaking with the idea that a novelist, a fucking novelist, would say such shit. And, well . . . He stopped again.

  Thomas wore his collar open, his tie loosened. His shirt billowed over his belt, which rode lower than it used to.

  —You seem pleased with yourself, she said.

  —It was a dull panel.

  She laughed.

  —I bought one of your books today and reread bits of it in the barber’s chair, he said. I even read the flap copy again.

  —You did? The admission rattled her more than she was prepared to show. When had Thomas had time for this? Her fingers nervously caressed the stem of the glass. Though the vodka was getting to her a bit now, making her stomach warm.

  —Do you teach literature or writing? he asked.

  —Mostly workshops.

  Thomas groaned in sympathy. I tried that. I wasn’t any good at it. I couldn’t hide my contempt for the work.

  —That would be a problem. She turned toward him slightly and crossed her legs. A different tailored blouse tonight, but the same skirt. He would see the uniform for what it was.

  —What’s the college like? he asked. I’ve never been there.

  She told him that there was a quadrangle in the shape of a cross, with a chapel at one end and, incongruously, a hotel at the other. There were stone buildings and archways and leaded casement windows, made to look ancient on the Oxford-Cambridge model, but entirely constructed within the last two decades. It was a school unmarked by any idiosyncrasy or ugliness, by any of the new, which surely any institution that had truly evolved would possess. It was a universe sprung fully fashioned from the earth without having paid the dues of age. (Like America, Thomas said.) And sometimes it seemed a stage set, she told him, although the dramas that were enacted there were real enough: an abnormally high number of professor-student love affairs, alcohol overdoses at frat parties, a near epidemic of razor-cutting (mostly females), the endless machinations of jealous faculty. I see my job as one of encouragement. It’s difficult to teach someone to write.

  —Do you encourage the poor students?

  —One has to.

  —Aren’t you just wasting their time? And yours?

  —It’s what I’m there for. I suppose if I had a truly hopeless case, I’d suggest alternatives. If I thought the student could handle it. But I’m a bit of a coward when it comes to criticism. And I’m an easy marker.

  He smiled.

  —I had dinner with Mary Ndegwa, she said.

  —I’ve hardly had a chance to see her.

  —She’s very graphic about what she missed.

  —Well, it’s the core of all her poetry.

  —Her son, Ndegwa, is with the Ministry of Finance.

  Thomas shook his head again — a man who had largely isolated himself and was thus bedazzled by change; a man for whom a child’s life stopped at five. Baby Ndegwa, he said with something like awe. I’ve never been able to write about Kenya. It doesn’t seem to belong to me.

  —We were only visitors.

  In another room, a man began to play a piano. The bar was rapidly filling. She and Thomas had to speak more loudly to hear each other.

  —Sometimes I think about Peter, Thomas said. I often wish I could just call him up and apologize.

  Linda took a sip of her drink. I can’t remember ever making love to him, she said. What we did, I mean. I know that it happened, but I can’t see it. And I can’t understand how I can have been that intimate with someone and have no visceral memory of our time together. I don’t know whether I’ve simply forgotten or I was never paying very close attention. She paused and shook her head. What a horrid thing to say. I’d die to think I’d meant so little to someone I was once married to.

  Thomas was silent. Perhaps he was struggling not to ask her if she remembered their own lovemaking.

  —Do you know we on
ly made love four times? Thomas asked. In all those years? Four times.

  —Technically, she said.

  —Rich was fucking my wife. I saw them through the binoculars. He said he wasn’t, but I’ve never believed him. It’s been a thorn between us all these years. If I’m right, I could never forgive him, and he knows that. If I’m wrong, he’ll never forgive me for thinking him capable of it. Either way, we’re pretty much screwed.

  She waited for Thomas to say more about Rich, but he remained silent. She noticed that Thomas had a new way of holding his mouth; the lips a bit tighter, making him seem more wary. She wondered: was there such a thing as human decency?

  —Thank you for the drink, she said. But I have to go back to my room. I’m worried about my son. His lover is going to take him into rehab tonight if Marcus is willing. She paused. My son is gay.

