by Anita Shreve
“I think some part of her was afraid of me,” he says, “afraid that I would want to live in Naples.”
“Would you have done that?” she asks.
“Not if she didn’t want to. I don’t think she ever understood the power she had over me.”
“Does she still? Have that power?”
“Oh, yes,” he answers, smiling.
He has, Sydney thinks, a lovely smile. His eyes are large and heavy-lidded, his hairline high on his forehead. He might be any age between thirty and forty-five.
“What happened to her?” Sydney asks.
“She has risen quite high up at her bank.”
Sydney takes a sip of coffee. “Maybe she’s more secure now and would defy her parents.”
“This was years ago,” Mr. Cavalli says. “She has been married and divorced since then.”
“I’ll bet the parents are sorry now,” Sydney says.
The man smiles. “I doubt they give it a single thought. They are not in the least the sort of people who ever look back.”
Sydney sighs. “I wish I could be like that,” she says.
“No, you do not,” he says. “To never think about your actions, your past, what might have been? All the rich tapestry that was your life until this moment?”
“I’ve been hoping for amnesia,” Sydney says.
“Are you in pain right now?” he asks, touching the cast on her wrist with the tips of his fingers.
“Hardly ever,” Sydney says. She cannot feel the touch. If she can’t feel it, it doesn’t count as a touch in the usual sense. “Sometimes at night it aches.”
“When does it come off?” he asks, removing his fingers.
“In five weeks.”
“So you will stay here until then?”
“Oh, no,” Sydney says. “I’m going to run out of money in four days.”
Immediately, she is embarrassed. “I can’t stay,” she adds. “I have a lot to do. I have to move out of the apartment I shared with. . .with Jeff,” she says, naming the treacherous fiancé. “I have to find a new place.”
“In Boston?”
“Possibly.”
A waiter comes to ask if he can fill their cups with hot coffee. Both decline. Neither has touched any of the pastries, though Sydney thinks the meringues appealing. “I didn’t know him very well,” she says suddenly, surprising even herself. “Jeff, I mean. In retrospect, and I’ve been thinking about this, there was a great deal I didn’t know about him. He was often daydreaming. About what, I never knew.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“I thought I would have years to discover where he went in his mind.”
“You have had a bad time of it, both emotionally and physically,” Mr. Cavalli says.
Sydney shifts her wrist in her lap. “The odd thing is,” she says, “I was almost grateful for the accident. I felt that it woke me up from a deep sleep. It was a relief to feel real pain, physical pain. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear.”
“Absolutely clear. May I ask you what your fiancé does?”
“He’s a professor at MIT,” she says. She thinks a moment. “You’re not at MIT, are you?”
“No, no,” he says. “I’m in the import-export business.”
That might mean anything, Sydney thinks. “Do you live here?” she asks. “In Boston?”
“I am back and forth, London and Boston.”
She thinks him evasive. To ask any more questions, however, would be rude, and there is no need for that. Beyond a certain point, she doesn’t care what he does.
“I knew that something was missing,” Sydney says after a time. “There was a slightly unreal quality to all of it.”
“You’re speaking of your fiancé.”
“It was a very fast courtship.” She remembers the day Jeff sat down with her on the porch and announced that he’d left Victoria for her. And how she thought he was so far ahead of her already. “It’s as though we skipped several steps that now, in retrospect, seem necessary.”
“What steps?” he asks, pouring himself a second cup of coffee.
“A mutual recognition that you’re both moving closer to something. The relationship seemed to have happened before I even realized it.”
“This was your first love?” he asks.
“I’d been married twice before,” she says. Sydney waits for a flicker of surprise to cross Mr. Cavalli’s face, but he has perfect poise. “One of my husbands died,” she explains. “The other one I divorced.”
“I am very sorry,” Mr. Cavalli says.
Sydney tells him about Andrew and Daniel. She tells him, too, about how she and her mother left her father one day in New York and moved to western Massachusetts, and about how she’s never quite forgiven herself for allowing that to happen. She tells him about Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, about Ben and Julie. In turn, he tells her about his extended family, his annual visits to Naples. Once he reaches over and touches the wrist of her free arm, and she inadvertently flinches. Immediately, she is sorry but can think of no way of conveying her regret without mentioning the incident, which she knows will embarrass them both, or without touching him in return, which might give him the wrong message entirely. She sits for a moment in an agony of confusion.
“I have an appointment,” he says almost apologetically. Sydney didn’t see him glance at his watch. Perhaps he has learned how to do so without alerting his guest—a neat trick. “I wonder, would you be insulted if I asked you to dine with me tomorrow night?”
Sydney is surprised by the invitation, which she knows to be partly a product of good manners.
“I’m terrible company right now,” she says.
“I have not found that to be true.”
“Thank you for the coffee. This has been pleasant. . .Well, more than pleasant.”
“Very pleasant for me as well,” he says.
“You’re like the stranger on the plane,” she says.
