by D. W. Buffa
Jennifer pulled off the road onto a promontory high above the sea, and parked the car in front of a restaurant that had been there as long as I could remember. It was a long, lowlying wooden frame building that looked like a roadhouse, the kind you once saw in movies where long-legged women sat at the corner of the bar, staring through languid, half-closed eyes into the cigarette smoke that danced slowly into the air with every provocative breath they took.
We found a booth next to a window that overlooked a small cove. Down below, on the rock-covered inlet, waving their arms in the air, children ran into the water and then, when it was up to their knees, tumbled back to shore.
“Do you remember this place?” Jennifer asked as she studied the menu. “We stopped here the first time we came to the coast together.” She glanced at me over the top of the menu. Her dark glasses were on the table. The lines at the edges of her eyes, barely noticeable before, spread out and deepened as she smiled.
“It hasn’t changed, has it?”
I followed her gaze around the busy dining room. A man in his early thirties was sitting at a table with his blond wife and their three blond children, talking to someone on his cell phone.
One of his children was playing with a handheld video game. At the far end of the restaurant, next to the steps that led up to the bar, a bearded, heavyset man was sitting alone, drinking coffee, his plump fingers tapping slowly on the keyboard of a slim lap-top computer.
“The restaurant hasn’t changed,” I replied.
“Neither has the menu,” she said, inspecting the cracked plastic surface of the art deco cover.
The waitress, a woman in her late forties with a cupid mouth and a quick smile, took a short yellow pencil out of her graying blond hair and jotted down our order on a green paper notebook, the kind that wind up stuck on a spindle next to the cash register. I watched her walk away. “I think she waited on us last time. I remember her. A cute blond high school kid.”
My eyes came back to Jennifer. “Your sister said you moved back a few months ago. She’s really the society editor? It’s hard to believe. I don’t think I ever saw her in a dress.” I was going off in all directions at once. I stopped and shrugged helplessly.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked quietly.
“Do you know how long it’s been? I couldn’t even be sure you still remembered me. If Lisa hadn’t called last night and told me that she had seen you, and told me that you lived alone, I don’t know if I ever would have …”
“You don’t believe for a minute that I could have forgotten you. I was in love with you. I was always in love with you.”
The waitress brought our food, and for a while we talked about nothing but the mundane details of everyday life, like two old friends who had never been more than a few months apart.
“Why didn’t you ever get married?” she asked, pushing her dish aside. She had barely touched her food.
I tried to make a joke out of it. “You ruined me for other women.”
“No, really,” she said, searching my eyes.
“In a way, it’s true. I never had that same feeling again. Not for a long time. Just a few years ago,” I said, gazing out the window. The sea stretched out in the distance and then, at the far horizon, dropped off into the sky. “There was someone I wanted to marry.”
“What happened?” she asked sympathetically.
“Nothing,” I said, turning back to her. “She wasn’t in love with me. We lived together for a while, and then she left.”
I did not want to talk about it, not even with her. “What about you?”
This time, she looked away and watched the children play on the beach.
“Remember the summer after your first year in college, the summer after I graduated from high school? Remember that August, the night before I was leaving for Europe, when we stayed up until three o’clock in the morning, talking about what we wanted to do?”
She was still watching out the window, a distant look in her eyes. “Remember when you asked me to marry you? Remember what I said?”
“That you weren’t ready for that yet, but that maybe someday, when you were older …”
“Yes, but then you remember the letter I wrote you the next day, just before I left, the letter—”
“What letter? I never got a letter.”
Her eyes seemed to freeze, and then, slowly, she turned away from the window. “The letter I left at your house. The letter I gave to your mother to give to you.”
“She never— What did it say? What did you write to me?”
“That you were right, that there was no reason to wait, that I was in love with you, that we should get married just like you said.”
“I never got it,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “She never gave it to me. Why would she have done that?”
We both knew the answer. My mother had tried to control everything I ever did. It was one of the reasons I had decided to go so far away to school.
“She thought I’d ruin your life. She expected you to do great things.”
“That was her all right. She was always trying to run my life, but I still can’t believe that she—!” I stopped myself and laughed derisively. I knew it was true, and despite that I had still felt this strange irrational compulsion to say something in my mother’s defense. “I believe it. It’s exactly what she would have done. And it worked, didn’t it? I never got the letter. All I knew when I left you that night was that you said you would think about what we talked about. I never heard from you again. I went back to school and I didn’t come home again until the summer after my senior year, the summer before I started law school. You know why I didn’t come home? Because I knew if I did, I’d try to see you again, and I knew—I thought I knew—that would just make things worse.”
We were looking at each other and thinking of ourselves, all the ephemeral events of our lives, wondering how much different things might have been, astonished to discover that everything that had happened had been a kind of fiction that began with a lie.
