by Robin Black
“Who’s ready for a drink?” Owen called from the living room.
Everyone was.
As we sat at the table, I watched Nora bow her head, murmuring the prayer she spoke at every meal; or maybe a special one for the day. I wanted to ask her about it. For the first time, I felt a genuine, nonjudgmental curiosity about what all of this praying and believing meant to her. But I didn’t say anything, in part because for so many weeks I had needed to be ever vigilant that I not speak to her harshly. And though I would have asked the question respectfully this time, it was a question I might in another mood ask with belligerence, which was how I thought Owen would hear it no matter what my tone; and so I said nothing.
The meal itself was traditional—turkey, yams, stuffing, green beans—which Alison attributed to her being a foreigner. “It’s all very well for you Americans to use Thanksgiving as an excuse for culinary explorations, but I had to learn to do it right. I have to prove myself.”
“It’s delicious,” I said, and it was; though there were also moments when all I could taste was the discrepancy between this meal and the ones we’d had those many decades earlier, meals it had never occurred to me to miss, but that I suddenly longed to relive.
Across the table, Owen sat. Eating. And drinking.
The mood that had first set on me while making the pies hadn’t left me yet, and so as I watched him, I thought about all the many, many Owens there, carried in that single body of his. The boy. The man he had been before I taught him wariness. The measurer of distances and plumber of pond depths.
How was it that any one of us could walk across a room without our own multitudes tripping us up?
Maybe none of us could.
We were halfway through the meal when Alison began an impromptu, tipsy recitation of thankfulness. “Well, to begin, I am grateful to have found this place, by which truly I mean the two of you.” She held her glass first toward me, and then toward Owen.
“Oh, me too,” Nora said, raising hers. “And I’m grateful to be learning so much every day. Though I suppose that’s close to the same thing. I feel so very lucky.”
“What about you, Gus?” Alison asked. “What’s on your list of blessings for the year?”
“Well, all of that too, obviously.” I had to say it. I thought of my father, but I didn’t know how to phrase the peculiar gratitude I felt for how his ragged edges and my own now allowed us an odd new closeness; and I didn’t want to expose that private sensation to the assembled group. “I’m grateful to be engaged in work I care about. Owen, what about you? Do you have a list?”
“I’m afraid we’re a very boring bunch.” He raised his glass. “For you all, of course. And to be writing again. Something I truly never believed would happen.”
“Here’s to that,” Alison said.
“A roof over my head,” I said. “We shouldn’t take these things for granted. Food. Health. Being alive. You know those boys I paint?” I looked at Nora. “They all died years younger than you are now. Years.”
“Horrible,” Alison said.
“How do you phrase thankfulness for that?” Owen asked. “For not being those boys?”
“Maybe just that. I’m grateful not to be one of those boys.”
“We’re probably all grateful not to have died in some battlefield somewhere,” Owen said. “Or anyway, we should be.”
“Do you know anyone who’s part of it?” I asked Nora. “The current wars?”
She shook her head. “No. Nobody from my school even thought about doing that. High school, I mean. There were some kids at Tufts who had been in the army, but they stayed to themselves. I’m pretty sure we must have seemed like babies to them. And …” She frowned.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s so awful,” she said. “But I think we were a little bit afraid of them. It was so strange to think they had, you know. They had killed people. Or anyway, they might have.”
“My father was in the war. You should ask your mother to tell you the story. She knows all about it.”
“A case of mistaken identity,” Alison said, reaching for the stuffing. “Gus’s poor father had me mistaken for an old flame from the war.”
“World War II,” I added, thinking it must seem unimaginably long ago to the girl sitting there. “Millicent. Millie, the English girl with the horrible mother.”
“Is that why you want to paint these boys?” Nora asked. “Something about your father?”
“It was a different war,” I said.
“No, I know, I just wondered. I guess I’m asking why you’re so interested in them. If you even know why, I mean. Because I don’t always know why I write about the things I write.”
“I don’t know why I write what I do either,” Owen said.
“I was just wondering, Gus, if it’s different for you. With a subject. With what draws you to one.”
“No,” I said, wary of this questioning. “No, I think it’s probably not so different.”
“Is it a war thing?” Nora asked. “An antiwar thing, I mean?”
“Not really. I really don’t know.” The same questions that from Laine had felt so like help, now felt like an attack of some kind.
“Is it something about them being local? Like part of the history of this place? Like documenting a forgotten part of history?”
“Documenting history? No.” I looked over to Alison, who showed no sign of leaping to my aid. “I don’t really like to talk about my work while I’m doing it,” I said, though at least two people there knew that was a lie. “I’m sorry. It’s just not part of how I work. Being questioned and all. It makes me uncomfortable.”
“Oh, well,” Alison said, finally snapping into action. “That’s completely understandable. And anyway, who ever knows why we do what we do? I can certainly give a cogent explanation for why I’m fascinated by the petal of a rose, but who knows if it’s close to accurate?”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said. “I’m just … I just think it’s really interesting.”
