Where or When

by Anita Shreve

The maître d’ nods at Charles, indicates that he should follow him to what has become, in the several weeks they have been visiting the inn, their table. The snow outside the windows is thinning out; the storm, it seems, is nearly over. Charles follows Siân across the long dining room, his hand lightly at her waist. She has worn her hair down; it falls in a loose fan along the back of her dress. Pearls circle her neck. Charles orders immediately, as he has planned, a bottle of champagne.

  They sit side by side, and he takes her hand. Siân crosses her legs, touches a heavy silver spoon. He surveys the room. Only three other tables are occupied tonight; he suspects that the storm has kept most people away, though he has never eaten here in the evening. Instead of flowers in the center of the room, there is a Christmas tree—a small, simple tree with white lights. Boughs of spruce, interspersed with white candles, decorate the fireplace mantel.

  “Pretty,” he says.

  She nods. Her mood seems altered, shaded.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “You seem pensive.”

  She smiles. “It is pretty. I’m sorry.”

  The waiter brings the champagne, pops the cork, fills the glasses. Charles raises his to Siân.

  “To presents we can’t give each other,” he says.

  “Yet,” she says.

  She takes a sip, doesn’t meet his eyes. She puts her glass down.

  “What’s it like?” she asks. “Your Christmas?”

  He sighs. So that’s why she is pensive. He studies her mouth, the long curve of her lower lip. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” he asks. “It might be better if we didn’t.”

  “No, I’m sure. I’d like to be able to picture what you’re doing that evening, that day.”

  He hesitates. He has a feeling that he has often: a sense that no matter how he answers this question, the answer will be the wrong one. “Are you writing?” he asks instead.

  She turns her head slightly away. She seems surprised by the question. “Not much,” she says. “I write to you. I can’t work well now. I’m too . . . preoccupied, I guess you would say.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “You’re trying to change the subject.”

  “OK. OK. Here’s what happens. My wife’s parents and my parents and my wife’s sister and her kids come over on Christmas Eve, and basically I hang out in the kitchen, cooking.”

  “You have Christmas on Christmas Eve.”

  “The adults do. We open our presents in the evening, after the children are in bed. The kids open theirs in the morning.”

  “Oh. And do you go to church?”

  “I don’t. And Harriet doesn’t . . .” A flicker of something crosses Siân’s eyes. He wishes he hadn’t mentioned his wife by name. “ . . . but my parents go to midnight mass, and maybe my daughter Hadley will go with them. I’m usually doing the dishes.”

  She is silent next to him. He knows what she is picturing, what she is imagining, what she wants to ask and won’t: Do he and his wife exchange presents? When do they do this: when others are present or when they are alone? He watches as she drains her glass, pushes it forward on the table as though to ask for another. Silently he fills her glass again. She raises it, nearly drains it at one go.

  “Siân . . . ,” he says.

  “Do you want to hear about my Christmas rituals? So you can picture what I’m doing?”

  “Siân, don’t,” he says.

  “It’s quite interesting. Really, Charles, you should let me tell you.”

  There is a slightly manic note to her voice that he has never heard before. She drains her glass, nudges it forward yet again. “The champagne is delicious,” she says. “You have excellent taste. I feel like getting drunk tonight. Why not.”

  Reluctantly he fills her glass again. “Why don’t we order?” he suggests.

  “In a minute,” she says. “I’m going to tell you about Christmas Eve on a Polish onion farm. You haven’t lived until you’ve had Christmas on a Polish onion farm.”

  “Siân, why are you doing this?”

  “Actually, I used to like this ritual. I used to like rituals of any kind to break the silences. I used to like as many people in the house as possible. . . .”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “It’s called Wigilia,” she says, “the Christmas Eve dinner. We have it at our place, all the relatives—well, all Stephen’s side of the family. We visit my father the day after Christmas. I cook for days beforehand with Stephen’s mother. I bet you can’t picture that, can you, his mother and me in my kitchen, making pirogis. Well, I do. You can’t imagine how good they are. You like to cook. You should learn how to make them. . . .”

  “Siân.”

  “I fill them with sauerkraut or potato or farmer’s cheese and potato or prunes. The prune ones are especially delicious. . . .”

  “We can go upstairs, come down later to eat if you want,” he says. Her face is flushed, her eyes too bright.

  “And we never have meat. Only fish. We have pickled herring. Do you like pickled herring? And pike and carp. And borscht. And sometimes cabbage soup. And sauerkraut and sardines. And a kind of poppyseed bread. And figs and dates. And everybody eats as much as he can. And oh, I almost forgot: You have to leave a place for the unknown visitor. You know who the unknown visitor is, don’t you?”

  He looks out across the long dining room. The heavy white linen seems extraordinarily beautiful to him—comforting, weighed down by anchors of silver. When he turns to glance outside the long windows, he sees that the snow has finally stopped. Within the dining room, and without, there is an unearthly quiet, the quiet of a building surrounded by a new snow. And is it only his imagination, or is everyone in the room actually frozen, listening intently to Siân’s voice, at once animated and brittle, as if it were a piece of crystal that might soon shatter?

  “Well, it’s for Jesus Christ. That’s who.”