When Sydney returns to her room, she sits on the bed, wondering if she regrets having accepted Mr. Cavalli’s invitation. She cannot deny to herself that she finds the man attractive, and she wonders what it means that she can so soon feel attraction of any sort for another man. When she thinks about entering into a relationship with such a man, however, she feels only fear—a fear similar to, yet not as intense as, the fear of living her life alone.
The next night, Mr. Cavalli meets her in the lobby. He has made reservations at an Italian restaurant just off Trinity Square. The dining room is two stories high with voluptuous quilted draperies and comfortable banquettes. They are seated in an intimate corner near a lighted mural of cypress trees that Mr. Cavalli says reminds him of Italy. The menu is replete with dishes that can be ordered in whatever quantity or sequence one wishes. At her request, Mr. Cavalli orders for both of them. The appetizers are langoustines, prepared with their heads still intact, another reminder of his childhood, he points out.
Sydney stares at the spiny lobster, already broken for her.
Sydney and Mr. Cavalli stay in the restaurant for hours. They drink Prosecco and red wine and talk about near misses and marital mishaps. When she leaves the table, she thinks she might be drunk.
On the way back to the hotel, her wrist aches only a little. She knows that in two days she will have to leave the hotel with her broken suitcase (perhaps tomorrow she will do something about that) and go out into the world in which she once lived. There she will have to begin all over again: find a place to live, get a job, make friends, perhaps even stumble into another relationship. She doubts the latter will happen for quite some time. The hotel has been her private halfway house, a buffer between the woman she was and the woman she must now become. It has cost her all of her savings (indeed, she will now need to borrow money from her father for a security deposit on an apartment), but she does not regret a penny spent.
Mr. Cavalli parks the car just shy of the hotel. Sydney wonders if he will expect her to invite him up to her room, but then she thinks not
—he would not embarrass her in that way.
He bends in her direction, and she offers him her cheek. Deftly, he turns the kiss into a European one—a peck on both cheeks.
“I have to go to London tomorrow,” he says.
“I have to go out into the rest of my life,” she says and laughs.
He gives her his card. “Will you call to tell me that your wrist has healed?” he asks.
Sydney smiles and nods, but already she knows that she will not do that. That this has been an interlude in their lives is perfectly clear, and already she is assailed by mild nostalgia.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For making everything just a little bit easier.”
There is a moment, recognizable to each of them, when she might linger and change everything entirely. But she lets herself out of the car. She doesn’t look back as she walks toward the hotel door.
When Sydney checks out on the twenty-second day, personnel come from a side room to say good-bye. A great to-do is made about putting her small but brand-new suitcase into the back of a taxi. She is not allowed to give the doormen tips. Rick steps from around the counter and tells her to take care. Sydney thinks that she might cry. She is made to promise that she will come back, but she guesses that she will not, that she will never again be able to justify spending that much money for a single night, never mind twenty-two of them.
As the taxi draws away, she blows the staff a kiss.
When they reach the intersection, the cabbie swings his arm over the back of the front seat. “Where to?” he asks.
2005
Chapter 12
Floods of biblical proportion have destroyed a southern city. Gas prices are soaring. Sydney notes that the Hampton tolls now have E-ZPass. In high season, the wait was sometimes a half hour, occasionally an hour. Now there are no lines, as if the north has been evacuated.
So much change. London bombed. Iraq shelled daily. It is an act of will, she sometimes thinks, simply to turn on CNN each evening and take in the day’s news—hardly believable, all too believable.
Sydney enters the public parking lot, her car rolling over the loose gravel. There is a bathhouse, a badly weathered fence, a boardwalk. She lets her window down and inhales the air. It smells of dark sand and fish, signaling a low tide. The breeze is warm on her arm, poised on the sill. Warmer still will be the water, as it often is in September. Sydney knows that there will be few people on the beach.
The family never stays after Labor Day. Never.
She removes her shoes and rolls the cuffs of her black dress pants. She locks her car and slips the key into her pocket. The boardwalk is covered with thin drifts of sand. A last gasp of beach roses, most already turned to hips, crowd the wooden planks. She will cross the boardwalk, take in the beach, and then walk to the house. When she has accomplished this small but necessary task, she will return to her car and continue her drive north to Durham.
But when she reaches the beach, the view cuts unexpectedly to the quick, her body armor shoddy and out-of-date. She stands with her hand to her chest, as if that gesture might protect her. It is not only that she had lost the memory of what this particular beach looked like. It is, too, that she had forgotten that this air is the same that was once alive with sounds and smells and words. Sydney is suddenly fearful of those aural and tactile sensations.
The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating.
Sydney sits where she has planted herself. She closes her eyes against the naked sun and listens to the waves. She can detect their height just by listening—can tell the large smashers from the slow rollers. Has there recently been a storm? In the city, she is sometimes unaware of the weather altogether, or only mildly reminded of it as she walks from apartment to office and back again. Most of her days are spent in the psychology building, in a room with no windows. Sometimes, emerging in the early evening, Sydney is surprised to discover a heavy downpour, or its opposite, an evening so beautiful she can hardly believe she almost missed it.
