Where or When (16 page)

“A what?”

“A stork bite. At least that's what it looks like. A birthmark. It's just inside your hairline.”

She touches the back of her neck. She stands up, walks to the window, looks out at the lake. He gets out of bed, stands beside her. He is wearing only his shirt, unbuttoned.

“That was very strange,” he says, “when we sat down there last week, looking out at the water.”

“What did it mean to you?”

“I don't know,” he says. “It seemed like John the Baptist himself was going to emerge right then from the lake.”

“That's not a very Catholic image.”

“No.”

“Where's it coming from?”

“I suppose I just wanted to jump in and be cleansed. I didn't want to have to imagine you with anyone else.”

She puts her hand on his shoulder, slides her hand down his back.

“I think this was supposed to happen,” she says.

“Can we trust that?” he asks.

She is silent for a moment. “I think if you can't trust this, you can't trust the universe.”

The room, his chest, expand. He wants to open the window, call out to the waiters.

“I think we were meant to have mated,” she adds.

He smiles. He loves the word “mated.” It suggests to him something primitive, simple, animal-like, beyond thought, or before thought, like the way she has recognized his scent.

“Yes,” he says. “I believe that.”

“And I've never even seen your children.”

“Nor I yours.”

“We won't ever have children together,” she says. “Well, we probably won't have children together. What I mean is, we ought not to have children together.”

A new thought enters his mind. He is appalled that he has not been concerned about this earlier—more appalled by his next thought: While he is worried that they have made love unprotected, he wishes fervently that he could make her pregnant.

“I ought to have mentioned this sooner,” he says, “but . . .”

She shakes her head quickly. “No. I didn't bring anything. But I'm not sure it's an issue for me anymore.”

He is not altogether certain what she means by this, but he lets her statement go. “We have enough children,” he says.

“We've only known each other six days.”

“Six days and one week.”

“Six days, one week, and thirty-one years,” she says.

He folds her into him, brings her head into his shoulder. She has asked him in a letter, “What
is
this?” The question of meaning, he knows, might not be able to be answered. Is this relationship, he wonders, regressive or progressive? Are they each merely trying to recapture an immature childhood love? Or is this a chance—the chance of a lifetime—to have a rich, mature, sexual love with the person you were meant to be with? Odd how these very questions are implicit in the song he has found again and now likes so much.
Things do come back to you as though they knew the way.

She touches the cloth of his shirt, brings it to her face, inhales deeply.

“I love the smell of you,” she says.

 

She has put herself together as best she can, has redone her hair, though she had no makeup with her to cover the faint mottling at her forehead. Her gray jacket is wrinkled. “Next time,” she said in the room, his heart lifting at the words, “I'll have to bring some things with me so that I can shower, fix myself before lunch.”

They are sitting at the same banquette they had before. The room is much as it was last week, except that sheer white curtains have been drawn across the large floor-to-ceiling windows to protect the diners from the trapezoidal blocks of bright sunlight that fall at this hour across the dining room. He has had a vodka, she a glass of wine; he, oysters; she, salmon. Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly—he was hungry for the first time in weeks. He feels exhausted but exhilarated. She sits slightly turned toward him, her knee just touching his thigh. He has his hand on her leg, on the skirt of her dress. Though she is not precisely smiling, her face gives off a glow as if she were.

“You're beautiful,” he says. He knows that she does not have an unflawed body, as he does not; and he knows that she is forty-six, not twenty-six. And yet he cannot, at this moment, conceive of another woman being more appealing to him than she.

“
You're
beautiful,” she says.

“I don't think anyone's ever said that to me before.”

She puts her hand on his knee, touches him lightly there. “I've never done this,” she says. “I mean I've never been unfaithful.”

“Nor have I.”

“I don't have what you would call a very bad marriage,” she says slowly, removing her hand. “But Stephen and I are not close. We don't . . . We hardly ever . . .” She makes a gesture as if to include the experiences they have just had together in the room in the west wing.

He puts a hand up quickly. “Don't,” he says. “I can't. Not yet.”

She looks down at the table.

“We have to be careful,” he says.

She agrees quickly. “I don't want your wife to be hurt.”

“No. I didn't mean that. I mean we have to be careful with each other.”

She studies him. “I sometimes think about the next thirty-one years,” she says.

“So do I.”

“I wonder, how much time do we have left? The second half? The third third? And it's all so serendipitous. If you hadn't bought the Sunday paper that morning, we wouldn't be here now.”

“Does it matter, the number of years?” he asks. He can hear the sudden heat in his voice. “Isn't it worth it even to have one year, one month? Isn't that just as valuable—or is it really the accumulation of hours?”

She sits silently. He knows she cannot answer this question. She reaches into her pocketbook. “I brought some pictures,” she says. “To give you an idea of the years in between. And I wanted to show you my daughter.”

He takes the small, neat pile of photographs from her hand, puts on his glasses.

“That's me in high school,” she says, pointing to a picture of a girl in a pageboy haircut, a simple sweater and pearls. She is not wearing glasses in this picture, and he is struck by how much older than a girl she looks. She has to have been only sixteen, seventeen at best. Yet her eyes have an ageless quality—a gravity that belies her youth. “And that's me in Senegal.” He looks at a photograph of a tall, thin, angular woman in dark glasses with a colored cloth wrapped around her breasts, forming a dress. “It's all the women wore there,” she explains. There are other people in the photograph as well, but no men. She shows him other pictures—some of a small, pretty child with long blond hair. None of her husband.

