“Wow,” I say. “Wow. This is so weird.”
“Indeed,” he says. “Wow.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was hungry.”
“Shouldn’t you be in Cambridge with your family? It’s New Year’s.”
“Elias had a baby. They’re all in Cleveland. Hopper is the godfather. I had too much work. What’s your excuse?”
“I was breaking up with my father. He lives around the corner.”
He nods. “That was always kind of in the cards. Who was that greasy-haired guy you were shouting at?”
“Just some asshole.”
He smiles. “So, not your boyfriend?”
“Funny,” I say, and slide into the booth across from him. “I can’t believe it’s you. You got old.”
“I always told you I would, but you refused to believe me.” Under his ratty wool overcoat, he’s wearing a faded work shirt and jeans, stained everywhere with thick blobs of colored paint.
“You look like an insane person,” I say. But if I’m being honest, he looks amazing.
“You look good,” he says.
“I look like shit and we both know it.” I pull a few paper napkins out of the metal dispenser on the table and blow my nose. I look at him, trying to take in what I am seeing. He stares back at me, expression wide-open—that same vaguely unnerving look he had the very first time we ever met—an old man’s eyes in a young man’s face.
“I heard you were living in England,” he says.
“I am. London.”
Jonas points to a bland tenement building on the corner. “I live there.”
“You hate the city.”
“I’m at Cooper Union. Studying painting. I have one more year.”
The waitress comes over and hovers until we acknowledge her.
“Coffee?” Jonas asks me. “Or are you a tea person now?”
“Coffee.”
“We’ll have two coffees,” he tells her. “And two sugar donuts.”
“No donut.”
“K. One donut,” he tells the waitress. “We’ll split it. So. What’s in London?”
“Grad school. French lit.”
“Why there? Why not here?”
“Farther away.”
Jonas nods.
“So,” I say. “Seven years.”
“Seven years.”
“You never came back to the Woods. You disappeared.”
“I liked camp.”
“Don’t do that. You’ve never been good at glib.”
He takes my hand, touches my ring. “You still have it.”
I tug the ring from my finger, put it down on the table. The silver plate has worn off in places, and the prongs are barely holding the green glass in place. “This is the first time I’ve taken it off since you gave it to me.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t died of gangrene.”
“I got mugged last year. In London. By a skinhead. He tried to take it, but I refused. I told him it was worthless. He punched me in the stomach.”
“Christ.”
“There was a man there. He saved me. He’s the reason I still have it.”
The waitress drops two cups of coffee on the table between us. “He’s out of sugar donuts. We have a cinnamon cruller or a Boston cream.”
“I think we’re good,” I say. “Can I have some milk?”
She reaches across to an empty booth. Grabs a bowl of fake creamers.
“Cinnamon cruller,” Jonas says.
I watch her walk away. “I’m with him now. The ring guy. Peter. He’s here. Well, at Mum’s.”
“Cool.” Jonas seems unconcerned. He takes a little creamer from the bowl, peels off the foil top, dumps it in his coffee. “So, what does he do?”
“He’s a journalist.”
“Is it serious?”
“I guess so.”
Jonas takes a bite of his cruller. It leaves a dusting of cinnamon on his lips. “Well, I hope you made it clear to him you’re already engaged to me.”
I laugh, but when I look at him, his face is completely serious.
“I should probably go. He’s waiting for me.”
“Stay. If he loves you he’ll wait. I did. I have.”
“Jonas, don’t.”
“It’s true.”
“You didn’t wait. You left.”
“What was I supposed to do, Elle? Come back the next summer and pretend nothing had happened? Take sailing lessons? Put a lie between us? You know I couldn’t do that.”
All these years I’ve thought about him, missed him, wanted to walk next to him on the quiet paths, souls twinned together. But now that he is here with me, all I see is how far apart our lives have grown.
“Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. Except that now there is no us.” And the truth of it is almost unbearable. “We don’t even know each other. I don’t even know where you live.”
“Yes, you do. I live across the street in that shitty building.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I am exactly the same person I was back then. Possibly a bit less peculiar.”
“I hope not,” I laugh. “Your weirdo-ness was always your best quality.”
Jonas picks up the green glass ring, holds it up to the light. “You should be careful with this. It’s valuable. I used all my allowance money to buy it.”
“I know. It’s worth a lot.”
“I don’t regret what happened.”
“Well, you should. We both should.”
“He was hurting you.”
“I would have survived.”
Jonas puts the ring back down on the table in front of me. It lies there between us. This tiny thing—so ugly, so beautiful.
“I don’t wear it because you gave it me. I wear it to remind me of what we did.”
The waitress comes back to our table, holding the Pyrex pot of coffee in her hand.
“Freshen your cup?” she asks.
“We’re good,” I say.
“Anything else you want?”
“Just the check.” I put on my coat and stand up. “I really do have to go.”
He hands me the ring. “Take it. It’s yours. Even if it reminds you of him.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I could lie. I would, to anyone else. “Because it also reminds me of you,” I say sadly.
