Where or When (8 page)

I can tell you about the bedroom. It doesn't matter now.

I had a glass of wine with me that I had poured after supper. I lay down on the bed, did not turn on the lights. I fumbled with the machine in the dark, plugged the headphones in, put them on. I had never listened to music with headphones before, had never experienced the way the music seems to be inside the brain.

I played the first song, and I smiled. It reminded me of CYO dances as a girl; of dark gymnasiums with loud, slow, dreamy music; of awkward embraces with boys who were often shorter than myself then. Of my face sometimes muffled into a taller boy's shoulder.

I played the second song and sat up in bed. I laughed. I thought: This is a kind of excavation.

I played the third song, and the memories flooded in upon me. A kiss at the nape of the neck. A butterfly.

I played the fourth song, and I began to cry.

 

 

 

 

H
E WAKES
for the fifth time and can see, to his relief, by the faint suggestion of light at the edges of the shade at the window, that it is finally early morning. He stirs slightly, not wanting to disturb Harriet, but something in his movements, the slight tug of the sheet perhaps, makes her turn toward him, murmuring in her half sleep. He feels then her fingers, her hand reaching for him, the practiced, sleepy gesture meant to massage, to bring him along. He sucks his stomach in, shifts slightly so that he is just beyond her reach, hoping that she is not yet quite conscious enough to notice this gentle rebuff. Not this morning.

He studies his wife in the gray light of predawn. She seems to be burrowing, lying on her stomach with the pink strap of her nightgown meandering down her shoulder. Her mouth is pressed open against the sheet; her eyes are still closed. Her hair is matted against her ear, half hidden by a pillow that has fallen partly over her head. He watches his wife sleep, this woman he has lived with for fifteen years, watches her breathe, and as he does so, he feels again, as he has felt at odd moments over the past several weeks, the tremulous drag of guilt, a line snagged with seaweed. In a file cabinet in the room below the bedroom, there are in a manila folder six letters and a postcard that could not be easily explained, that are, in their seeming innocence, as treacherous as motel receipts. Yet he resists this drag of guilt, knows he cannot afford to let it take hold of him. Not today, not this morning.

He rolls over, squints at the clock. Nearly six forty-five. Christ, it has to have been the longest night of his life, and there are still five hours and fifteen minutes to go. He knows already that the morning is lost to him, held suspended in anticipation: Will she be there? Will she come at all? He has no reason to expect her. She has written that she wants it—the nebulous “it” they have created only with words—to stop, and he has ignored her. He's done worse than ignore her: He's sent her the goddamn tape!

He slips out from between the sheets, walks naked into the bathroom. The tile floor is ice against the soles of his feet, the air so frigid he begins almost immediately to shiver. He minds that he pays six hundred dollars a month for heat and can still see his breath in the morning. He turns on the shower, watches as clouds of steam boil over and around the plastic curtain. His face in the mirror disappears; the bathroom fills with mist. He steps into the shower, adjusts the water temperature so that it is just below scalding. He turns, bends his head, lets the water pummel the back of his neck.

It has not, he knows, been an innocent correspondence. In the beginning he tried to tell himself that it was harmless, simply intriguing, but he knew, even then, that from the very first sentence of the very first note, there was nothing innocent about it. If he wrote her, as he had, that he had the same feeling looking at her picture as he had when he first saw her in the courtyard of The Ridge thirty-one years ago, what did that imply? And although he has not permitted himself to think of Siân Richards sexually—he cannot, despite his childhood memories, despite the temptation, for to do so might allow the “it” to spiral out of control—he knows that however chaste his thinking is, it is not innocent. Not to have told his wife, to have shielded Siân's picture with his elbow, was to have given the “it” a life. He remembers sitting in the car at the beach that rainy Sunday afternoon, drafting and redrafting that first letter, trying to strike just the right chord, find the right tone—a tone somewhere between revelatory and careful—and how he waited for days after that, convinced that the letter had been lost in the mailroom of her publisher, that it had not been forwarded after all.

But then she had replied. He remembers still the delicate blue surprise of that letter, how his hand trembled as he withdrew the envelope with the unfamiliar hand from the postbox, how he sat outside in his car and opened it and read the letter, not once but many times, before he was calm enough to start the Cadillac and move away from the post office. Her handwriting was tiny, cramped, with the capitals strangely pointed, and he had to look at several words twice or three times before he could decipher them. But she had used the word “delighted,” had remembered him as Cal. And at the end of the letter she had all but invited him to write to her again: If he knew what she looked like and what she did for a living, she said, oughtn't he then to tell her what he looked like and what he did for a living?

He got her letter on the twenty-fifth of September, had responded the next day. And then there was what seemed like an interminable wait for a subsequent letter. Each day he went to the post office, looked for the small, cramped penmanship. He thought of what he had written her, became convinced that something he said had put her off. Perhaps he'd been too forward, too bold. Too suggestive. Once, telling Harriet he had business in Boston, he got into the Cadillac and drove across Connecticut and New York and into Pennsylvania, to the town on the return address of Siân's envelope. He had no intention of making an unannounced visit; he simply wanted to see where she lived, as though from that he might derive more clues as to whom she had become. He knew, even as he was making the drive, that he was behaving like a teenager, not a grown man with a wife and three children, but he was unable convincingly to talk himself out of making the journey. (He thinks now, standing in the shower, perhaps that was the point of the trip after all: He was reliving something he hadn't been able to do as a teenager—the bike ride across three states.)