“Me too,” Alison said. “But right now, I’m more interested in dessert.”
Later, Owen accused me of snapping at Nora. “She’s just a kid, a curious kid.”
“She was badgering me. I didn’t want to be badgered.” We were sitting in the living room, a fire still glowing. We had spent the last hour or so tidying up with little conversation. “And I wasn’t rude to her,” I said, though I knew I had been. “I was just clear.”
“You didn’t hear your tone.”
“Maybe she’ll learn a lesson, then. Isn’t that what curious kids are supposed to do? I don’t understand why everyone is always leaping to her defense. No. That’s not true. I do understand why Alison does. I’m just hoping I don’t understand why you do.”
“I’m not leaping to her defense. In part I’m asking you if you want to be seen as attacking her. It’s, it’s maybe not how you want to appear.”
“Oh, please, let me worry about how I appear. What about how she appears?”
He didn’t say anything.
“She’s been chasing after you since the night she arrived,” I said. “Father figure, my ass.”
He waited a moment to speak. “We’ve never exchanged an inappropriate word,” he said. “If that’s what all this is about. I’m a model of propriety around her. I morph back into my sexless professorial persona.”
“But please tell me you’ll at least admit she has the world’s biggest crush on you?”
“I admit that she may be infatuated, in a harmless, unserious way.”
“I’m not so sure about harmless. And I don’t think I was rude to her.”
“Just relax, Gus. Nora isn’t a threat.”
“Nora.” I said it as if it were a preposterous word. I stood and walked toward the fire, poked at the embers just a bit. “Perfect little Nora. Except of course she isn’t little. She’s more like some kind of Amazon.”
He laughed and joined me, drew me to him in a hug, taking the poker
from my hand, leaning it against the fireplace. “Do you know what I’m thankful for?” he asked, smoothing my hair from my face, tucking a few loose strands behind my ears.
“For an adoring twenty-two-year-old who looks at you like you’re God and some kind of movie star all rolled into one?”
“Don’t be a jerk,” he said, and then kissed me, slowly, a little forcefully. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said. He slipped his hand into mine. “Let’s both of us display a little gratitude for what we have.”
After that, the subject of Nora felt newly out of bounds. I had raised it and Owen had reassured me. What’s more, he had done so without dredging up the past. That felt like some kind of freebie to me. But to broach the subject again was to doubt his word, and to doubt his word was to drag out the whole question of whose word was and was not to be believed. And the past would never stay asleep through that, I knew.
None of this was said or even hinted at, but years of navigating these waters had given me a decent instinct for managing the nasty currents that still ran through. A certain kind of avoidance had become second nature to me.
So I watched in silence as November slid away, holding my tongue about the frequency of Nora’s visits to the barn. But I began to make excuses to minimize the number of dinners we all shared each week. I couldn’t imagine how Alison was letting this all go on, couldn’t bear to hear from her about Owen’s positive influence again, and I would have started to avoid her even more during the days, except she beat me to the punch. No more knocks at my kitchen door, no more suggestions that we run errands together or just go for a walk.
My work suffered. Even I, with my near-lifelong ability to shut out upsetting situations and isolate myself, could not achieve the necessary detachment from our daily tensions to stay productive doing what Laine had advised me to do, to play, to have fun with it, to stop worrying about the quality and be willing to fail. And so I shifted my eyes once again from the figures in the paintings and set about perfecting what surrounded them. You cannot fight fire with fire. You cannot fight the sensation of losing control with the sensation of being out of control.
So the interior of my house on these canvases daily took on a more and more polished sheen, while the inhabitants of the paintings, like those of the house itself, were daily more evidently out of place.
18
On the calendar in our kitchen, the words Cape Cod and a question mark, all in Owen’s handwriting, hovered over the middle of the month. We were coming to the time he had thought might be right for our annual winter visit to his parents; but he’d said nothing about it for weeks. And I suspected that he wouldn’t unless I raised the matter. And even if I did, I thought he might well trump my desire to get away for a few days with his need to keep working now that things were rolling along. But then, one afternoon when he came in from work, he popped into the studio and asked what I thought of taking a day or so to pack and then head up north.
“It’s a good time for my parents,” he said. “And a good time for me too. How about you?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” I said.
The drive from our home up to the Cape and all the way to Wellfleet is about eight hours in the summer, sometimes even ten, but more like six and a half on a Wednesday in December when the notion of that unprotected elbow of land jutting into the Atlantic carries far less universal appeal. Owen and I—unsurprisingly enough—preferred the Cape off-season, the site of a party long ended, a few guests inexplicably remaining. His parents had first moved there from Boston nearly twenty years before, and during their early summers, we’d visited during the height of the madness and heat, a period they loved and seemed to draw energy from. But pretty soon, we began limiting our very occasional trips there to chilly days in bleak months, enduring their eye-rolling jokes over our poor timing and wrong preferences, our perverseness and also our inherently gloomy characters.
“Only the naturally lugubrious would prefer Wellfleet in February,” Lillian said.
