Where or When

by Anita Shreve

  He puts the car in gear, heads toward the post office. If he has any luck left at all, Noonan will be there already, and more important, the Express Mail letter will have come in. As has happened to him before, he both dreads and hungers for the letter—hunger winning out. The open line of communication between them seems so fragile, particularly now, when he cannot talk to her on the telephone, when she has been so guarded, that he is eager to restore it, no matter what the cost. If he can talk to her, if she can talk to him, if they can be in each other’s physical presence, then he truly believes that they will be all right.

  He drives through town, the odd storm creating havoc in the streets. Townspeople, bent double, seem blown from open door to open door. Hats, newspapers, paper bags, trash, and Christmas decorations skim along the streets and lodge momentarily in doorways. He comes to a stop at the traffic light, doesn’t like the perilous way it is swinging in the stiff blow. Harborside, he can see the water hit the seawall like a firecracker, explode in a spray that drenches everything within twenty feet of the wall—parked cars, hapless pedestrians, phone lines, the backs of shops. The tide is up. Any higher and there’ll be serious flooding in a couple of hours. He thinks of the houses smack up against the water along High Street; there’ll be anxious home owners there. He wonders if the spit will breach.

  Noonan’s Trooper is at the post office. Yes. If only his luck will hold, Charles is thinking, the letter will be there.

  He opens the door to the main office. Noonan says immediately, “Got a package for you, Callahan. How was your Christmas?”

  Charles signs for the letter.

  “Fine,” he says, relieved that not everyone in town knows yet about the debacle that was his Christmas. “And yours?”

  “Oh, the usual,” says Noonan. “Too much food, too many relatives.”

  “Know what you mean,” says Charles, holding the Express Mail package against his chest.

  A breastplate.

  “Watch yourself out there,” Noonan calls to Charles’s back. “Got a weird storm working itself up the coast.”

  Charles nods, hurries to his car, his temporary retreat. (He reflects that his car is one of the few havens he has left now, though GMAC in its wisdom will probably want to repossess it; he could total the car, he thinks idly, before they get their hands on it.) He tears open the packet, sees the thin blue envelope inside. More delicately, he opens the envelope, unfolds the letter. Just the sight of her handwriting is somehow deeply reassuring.

  He reads the letter through.

  He reads it again.

  And again.

  He holds the letter in his hand, opens his car door, stands up for air. He turns slowly around, lays his head on top of his car. He looks up, starts walking. He completes a large circle within the post office parking lot, still holding the letter in his hand. His stomach feels hollow, as if he had taken a fist. Above him, tree branches whip against a power line. A woman pulls into the parking lot, emerges from her car. Immediately the wind snatches an envelope from her hand. The envelope rises and falls, slides along the tarmac, lodges in a bush at the side. The woman runs in its wake, a comical and ungainly dash. The letter must be important, Charles thinks distractedly.

  He walks back to his car, the door still open, a little bell inside dinging to signal that something is amiss. He looks at the letter in his hand, thinks to fold it up, stick it back inside the thin blue envelope. Instead he reaches up to the cloudless sky, lets the letter go. He watches it loop and fall like a kite, skitter along the side of the post office, then disappear behind the back of the building. He thinks for a minute that he ought to run to catch it, that it is, somehow, valuable, a tangible thread to a precious thing he once owned, then he remembers suddenly that he owns nothing now.

  He reenters the Cadillac, no longer a sanctuary. He starts the car, pulls out to an intersection. Behind him a driver leans on the horn. Startled, Charles makes a right turn in the intersection, heading south and west toward the motel.

  She has written that it is over. Totally, completely, irrevocably over.

  She has written that her husband shot himself and will lose the use of his arm.

  She has written that she has loved him.

  He proceeds down High Street, unaware that he is even behind the wheel. He has no destination, no urgency at all. He thinks, oddly, that he will never get to Portugal now. He knows this for a certainty, though he is not sure why. He sees her skating in her boots, cannot bear the image, makes it go away. What is he doing? He cannot go back to the motel. Jesus Christ, he thinks, that’s the last place he wants to be. He brakes sharply and suddenly, makes a U-turn in the middle of High Street, causing a long squeal of tires as he does so. He drives, nearly blind, out toward the beach.

  To his right, along High Street, he is aware of the hammering of the surf. High upon a hill, he sees Lidell’s lost Tinkertoy, rusted beams dancing above the town. He sees houses now with their windows boarded up, sandbags along foundation lines. He hopes his children are inside a house somewhere, hopes Harriet has had the sense to pull them in. The biggest danger is from power lines. He himself has seen them snap and fall, crackling along the pavement.