  Thomas looked not shocked, but almost weary with the knowledge, as if the weight, the weight, of all these facts was almost too much to bear. Has it been difficult for you?

  —That? No. Not really. She slowly slid off the bar stool. This will be, though.

  * * *

  There were no messages from anyone. When Linda tried Marcus’s number, a voice, David’s, said: You have reached the happy abode of David Shulman and Marcus Bertollini. Linda cringed for Marcus.

  —That might mean they’re on their way to Brattleboro, she explained to Thomas, who had taken an armchair in the corner of the bedroom. She propped a pillow behind her back and sat with her legs stretched out along the bedspread. She kicked off her shoes, and Thomas took off his jacket. Whatever became of Donny T.? she asked suddenly.

  —What made you think of Donny?

  —I don’t know. He was always on the edge.

  —Of disaster, you mean.

  —Or of great success.

  —The success won out. He’s some kind of banker and worth millions. Probably billions by now.

  Linda smiled and shook her head slowly. She thought of Donny T. in the backseat of Eddie Garrity’s Bonneville, counting dollar bills in the dim light of a single lamp on the pier. Maybe it wasn’t the risk that had been the draw all those years ago: maybe it had simply been the money.

  —I want to tell you about Billie, Thomas said, startling her, until, looking at him, she saw that this had been the nugget of his thoughts all along; and she reflected that his need to tell this story again and again was probably not so very different from that of a woman who had recently given birth and felt it necessary to describe the ordeal in detail to whoever would listen. She herself had done the same.

  —I play it over and over again in my head, Thomas began. I always imagine that if I could just reach in and tweak some tiny detail, just one fact, I could easily change everything. Thomas slid down in his chair and propped his legs on the edge of a hassock. It was a bogus assignment in the first place. Jean had been hired by the Globe to take pictures of a place where two women had been murdered a hundred and some odd years ago. In eighteen seventy-three. At the Isles of Shoals. Do you know them?

  Linda nodded. I’ve never been there, though.

  —Rich had this idea, since it was summer, that we could combine Jean’s assignment with a little vacation. Sail up to the islands and around, maybe head on up to Maine. Thomas paused. I hate sailing. It was always Rich’s deal. Thomas shook his head. He’d brought a woman with him, a woman he’d been seeing, someone I’d met some months before at a party. Her name was Adaline, and she was perfectly nice — in fact she was quite lovely — but in an entirely unintentional way, she was dangerous. Have you ever had that feeling about someone? That he or she was dangerous?

  Linda thought a minute. Only about herself, years ago.

  —I think now that Adaline was a sort of catalyst. For some twisted thing that was playing itself out amongst the three of us — me and Jean and Rich. Thomas was silent a moment. Actually, Adaline reminded me of you. She looked just like you did in Africa. I hadn’t seen you since then, so in my memory, you were still that person. And what was uncanny was that she wore a cross. He put his fingers together, remembering. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. And she knew my poetry. And was very flattering about it. And I’ve never been very good at ignoring flattery.

  —No one is.

  —And Jean saw this — how could she not? — and it ate at her, as it would at anyone. I don’t think Jean was by nature a particularly jealous person. It was just that, on that boat, you couldn’t get away from it; whatever was happening on the boat, you had to live with it. It was in your face, hour after hour after hour.

  —And Rich saw it too? Linda asked quietly.

  —I have to assume that he did. Why else did he decide to fuck my wife then, on that trip? Jean and he had known each other for years. I don’t think there had been anything between them before that. Thomas’s eyes went inward, searching the past. No, I’m sure not. I’d have felt it, I think.

  Linda nodded.

  —We were all tense. And Jean and I . . . He glanced away and back again. To say we were having problems sounds banal. And it was, it was banal. But they weren’t problems in the way that one can define a problem and then try to solve it and move on. No, it was more that the texture of the marriage had gone wrong.

  Thomas sighed.

