Where or When

by Anita Shreve

  Carney was smoking when Charles walked in, and his face was a grayish color that looked like fabric. On the desk was a Styrofoam cup of milky coffee, also grayish-looking, not touched. When he visited this office, Charles often had an impression of metal, as if the room and its entire contents were constructed of metal—metal walls, a metal desk, a metal chair—and this somehow was in keeping with the ever-present stink of gasoline in the air.

  “It’s right there,” Carney said to Charles. Carney indicated an open letter with his hand. Charles remembered then that Carney didn’t smoke; he’d given it up years earlier. Charles took the letter from the desk. Clipped to its top was a check. Charles read the relevant sentence.

  He remembers a sensation of being buffeted—as if the air had been blown out of the room.

  “Jesus Christ” Charles said softly.

  Charles had gone to school with Carney, had played basketball with him, and the two boys had made it as far as the regional championships together. Then Charles had gone off to college and into the seminary, and Carney had stayed to work at his father’s Mobil station. Carney owned it now; the father had retired. That was how Charles’s business worked; he insured his friends, their referrals. Carney had held off for years, though, had had his children late. Usually it was the fact of the children that brought the new clients in.

  Three weeks earlier, Charles had sent in Carney’s application on a $300,000 policy, and he’d thought little of it until he’d opened his mail Tuesday. Carney’s case was what the home office referred to as “a flat declination.”

  “Your client is unacceptable for medical underwriting reasons,” the letter had read. “No further details are available. The initial deposit is being returned to the client with a letter of explanation.”

  Charles had been mildly worried for himself financially (another case shot); more seriously for Carney. Such a flat refusal didn’t simply mean your client had high blood pressure.

  Charles looked at Carney in his metal office. Through the window, Charles could see the boy replacing the cap on the gas tank, moving the Cadillac away from the pumps. The boy’s gestures seemed choreographed, dreamlike.

  “I’ve got two kids,” Carney said.

  Charles held the piece of paper, read the sentence again. He wanted to say to Carney that there must be some mistake, but he knew it wasn’t a mistake. The blood tests never lied.

  “And my wife . . . I’ve got to tell my wife.”

  Charles put the letter back where it had been. He wanted to know how, but would not ask. He wanted to say he was sorry, but that seemed an insult.

  “You want a drink?” he asked Carney.

  Carney was quiet, wouldn’t answer him. Carney’s hands were large, had always been large. He’d been brilliant, fast with the ball.

  “Let’s get out of here, Tom, go get drunk at least,” Charles said.

  Carney was staring at a spot on the opposite wall. He shook his head slowly. “About five years ago, I had some encounters . . .,” he said.

  Encounters. The word hung in the air. It was an oddly restrained and formal word for Carney to have used, and it didn’t necessarily mean one specific thing or another, but Charles didn’t have to know more.

  After a silence, Charles had left Carney in his office, left the gas station. He’d gone to the Qwik Stop, bought a six-pack, and driven over the bridge to the beach. He’d drunk the six beers as fast as he could, on no lunch. It had seemed to him then that if he hadn’t tried to make the sale, Tom Carney would never have known. It was illogical linking, Charles knew, but he couldn’t stop himself from making the loop. He’d thought of Portugal that afternoon, of emigrating to Portugal. He had wanted to be sitting at a cafe in the hot sun, eating braised octopus with Portuguese sausage and—for a change—looking out the other way across the Atlantic. He’d missed two appointments.

  Charles watches Medeiros disappear behind the dunes, relieved to be alone again on the beach. Charles likes the bridge and the beach, and he thinks of the drive here as the “drive to nowhere.” He imagines the drive itself, the drive alone even without its eventual destination, as a balm, a respite from the business in town. And sometimes, when he comes here and when he is absolutely certain he is all alone, he sings: show tunes, oldies from his youth, once in a while a current hit that has captured his imagination on the radio and that he has bothered to learn the lyrics to. He likes his voice—a good Irish tenor—and occasionally he wishes he could join a church, any church, just for the pleasure of singing in a choir, though immediately, when he has this wish, he thinks of having to endure the rest of the service or the mass, and his fantasy deflates. So he sings alone. Often, if he can, he brings Winston with him, his dog, his black lab, and if he can get him going, he will sing too—a high, lonesome, off-key wail that drives the gulls crazy and almost always concludes with Winston bounding out of the car along the dark muck of the bayside, chasing the gulls and plunging into the frigid waters if need be.