Sydney has not been north of Boston since the day she said good-bye to Mr. Edwards at his doorstep. She could not pretend, though, that when she and her colleagues received the invitation to the conference at the University of New Hampshire, she didn’t begin to be obsessed with thoughts of driving to the house and looking at it. She can’t articulate to herself exactly why this particular undertaking loomed so large; it seemed to occupy her mind much like the notion of calling an old boyfriend might have done. Whenever she pondered the drive north, the beach flickered like a beacon on an imaginary map.
The sun is a pleasure, and her heartbeat begins to slow. She has seldom been outside this summer, except to sit on a bench and eat her lunch or to take a quick walk, and already she has the pale face of February. She lies back in the sand. She thinks it is probably unwise to lie in the dunes so close to the water without any sunblock, even in September, but she had forgotten how forgiving sand can be, how it seems to accept the body and even to swallow it up. In the distance, she can hear a dog chasing gulls.
Sydney sometimes wondered if Jeff had used the tickets and gone off to Paris by himself. By the time she worked up the courage to enter the Cambridge apartment, it looked just as it had when they’d left it together to drive north to the wedding-that-hadn’t-happened: a suitcase lay discarded on the bed, the ironing board was still out in the kitchen. Not willing to bother a friend, though it was perfectly clear from the number of messages on the answering machine that friends had been trying to contact her, she hired a local moving van to put her belongings in storage until she found a place of her own.
Jeff had left an emptiness, shameful for its timing and its public nature. More astonishing in retrospect was not the fact that Jeff had abandoned her but rather that he had pursued her at all. It seemed a remarkable act of will, a performance running many days, the notices all raves. When she thought he was contemplating algorithms and terrorists, was he, instead, pondering his own treachery? Did he understand each day what he was doing? Or was he operating at a subconscious level that became clear to him only as the wedding drew near? Sydney found it hard to believe in all that dissembling. Scenarios in Montreal and Cambridge had to be played and replayed to watch his face for clues of his subterfuge. And wouldn’t Jeff have to have been desperately unhappy, either for himself or for Sydney, assuming that he had cared for her at all? Was she to believe in a single moment of the nearly eleven months she had been with him? Would she have to second-guess all her decisions now?
It was Emily who convinced Sydney to return to school, though she had been leaning in that direction for some weeks. She remembered the research, the classes, the sense of deadline—it seemed to be what was needed. She looked for an apartment near the psychology building where she would be spending most of her time. Rents were high, and she had little money, refusing on principle to tap into a joint account she and Jeff had built together for their future, there being no joint future now. She imagined that in time he would send her some of the money, which he did. No note accompanied the check.
Sydney tried never to think of Jeff or Julie or Mr. Edwards, whose crumpled face she had the most difficulty erasing from her mind. After several weeks of searching, she found a dismal studio apartment just a few blocks from the building in which she would soon immerse herself in work. Unlike most of the returning graduate students, Sydney was so eager for the new term to begin that she arrived an hour early for her first lecture. She was made to understand by her adviser that even more in the way of teaching and research would be expected of her now, which was, she thought, undeserved yet perfect timing. By then, most of the need for solitude had exhausted itself—so much so that she found she could occasionally go out to dinner or to a baseball game with some of her colleagues after work. She had not, however, dated any man since she had had dinner with Mr. Cavalli, which, she thought, did not count as a real date in any universe with which she was familiar. She had gone to
a few parties at which there had been men, and some of these men had made initial overtures, but it had been reassuring, if slightly alarming, to learn how quickly these men could be made to turn away. A ducking of the head. A refusal to meet the eyes. A patently weak smile. With Daniel’s death, avoiding men had had a different tenor to it: around Sydney, there had been a wall of respect. If men approached her, they were careful, wary, always sympathetic. After Jeff, however, Emily joked that it was as if Sydney gave off negative vibes, and Sydney thought this completely true: vibrations, emanating outward, might prove an effective buffer.
Sydney liked her work, could even occasionally talk herself into thinking of her research as timely and necessary, though she had the normal panicky sense of needing answers more quickly than the scientific method allowed. It was, she thought, a diluted sense of what cancer researchers must feel: an intense need to find a cure before thousands more died. Though her own research was less pressing, she seldom failed to notice at-risk girls on the streets of Boston. They were often overdeveloped, underdressed, very young, and accompanied by older men. In grant proposals, Sydney’s goal was to decrease the negative life outcomes for such adolescent girls. Privately, Sydney hoped simply to help save the girls from themselves.
After Jeff had sent the check, having called Sydney’s mother for her new address, he had forwarded a bundle of letters from Julie and Mr. Edwards. Sydney had the sense that Jeff was out of the country often, though she resisted calling his department at MIT simply to see if he was listed as an active teaching professor there.
In time, even Julie had stopped writing, discouraged at last by the lack of any reply from her friend, her almost sister-in-law. Sydney had suffered, reading the heartfelt, if artless, missives, yet not as much as she would have had she entered into that correspondence, or, earlier, one with Mr. Edwards, whose brief letters had always ended with an apology, never his to make.