Jonas takes out a pen and tears off a piece of napkin. “I’m giving you my number. For when you come to your senses. Don’t lose it.”
I fold the fragile paper, put it in my wallet. “It’s insanely freezing out there.” I pull on my hat, wrap my scarf around my neck.
“I miss you,” he says.
“Same,” I say. “Always.” I lean down and kiss him on the cheek. “Gotta go.”
“Wait,” Jonas says. “I’ll walk you to the subway.”
Outside the diner, snow is falling in great heaps, dumping fistfuls at a time. Jonas puts his arm through mine, sticks my cold, un-mittened hand into his coat pocket. We walk the seven blocks without speaking, listening to the silent snowfall. The quiet between us is easy, familiar—like walking single file down the path to the beach, roaming around the woods—everything between us resonant but unspoken.
The gray, gaping mouth of the subway comes sooner that I want it to, exhaling bundled, bedraggled people in its stale concrete breath. Jonas takes both of my hands in his.
“You don’t have to miss me, you know.”
I take my hand out of his and put it on the flat of his cheek. “Yes. I do.”
He pulls me to him so quickly I have no time to react. Kisses me with the intensity of every day, every month, every year we have loved each other. It is not our first kiss. That was long ago, underwa
ter, when we were children—when we said goodbye for the first time, knowing it would not be the last. But this time when I pull away from him, it is agonizing. Not found, but lost. I pause, stand on the precipice of memory, wanting so desperately to fall into it, knowing I can’t. Jonas is animal, Peter is mineral. And I need a rock.
“I’ll see you,” I say. And we both understand what that means.
“Elle . . .” Jonas calls out as I head down the steps into the subway.
I stop, but this time I don’t turn around.
“Peter isn’t the ring guy,” he says. “I’m the ring guy.”
23
1991. February, London.
The Heath is empty. Just a few grim-looking dog lovers, who stand apart from one another watching their shivering pets run off leash, chicken-bone legs covered in mud, having fun at their owners’ expense. It’s raining. Not a lush, fertile deluge, but that endless drizzle from a leaden lowering sky specifically designed to make you pull your socks up. A black dog charges across the field chasing a red ball through the mizzle.
I’ve moved into Peter’s Hampstead flat, with its grand, soaring ceilings and plaster cornices. Bookshelves line the walls, filled with leatherbound volumes on shipbuilding or Agrippa that Peter has actually read. At night, when he gets home from the City, we build a proper fire in the fireplace, curl up together on the sofa under feather duvets while he reads aloud to me from the most boring book he can find, until I beg him to stop and make love to me instead.
The flat would be heavenly if it hadn’t been decorated by his mother in austere velvet sofas with lion’s paws for feet, and prints of hunting dogs carrying limp dead fowl in their mouths. Peter has taped a Clash poster over one particularly heinous Br’er Rabbit death scene, and thrown kilims over the backs of chaises. But I can still feel her here, spying through the eye of the formidable-looking ancestor whose portrait hangs above our bed. I know she wasn’t happy when I moved in. A young American girlfriend is acceptable as long as it ends when she returns to her ghastly country.
On days like today, when Peter is at the office and I’m alone at home trying to finish my thesis, pacing the rooms, eating Nutella from the jar, getting nothing accomplished, I can feel her staring back at me from the walls, the ceilings, as if she has skim-coated them with her disapproval. If only she knew how right she is.
At the bottom of our street there’s an old pub with a hopeful outdoor terrace for sunny days. Beyond it is the vast Heath, its wild, reckless fields and forests smack in the middle of the city. The woods here are gnarled, druidic, their roots extending out around them like fingers seeking blindly for a past they still remember. Little paths lead between them, worn trails that disappear into deep hollows, fecund, rotting, overgrown, hiding fox dens and the men who come here to cruise for blow jobs after dark.
Most afternoons, I walk on the Heath, letting my mind air out after too many hours staring at a typewriter. I’ve planned to take a proper long walk this afternoon, from Parliament Hill to Kenwood House, but the rain starts coming down, heavier now, waterlogging the world, so I change course and make a diagonal cut across the field toward home, past the men’s swimming ponds.
Two old men in matching blue rubber bathing caps and baggy trunks stand at the edge of the public pond, their white, crepe-paper skin translucent, dull rain pattering their backs. I see them here almost every day. It’s a British thing—taking pleasure in duty, maintaining a citizen’s right to swim in a cold, unappetizing pond in the middle of a public park because one can. The same reason Peter’s mother insists on walking directly through her neighbor’s garden or the farmer’s pigsties, ducks and geese scattering as she climbs a wooden turnstile: because it is a public right of way, and the pleasure in walking through, legally trespassing, is so much purer than the ease of walking around.
Now, as I hurry past the swimming pond, I can see the old men laboring across the water, strokes in perfect synch; two bright blue snapping-turtle heads in a dreary sea. It must be freezing.
I’m almost out of the park when I hear shouts behind me. A woman with a small dog is waving her arms, screaming. A man on the far side of the field hears her, breaks into a run, but I am closer and reach her first.
“He’s drowning,” she screams, pointing to the pond, frantic. “I can’t swim.”