“Maybe your mother was right,” Jennifer said. “I might have ruined your life. I was selfish, self-absorbed, and sometimes even cruel. And we were so young! If we’d gotten married, how long do you think it would have lasted? And then what would have happened?”
I felt again inside me the vast emptiness of that next year away at school, the awful sense that nothing mattered anymore and that I had become the unwilling spectator of my own meaning-less life.
“It would have lasted,” I said, certain it was true because everything else had been so false.
She smiled and touched my hand. “It’s nice that you still think that.”
The waitress cleared away the dishes and brought coffee. It was after two and only a few people were left in the restaurant. The sunlight slanted through the window and I twisted around against the corner of the booth to avoid the glare.
“That’s the way you always used to sit. You never sat up straight.
You always slouched like that, and you’d look at me with those big brown eyes of yours, always sulking about something.” She hesitated, as if there was something she wanted to tell me, but was not sure she should. “I fell in love with someone once because he had eyes like yours, brown eyes that seemed to look right through me.”
“Is he the one you married?”
It took a moment for her to remember that we knew next to nothing about the way we had lived our lives. “No. I was married at the time, but not to him. I met him at a country club dinner. Some friends of ours from college had invited us. They brought along a friend of theirs who was visiting from Chicago.
He had your eyes. I think I fell in love with him before they finished introducing us …” Her voice trailed off, and she gazed out the window at the ocean lying motionless under the sun.
“We danced together,” she said, still staring out the window.
“We were in the middle of the dance floor.” She took one last look and then turn
ed back to me. “One moment we were dancing, and the next moment, while everyone was dancing all around us, we stopped, stopped still, right in the middle of the dance, and he said, ‘Leave with me, now, right now. Let’s just walk off the dance floor and never come back.’ “
She looked at me as if she had just made a confession and was waiting for me to pass judgment.
“Did you want to? Leave with him, and never come back?”
“More than anything.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I felt sorry for my husband, because I’d never loved him.”
“Never loved him?” I asked, confused. “Then why did you marry him in the first place?”
“Because he raped me,” she said simply. “You know how it used to be in those days. Everyone used to drink too much and then use it as an excuse for things they wanted to do anyway. It wasn’t really rape, not in the way we usually mean it. We’d been to a fraternity party and we had both had a lot to drink. We were parked in his car, necking, that’s all. Then he tried to do more than that, and I told him not to, and when he wouldn’t quit, I shoved him away from me and told him to take me back.”
She lowered her eyes, and with a wistful look slowly stirred the cup with a spoon. “He didn’t take me back,” she said as she lifted the cup to her mouth, holding it with both hands. She sipped the coffee and then placed the cup back in the saucer.
“Anyway, I got pregnant and we got married. That’s how it worked in those days, remember?” she asked, a faint, reluctant trace of defiance flashing for just a moment through her eyes.
“Why didn’t you—?”
“Have an abortion? I’d done that once already. I wasn’t going to do it again.” Her eyes flared again, followed closely by a sad, apologetic smile. “It was a long time ago, Joey. We were just kids.”
We left the restaurant and found a bench at the edge of the cliff, next to a wooden staircase that led down to the beach.
Above the low roar of the ocean, we listened to the shouts of the children playing and tried not to think too much about what might have been. After a while we got back in the car and drove along the shore, like two aimless wanderers with no place to call home.
“We lived in Los Angeles, until four years ago, when we got a divorce, and he moved back to Seattle. My son, Andrew, is a producer. Television shows. He’s done very well. I’m a grandmother, for God’s sakes. Twice. A boy and a girl, eight and six.”
It was what every parent wanted to think, that their child had done well. My parents had thought it about me, and I guessed Jennifer’s parents had thought the same thing about her. It was, I imagined, one of those instincts that must come with having a child of your own, the capacity to limit your memory to what was only seen in the best possible light.
“Did you ever see him again?”
Her eyes stayed on the road. “The man at the country club?”
She wrinkled her nose. “The man!” She laughed, struck by how incongruous it all seemed now. “He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six. He was just a boy. And I was only twenty-four, just a girl.” The smile lingered a moment longer, then faded away. “Yes,” she said finally. “I mean, no. I never saw him again. He called me, left me his number. In case I ever changed my mind, he said. I kept it for a while, then I threw it away. If I’d kept it any longer, I would have changed my mind.”
On the way back, we stopped and watched the sun slide down the sky and dissolve into a liquid orange fire that spread out across the horizon as it pulled down the darkness over the edge of the sea. And then we left, the lights of the Porsche slashing the night as we followed the narrow road that cut through the coastal range and took us back to the city.
“Want to have dinner tomorrow night?” I asked, as casually as I could, when she dropped me off at the house.
“Call me tomorrow.” She leaned over and kissed me on the side of my face. I watched her drive away, and thought about all the years I had missed, all the things that might have been.
