I Thought You Were Dead (20 page)

W
hen Tamsen arrived, two days later, Paul told her about a terrible dream he'd had, one not particularly difficult to interpret. He'd been with his parents at the Mall of America. They'd become separated and couldn't find one another, which filled him with anxiety, even though he was a full-grown adult and not a child. Eventually he found his mother, who informed him, “Your father isn't with us anymore. His heart is stuck.”

“Can you get your father online?” Tamsen asked.

She'd arrived just before six. Paul was cooking her a relatively fancy dinner by his standards, veal scaloppine in a mustard cream sauce with wild mushroom risotto, matched with a spectacular Chianti, or so the wine salesman at the liquor store had claimed. He wanted to do something special for Tamsen, to pay her back for all the things she'd done for him. She said her cooking instructor would have been pleased. Stella was under the kitchen table on scrap patrol.

“Probably,” Paul answered her. “I don't think he's going anywhere. Why?”

“Your dream made me think of something.”

Paul called his mother and got her to turn the computer on and set it up for his father to use. When they were ready, Paul asked Tamsen what she wanted him to say.

“I usually start by asking him how he's feeling,” Paul said.

“Do that, then,” she said.

“This isn't exactly going anywhere,” Paul told Tamsen.

“Tell him you think Tiger Woods's father must be very proud of him,” Tamsen suggested.

“Why don't you type?” Paul said, rising from the chair and offering her the keyboard. “He won't know the difference.”

“Paul, please,” she said.

“If you have something in mind, just go for it,” Paul said, gesturing toward the open chair. “I give you permission. It's better than you telling me what to type. If it takes too long, he loses focus.”

Tamsen took a seat at the keyboard.

“Gee,” Paul said, “this is making me feel
much
better.”

“Just wait a minute,” she told him.

“What does this have to do with my dream?”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “It just made me think that maybe you got it backward.”

“How did I get it backward?”

“You didn't lose him,” she said. “He lost you. He's the one who had the stroke.”

“Now
this
is getting interesting,” Paul said.

His grasp of family history wasn't as complete as it could have been. He remembered his grandfather and namesake as a quiet, stern, undemonstrative man, an architect who designed railroad stations and yard depots for the Northern Pacific Railway. He gave everybody five dollars for their birthdays, always a crisp, unwrinkled, unfolded bill, tucked into special cards with a window cut in the front to frame Abraham Lincoln's face. He'd seen four of his boys leave to fight in World War II and welcomed three home, having lost Inger, his second oldest, in the invasion of Normandy. Harrold had served in the Pacific. Neither Paul's father nor his uncles ever spoke of what happened during the war. Paul's grandfather died when Paul was nineteen.

“So Harrold has thought all this time that he was talking to his father,” Paul said.

“Apparently,” Tamsen said.

“I'm going to have to go back and reread our previous conversations,” Paul said. “Switch seats with me.”

Paul typed.

“What are you doing?” Tamsen asked.

“Pretending to be my grandfather,” Paul said. “If that's who he thinks this is.”

“That's lying,” Tamsen said.

“I know,” Paul said, “but when is he going to get another chance to talk to his father?”

T
hey talked about it at dinner. It was still a bit overwhelming. Paul worried that he might have said something wrong in his previous e-mails, but Tamsen told him not to second-guess himself. It broke his heart to think of how confused and lost his father must be feeling. He couldn't think of a way to rectify the situation, other than to let time blur the outlines and smear the images. He thanked Tamsen for figuring it out on his behalf. She deflected his gratitude, adopting an aw-shucks-it-was-nothing, anybody-would-have-done-the-same-thing pose. Yet, though Paul felt closer to her, he sensed that she wasn't reciprocating. She seemed, he thought, odd, somehow, or distant, as if now that she'd helped him straighten things out with his dad, she had something else on her mind.

Stella thought the veal tasted like chicken. Tamsen appreciated the fancy dinner but ate quickly, rather than savor it. When she told him, sipping her after-dinner coffee, that she really had to be getting back, Paul begged her to stay, explaining that he'd rented a movie and hoped she'd watch it on the couch with him and spend the night. She told him she hadn't brought a change of clothes, which made no sense, because she had a drawerful of clothes she'd left behind during her previous visits.

“What movie did you rent?” she said at last.

“
Casablanca
,” he said. “You said you always wanted to see it.”
That had to have scored him significant points in the thoughtful/considerate boyfriend department.

“I did say that, didn't I?”

He poured each of them another glass of wine, grabbed a quilt from the bed, and moved next to her on the couch. She lifted Stella up to join them, the dog's head resting in Tamsen's lap.

It wasn't until the movie was nearly over and the Nazis were racing to the airport that Paul realized what he'd done. What was he thinking, showing her history's most tragic love-triangle movie? What an idiot he was! It was like a scene out of a Woody Allen movie. Come to think of it, it was a Woody Allen movie. He could see the film affecting her. He considered pausing the movie and suggesting they go to bed without finishing it, but it was too late to stop it now. What a moron! If art was supposed to hold a mirror to the soul, he'd just presented her with a floor-length 103 magnifying reflector. By the end of the movie, tears were flowing down her cheeks. Afterward, she had her head buried in his chest, sobbing, and he knew why before she spoke. He held her and stroked her hair.

“Is that a great movie or what?” he said at last, trying to give her an out by pretending she was just sad because Bogie and In-grid Bergman weren't going to be together. She sat up and looked at him, trying to smile.

“Jesus, I can't keep doing this,” she said, sniffing. “I can't keep having my feelings pulled in so many directions. It's tearing me apart. Believe me, it's totally my own fault and I have no right to complain to anyone. I take full responsibility. I'm not going to say, ‘You do the thinking for both of us.' This is all on me.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “Tell me what's going on.”

“Same old thing,” she said, sniffing again, apologetic and apparently mad at herself. “Something's gotta give, Paul. This is just too hard. I haven't been sleeping. I have bags under my eyes.”

“Did something happen?” He found it hard to swallow.

“Nothing specific,” Tamsen said. “It's just that Stephen and I had a talk the other night. This is driving him crazy too. It's got to be getting to you too — isn't it? It's not good for anybody. You can't be all that happy about the situation.”

“I'm happy when you're here,” Paul said. “When you're not, I just sort of go numb and try not to think about it.”

She leaned her head toward him and kissed him.

“I'm happy when I'm with you too,” she said. “But when I'm with you, I'm making Stephen unhappy, and I hate that. And when I'm with him, I'm making you unhappy, and I hate that too. Whatever I do, it's wrong. It worked for a while, but that's not true anymore. I should have known better.”

“Is it wrong for you to be sitting here?” Paul said. “I think it's pretty right.” But he wasn't going to try to argue her into choosing him. As much as he wanted to be with her, deep down he had to allow that she needed to feel free to do what she had to do. There were things she wanted. Even a moron could see that Stephen was probably better able to give them to her than Paul was, and if that was true, then the right thing for Paul to do would be to back off and not stand in her way. Maybe the movie was affecting him too.
“If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
If she wanted stability, security, a family, then Stephen was her best bet. Paul could see that. Surely she could too. Those were just the facts.