Rules of Civility (33 page)

The ghost of Henry David Thoreau frowned upon me, as well he should. I returned the book, tiptoed to the landing, and headed down the stairs.

I found Tinker in the kitchen frying ham and eggs in a big black skillet. Two places were set at a small kitchen table with a white enamel top. Somewhere in the house there must have been an oak table for twelve, because this little one couldn't handle more than a cook, a governess, and three of the Wolcotts' grandchildren.

Tinker's outfit was embarrassingly similar to my own—khaki pants and a white shirt—though he was wearing heavy leather boots. After serving up the plates, he poured the coffee and sat across from me. He looked well. His skin had lost the pampered tan of the Mediterranean, taking on a rougher hue, and his hair had curled with the humidity of summer. The fact that his beard was a week old was to his advantage—having outgrown the appearance of a hangover but having yet to reach that of a Hatfield or McCoy. His demeanor reflected that same unhurried state that I had heard on the phone. He grinned at me as I ate.

—What? I said finally.

—I was just trying to picture you as a redhead.

—Sorry, I laughed. My redhead days have come and gone.

—It's my loss. What was it like?

—I think it brought out the Mata Hari in me.

—We'll have to lure her back.

Once we'd finished, cleared, and cleaned, Tinker slapped his hands together.

—What do you say we go for a hike?

—I'm not the hiking sort.

—Oh, I think that's exactly what you are. You just don't know it yet. And the view of the lake from Pinyon Peak is breathtaking.

—I hope you're not going to be this insufferably upbeat all weekend. Tinker laughed.

—There's a risk of it.

—Besides, I said, I didn't bring any boots.

—Ah! So that's it, is it?

On the other side of the family room, he led me down a hall past a billiard room and swung open a door with a flourish. Inside was a muck room with slickers on pegs and hats on shelves and boots of all shapes and sizes lined along the baseboard. From Tinker's expression you would have thought he was Ali Baba revealing the riches of the forty thieves.

A trail behind the house led through a grove of pines into a deeper wood of oaks or elms or some other towering American timber. For the first hour, it was a gradual incline and we walked shoulder to shoulder through the shade at an easy pace, conversing like friends from youth for whom every exchange is an extension of the last, regardless of the passage of time.

We talked about Wallace, echoing each other's affection for him. We also talked about Eve. I told him about her escape to California, and with a friendly laugh he said the news was surprising right up until the moment you heard it. He said that Hollywood had no idea what it was in for, and that within the year Eve would be either a movie star or a studio chief.

To hear him talk about Eve's future you wouldn't have had an inkling of what had just transpired between them. You would have assumed they were old familiars with a fond and unspoiled camaraderie. And maybe that was just about right. Maybe for Tinker their relationship had been reset to January third. Maybe for him the last half a year had been snipped from the chain of events like a poorly scripted scene in a film.

As we walked farther, our conversation became intermittent like the sunlight through the woods. Squirrels scattered before us among the tree trunks and yellow-tailed birds zipped from branch to branch. The air smelled of sumac and sassafras and other sweet-sounding words. And I began to think that maybe Tinker was right: Maybe I was a hiker.

But the slope began to grow steep, then steeper, and steeper still until it was the pitch of a staircase. We were climbing single file in silence. An hour went by, maybe four. My boots became a size too small and my left heel felt like I had stepped on a frying pan. I fell twice, scuffing my foxhunting khakis, and I had long since sweat through my heiress's shirt. I found myself wondering if I had enough self-control to ask
How much farther?
in a casual, disinterested, offhand sort of way. But then the trees started thinning and the grade mellowed, and suddenly we were on a rocky peak exposed to the open sky with a view to the horizon unmarked by man.

Far below us, a mile wide and five miles long, the lake looked like a giant black reptile crawling across the wilds of New York.

—There, he said. You see?

And I could see. I could see why Tinker, feeling that his life was in disarray, had chosen to come here.

—Just as it looked to Natty Bumppo, I said, taking a seat on the hard stone.

Tinker smiled that I remembered who he had wanted to be for a day.

—Not far from it, he agreed, pulling sandwiches and a canteen from his knapsack.

Then he sat down a few feet away—at a gentleman's distance.

As we ate, he reminisced about when his family had spent Julys in Maine and he and his brother had hiked the Appalachian Trail for days at a time—outfitted with the tent and compasses and jackknives that their mother had given them for Christmas and that they had waited six long months to put to use.

We still hadn't spoken about St. George's or the change in Tinker's circumstances as a youth. I certainly wasn't going to bring it up. But when he talked about hiking in Maine with his brother, he was making it clear in his own way that those were halcyon days preceding less fortunate times.

When we finished lunch, I lay down with Tinker's pack under my head and he broke sticks and tried to toss them onto a small bed of moss twenty feet in the distance, in the manner of a schoolboy for whom no walk home is without its world championship. His sleeves were rolled up and he had freckles on his forearms from exposure to the summer sun.

—So were you a Fenimore Cooper fan in general? I asked.