The trip through Connecticut and New York was exhilarating. He had Roy on the tape player and another tape he'd bought in September, in search of the song he remembered at the beach, a tape of golden oldies from what he had already come to think of as “their” era, and the day was fine. Crisp and golden, pure fall.

But he wasn't at all prepared for the sight of her town, stranded, it seemed from his vantage point as he followed the map across the border and over the mountain, amidst a vast black desert. He knew only from the poems that what he saw had to be the “black dirt” she wrote of; if it wasn't for the poetry, he'd have thought he'd spun off into the surreal, that the land west of the small mountain was sealed with tar, that he'd somehow stumbled upon a foreign landing strip. He descended the winding road cautiously and drove straight into the town, and as he did so he felt the exhilaration of the journey dissipating. The light over the black dirt was unearthly and pale, and even though the sun still shone, the houses looked washed out or smudged. He decided then that the effect was created by the blackness of the soil; the light was sucked up, he thought, swallowed by the dirt itself.

In the center of the small village was a dark Catholic church with a parking lot to one side and a cemetery in the back. Opposite the church was a row of storefronts—a video store, an uninviting bar with faded blue curtains covering the windows, a real estate agency, and a restaurant, The Onion Inn. He had a sandwich there, asked the waitress if she could direct him to the street he was looking for. He wondered, while he ate his sandwich at the bar of the inn, if he would know Siân Richards if she walked in now, if when their eyes met she would know him. He'd been replaying various scenarios for days, imagining their first encounter after thirty-one years. Sometimes he imagined kissing her before he even spoke to her. He examined every woman in the restaurant—those at the tables, those who entered while he sat there—but none of them remotely resembled Siân. He didn't know what he'd do if he did encounter her that afternoon. She'd have thought him deranged if she knew he'd driven more than four hours just to see the town in which she lived. And almost certainly that information would have frightened her off. Yet it was all he could do to refrain from asking the waitress if she was familiar with the name.

He followed the waitress's directions to the address he had asked about. The road wasn't hard to find; there were only three leading from the village—one to the north of the onion fields, one to the south, and one that seemed to bisect the dark desert like a canal. Hers was to the north, the farms arranged along it as along a shoreline. He drove by the house twice before he realized it was the address he wanted: The number was hidden from view behind a post on the front porch. It was a gray house with black shutters, a farmhouse with an ell. Out on the front lawn was an ancient elm, its leaves this time of year just beginning to catch fire. He saw, in the three or four times he passed the house after he realized which was hers, that there were white curtains at each of the windows, that the red barn in the back belonged to the farmhouse, and that there was a flower garden at the side. To the other side was a massive yellow tractor in the driveway. Each time he passed the house he slowed the car down and held his breath, wanting to see a woman and yet not wanting at all to see a woman, but there was no activity as he came and went—not a movement behind a window, not a child playing in the yard, not a man walking toward the barn. He'd wondered where she was, what precisely she was doing then.

Later, after he'd driven the other roads leading from the village and had seen all there was to see of the town—primarily other farmhouses, most of which had been painted in odd, pastel colors that seemed to obliterate whatever charm the buildings might intrinsically have had in some previous era—he crossed another small mountain in order to reach the university, and he had thought that the bleakness of the valley, however dispiriting (but was it bleakness, he wondered, or was it simply the fear of being swallowed up by the black dirt oneself?), was somehow encouraging: If he had discovered Siân Richards living in a pretty village, on a sunlit street, with a Volvo station wagon in the driveway and a ten-speed Motobecane on a front porch (or, in an imposing fortress on Manhattan's East Side, with a doorman out front and a Porsche in a garage somewhere down below), might he not have felt more inhibited in his pursuit of their much-imagined reunion? And yet he had to concede as well that possibly Siân Richards was perfectly happy at her farm and in her marriage that the despair suggested in her poetry—the suggestion of pinched lives—did not come from her own circumstances but was a metaphor for something larger, which he might better grasp if he knew more about poetry.

The university was a small one in population, though it did have a large agricultural school, and it was through fallow fields that Charles drove to reach the main campus. Classes were in session that day, and he wondered if Siân was there, teaching. He hadn't seen a car of any kind in the driveway of her house. He walked a series of footpaths under bare trees and between red-brick buildings until he had crisscrossed most of the central campus. Girls in thick sweaters and boys in neon parkas looked at him as they passed by. He studied each older woman he encountered—hopeful and panicky at once that he might stumble upon her. Occasionally his own years at Holy Cross came back to him. He was certain, when he left finally (too late to make it home in time for dinner, and he had to compose yet another lie in the car), that he had not come face-to-face with Siân Richards, though it was easier to imagine her there, on that campus than it was to envision her in the gray house by the onion fields.

After that day, he developed a habit of going to the post office three, four times a day in search of a blue envelope in his box. For weeks, it seemed, there was nothing, and then finally she wrote him. Hers, he thought, was an odd correspondence, one that was, at its heart, not always easy to decipher. Sometimes she seemed encouraging; at other times, occasionally even in the same letter, she appeared to withdraw. It was a kind of feinting: a touch here, then a retreat. His own correspondence to her, he was certain, was not difficult to read. He was pushing her, he knew, even at the risk that she might close up altogether. He thought that he had taken a terrible leap by describing the “awful loneliness” of her poetry, but she hadn't seemed to mind that. And sometimes he thought he detected humor in her letters, as when she echoed his comment about her husband in her comment about his wife, or when she said thanks, but she wouldn't need a chaperone. (He imagined—hoped for?—a dry wit.) Yet she could unnerve him as well. She said that he would be disappointed when he met her. What did “disappointed” mean? he wondered for days.