by David Plante
She rose on an elbow and said, “You’re thinking again.”
“Am I?” he asked.
“Aren’t you?”
“I guess I am.”
“Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
“Oh,” he said.
She lay back and said, “If it’s about your not going to church with your mother on Easter Sunday, I’d say that you’ve gotten over that, or you’ve come a long way in getting over it.”
He said, “Yes.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you.”
“Then go to sleep. We should leave early tomorrow for Boston.”
“I’ll try to sleep,” he said.
“Your thinking is keeping you awake?”
“I guess it is.”
Nancy said, “When we were outside the cathedral, and you didn’t want to go in, I saw you had tears in your eyes. Why?”
He said, “I was wishing that my mother was dead.”
Neither slept, and Yvon went to his room. Then Nancy slept fitfully, and when she went to Yvon’s room she found him dressed. Mr. and Mrs. Green were out, but the breakfast table was set for them, with a note to wish them a safe journey back to Boston and Boston University, as if, Nancy thought, to emphasize education, with love.
On their way, when the first green interstate sign for Providence appeared, Yvon asked Nancy, suddenly, but as if in his long silence over the trip he had contemplated asking her, to leave him off at the train station.
She winced, but it did not surprise her, and she stated more than asked, “You want to go back to your mother.”
“I do.”
The abruptness of his wanting to be left off made her abrupt, too, even curt, and she said, “Fine,” and took the exit for Providence.
She stopped at a curb before the train station and kept the engine running while he got out and took his case from the trunk. She knew that she shouldn’t offer to take him to his parish, that he would refuse, but she didn’t want him to have the choice of refusing; she refused for him by saying again, curtly, “Fine with me.” He held open the car door on his side, now apparently unsure if he was doing the right thing, and he swung the door inward and outward a number of times in his uncertainty. He could open the door wide and get back into the car with her or shut the door. “Well?” she asked, and resentfully wanting him to shut, even slam, the door, she waited, wishing that he would get in. He shut the door and she drove off without saying goodbye, without looking back when she stopped for another car; she hoped she had impressed him with her resentment that he’d chosen not to stay with her but to go to his parish and his mother.
Then, unlocking the door to her apartment, she felt she had treated Yvon badly, that she had treated him badly because really she should have known that he had no choice. He had to go back to his mother.
She was not surprised at how lonely she was. At strange moments she felt that her loneliness was as deep as mourning for Yvon, who, now away from her, seemed to have died. She knew she felt these emotions—hurt as she was, angry as she was, forgiving as she was, lonely as she was—because she loved him.
She didn’t see him all that week. Early on the following Sunday morning he telephoned from Providence.
“Have you been there all this time?” she asked.
He said that he had.
“But what about your classes?” She couldn’t say, “What about me?”
He said, “I can’t come back now.”
And she felt she was giving too much of herself away, though she tried to keep her voice as if itself at a distance, “When will you come back?”
He didn’t know.
Now she gave herself completely away. But he would come back, wouldn’t he?
He didn’t answer, and she thought that someone was listening to him speak, no doubt his mother. He said, “We’ll be late for Mass,” and he sadly said goodbye and hung up. Surely his mother had been listening, and surely his mother had allowed him to make the telephone call.
What hold did his mother have on him—his ailing mother with the dark Indian eyes who, Nancy thought, must have made him feel he betrayed her—for not caring for her enough, for not devoting himself to her needs, her demands. Of course she made him feel guilty for abandoning her on Easter and going to New York, even though Yvon had said that his mother wanted him to go, wanted him to be happy. And it came to Nancy: that Yvon’s mother took it as a betrayal not only because he was away at Easter, the most holy of her holy days, but had spent Easter with a Jewish girlfriend.
She thought back over the Passover Yvon had so enthusiastically participated in—so much so that he may have been, oh, parodying being a Jew. Was that possible for him, who said he knew nothing about Jews? She had to put out of her mind that his mother probably objected to her because she was Jewish. She was in herself too aware of being Jewish.
Yvon suffered his mother, but she, Nancy, was not going to excuse him for his suffering. She would, in his absence, go to museums, to a concert, read books (she came, after all, from a cultured family; he had probably never been to the Fine Arts Museum or to Symphony Hall or read Henry James); she would see friends she hadn’t seen since she had met Yvon, would see Manos. She was determined she would not miss Yvon; she would not wonder about him in his remote parish, with his mother and his brother, as if to wonder would be to be drawn into their primitive darkness.
Instead, she wandered about the small apartment, then lay on her bed.
Yvon’s mother had wanted him to go to New York, had wanted him to be on his own, saved from her, saved from her kitchen and her house and her parish, from her religion, from her history, from her craziness, because she was crazy. But he still went back.
It seemed to Nancy that all of her thoughts were people, in a ring about her, and the people vied to stand out and stand steady and speak, and the one who stood out was Aaron Cohen, who said, “Yvon has his own longing.”
She missed Yvon very much, missed him more than she had ever missed anyone else in all her life.
Next Sunday he didn’t telephone, and she knew it was up to him to come to her.