Down below in the pond I see only one blue head.
“He was over there.” She points. “He was right there, calling for help. I can’t swim.”
“Call 999,” I shout.
I’m in the pond before I have time to think, kicking off my sneakers, leaving my raincoat and heavy sweater somewhere on the ground behind me. The water is warmer than I expected, fresher. I surface six quick strokes from the old man. He is treading water, shivering with shock. His terrified eyes search the surface for a sign of his friend.
“It was our third lap,” he says. “We always do six laps.”
“Get back to shore,” I say.
I go under, eyes searching the gloom for a spot of inconsistency, of color. I break surface for air and dive again, deeper this time, down to the reedy bottom. Ahead of me, I see a hint of blue.
The paramedics arrive just as I reach the shore, breathless, dragging the old man’s limp weight. Two of them wade in to pull me out, but I shake them off. “Save him,” I gasp. “Please save him.”
His friend stands shivering on the little wooden dock. The woman has wrapped her coat around him. We watch the paramedics pummeling his sad white chest, breathing into him. I hold my breath, wait for that sputtering of water to cough from his lungs, his eyes opening in surprise, as if he has just spat out a live frog. In the muddy shallows, his blue rubber cap laps the shore.
* * *
—
Peter is already home when I come in, lying on the uncomfortable sofa, reading. He must have just gotten home, because there’s only one cigarette butt in the ashtray and his mug of tea is still steaming. I stand in the doorway, barefoot, dripping a puddle onto the coir mat.
“You got caught in the rain,” Peter says, putting his book down. “I’ll light the fire.”
I’m frozen in place, my heart a sodden heavy thing.
“C’mon then,” Peter says, coming over to give me a sloppy kiss, “let’s get you out of those wet things.”
“An old man drowned in the swimming pond.”
“Just now?”
“He swims there every day. With his friend.”
“And you saw this? Poor possum,” he says.
I am numb, too numb to feel. “He hadn’t even reached the bottom of the pond. He was still floating down when I got to him.”
“Hang on a minute,” Peter says. “Wait. You mean to tell me you went in after him yourself? Into the men’s swimming pond?”
“The water was dark, but I saw his bathing cap.”
“Christ, Elle.” Peter fumbles for a cigarette, lights it.
“The paramedics were already there when I got him to shore. He looked like a fetus—one of those things they keep in formaldehyde.”
“You could have drowned. What the hell were you playing at?” he says, his voice gruff with love and worry.
I look away from him. I wish I could tell him, explain it. I needed to save him. A drop in the bucket. But I can’t.
He wraps me in his arms, holds me tight. “Let’s get you into a hot bath.”
“No. No water.”
Peter peels my wet clothes off where I stand, carries me to our bed. He climbs under the covers with me, fully dressed, spoons me. I like the feel of his shirt, his belt buckle, his pants, so cloth-like, so concrete, pressing against my naked flesh.
“You should take off your shoes,” I say.
“I’ll go make you a cup of tea. Don’t move. In fact, I’m never letting you out of this flat again.”
My skin refuses to warm. I pull the covers
closer around me but my body keeps shaking. I can’t stop thinking about his body drifting down, the amniotic embrace of death, how graceful he looked as he fell. I listen to Peter filling up the electric kettle, the jangling of silverware as he opens a drawer. I imagine every little movement he is making: carefully choosing a teacup he knows I will like, dropping in two PG Tips bags instead of one, steeping the tea forty seconds longer than I would, pouring in enough milk to make it the correct shade of pinky-beige, not too pale, stirring in a heaping teaspoon of sugar.
“Whiskey in or on the side?” he says, bringing me my tea.
“I need to go home,” I say. “I’m sick of the rain.”
“What rain?” he says.
24
1993. September, New York.
The cat has stretched herself out on a sun-washed windowsill next to a pot of red geraniums. Her long tail brushes back and forth like a trailing vine, strewing loose flower petals from the sill onto the hardwood floor below. One of them has landed on her back and perches lightly atop her soft tortoise fur, a splash of red paint. The telephone rings, but I ignore it. There’s no one I’m in the mood to talk to. I hate everyone today.
Peter is drinking his coffee, reading the paper in the kitchen of our East Village walk-up. “Can you get that?” he calls out. “It could be the office.”
I’m hating Peter most of all. The apartment stinks of cigarettes; there are newspaper fingerprints on the walls, on the light switches, on the backs of the chairs. We had plans to go upstate this weekend for my birthday, but Peter had to cancel. Too much work. And yet somehow he has time for the Sunday paper and coffee. His dirty underpants lie in a heap next to the bed, waiting for me to pick them up and throw them in the laundry. He bought skim milk. I hate skim milk—its thinness, its blue-vein color.
I let the phone ring twice more, just to irritate him, before reaching over to answer it, but the machine gets there first.
“Eleanor?” a small shaky voice asks, confused. “Eleanor? Is that you?” I grab for the phone.
“Granny, I’m here,” I shout, afraid she is already hanging up the receiver—as if my voice can catch her hand midair.
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