—Oh, I must have read
Last of the Mohicans
and
Deerslayer
three different times. But then, I loved all the adventure books:
Treasure Island . . . 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . . . The Call of the Wild . . .

—
Robinson Crusoe
.

He smiled.

—You know, I actually picked up
Walden
after you said you'd want to be marooned with it.

—What did you think? I asked.

—Well, at first I wasn't sure I was going to make it. Four hundred pages of a man alone in a cabin philosophizing on human history, trying to strip life to its essentials . . .

—But what did you think in the end?

Tinker stopped breaking sticks and looked into the distance.

—In the end—I thought it was the greatest adventure of them all.

 

At around three, a bank of blue gray clouds appeared in the distance and the temperature began to drop. So Tinker gave me an Irish sweater from his pack and we headed back down the trail, trying to keep a few strides ahead of the weather. We had just gotten to the grove of trees when it began to sprinkle, and we were vaulting up the steps of the house with the first clap of thunder.

Tinker built a fire in the great fireplace and we settled down on the Navajo rug at the edge of the hearthstone. The warmth began to bring out the starburst blushes on his cheeks as he cooked pork and beans and coffee right over the embers. I pulled his sweater off over my head and the wet wool gave off a warm, earthy smell that recalled another hour. It took me a moment to realize it was that snowy night when we had snuck into the Capitol Theatre and I had found myself in the embrace of Tinker's shearling coat.

As I was drinking a second cup of coffee, Tinker poked at the fire with a stick dislodging sparks.

—Tell me something that no one knows about
you
, I said.

He laughed, as if I was kidding; but then he seemed to think about it.

—All right, he said, turning a little toward me. You know that day we bumped into each other at that diner across from Trinity Church?

—Yes . . .

—I followed you there.

I slugged him in the shoulder like Fran would have.

—You did not!

—I know, he said. It's terrible. But it's true! Eve had mentioned the name of your firm, so just before noon I went across from your building and hid behind a newsstand to see if I could catch you going to lunch. I was waiting for forty minutes and it was freezing.

I laughed, remembering the bright red tips of his ears.

—What prompted you to do that?

—I couldn't stop thinking about you.

—Blah, I said.

—No, I'm serious.

He looked at me with a gentle smile.

—Right from the first, I could see a calmness in you—that sort of inner tranquility that they write about in books, but that almost no one seems to possess. I was wondering to myself:
How does she do that?
And I figured it could only come from having no regrets—from having made choices with . . . such poise and purpose. It stopped me in my tracks a little. And I just couldn't wait to see it again.

 

By the time we went upstairs, having turned off the lights and scattered the embers, we both looked ready for a good night's sleep. On the steps, our shadows swung back and forth with the movement of the lanterns in our hands. As we reached the landing, we bumped into each other and he apologized. We stood awkwardly for a second, then after giving me a friendly kiss, he went west and I went east. We closed our doors and undressed. We climbed into our little beds and read a few aimless pages before dousing our lights.

In the dark, as I pulled up the quilt I became conscious of the wind. Rolling down from Pinyon Peak it was shaking the trees and the windowpanes as if it too was restless for resolution.

There is an oft-quoted passage in
Walden,
in which Thoreau exhorts us to find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly as would a sailor or a fugitive slave. It's a thrilling sentiment—one so obviously worthy of our aspirations. But even if you had the discipline to maintain the true course, the real problem, it has always seemed to me, is how to know in which part of the heavens your star resides.

But there is another passage in
Walden
that has stayed with me as well. In it, Thoreau says that men mistakenly think of truth as being remote—behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the reckoning. When in fact,
all these times and places and occasions are now and here
. In a way, this celebration of the now and here seems to contradict the exhortation to follow one's star. But it is equally persuasive. And oh so much more attainable.

I pulled Tinker's sweater back on over my head, tiptoed down the hall, and stopped outside his room.

I listened to the creaking of the house, to the rain on the roof, to the breathing on the other side of the door. Careful not to make a sound, I put a hand on the knob. In sixty seconds it was going to be the midpoint between the beginning and the end of time. And in that moment, there would be a chance to witness, to partake in, to succumb to the now and here.

In exactly sixty seconds.

Fifty. Forty. Thirty.

On your mark

Get set

Go

On Sunday afternoon when Tinker took me to the depot, I didn't know when I would be seeing him again. Over breakfast he said he was going to spend a little more time at the Wolcotts' to sort things out. He didn't mention how long that would take and I didn't ask. I wasn't a schoolgirl.

I boarded the train, walked a few cars ahead, and sat on the wooded side of the tracks so that we wouldn't have to go through the motions of waving. Once the train was under way, I lit a cigarette and dug in my bag for the Agatha Christie. I hadn't gotten much further than the seventh paragraph of chapter VIII and I was looking forward to pressing on. But as I pulled the book out of my bag, I saw something jutting from between the pages. It was a playing card torn in two—the ace of hearts. On the face of the card was written:
Mata—Meet me at the Stork Club on Monday the 26th at 9PM. And come alone
.