Weeks passed and he neither returned to the apartment nor contacted her. And she told herself that—at least for now—she had to give up on him.
Awarded her master’s in English, she stood in her cap and gown for photographs her father took. At lunch at the Ritz, where her parents were staying, her father asked her when she’d be getting back to New York, and her mother frowned at him for asking such a question, and frowned more when he, shrugging, said to his wife, “Well, I’d like to know what she’s planning on doing.” Nancy said, “I’ve got something I want to sort out here in Boston.” “What’s that?” her father asked, but her mother said to him, “Let her be.”
Her parents walked with her through the Public Garden and the Common to her apartment. Entering before them, Nancy almost tripped on one of Yvon’s shoes on the floor where it had been for several weeks; she tried to kick it under the bed, but, instead, it tumbled over into the room.
“How is Yvon?”
Her mother said, “Let Nan lead her own life.”
But Nancy said to her father, “It’s not a secret. Yvon’s gone.”
“Gone?” her father asked.
“Gone,” Nancy repeated.
Her parents left Boston the next day.
As soon as they left Nancy tried to find Yvon’s telephone number in Providence to call him, but he had never given it to her, and Providence information listed so many Gendreaus that she wasn’t able to distinguish his. She had assumed only Yvon’s family could have had that name. Then she thought that he would not want her to call him in his parish.
Irritated, she thought of going to New York, or, better, to Amagansett, leaving a note behind telling him, starkly, that it was up to him to g
et in touch with her on his return. But she was scared that he wouldn’t return.
To distract herself she went out into springtime Boston to visit museums she had promised herself to visit. She tried to lose herself in shopping. She telephoned Manos and suggested that they meet, but he told her that he was dating somebody. He asked, “How are things with you and Yvon?” and she answered, “I’m waiting for him to come back from the dead.”
On a warm afternoon, with an ocean wind blowing about her, she followed the Charles River across the wide, flat fens to the Museum of Fine Arts. The reeds along the riverbank shook in the wind. In the rotunda of the museum, at the top of a smooth flight of marble stairs, she stood for a long while before a painting, which, amid her preoccupations, appeared to go blank again and again.
She told herself she was not going to marry Yvon, was not going to live her life with him, have a family with him, become grandparents with him, and she was not because, primitive as he was, he was not someone she would or should marry. Because Yvon was a failure.
On her way back to her apartment she tried to make herself wish that he would never return, that she’d leave Boston and not ever think of him again.
But when she opened the door she saw him, naked, kneeling on the floor by the bed, swaying from side to side. She saw him just for a second before he was aware of her, and then he jumped up, turned quickly away, and ran to the narrow wall to the side of the big, curtain-less window.
“Yvon,” she yelled.
His face contorted, he stood with his arms held out from his body, as if to expose himself in his nakedness totally to God.
“Why are you naked?” she asked.
He remained with his arms out.
Then Nancy heard herself say, in a high voice that was not hers, “Stop this.” All at once hysterical, “Stop it, stop it,” she cried.
He went to the bed and sat on the foot of it. His hands hanging loosely between his knees, he hit them against each other, swung his head from side to side. He didn’t look at her, hitting his hands together and swinging his head.
On the floor by the bed was a pile of clothes, and she saw a bloodstained shirt. She picked it up and held it out to him. Hardly moving her lips, she asked, “What is this blood? What happened?”
He continued to swing his head from side to side, in misery.
Nancy kicked at the clothes and saw that all of them were bloodstained, even the underpants, as if blood had soaked through to them, and she dropped the shirt onto the pile.
“Yvon, what happened?”
He shrieked, “The blood is hers. She did it. She did it.”
Nancy stepped back from him and turned to look out the window, and with a flash of distraction she noted that the quartz Yvon had given to her was gone, and she didn’t know what she had done with it, or the fragment of meteorite. She felt that she was alone, so the appearance of Yvon, standing before her was a shock. Rigid, she didn’t react when he grabbed her. Her hair stuck to his sweaty shoulder, neck, cheek, fanned out in fine strands when he shook her. She tried to push him away with her elbows, shouting, “No,” but he was stronger than she was.
And, after, his shoulder blades and spine jutting from his bare back, he turned away from her and lay down on the floor, motionless. She nervously combed out her tangled hair with her fingers. Without packing, without even washing, she left him, taking only her handbag, to go out to her car, where, her eyes closed, she shook violently, not weeping, but from time to time yawning in a way that made her shake all the more. She was still trembling when she turned the key in the ignition.
As she neared New York, trying to reassure herself that she was a woman of experience enough not to be broken by the violent actions of a crazy man, she promised herself, I will never see him again.
Her parents were not in New York, but in Amagansett. In the apartment, lying in her childhood bed, Nancy moaned, “Oh Yvon,” and tears rose into her eyes.
Three
The Greens’ large, brown clapboard house in Amagansett was in woods, and Nancy, in the morning, went in her light nightgown and barefoot from her bedroom to the trees. The tall, thin trunks went up to high branches, where the early sun shone; she stood in the shadows below, among ferns. She walked among the ferns on dead, damp leaves. She saw the house, with its porch and wicker chairs, through the tree trunks. Her mother was at the screen door.