  It was why he’d bought the oversize Cadillac, a car big enough, he thought at the time, for himself and his dog. (Charles thinks of himself as getting bigger too, with each passing year, as if life itself were causing him to inflate, though except for the occasional pound or two, he knows this can’t be true.) There were other reasons as well for the purchase, all of them nebulous but of equal weight, the sum total of which urged him to make this uncharacteristically showy gesture. He’d driven a Cadillac in Milwaukee on a business trip, and the car had reminded him of the big cars of his boyhood, the mythic Bonnevilles and Chevrolets of his early teens. And when he’d come home from the business trip and passed the Cadillac dealership and seen the sign announcing the sale, he’d pulled in, knowing as he did so that he’d be seriously chastised if he bought such an ostentatious American car, by Harriet and by his friends and even by many of his clients, and somehow this had perversely pleased him, though not as much as turning in the Saab—that ever-present symbol of New England yuppiedom—had done.

  Charles crosses the dunes twenty minutes behind Medeiros. He takes the bridge fast; by now, he knows, Harriet will have passed from merely impatient to tight-lipped. He reaches down in front of the passenger seat, snaps the cooler lid, brings a bottle of beer between his legs. With a practiced gesture, he twists the cap, inhales a long swallow. It’s ten o’clock in the morning. But it’s a Sunday; it’s OK. His soul is not in jeopardy. Yet.

  At the end of the bridge, the road forks. To the north is a tight string of low-rent beachfront houses, a wall of thin shacks that stretches along the coast to a power plant at the end of a rocky beach. To the left is High Street, residential until the harbor and the village itself. Here the houses are more substantial—two-story, wooden-frame homes with peaked roofs, most of them year-round. The yards are small, postage-stamp, some bounded in the chain-link favored by the first-generation Portuguese and Irish, others bordered by the hedges and white picket fences preferred by their children and the newcomers.

  Sometimes now, driving this road, Charles imagines that there has been a war or at least a skirmish—something to explain the bombed-out landscape, the physical and psychic eyesore of stalled construction, additions that will never be completed and that now lie covered with torn blue tarps, condo complexes aborted even before the windows got their glass. Where once there were weathered saltboxes surrounded by sea grass, now there are abandoned foundations, signs that say No Trespassing—ugly, half-built concrete objects that mar the blue of the ocean. He passes such a sculpture, with its rusted girders pointed toward the heavens, and thinks of Dick Lidell. Two years ago, Charles sold Lidell a policy for three million, and when the home office wanted to look at Lidell’s tax return, Lidell had shown four million five in cash. The man could have retired. Instead the four million five went into the Tinkertoy with its orange girders up on the hill, and Lidell, Charles knows, is now renting someone else’s two-bedroom condo.

  The stories are legion. Charles passes his office, a modest white Cape
with dark green shutters. In the front, hanging from a wrought-iron post, is his sign: Charles A. Callahan/Real Estate and Insurance. Each year Harriet tends the garden around the front porch of the office and hangs a basket of geraniums on the post with the sign. It was Harriet who found the old wicker rockers at a garage sale, rewove them, and painted them green to match the shutters. The rockers have been on the porch for three years now, though no one ever sits in them. He hates passing his office, hates thinking of having to go to it in the morning. The building will be the bank’s within a matter of weeks. He will have to move his business into his home then, a move that doesn’t bear thinking about.

  He knows, of course, that it was greed: an unfamiliar sin of boyhood, a ubiquitous sin of middle age, or so it seems to him now. But nearly as bad, he believes—almost as damning, almost as venal—was his carelessness, his recklessness.

