by David Plante
His reaction to seeing her was as matter-of-fact as though he had been waiting for her. “Join me for a walk?”
She swung her head so her hair swung. “Sure.”
On a blanket among the low dunes of the beach were a man and woman in swimsuits. The man was kneeling over the woman, who lay on her stomach, and he was spreading lotion over her shoulders and back. Around them were pieces of driftwood, smooth roots of trees and broken planks, in puddles of water.
Nancy said, “I guess, after foggy, rainy England, the sun comes as a nice change.”
Tim pursed his lips, then said, “That’s not an altogether original view of England.”
Anxious, Nancy said, “It rained all the while I was there, but I was there only a few days.”
Tim said, “England is very often sunny.”
“I guess I was there at the wrong time.”
His eyes narrowed, he kept looking out at the ocean, and she thought he had lost interest in her because he thought her unoriginal. But he said, “Shall we sit on the beach?”
She followed him to where the sand rose into a dune grown over with dune grass. With apparently thought-out gestures he drew off his polo shirt with its little emblem embroidered near the shoulder. His chest muscles were narrow and taut and distinct, and his skin was matte white and his chest covered with curling, shiny black hair.
A young man, swinging his shirt and whistling, walked past them, and a vision of Yvon came to Nancy, a vision of him laughing and about to get into bed with her. And she thought: forget about him.
Tim sat on the sand, leaned back on his elbows, and looked again at the ocean, the tendons in his neck taut. Nancy sat beside him, her legs crossed like an Indian. Squinting, in the same way he had studied the horizon, he now studied her as he lay back and put his hands behind his head.
She looked away from his eyes to the blue sky, where the sun and the full moon both shone, the sun bright yellow and the moon pale white. Nancy didn’t look back at Tim, but, aware of him staring at her, she said, “How strange.”
“What’s strange?”
“The moon and the sun out together.”
His voice was a little hard. “What do you mean by ‘strange?’”
Embarrassed, Nancy faced him and, laughing at herself, said, “I’m not sure what I mean.”
“Are you an American mystic?”
“A what?”
“An American mystic.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“If you’re an American you’re a mystic.”
“And what makes an American mystic?” Nancy asked.
Tim said, “To think that the moon and the sun out together must have some strange meaning.”
“Well,” Nancy said, “I’m American.”
“So was my wife.”
“Was?”
Then, very matter-of-factly, he said, “My wife is dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
He laughed a laugh from deep in his throat that might have been a cough. “Sorry for a thirty-year-old widower who doesn’t really know how to run his life on his own?”
She wondered about this, but she laughed. “Yes, sorry for that.”
“Thank you.”
Nancy was wary of him but at the same time he roused in her some kind of amused, wicked spirit. She asked, “What strange things made your wife a mystic?”
“Everything had a strange meaning to her.”
“Everything all together?”
“Everything all together.”
Nancy lowered her eyes to take this in, then she raised her eyes to again see him staring at her.
She said, her voice high, “You’re strange.”
He said, “Look me straight in the eyes.”
She did, and she saw that he was smiling a little, and she sensed her lips rise at the corners.
He said, “Don’t look away, keep your eyes on mine.”
She opened her eyes wide to fix on his.
He said, “I’m the least strange person you’ll ever meet.”
“Oh?”
“But I don’t mind if you don’t take me seriously. In fact, I would prefer if you didn’t. I never like being taken seriously.”
“Then I won’t take you seriously.”
“At Eton, we called this Eton bantering.”
“Well then, teach me Eton bantering.”
“You may be a good learner. My wife never learned. She was very serious.”
“I’ll try not to be.”
“Do try.”
“What did your wife die of?”
“Cancer—ovarian cancer.”
“No children?”
“None. She couldn’t. And I must confess, I would have divorced her but for the cancer. I’m not such a bastard that I would do that after she became ill. But I do want children. If I were to get married again that certainly would be a primary condition for marrying.”
Nancy kept thinking: this was bantering.
“But supposing your second wife couldn’t bear?” Nancy asked.
“I would have to divorce her and marry another.”
“What about this—what about getting someone pregnant, then marrying her?”
“To be considered,” he said lightly, “to be considered.”
There was, she felt, a sophisticated lightness to their bantering.