  He sees her on a bed, the lovely tilt of her nostrils. He can feel her hand on his skin.

  He sees an image he has often in his dreams: the nipples of her breasts bursting through the white cloth of her blouse. He had it when he was a boy, and then later when he met her again, and he had not had it in all the years in between.

  He wonders if the dream will go away now.

  In Portugal they might one day have sat at a cafe in the sun, eating braised octopus and Portuguese sausage. He’d have read to her, or she to him. They’d have drunk red wine and gone swimming and then made love.

  Simple pleasures.

  He ought to have known it was not possible. He ought to have known she wouldn’t leave. She had said it, and he had not paid attention. Neither one of us can help the other, and that’s the truth.

  He sees the bridge in the distance, the surf battering the pilings. No fishermen against the railing today. He wonders if the blow could actually knock a man down. He thinks maybe he’ll take the Cadillac straight across the bridge, pile it into the dunes, walk back to town and call GMAC, tell them where they can pick up their car.

  He hits the bridge too fast. The rattling boards seem to want to shake the Cadillac apart.

  The spray is beautiful at the railings. Splendid and theatrical. The sky above the spray is the darkest blue he has ever seen.

  He reaches down in front of the passenger seat, snaps a Bud from its plastic ring. He brings the beer between his legs, pops the top. Eight-twenty in the morning. Perhaps his soul is in jeopardy now.

  Looking up from the beer, he sees the sheet of ice. A sheet of ice that must have formed in the night from the spray, a sheet of translucent ice across the bridge. He brakes a split second too late and knows it.

  He feels the brakes lock, the car skid. The railing gives with ease, splintering into a thousand bits of wood. He sees Siân’s face; he hears his daughter’s voice. The Cadillac sails in a magnificent arc, a graceful arc, out toward Portugal.

  Timing is everything, he thinks.

  For the first time in her life, at breakfast, she had not known how to be. Cal had sat beside her, so near, and yet there was a gulf between them. They could not touch, could not even speak, and within hours, she knew, they would never see each other again. All night she had lain awake in her bed, reliving the moments on the forest floor, unsure of their reality. It wasn’t possible such a thing had happened to her, and if it had, what did it mean?

  She had worn the bracelet. It had risen and fallen on her thin wrist as she moved her hand, a tangible sign that they had been together. She sat beside him, in her shorts and sleeveless blouse, her stomach knotted with memories of the night before, with a kind of bottomless dread of knowing that she had to say goodbye. She knew that he would not kiss her again, would not be
able to in the daylight, and she knew that he would not touch her, not as he had the night before. That was over, encapsulated, a memory now—and it would be many years before she would let a boy touch her in that way again.

  She said the word “badminton,” and she could see that he was grateful. She spoke to him in a low voice so the counselor would not hear, and when she dared to look at Cal, he was smiling.

  She left the dining hall with the others, as if she would walk down the path to the outdoor chapel, as if she would attend this last mass with the group. She walked alone so as not to draw attention to herself, and quietly, when the others were engaged, she slipped to the side, walked along the grass to the field where the badminton court was. She expected someone to call out to her, hunched her back a bit in anticipation, but miraculously, no one seemed to notice she had gone. The morning was hot and damp and still, the sun already high in the cloudless sky. Within hours, when the parents had arrived, retrieved their children, and taken them to their separate homes, the day would be a scorcher.

  She saw him sitting on the stone bench already, a bench that had earlier intrigued her. One support was a death’s head, a ghoulish face with lolling tongue, a face forever frozen in a grimace; the other was a madonna-like figure, except that the young woman, whose breast was bared, carried a stone rose, not a child. The boys tittered at the figure when they came upon it, and she supposed the church that owned the camp might demolish the bench one day. She hoped they wouldn’t, because she liked the odd pairing, wondered at the mind of the stone carver who had created it.

  Cal had rackets with him, a pair of birdies. She knew he had to have flown to get the rackets and be at the court before her.

  He stood awkwardly, handed her a racket. She thought he wanted to say something. He looked at her but did not speak. Instead he gestured with his racket to take the court, choose her side.

  She walked to one half of the mown grassy rectangle. It was a lovely court, surrounded on all sides by shrubs and hedges, some raspberry bushes. She heard the drone of bees, the hot sound of an early summer morning.

