Back When We Were Grownups (16 page)

She said, “Hello, Will.”

She held out her hand, and he took it. (This must surely be the first time they had shaken each other’s hand.) His fingers were as knuckly and wiry as ever, but there was a difference in the texture of his skin, a kind of graininess that she saw in his face, too, now that she was close enough—a sandy look to his cheeks, a trio of fine lines straining across his forehead. His lips, which had once been very full and sculptured, were thinner and more sharply defined. He was wearing a wilted suit jacket over an open-necked white shirt—elderly clothes, sagging off his bony frame in a slack and elderly way.

She settled in the chair opposite him, and he sat back down. “What happened to your long golden braid?” he asked her.

She raised a hand to her head. “My . . . ?” she said. “Oh. I cut it off. It was too much trouble to take care of.”

A menu arrived on her plate, and another on Will’s. The hostess said, “May I tell Marvin what you’re having to drink?”

“Who’s Marvin?” Will asked.

“Iced tea for me,” Rebecca said, although she could have used something stronger.

Will said, “Just water, please.”

“Sparkling, or still?”

“Pardon?”

“Tap,” Rebecca volunteered. (That much she felt sure of, although the question would not even have been thought of in their dating days.)

As soon as the hostess had left, Will turned back to Rebecca, plainly expecting her to begin the conversation. Instead, she spent some time placing her purse just so on her left, then unfolding her napkin in slow motion and smoothing it across her lap.

Why was she acting so gracious, she wondered—so matronly, so controlled?

It was the way she behaved with strangers. Really, he was a stranger.

But she said, “It’s wonderful to see you, Will!”

He blinked. (She may have been a bit loud.) He said, “Yes, me too. For me to see
you,
I mean.”

There was a pause.

“And all except for the braid, you look exactly the same,” he added.

“Yes, fat as ever!” she said, laughing brightly.

He cleared his throat. She rearranged her napkin.

“I took the Poe Highway over here,” she said. “Goodness, things have changed! So many new housing developments, or new to me, at least, and Macadam looks
very
different. I doubt I’d even—”

A young man dressed in black set their drinks in front of them. “So,” he said, whipping out a pad and pen. “Decided what you’re having?”

Rebecca said, “Not quite yet, thanks,” but Will said, “Oh, sorry, wait a minute, let’s see, what am I—”

He took a pair of rimless glasses from his breast pocket and hooked them over his ears. (Now he seemed downright ancient. She could draw back from him and imagine that she had never seen him before.) “You go first,” he told Rebecca.

She said, “Well, I . . . The salmon, I guess.” It was the first thing her eyes landed on.

Will was peering at his menu. “Salmon, veal, rib roast . . .” he said, his index finger traveling down the page. “Ah, maybe the rib roast.”

“And how would you like that cooked, sir?” the waiter asked.

“Medium, please. No, better make it well done.”

“Well done it is,” the waiter said, writing on his pad.

“On second thought,” Will told him, “I believe I’ll have the Award-Winning Swordfish.”

“Swordfish,” the waiter said. He scratched out what he’d written.

“But without the Caramelized Onion Sauce,” Will said. “Unless . . .” he said. He beetled his snarly white eyebrows. “Would it still be the actual Award-Winning Swordfish if it didn’t have the sauce?”

“It wouldn’t be the
actual
Award-Winning Swordfish in any case, sir,” the waiter said, “because that one was eaten by the judges.”

Rebecca laughed, but Will just said, “All right, then, no sauce. And no dressing on the salad.” He looked across at her. “I’m trying to watch my cholesterol.”

This surprised her at least as much as his having Caller ID. Mentally, she supposed, she had sealed him in amber—imagined him still a college boy wolfing down milk shakes and burgers.

“I’m not used to eating out much,” Will told her once the waiter was gone. “Generally I cook at home. I make my famous chili. You remember my chili.”

“Oh! Your chili,” she said. She did remember, she realized. Or at least she remembered Will chopping onions into tiny, uniform squares, and Mrs. Allenby tut-tutting at the red spatters across her clean stovetop.

“My particular recipe constitutes a completely balanced meal,” Will was saying. “I mix up a double batch every Sunday afternoon, and I divide it into seven containers and that’s what I eat all week.”

“All week?”