Nancy said, “If you’re alone and don’t have anything else to do this evening, come have dinner with my parents and me.”
Sitting up and putting on his shirt, he said, “It just occurs to me that if a middle-, or an upper-middle-, or, especially, an upper-class girl in England had said that, she would have put herself before her parents and said, ‘Come and have dinner with me and my parents.’”
He was demonstrating his knowledge of the British class system, and if this was meant to impress Nancy, it did.
That night Nancy told herself it was the insects beating their wings against the screen that kept her awake. In her nightgown, she got out of bed and went to the window to look at the insects, their antennae vibrating as they danced on the mesh in fast circles around one another. She examined a large, motionless moth with soft dark wings, its pale eyes seeming to stare at her.
Back in bed, she couldn’t sleep, and when, in the morning, still in her nightgown and bare feet, she went out onto the back lawn, a frightening longing rose up in her to see Yvon.
Her mother came out to her with a glass of orange juice.
“Will you be seeing Tim Arbib again?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Nancy said, and then, not to disappoint her mother, she added, “Probably.”
“I’ll invite him again to dinner if you want me to.”
Tears welled up in Nancy’s eyes, and when she blinked the tears ran down the sides of her nose. “I think I should go to Boston for a few days,” she said, “just a few days.”
“I understand,” her mother said.
“Has Dad already gone back to Manhattan?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll leave after breakfast.”
Nancy walked across the lawn to a lilac bush. She broke off a branch of lilac, and, the bush shaking, a mass of insects flew out and around her. The sprig of lilac in her hand, she stopped, or felt she was stopped, in the middle of the lawn, by the overwhelming feeling, occurring like a dark, arresting circle around her, of her deepening longing for Yvon. Looking at the sprig of lilac in a hand that wasn’t her hand, she felt that someone else, not herself, was standing where she was, longing for what she herself could never want, could never long for. The sprig of lilac appeared stranger than any plant she had ever seen before, the insects flying around her appeared stranger than any creatures she had ever seen before; the house and the woods appeared to her the strangest place she had
ever seen before. There could be no stranger world than the world she stood in, if it was she who was standing in it.
She thought she would get out of that world, too strange to her, and live in a familiar world, even if this world were not very happy. And she would do this by going to Boston and seeing Yvon for the last time.
On the highway to Boston, a low-slung car with big tail fins passed her, the windows open. In the front seat were two young guys, bopping their heads to loud music. Two large soft dice were dangling in the rear window. They appeared to be so happy. She arrived in Boston as the sun was setting.
She had her keys to the street door and to the apartment on Beacon Hill, but, as Yvon had done when they were living together, she rang the bell at the street door instead of going in and surprising him. He didn’t appear. She opened the black door, climbed the bare wooden stairs to the landing, and stood for a moment at the door to her apartment, as if waiting for him to open, before she opened it herself.
Entering the hot apartment, the windows all shut, she startled Yvon, who, lying on the bed in his underpants, jumped up on seeing her and stood as if at attention. The unmade bed smelled of his body in the sun-filled room. As she stared at him, he slowly raised his arms and, as if to protect himself, crossed them over his bare chest and grabbed his own shoulders.
“I’m sorry, I thought someone made a mistake ringing the bell.”
She said, flatly, “I came up to Boston to get something.”
With the same flatness, he asked, “Oh?”
She had no idea what to tell him she had come for.
He asked, “Would you like some cold tea?”
“I would like some, yes.”
From the floor he picked up a pair of chinos, which he drew on, then he took a shirt from where it hung on the back of a chair and put it on and buttoned it.
“I was just resting before I go off to teach,” he said.
“You teach?”
“I got a job teaching French in a language school.”
“Then you’ve found a practical way of using your French.”
“I’m trying to be practical.”
He held out a hand for her to go ahead of him into the kitchen, where they sat at the table with tea in tall, thin glasses with patterns of flowers on them. She tried to center her thoughts and feelings away from him, on the rim of her glass, but she was drawn, and all her thoughts and feelings with her, to his lips, his jaw, the hollow at the base of his throat. She looked at him closely, at the lobes of his ears, his eyebrows, his sweat-moist forehead.