  At the time, the idea seemed to Charles like a certainty: All he had to do, Turiello explained, was take the equity out of the office, then leverage that cash into a one-third share of a three-million-dollar loan on the proposed office-condo complex the other side of town. Turiello had been a good client; the idea had been too seductive to walk away from. The location was ideal—a commanding precipice on the coast road, visible for miles. If the plan had worked, if the real estate market hadn’t crashed, Charles, like Lidell, could have retired, and Harriet and his children would have been set. But timing (and he now knows the precise truth of this bromide) is everything. Almost immediately the market had begun to collapse, and neither he nor Turiello nor the third partner, Turiello’s brother Emil, could lease or sell any of the space. At last calculation, Charles was into the bank for a million, his commission flow had trickled to almost nothing, and he now has on his desk a stack of policy lapse notices nearly half a foot high. If the bank can’t sell the office soon for a decent price, Charles knows he will almost certainly lose his house as well. Already the newly compounded mortgage is crushing; his savings are nearly depleted. When he wakes in the middle of the night, the sheet below him soaked with sweat, the question he ponders is this: Will he have to put his next mortgage payment on his MasterCard?

  Sometimes in the middle of the night he allows himself to think he is particularly plagued by bad luck or timing—but he has only to make this drive, as he does each day, to know he is but one of many. He can catalog the names: John Blay, Emil Turiello, Dick Lidell, Pete French . . . the list is long. Each with bombed-out fantasies, chill sweats in the night. Each scrambling now just to keep his home.

  Charles rounds the last bend just before the village. Here there are Federal houses, white or pale yellow with black shutters, fading square mansions with widow’s walks and larger lawns. Ship captains once built these, Charles knows, and then later sold them to the owners of the mills. Now there is only one mill owner in residence; the rest are professional offices. Two stand empty. Out in front of several there are For Sale signs. Charles’s name is on some of the signs.

  As a summer place, the town has always been marginal, not a town that attracts the Volvos and the Range Rovers. It is and always has been a Rhode Island fishing town, mostly Portuguese and Irish, too working-class to have supported the massive summer places farther south and west or along the coast of Connecticut. For the most part, the town has remained undiscovered, not yuppified, and Charles is glad of this, though he thinks he shouldn’t be.

  He passes the bank at the end of the village—The Bank—the largest building in town, an imposing stone edifice with beautifully proportioned windows and two monstrous white columns that make it look deceptively solid. It is a singular institution, a family bank, not part of a chain, the only game in town. If Charles hates passing his office, he hates having to pass this building even more, loathes particularly the fact that lately the bank is almost always on his mind. From habit, he averts his eyes, studies a knitting shop across the street.

  He takes the first right at the end of the village, brings the car to rest in the driveway of his house. A hundred and forty thousand on the clock. Christ, he wonders, can the old Cadillac make it another sixty?

  Charles steps out of the car, looks at the incomplete addition at the side of his house, the foundation with no building, the addition that was to have been a new kitchen for Harriet, then later an office for himself, and will now stand empty, filling up with water in a rain, and he knows it is folly to imagine oneself as the repository for all the economic troubles, that somehow it all ends with oneself. For beyond him is Antone Costa, then Costa’s three sons, one of them married already, two grandchildren in eventual need of college educations. And beyond them, who? Carol Kopka, a single mother with two kids, at the checkout counter down at the A&P, the last to have been hired before the troubles? Bill Samson at the Dodge dealership, who’s running thirty percent behind this year in sales? Christ, even Tom Carney at his gas station? He wonders if there is anyone in town who has escaped unscathed.

  Harriet, he sees at once, has already been on the mower. The front lawn has shot up in the cooler weather, but the back lawn is trim. He could put the office in the front, he knows, where they have now a living room they hardly ever use, favoring, as they do, the family room, off the kitchen. He has been thinking about this for weeks, has reached no conclusions. He likes his house, though it is too grandiose and impractical. The house is frigid in winter, and the plumbing is mystifying—yet it’s an elegant building, even if its nineteenth-century lines have begun to sag. Harriet mows the lawn, keeps the exterior tidy and painted, and minds that Charles has not solved the riddle of the plumbing—his part in this particular unspoken marital bargain.