In the dining alcove, her mother poured out a glass of orange juice for her and said, “The Kenners are giving a party this evening.”
“A party?”
“Don’t you like parties anymore?”
“I guess I do,” Nancy said.
Her mother put her hand on Nancy’s head. “Are you all right?”
Laughing, Nancy said, “Why shouldn’t I be all right?”
With her mother and father, she went into the Amagansett center for the Saturday shopping, and, as she had done as a little girl, stopped in the drugstore to buy her father a newspaper and look over the magazines in the rack; she chose two or three she once thought fun. With her parents she had lunch in a small restaurant, and in the afternoon they lay on chaises longues in the sunshine by their pool and, while her father read the newspaper and her mother dozed, Nancy flipped through the magazines, which were no longer fun. Lowering a magazine, she looked around, then looked at her parents, who, she knew, wanted both to protect her and to allow her all the freedom in the world, but Nancy felt no freedom was open to her.
The party at the Kenners was at dusk on a lawn behind their house. Kerosene torches burned, the flames wavering pale yellow against the pale gray sky, on stakes along the picket fence at the back of the lawn and down along the flagstone path to the pool. As Nancy, feeling her lightly sunburnt body sensitive to the small, shifting movements of her dress, approached the people, she felt revive in her, just a little but enough for her to be aware of it, her old pleasure at going to a party. As soon as she got her drink, from a bartender in a white jacket behind a long table covered with a white cloth and bottles and glasses, she turned away from her parents to look around at who was at the party. One of the torches was smoking.
She saw a man standing alone under an apple tree near the house, his hands on his hips, looking around. He wore white flannel slacks, a white shirt, and a dark blue blazer, and his smooth black hair was combed back flat from his high forehead.
Nancy went to her old friend Eugenia Kenner, and, indicating the man in white flannels, she asked “Who’s he?”
Eugenia said, “I don’t know. But let’s find out.” She introduced herself as the Kenners’ daughter, and he replied that his name was Tim.
“And this is Nancy,” Eugenia said.
He was tall, with a large nose and a narrow face, his forehead high because his hair was receding. He appeared very neat, the collar of his starched shirt sharp-edged, and one button of his blazer buttoned. When he held Nancy’s hand, he half-frowned, half-smiled. He was British.
Eugenia said she’d get him a drink, and, turning away to go, raised an eyebrow at Nancy.
She asked him what he did, and he said he was in law.
“A lawyer?”
“Oh, my ambitions are much greater than that.”
Nancy noted how his tall body beneath his neat clothes appeared to be regularly exercised.
“Are they?” she asked.
As he was explaining to Nancy the difference between a solicitor and a barrister and a Q.C., Eugenia came back with the gin-and-tonic he had asked for, then, again raising an eyebrow at Nancy, left her to Tim. He was from London, in New York on a visit, and had been invited to the Kenner party by a mutual friend, Simona Morrow, who said she’d meet him here at the party, but he didn’t see her, so he dared say he must have arrived before her.
Nancy said, “I went to London with my parents when I was a girl.”
As if from a height, he as
ked, “And what do you remember?”
“I remember a soldier wearing a red uniform and a tall fur hat, standing at attention in the rain.”
“One of the Queen’s Foot Guards. Standing at attention in the rain is their duty.”
Simona arrived, her hands raised palms out. Out of breath, she said, half to Tim and half to Nancy, that one of her children had suddenly become ill, but her husband had said he’d take care of him and insisted she come to the party to see Tim. Then she kissed Nancy on both cheeks and said, “Please excuse my agitation, Nancy dear. It’s so lovely to see you again.” She had become, Nancy thought, very British.
Simona and Tim began to talk about friends in London, and Nancy left them to find Eugenia. She said to her, “He sounds severe.”
“Maybe that’s just what we both need,” Eugenia said.
As people were leaving the party, Nancy was standing silently with her parents when Tim came to her. She introduced him to her parents; hearing his name, Tim Arbib, Mr. Green asked him what sort of name Arbib was. He replied that it was a Jewish Egyptian name. Then Mrs. Green asked him what he did for amusement while he was visiting, and he said he liked to take long walks along the wide Long Island beaches. But before any more conversation could involve him, Simona called him away.
Sunday afternoon, while her parents visited friends whom Nancy found boring, she stayed at home. The sky was cloudy, the air moist. She became restless. She refused to think about Yvon. She telephoned Eugenia, but Eugenia had a date, and Nancy thought, we must grow up. When the idea of walking along the beach occurred to her, she realized it gave her a sense of possibility, one that had not come to her since she left Yvon, when all possibility had shut down on her. She drove to the ocean and walked where the surf spread out on the sand, among people walking their dogs. Beyond a long wall of boulders that Nancy climbed over, she saw Tim Arbib, his hands on his hips, looking out at the Atlantic. Though he might not have had any interest at all in meeting her, might have even been annoyed by it, she approached him, smiling so that when he turned to her he would find her smiling.