  —And so what do you do with that? Together you have a beautiful five-year-old girl. You get along well enough. There are no crises to speak of. Do you destroy a marriage because something vague doesn’t feel right? And, of course, you don’t know for certain that the marriage is irrevocably broken. Part of you is always hoping you can make it right.

  —Define “right.”

  —See? That’s the problem. In a marriage, you’re always working towards something, but you’re never sure when you’ve got there. If you’ve reached it yet. “Is there something more?” you keep asking yourself.

  He slid his tie through his collar and folded it. He laid it on the armrest. Jean and I weren’t sleeping together. Not often, anyway. So there was that to deal with, too, because it was all around us. Sex. In the mornings, you could hear Rich and Adaline fucking in the forward cabin. I’ve said that.

  The fucking so harsh a word, Linda thought. His anger must still be sharp. Bitter.

  —I know that Jean thought for years that I’d used her. Right after I met her, there was an uncanny period during which I started writing again after a long dry spell. For years, I’ve had trouble with writer’s block. Jean thought I stayed with her because of that, that she was a sort of muse for me. I was never able to disabuse her of that idea. He ran his hands over his still unfamiliar head. And it was complicated by the fact that early on — before I knew Jean and I would be married — I’d told her about you. She knew I loved you. He took a breath. That was a problem.

  Linda crossed her arms over her chest. Why did this knowledge upset her so?

  —How do you take that out of the equation? Thomas asked. How do you solve a problem like that?

  Linda breathed slowly and evenly. The room was cold, and she rubbed her arms.

  —The second day we were there, Jean and Rich went over to the island where the murders had occurred. We were moored just off the island — it had a dreadful name: Smuttynose — and Adaline and I were alone on the boat. Just talking. She’d lost her daughter in a messy divorce, and she was telling me about it. He scratched his head again. Such irony. To think that I was comforting her, and just hours later it would be me who’d lost a daughter. He put his head in his hands for a moment, then looked up. I happened to see some people over on the island, and I decided it would be Rich and Jean. I thought I’d give them a wave. I picked up the binoculars and saw Rich and Jean embracing. Jean was naked from the waist up.

  Linda gasped. The image was shocking, even in a world of shocking images.

  —I watched for a while, and then I couldn’t bear it. I threw the binoculars overboard. Adaline kept saying, “What, Thomas? Thomas, what?” But I couldn’t speak. And I don’t know why it bothers m
e so much, even now. After everything else . . .

  He leaned back in the chair.

  —It was your brother, Linda said. It was your wife.

  He nodded.

  —It was biblical, she said.

  He nodded again. What is sex, anyway? he asked. Is taking your shirt off in front of your brother-in-law sex? Technically? Where do you draw the line?

  —There isn’t one.

  —No, of course not. He took a deep breath. I was crazed after that. I couldn’t think clearly. I was so fucking preoccupied. And then, when they got back . . . He paused. There was a storm brewing. A serious storm. I’m not a sailor, but even I knew it was bad. There wasn’t any time to confront Rich or Jean. Thomas was shaking his head constantly now as he spoke. And between the storm and the tension, none of us was paying attention.

  He stood up suddenly, as if gathering courage for the rest. He walked to the window. We thought Billie was safe with Adaline. Adaline was seasick, and she was lying in the forward cabin with Billie, who was beginning to feel queasy herself. Rich and Jean and I were trying to stabilize the boat and get to shore. Thomas rubbed his eyes the way only a man would do: vigorously, even viciously. Adaline left Billie lying on the bed and went through the forward hatch to get some air. Probably to puke, too. I know she thought Billie wouldn’t leave the bed.

  Thomas began to pace. He walked to the French doors and through them to the living room. He picked up a small vase and put it down. He walked back to the bedroom. Jean and I had been trying to get Billie into her life vest. And I suppose we thought we’d done it, or maybe we were interrupted, I can’t remember now. But we should have known. Billie didn’t want to wear it, and we knew better than anyone just how stubborn she could be. We should have forced her into it and kept our eye on her at all times. Harnessed her, if need be, to the boat.