  She puts her glass down on the table. She stands up slowly, with inordinate care, and slips through the small space between the banquette tables, as though each movement had been choreographed. She turns delicately without looking at him. He watches her walk the long distance through the dining room, her pace unhurried, her back straight. Her heels click rhythmically on the wooden floor. He follows her with his eyes until she rounds a corner and he can see her no more.

  The champagne was a mistake. They have not eaten all day. He will give her a minute, then follow her back to the room. Perhaps she ought to have a short nap before they eat. He will suggest it, rub her back. The dining room must be open late; he’ll speak to the maître d’. He knew it was risky territory; he tried to warn her off. And yet, he thinks, this had to happen. It’s his own anger too. At what might have been and wasn’t. Will he ever be able to listen to her talk about her life, or she his, without the hurt?

  He looks up. A waiter is at his elbow.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the man says, “but I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Your friend appears to be ill.”

  Charles stands up. “Where is she?”

  “She’s in the ladies’ room, sir.”

  He finds her kneeling in a stall, her feet splayed out behind her. A waitress, standing in the center of the room as if not wanting to approach any nearer, is the only other person present. Charles nods to the waitress, dismisses her. “I’ll handle this,” he says.

  Siân retches once into the basin, reaches up with her hand to flush the toilet. Charles moves in beside her, squats down with his back against the stall. Siân’s face is white, with pearls of sweat on her forehead. He holds her hair back with one hand, puts the other to her forehead to brace her.

  “It’s all right,” he tells her. “Let it out. Let it go. Don’t fight it.” It is what he tells his children when they are sick in the night.

  “I can’t do this,” she cries. “I can’t do th
is.”

  “It’s OK, Siân. It’s OK.”

  “No, it’s not OK. It’s not OK at all. My daughter is at home without me. I have to lie all the time. We didn’t have all those years, and now it’s too late, we won’t be able to have any time at all. We have families, and they need us.”

  “We’ll work it out,” he says quietly.

  She retches again into the bowl, wipes her mouth. He flushes the toilet for her.

  She sits back against a corner of the stall, her knees raised. She doesn’t seem to care about her ungainly posture, her knees spread as if she had on jeans and were resting against a stone wall. He takes a handkerchief from his suit pocket, hands it to her. Her face is bathed in sweat, her hair curling along its edges in wet tendrils. In the fluorescent light, her face washed of color, she looks every bit of her forty-six years—a middle-aged woman, he would say now—and curiously, studying her, he can see all of her, all the women she has been or will be, from the young girl to the old woman. The clarity of the images frightens him, but he is aware only that he loves her, that he wants nothing more in life than to be allowed to take care of her.

  “You don’t understand,” she says, her eyes rimmed red, her cheeks wet. She reaches up for toilet paper, blows her nose. “My husband gets up early and makes doughnuts on Christmas morning. He’s giving me a leather-bound edition of my book. On Christmas morning, we drape a blanket across the entrance to the living room, so that Lily can’t peek at her presents, and then we ceremoniously drop the blanket, and she squeals with delight. My daughter loves Polish food. Even I like the pirogis. Don’t you see? We can’t undo that.”

  Her voice has reached a pitch he has never heard before. He watches as she leans her head back, sighs deeply.

  “I’m finished,” she says. She closes her eyes. She looks worn, exhausted. “Families once took us away from each other, and now families are taking us away from each other again.”

  “I’ll help you,” he says.

  She shakes her head. “You can’t help me,” she says quietly. “Neither one of us can help the other, and that’s the truth.”

  He lifts her to her feet. He watches while she washes her face at the sink, towels it dry. She sloshes mouthfuls of water, spits them out. She runs her fingers through her hair, pulling the wet strands back.

  “I need some fresh air,” she says.

  “I know,” he says. “I’ll get our coats.”

  He returns from the room with their coats and scarves and her boots. She exchanges her shoes for her boots in the hallway.

  “Wait here,” he says to her before they go outside. “I’ll be right back.”

  When he rejoins her in the hallway, he is carrying a broom.

  “I got it from the kitchen,” he says.

  “What’s it for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Outside, the snow across the lawn is a vast cascade of white, unmarred by footsteps of any kind. He calculates, as they make their way down to the path, that the accumulation must be somewhere between four and six inches. A moon has risen and shines through the last patches of cloud. It will be a clear night and cold.

  He takes her arm, helping her through the snow. Her boots are dress boots with heels, not meant for hiking. When they are halfway down the lawn, he turns to see the inn behind them. The facade is ablaze, the glow from inside making golden pools of light on the snow. In the darkness, it seems as if inside the inn there were a large party, a Christmas party, with many guests dressed in velvet and gold and black, holding champagne glasses, smiling under holly, their faces lit by candlelight. He has a fleeting sense of having left something important and warm behind.

  Amidst the pines, the going is rougher, the light from the moon partially obscured. Beside him, Siân has begun to breathe more normally. He carries the broom over his shoulder like a rifle.

  When they reach the clearing, they can just make out the shape of the benches in the snow. He walks with Siân to the one closest to the lake, the one they sat on a few weeks ago, brushes it off with the broom.