“Now I’ll have an extra container on hand because of this evening. I’m not sure yet how I’ll deal with that.”

“But don’t you get awfully bored, eating the same meal every night?”

“Not a bit,” he said. “Or if I do, what of it? I’ve never understood this country’s phobia about boredom. Why should we be constantly diverted and entertained? I prefer to
sink into
my life, even into the tedious parts. Sometimes I like to sit and just stare into space. I don’t require newness just for newness’ sake.”

“Well . . . you’re right, I guess,” Rebecca said. “Goodness!
I
don’t know why we mind boredom so much.”

“I have my lunches in the college cafeteria. Spinach salad and yogurt.”

“That sounds extremely healthful,” she told him.

The waiter set a basket of breads between them, and Rebecca selected a roll and put it on her bread plate. Then she reached for the butter. The silence was that obvious kind where every gesture becomes important. The slightest turn of her wrist seemed almost to make a noise.

“So,” she said finally, “I gather you’ve adjusted to living on your own, then.”

“Yes, I can’t complain. I rent a very nice apartment over on Linden Street.”

“An apartment,” she repeated. (Cancel that image of the tenured-professor’s house.)

“In the home of Mrs. Flick. You remember Dr. Flick of the English department, don’t you? She started renting out her top floor after he died. I have a good-sized living room, dining room, kitchenette, bedroom, and study. The study can double as a guest room if my daughter ever wants to stay over.”

“Oh, Will, you have a daughter?”

“Seventeen years old—a senior in high school. Beatrice, her name is.”

Beatrice! Rebecca was struck dumb with admiration. Beatrice would be a female version of Tristram. Rebecca pictured her in a modest muslin dress from the nineteenth century, although she knew that was unlikely. She pictured Beatrice and her father joined in some scholarly endeavor—Beatrice reading aloud while Will nodded soberly in his rocking chair by the fire.

“But that’s nothing compared to you,” Will was saying.

“Me?”

“You have
four
daughters, you mentioned.”

“Oh, yes, I’m way ahead of you!” She took a gulp of iced tea—too big a gulp; she nearly choked. “I’ve got grandchildren, even! Six. I mean seven. Because my husband’s three girls were older, you know; his girls from his previous marriage.”

“And how did he happen to pass away? If you don’t mind my asking.”

His delicate wording, along with the clumsy look of his mouth as he spoke—a sort of crumpled look, as if he had too many teeth—made her feel the need to set him at ease. “He died in a car wreck,” she said forthrightly. “It was very sudden. Well, a car wreck is always sudden, of course. But I was so unprepared! And so young! I was twenty-six years old. And his girls had just barely gotten to where they admitted I existed.”

“Couldn’t you have sent them to their relatives? They must have had some, someplace.”

“Well, only their mother.”

“Their mother!” Will said.

“But she’d remarried; she lived in England. Sending the children to her would . . . In fact, the subject never came up.”

Will shook his head. “Personally,” he said, “I would find that situation intolerable.”

This hurt her feelings, for some reason. She knew he meant to sympathize, but she couldn’t help imagining a note of judgment in his voice. She said, “Everything ended up fine, though! Just fine! I’ve managed very well. I run a little business out of my home, hosting parties. Joe started that—my husband. And the girls are all grown up now. You should meet them! It’s this huge, big, jumbled family; nothing like what you and I were used to when we were children. Oh, isn’t it amazing, how life turns out? Could you have imagined we’d be sitting here, waiting for swordfish and salmon, back when we were eating pancakes at Myrtle’s Family Restaurant?”

On cue, the waiter set their plates in front of them—Will’s swordfish starkly naked, Rebecca’s salmon buried beneath a conglomeration of capers, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, black and green olives, and pine nuts. Two salads arrived, Rebecca’s smothered in blue cheese dressing. “Fresh-ground pepper?” the waiter asked, brandishing what looked like a mammoth chess piece. Will shook his head. To make up for him, Rebecca said, “Yes, please!” even though she was longing for the two of them to be left alone. One twist of the grinder and she said, “Okay! Thanks!” Finally, the waiter walked off.