When I got inside, I picked up the telephone and dialed the number. No one answered but I let it ring anyway. Finally, she picked it up, and I heard her frail voice.
“It’s me, Joseph,” I said brusquely.
“Oh, hello, dear. I was asleep. Is everything all right?”
I had forgotten the three-hour time difference between here and North Carolina where my mother lived with her second husband in a retirement community.
“Do you remember Jennifer Frazier?” I asked. The anger that had been building inside me was suddenly replaced by a feeling of helpless fatigue.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think so. Was she a friend of yours?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said quietly. “I just called to see if you were okay. Sorry I forgot how late it is there.”
My mother had kept Jennifer’s letter and changed two lives forever, and had dismissed it from her mind as a matter of no great consequence. It was probably better that she did not remember. She would still have insisted that she had been right.
Eleven
_______
Iheard it on the radio the next morning on my way to the office. The police had made an arrest in the murder of Judge Calvin Jeffries. According to a police department spokesman, no other details, not even the name of the suspect, would be released until a formal press conference, tentatively scheduled for five o’clock in the afternoon.
The timing was anything but accidental. I had seen it often enough before, the brief preliminary announcement, followed by a day-long wait; the rumors started and then denied in a way that made it seem certain they were true; the frenetic race among reporters to be the first one to get the story right before there was any story to tell; and then, finally, the press conference itself scheduled at the time when the local television news shows would have no choice but to carry it live. The chief of police, the head of the state police, the lead investigator, everyone who had played a prominent part in the search for the killer, would stand in front of the camera, surrounded by every politician who could bluff or cajole his way onto the stage, and explain in muted monotones the highly efficient way in which they had developed and explored thousands of different leads and how all their painstaking patience had finally paid off. It was the law enforcement equivalent of a military parade. Watching it, everyone felt safe, secure, protected by a well-trained and well-equipped force of dedicated men and women. They caught a killer and called it a victory; someone had been murdered and no one even wondered whether that might not have been a defeat.
My investigator, Howard Flynn, was waiting for me when I arrived at the office, hidden behind a section of the newspaper.
“Come in, Howard,” I said without stopping.
Squeezed tight between the arms of a straight-back chair, Flynn shoved himself up and followed behind me. While I settled into the leather chair behind my desk, Flynn, breathing heavily, lowered himself into the blue wingback chair directly in front. He looked like an aging bouncer in one of those bars where the drinks are watered and the customers too drunk to care. Over six feet tall, and well over two hundred thirty pounds, the skin at the back of his short, squat neck lay in taut, thick folds, as if a hangman had decided that a single rope could never hold him.
His face was blotched like a red rash. Reddish brown hair, graying at the sides, swept back from a flat forehead in a series of small, sharp waves. He was wearing what he always wore, a brown plaid sports coat and a solid brown tie. The left collar of his starched white shirt curled up at the tip, and the thread on the top button had begun to unravel. Without a word he pulled out a pack of Camels and lit one up.
“You quit drinking,” I remarked as I glanced through the stack of papers my secretary had left on my desk. “Don’t you think it’s time you quit that, too?”
“And make the same mistake twice?” Flynn asked in a gruff voice. He took a long drag, and then added, as if it was the end of all argument on the subject, “I’m Cath
olic.”
Each excuse he offered became more bizarre. “What?” I asked, astonished. “What do you mean? The reason you don’t quit is because you’re Catholic?”
He shrugged. “I’m Catholic. That means I believe in the here-after.” He paused as if this was some fine point of theology. “And that means that I’m not some goddamn health nut who doesn’t care about anything except how nice and pink his goddamn lungs are.”
Knitting my brow, I shook my head and studied him through half-closed eyes. “You really should have been a priest. With that kind of logic you might have become a cardinal.”
A faint smile formed on his heavy mouth. “Listen. I became a lawyer. How much more Jesuitical can you be than that?”
We exchanged a glance, a silent acknowledgment of what we both understood and never talked about.
Flynn looked away, the cigarette dangling in his pudgy fingers as he stared out the window. In the distance across the river the snow on the peak of Mt. Hood shimmered a rosy pink in the early morning sun.
“Actually, I was going to be a priest once. My mother wanted me to.” He caught my reaction out of the corner of his eye. “No, really,” he insisted. “I’m not making it up. I was an altar boy.
True story. For almost a year.” He raised his hand to his face and sucked on the cigarette that was stuck between his fingers like a nail driven through a board. “Then the goddamn priest decided he liked me.”
I thought I knew what he meant. “Liked you?”
“Yeah. He tried to put his hands on me. I never went back. My mother never quite got over it.”
“What the priest did?”
“No. I never told her about that. It would have destroyed her.
She was about as devout as they come.”