  “That’s what the broom was for?” she asks.

  “No, not exactly,” he replies.

  She sits on the bench, her hands in the pockets of her coat, her body drawn inward against the cold.

  “I’m going to test the ice,” he says.

  The snow on the lake is faintly blue from the moon. He is not sure exactly where the shoreline ends and the lake begins, but when he reaches the ice, the soles of his shoes slip against the hard surface. He is destroying his shoes, he knows, and his feet are frozen from the snow. He walks twenty-five feet out onto the surface of the lake, takes a test jump; the ice feels solid. He begins then to sweep. The snow, so new and light, blows effortlessly away like dust. When he has cleared a patch the size of a small bedroom, he slips across his newly created rink and walks to where Siân is sitting.

  “We’re going to walk on water,” he says, reaching for her hand.

  “You’re crazy,” she says.

  “Well, we knew that.”

  He holds her hand, then her whole arm when they reach the ice. She makes one small tentative movement onto the ice, leans into him for support. When he takes her weight, he is afraid for a moment that his footing will give and they might both go down, but his shoes hold and he steadies her. Together they slide forward, first one foot and then the other.

  He lets go of her arm, but not her hand. They glide across the ice, she occasionally clutching him when she feels herself about to lose her balance. They are dark shapes on the lake; he can barely see her face.

  “I’ll always love you,” she says.

  “I know,” he says.

  A bird—an owl?—hoots at them from across the lake. But the snow, all around them, is a buffer, smothering the sounds of the outside world.

  In the center of the small square he has made, he turns to her, then holds her arm out in the classic dance posture. They execute a few slippery steps, draw closer to each other for support.

  “What are you listening to?” she asks.

  “You won’t believe this,” he says.

  “I might.”

  “The Brahms Second Piano Concerto. Do you know it?”

  “I think so. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the third movement. The quiet one. The one that begins with the cello.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a concerto, but it’s like a symphony,” he says. “I used to think it was the most beautiful piece of music I’d ever heard, and I’m not sure I don’t still think that. Sometimes, when everyone is out of the house, I put it on full blast and just luxuriate in it. I believe it’s the longest concerto ever written. Brahms himself was the soloist at its premiere. God, how I’d love to have heard that. I have a number of versions, but I’m partial to Cliburn with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although the Rudolf Serkin is absolutely—”

  “Charles.”

  She puts her gloved hands to his face.

  “What?”

  “Stop.”

  “Stop?”

  “You’re as bad as I am with the Polish food.”

  Her face is white, drained by the moon. She looks, despite her warm coat and scarf and gloves, naked to him, her face unmasked, her eyes, in the cool light, black and open. This is, he knows, one moment that they have, one moment in time, one pearl on a short string.

  “If you’re skating on thin ice,” he whispers into the frosty night, “you might as well dance.”

  Around the curtains there is light. They are naked in the bed, she folded into him, like spoons. He is hard when he awakens, knows it instantly, knows too that this is not generic lust, that she was there in the dissipating dream: He sees her face in a fragment before it drifts away. He finds her breast, the small nipple, nearly always erect. Her belly, the softness there. She does not exercise, and, somehow, this appeals to him. He makes a light circular motion with his hand, and she awakens, turns onto her back. He knows he must look like a pterodacty
l, his thinning hair in a sculpture all its own, but she smiles, embraces him, shifts slightly so that in one movement he is above her. He enters her immediately without needing to be guided in. She is slippery already, as though waiting for him in her dream. Was it a dream that produced this, he wonders, or is it left from an earlier time—how many hours ago?—in the night? He straddles her legs; he feels welded to her, and he can see her face. Her excitement is contagious, fuels his own, as his, he knows, triggers hers. He watches now as her mouth opens; he circles her tongue with his own. He smooths her hair from her forehead. He raises himself up, his weight on his hands. Her eyes dart from his face to his shoulder and back again. He watches as a flush of color begins at her throat, suffuses her face. They are locked in a deep, slow rhythm, the ebb and flow of waves. In time, studying her, he sees the slight arch of her neck that tells him she is close. He has wondered if it might be possible, but now it seems almost inevitable. He feels himself there, holds back, examines the tilt of her chin. In a few hours they will leave each other, sucked back into lives of lost meaning. There is only this now; this is everything. The frame of the world around them increases his urgency. He waits for her to close her eyes, as she almost always does near the end, but this time, she opens them immediately, astonishing him.

  “I want to see you,” she whispers.

  And saying that, she comes, and he is with her, and it is only seconds later that he hears again the mingled bewilderment and pleasure of their simultaneous cries.

  It was brief, and yet it was a lifetime. I used to think it was something I would never have, that the era in which I was raised and the church I nearly wed had bred it out of me, or had leached it out. But you gave it to me, or I gave it to you, and now I cannot separate your body from your words, nor mine from my thoughts. I cannot separate what we did from who we were. Every image is erotic, or within the fold, etched in stone now, engraved blossoms.

  In December, the black dirt held the warmth long after the other soil had frozen, as if, along with the light, the dirt had swallowed up the sun. Consequently, the early snows melted on the onion fields, like snow falling into the sea.