  Harriet is in the kitchen, wrestling with a large white softball of dough in a mustard-colored bowl. She has on her Sunday clothes—a pink sweatsuit and sneakers—and Charles can see that she hasn’t had her shower yet: Her short, nearly black hair is still matted at one side from sleep, and there are smudges of teal blue below her lower lids. She doesn’t speak as he walks in. He could tell her that he ran into Joe Medeiros, that Medeiros is pulling out of a deal, and that this will mean another stall on the addition, thus eliciting, possibly, a glance of sympathy or, at the very least, a change of subject, but as he watches her kneading the dough angrily, he decides to forgo the solicitation. More than likely, the news will simply frighten her. He puts the doughnuts on the counter, the milk in the fridge. He asks, “Where are the kids?” and she answers, not looking at him, “Outside.”

  He takes the newspaper into a small room off the porch that is a kind of sanctuary, a library if one were to be so formal, which he is not inclined to be. This, too, is a room that could be turned into an office, though it is a bit cramped, and he does not like having to think of giving up his retreat.

  There are books in uneven stacks on the floor of the room, nearly covering the small Oriental Harriet gave him last year for Christmas. Across one of the books is a tie he wore a few days ago. A second pair of dress shoes is in a corner, and for some reason he cannot quite fathom, a pair of jeans is flung over a chair. It is another unspoken marital bargain that Harriet never enters this room, and as a consequence it is seldom cleaned, seldom tidied.

  He drops the heavy Sunday paper on top of his desk, itself awash in inches of unopened mail, half-read magazines, and more books. Slipping the sweatshirt over his head, he tosses it in the direction of the chair with the jeans. On a bookshelf he has his turntable, and he puts on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, a piece he plays often, never tires of. It seems to him a hopeful concerto, nearly a symphony, appropriate somehow for a Sunday morning, even though the news this particular Sunday morning has not been especially hopeful. Outside, Hadley, his eldest daughter, is squealing as she takes the long, looping ride on the rope he hung for her from the tall walnut, a sail through the air that ends with a whomp in a large, forgiving pile of leaf mulch. Jack, his son, two years younger than Hadley’s fourteen, is with her and is loudly demanding a turn for himself. Charles can see him through the smal
l window of his study, squirming with impatience. He wonders briefly then where Anna, his five-year-old, is—not with them, for he would see or hear her. But he quickly dismisses the query; Harriet will know, will be watching her. For the moment he can relax.

  He picks up his reading glasses from the desk, puts them on. Usually he begins with the magazine: a quick perusal of the cover story, a glance at the recipes, a longer look at the crossword to see if it’s one he might tackle. This week the recipes are about blueberries—not interesting. He would study them if the dishes were Italian or Spanish or Indian. He is the cook in the family, though Harriet likes to bake, and his children often complain that what he concocts is inedible. The cover story is about the savings-and-loan scandal. He will look at that later. He picks up another thin magazine inside the paper, the weekly literary supplement.

  He is thinking, as he turns the pages, of a book he has ordered at the bookstore and forgotten about; he must call to see if it is in yet. It’s a volume by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur; it must definitely be in now: he ordered it—what?—in July, he is sure. Perhaps, he is thinking as he idly peruses the table of contents, the bookstore did call, and Harriet answered and has simply forgotten to mention it to him. And it is then, in the middle of this thought, that he turns the page and sees the photograph.

  His hand stops. He looks at the photograph. He lays the paper flat.

  He lets his breath out slowly. He looks at the picture, reads the print around it.

  It is Siân Richards. Of course he knows by the name. Another woman might conceivably have this name as well, though he thinks that unlikely. More than the name, it is her photograph that makes him certain. It is, without question, the same face, the same expression in the eyes. He brings his hand up to his face, smooths his jawline with the back of his fingers. He puts his hand down on the desk, on the newspaper, and notices that it is trembling.