“Where was I? Myrtle’s Family Restaurant,” Rebecca said. She speared an olive. “Oh, doesn’t it seem long ago? But of course, it
was
long ago. And yet, in another way . . . I can remember just like yesterday that time in ninth grade when we went to the drive-in movie. I had such a crush on you, and you thought we were just friends. You thought I was only this kid you’d gone to nursery school with.”

The olive had a pit, she discovered as she bit down. She removed it with a thumb and forefinger and hid it under her roll. Luckily, Will’s eyes were on his plate and he didn’t seem to notice.

“A bunch of us went to the movies,” she said, “in Ben Biddix’s older brother’s pickup truck. Remember? Ben paid his brother five dollars to take us since none of us could drive yet. And we all sat out on that grassy spot down in front of the screen—do you remember this?”

Will shook his head.

“It was you and me and the Nolan twins and Ben and his brother and Nita Soames, who was going out with Ben’s brother at the time. In fact I think she eventually married him. The night was really clear and warm with a balmy breeze, a kind of
promising
breeze, you know that kind? You were sitting next to me and I put my hand down flat in the grass, hoping to seem nonchalant, and then I inched it a little closer to your hand and waited, and then a little closer; so finally just the sides of our hands were barely touching, or maybe not even touching but warming each other, sort of—”

“You broke my heart,” Will said.

All this time he’d gone on gazing at his plate, keeping his face so impassive that she wasn’t sure he was listening. And she wasn’t sure even now, because there she was, magically transported to that starlit evening in 1960 when everything was poised to begin, and meanwhile he had leapt forward to the very end of the story. She set down her fork. The olive was sitting high in her throat like a thick, heavy stone.

“You never gave me the slightest warning,” Will said. He took hold of both sides of the table. “I thought everything was fine. I trusted you. Then one day you said goodbye and walked out, not a word about why. Got married two weeks later. I had to hear it from my mother. ‘Did you know about this person?’ she asked me. ‘He must have been in the picture for quite some time,’ she told me. ‘Rebecca can’t have been dating him only two weeks, I shouldn’t think.’”

As he spoke, he leaned toward her until he was hugging the table between his sprawling arms. It made Rebecca see, at long last, that this really was Will Allenby—a lanky, big-eared giraffe of a boy who never had quite learned how to manage his own limbs. Those were his startling eyes, whose clear blue light she only now detected underneath the shelter of his thatched brows. And his wide, sharp shoulders, and his boxy Adam’s apple bobbing in his neck. Looking at him was like looking at changeable taffeta—back and forth between the generic old man and the specific young Will. Which made it all the worse that he sounded so bitter.

She said, “Will. I’m sorry. I know I didn’t treat you well. But it wasn’t anything I planned! I was just . . . overwhelmed! Swept off my feet by a fully grown man, someone who already had his life in order, was already
living
his life, while you and I were still . . . but I never meant to hurt you. I hope you can believe that.”

The waiter said, “Is everything to your liking, folks?”

“Yes, delicious,” Rebecca said. “Then afterwards,” she told Will, “after I was married and settled, I know I should have written or something. Offered more of an explanation. But everything started moving so fast! Everything was so chaotic! I had the three little girls to take care of and more and more of the business falling on my shoulders; I was living in that crowded house with my ailing mother-in-law and an uncle-in-law in mourning and a very adolescent brother-in-law; and then my own baby came along. There wasn’t a moment to think, even, let alone write you a letter! It seemed I got onto a whole different path, got farther and farther away from my original self. But just this summer I sort of . . . woke up. I looked around me; I said, Who have I turned into? What’s become of me? Why am I behaving like this? I’m an impostor in my own life! Or another way I could put it is, it’s
not
my own life. It’s somebody else’s. And that’s the reason I phoned you.”

Will straightened slowly in his seat until he was upright again. He said, “I guess you thought you could waltz on back as if you’d never left.”

“I didn’t think that!”

“You thought I’d say, ‘Oh, sure, Rebecca, I forgive you. I’ve forgotten all about what you did. Let’s go back to the old days.’”

“I never thought any such thing,” she said.

But she had, in fact. Secretly, she had fantasized that he might say he’d never stopped loving her. Now that seemed conceited, and self-deluding, and shameful.

She slid back her chair and stood up in a rush, bruising both of her thighs against the underside of the table. “Sorry,” she told him. “I can see this has been a mistake.”