  He served; they batted the birdie back and forth for practice. He asked her if she wanted to begin, and she nodded her head.

  Her arm was long, and she knew how to hustle. No shot was beyond her reach, and that was her most serious flaw, going for shots that were clearly out of bounds. He played a steady game, his eye better than hers, running less, letting the long shots go, but she saw that he was playing for real, that he knew almost immediately that she could play the game, that she might beat him.

  She liked the airy thwack of the birdie against the taut strings of the racket. She liked to smash it at the net, sending it to the grass before he could react. She laughed when she herself missed a shot. Once she ran backward for a high loop, the birdie vanishing in the sun, then lost her balance, tripped, fell onto the grass. He came to the net, asked if she was all right. Her shorts had grass stains in the back. She wiped them off. I’m fine, she said, laughing again, then served a brilliant shot, one she knew he would let go, would think was going over the line, and when it landed perfectly in the corner, he whistled in appreciation.

  The score was 16-14, or perhaps something else, but he was winning, just. He stood poised for his serve, and she waited. He was looking at her through the net, and she thought that he was thinking about where to place his shot. He had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled above the elbows. He wore black pants, white sneakers. He held the racket and the birdie out, at arms’ reach. He didn’t move. She was going to goad him, then sensed something, stopped herself. All around them, there was quiet, a deep summer hush. He raised the racket and the birdie, made his serve. It was a terrible shot, she could see that at once. The birdie veered off to the side, hit the pole, ricocheted to the ground. Embarrassed for him, she ran to the place where the birdie had fallen, bent over from the waist to retrieve it. He ran to get it too, possibly apologetic. When she bent, her hair parted at her neck, fell forward over her face.

  She felt it, shivered slightly.

  A kiss at the nape of the neck. A butterfly.

  His lips—his dry, boyish lips—made the shape of a butterfly against the back of her neck. She felt the light touch against her skin, thought, Butterfly.

  She stood up, looked at him. She wanted to reach out, touch him on the arm. She wanted to take one step forward, kiss him on the cheek. She wanted to say again that it was all right to have done what they had the night before, that it was not all right that she was leaving him. She wanted to tell him that she would never forget him, no matter what happened to her.

  But she could not move that one step closer. And he could not touch her. He shifted a fraction to the side, as if he would return to his half of the court. She smoothed her hair back off her face.

  He said, Siân.

  She meant to speak, couldn’t, hesitated a fraction too long.

  They turned simultaneously, took up their positions. She had the birdie; she had lost track of the score now. She thought that possibly he ought still to have possession of the birdie, but that didn’t seem to matter.

  She raised her racket. She would sail him a long one. She smiled, and she saw, through the net, that he was smiling back at her, in anticipation.

  She hit the shot. She watched it soar into the sun.

  And it seemed to her that it was then that the birdie high above them both, stopped at its apex, stopped in time.

  Where or When

  WORDS BY LORENZ HART

  MUSIC BY RICHARD RODGERS

  When you’re awake

  The things you think come from the dreams you dream.

  Thought has wings,

  And lots of things are seldom what they seem.

  Sometimes you think you’ve lived before

  All that you live today.

  Things you do come back to you,

  As though they knew the way.

  Oh, the tricks your mind can play!

  It seems we stood and talked like this before.

  We looked at each other in the same way then,

  But I can’t remember where or when.

  The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.

  The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,

  But I can’t remember where or when.

  Some things that happen for the first time,

  Seem to be happening again.

  And so it seems that we have met before,

  and laughed before,

  and loved before,

  But who knows where or when!

  The Tape That Charles Sent Siân

  A Teenager in Love

  Dion

  Angel Baby

  Rosie & The Originals

  That’s My Desire

  Dion & The Belmonts

  Where or When

  Dion & The Belmonts

  Mr. Blue

  The Fleetwoods

  Come Softly to Me

  The Fleetwoods

  What’s Your Name?

  Don and Juan

  In the Still of the Night

  The Five Satins

  To Know Him Is to Love Him

  The Teddy Bears

  Here Comes the Night

  Them

  Don’t Look Back

  Them

  Will You Love Me Tomorrow

  The Shirelles

  Crying

  Roy Orbison

  Love Hurts

  Roy Orbison

  Donna

  Ritchie Valens

  About the Author

  ANITA SHREVE is the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Fortune’s Rocks, The Pilot’s Wife, The Weight of Water, Resistance, Eden Close, and Where or When. She teaches at Amherst College and lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

 

 

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