“That’s us,” Owen had cheerfully replied. “Naturally lugubrious and proud of it.”
In general, over the years, we would spend the hours of the drive talking about his parents, as if desensitizing ourselves in anticipation of the exposure. Not that they were as toxic as all that, but there was a way in which the idea of a sudden encounter was like the idea of falling unprepared into an icy stream.
This time, though, we were quiet at the start. As I drove we exchanged only occasional comments on the traffic, the choice of Hudson River crossing. When we approached the George Washington Bridge, Owen said we must be the last people on earth to pay cash at tolls anymore and I said we couldn’t be since the lines in the cash lane were so long, but that I knew what he meant. He wondered if we should get one of those auto-pay devices and I said we barely drove enough to make it worth the effort. We were a bit stiff with each other, as we had been for days, but I didn’t know anything was about to shift until just as we got past the toll, Owen said, “There’s something we need to talk about, Gus.” And then I knew immediately what it would be.
“Right,” I said. “I guess there is.”
“Nora,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, after a moment. “Nora.”
“I’m …” He was looking out the window.
“I know what you are. I’m not blind.”
(Later, just hours later, sitting at dinner with his parents, the phrase We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it would rattle in my head like a loose nail I couldn’t shake free. How long had I been waiting for exactly this exchange? How often had I told myself not to worry in advance? That we would cross that bridge when we came to it. And then there we were, silent across an actual bridge, life laughing at us as we made our way from one shore to the next.)
“Well, I guess it’s good you’re talking about it,” I said, reasonably—though it didn’t feel good. And I didn’t want to be reasonable. But it was what we had sworn after the disaster of Bill. If you ever feel tempted … if you feel yourself falling, fess up. Nip it in the bud. We can deal with these things together. They’re bound to come up in a life. But we can deal with them. If we’re honest. We’ll cross that bridge …
“I know that you’ve wondered,” he said. “And I’m not saying you’re entirely wrong.”
“It’s a little hard to miss.”
“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I don’t exactly know what’s happening.”
“She’s very lovely.” My voice sounded steady, detached—as though I were commenting on a photograph of somebody’s niece. “It’s easy to see why.”
“It isn’t that. It isn’t that at all, really. She’s …” He turned to me. “Do you want to hear all this, Gus?”
No, I did not. I, Gus Edelman, emphatically did not want to hear this. Nor did I want it to be true. Nor did I want to be stuck behind an enormous truck that moved with the vehicular equivalent of a series of spasmodic coughs. I didn’t want anything that was happening to be happening. But I had also slipped into some other mode. An insensate autopilot mode. As though there were some emergency preparedness crew inside me ready to take over, to behave calmly, to focus on damage control.
“I want us to do whatever is most likely to help,” I said. “If it helps you to talk about her, then I think you should talk about her.”
He didn’t respond. The truck changed lanes. I prayed to a vast imaginary power that he wouldn’t want to talk about her.
“No,” he finally said. “I don’t think it will help.”
We were silent all the way to Greenwich.
“What do you want to happen?” I finally asked. “Are you considering …?”
“Honestly, Gus, I just wish she had never shown up.”
He meant Alison—not Nora. I knew from the harshness of his tone.
“She was supposed to stay only weeks,” I said. “Remember? It’s almost funny, isn’t it?”
“Almost.”
We didn’t speak again until Br
idgeport.
“The reason I’m telling you, Gus, is because … because back with that other thing, back before, the part I couldn’t bear was the lying. I don’t want to do that to you.”
Even in disloyalty, he was the better person.
“I appreciate your telling me,” I said. “I would hate the lies too. I will say it again, for the billionth time, I am eternally sorry that I put you through that. But I guess, I’m just not sure what exactly you are telling me. Have you …?”
“No. We haven’t … nothing like that … Though a couple of nights ago …”
I felt immediately ill.
“We were in the barn and she … she told me how she feels.”
I could picture it too clearly. Nora sitting on our old couch, her shoes off, her feet tucked under her. Doubtless, pages of his on her lap. That earnestness of hers in full flower. I’ve fallen in love with you, Owen.
“And you told her what in return?”
“Nothing really. But my guard was down. I couldn’t muster … I didn’t say much.”
“Of course your guard was down. You’ve done nothing but moon over that child … Honestly, what did you think was going to happen?”
He didn’t respond. He wasn’t going to let this become a fight. And he was right. There was no point.
“Never mind,” I said. “I appreciate that nothing happened. And that you’ve told me.”
“I won’t lie to you,” he said again. “She told me how she feels, but she also told me she would never act on it. That she had to tell me, but not because she would ever do anything …”
“And you believed her? Why? Because she wears a cross around her neck? Or is it her beatific smile?”
More silence. More miles.
As New Haven slipped past, I said, “Can’t you just send her away? Tell her the way she feels about you makes it impossible having her next door. Because she must have friends she can stay with. It really can’t be that the property next to ours is the only patch of land on this planet where she can exist and thrive.”