He stops suddenly at one photograph, can go no further. It's of Siân and a baby. She looks to be in her late twenties or early thirties, and she's cradling the baby in her arms, as if she were nursing the infant. This has to be the son who died.

He puts the packet of photographs in his lap, looks across at the far wall.

“It hurts that this is you, and I wasn't there,” he says.

He hands the photographs back to her. He can feel the pressure of the minutes left to them. He glances surreptitiously at his watch, but she sees him.

“What time is it?” she asks.

“I don't want to tell you,” he says.

“I'll have to know,” she says.

“I was hoping we could go back to the room, but I know you can't.”

“We'll come back here.”

“When?”

“I'm not sure. It'll be hard to get away.”

“But we have to.”

“Yes.”

“Can I call you?”

She looks down at her hands. She raises her head, sighs. “He's almost never in the house between four and five,” she says. “But I have Lily then. It won't be easy.”

As he pays the bill, she gathers her coat around her. They leave the dining room. He puts his hands in the pockets of his pants, hunches his shoulders against the cold. He's left his overcoat back in the room, will have to retrieve it when she has left. They walk together across the parking lot to her car, the small black Volkswagen.

“If we think about what might have been,” she says, taking his arm, “we'll drive ourselves mad.”

They reach her car. She puts the key in the lock. She looks up at him. He is aware only that within seconds she will leave him.

“Will we be allowed to do this?” she asks.

“I can't conceive of not doing this,” he says, answering her.

He puts his arms around her, brings her head into his shoulder. As he does so, a car pulls into the parking lot. The driver, making the turn, is an older woman with short, graying hair, a waitress perhaps, or a chef in the kitchen. The woman looks at him, smiles broadly, gives him a thumbs-up sign. He smiles back at her.

“This is it,” he says to Siân.

 

Minutes later, entering the room to retrieve his coat, he sees the bed, still unmade, still rumpled. He sits at the edge of the bed, notices a stain on the bottom sheet. He touches the stain with his fingers, closes his eyes. How can they be apart, he wonders, with this evidence of their union?

 

 

 

 

The girl knew, on the second day, that the boy would speak to her. All the afternoon before—inside the rooms of the old mansion and out on the lawns, and even by the pool when finally they had been allowed a swim—she knew that he was watching her. He wore red bathing trunks and dove with his body pointed like a knife, and when he came up, his hair, though short, was flattened, and he was looking at her.

On the second day, just before noon, she left the art room, where the others were, and walked along the path to the lake. Such a walk was not on the schedule, but it was not forbidden either. She was not a recluse necessarily, though she did often prefer to be alone.

Walking from the wide lawn into the thicket of trees was, she thought, like entering a cathedral where the walls were made of tall pines rather than the large hand-cut stones of the Catholic church near her home. The breeze from the lake drifted up the path through the trees and the walk was dark in shadow, sheltered from the glare of the midday sun She made her way with her hands in her pockets, and when she heard the footfalls behind her, she kept her pace steady, did not hesitate or turn around. She entered the clearing, walked along the aisle between the wooden benches, sat at the one closest to the water. In front of her was the cross, and beyond that, the surface of the lake stretched to the other shore. Her being at this camp, she knew, was not about the cross. She understood already, even at fourteen, that the cross was historical, that it was but one of several ways the adults around her had seized upon to define hope, though she liked the discipline and the ritual of her church, the cadence of the Latin words.

He sat on a bench not far from hers, facing toward the water as she was. He said Hi in a shy voice, glancing at her sideways, and she said Hi too, looking at him quickly. He told her his name, and she said hers, though each knew the other's already. He asked her where she was from, and she asked him where he was from, and they gave their answers casually, not knowing that these answers sealed their fate. He seemed like her, she thought, not withdrawn, but someone comfortable with his own company. He said he'd left the room where the others were because he already had a wallet and couldn't see the sense of making another, not one held together with gimp anyway. She nodded and smiled. She said she wasn't much for crafts herself. She preferred other activities—the swimming and the archery, badminton. He said, smiling at his own cockiness, tempting fate, that he was pretty good at badminton and that they ought to play sometime. She said then, matching his self-mocking tone, that she was all right herself, and she might, if he was lucky, give him a game. They sat silently then, looking out at the water, both with smiles still left on their faces, until the smiles, after a time, faded.

He stood up, moved over to her bench. He sat beside her. He held a stick, etched figures in the dirt beneath their feet. They talked of their families and their schools, their new counselors, the routine at camp, each knowing that the casual questions and answers masked another dialogue, one spoken with averted eyes, small gestures. She crossed her legs; he scratched his arm.

The lake was not for swimming. At the shoreline, the bottom turned dark with roots and weeds. There were fish in the lake, and sitting there, even under the hot sun, they could sometimes see the movement of a bass or a perch at the surface. A bell rang a melody, tolled twelve chimes, signaling lunch. They could not be away for this event, would be looked for, spoken to. She thought she might not mind that, except that then the others would know they had been found together and would be watching them.

She stood first and said they would have to go up the path now to the dining room. He flung the stick into the water. She watched it sail and fall. It was understood already, even on this first meeting, that they must return separately, and so he said, chivalrously, that he just wanted to inspect the boathouse before going back—allowing her to walk up the lawn first, accepting for himself the greater risk.