What did he think? Did he think that his mother killed herself because he went to New York and not to her in the parish? Whatever he thought, his dead mother now denied Nancy and Yvon any possibility together.
Rising, Yvon said, “I’ll leave you on your own to get what you came for.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
He remained standing at the other side of the table. “I should be going to school for my evening class.”
She knew in all her body that if she didn’t let him go now, she would do something to make him stay, though she had no idea what that could be. As strong as it was, it couldn’t be more than the desire to lie on the same bed with him, in those sheets saturated with his smell, couldn’t be more than the desire to lie next to him and fall asleep with him. Nothing more than that? She was very tired, more tired than she could stand, and at the same time she felt, in all her tiredness, a tightening of her muscles and tendons that made her hold out her hands, her fingers curled, to grab something, to grab him, across the small table and, knocking over the glasses of tea, pull him towards her and, oh yes, bite his lips, knock over the table by pulling at his shirt so he stumbled after her into the bedroom and onto the bed. No, no, not that, not that; but something more than that, something that sex could never realize; something that had to be fought for through flesh and bone if it was to be had at all. He knew what this something was, he knew it more than she did, more than she ever would, and she must have it in repossessing him. She felt, as she had never before in her life felt, a rush of passion for that something he embodied in his arms and shoulders, in his chest and thighs and legs, in his very smell, which she must have, which she would have.
But she sat still, and, though her feelings made little spasms pass through her, she held herself back from giving in to the impulse to reach out for him as she watched him, standing above her, place his hands on his cheeks and close his eyes.
He opened his eyes and said, “I need to go to school.”
She stood. “Let me lie on the bed next to you,” she said, “just that. I won’t touch you. I’ll lie next to you. That’s what I came for. That’s everything I came for.”
Yvon kept his hands to his face.
“Do I have to beg?” she asked.
He dropped his hands and turned away.
She sank cross-legged on the floor next to the chair, and, her shoulders slumped and her hands in her lap, she sobbed, but Yvon didn’t come to her.
Her whole body aching, she got up long after she heard the door to the apartment shut.
Before she left, she looked for the quartz and the fragment of meteorite, wanting to take them away with her, but they were gone.
At sunset, wide and gray-purple, cars along the highway switched on their lights, and as the dark deepened, the white and red lights flashing past her were all she saw. She was so tired that, after a moment of abstraction when the lights of the traffic appeared to drift up and away as though the cars were turning off in an unexpected direction, she left the highway to get a cup of coffee.
Twice more she stopped for coffee. She imagined that off the highway, in the nighttime woods, people were standing, illuminated by beaming car lights. She was still closer to Boston than to New York. She was sweating, and she felt that her clothes were dirty and twisted about her, that her hair was dirty.
Halfway to New York she stopped again, this time to eat. The restaurant was crowded, and she, at a small table next to the large table of a family with a baby in a highchair, couldn’t eat the food she ordered. Her head began to throb. She paid the bill. Outside, the cars in the parking lot glared in the floodlights. For a while she couldn’t find her car.
The expressions on Nancy’s mother’s face appeared to have been slowly thought out, and, with simplicity, she put a hand on Nancy’s arm and told her that Tim Arbib had left a message.
Nancy had never imagined that she, a free spirit, could be so emotionally and bodily constrained, with no sense of possibility. Standing long under a cool shower, cupping the water in her hands as it fell and splashing it against her face and body, she thought perhaps she understood the need for purification. She let the water pour over her head, down though her long hair that, dripping, flowed along her body as though her hair too were water, and her skin water.
Because she thought meeting Tim Arbib might confuse her, she waited some days. She dressed in a loose gray pullover, a gray skirt, and black pumps, her hair simply brushed back from her face, the simplicity meant not so much to protect her as to make her appear serious, because she was serious, and if he had any appreciation of her it had to be that she was serious, and that with her he was, too—not the bantering girl he had met, but a woman whom he must treat as a woman, a serious woman. If he did not respect her as she insisted on being respected, she would make every effort to protect herself against him; then, back in her room and on her bed, she would lie, a broken girl.
She held out a hand to him to shake, but instead of grasping her hand, he lightly pressed the tips of his fingers against hers and turned her hand as though to raise it and kiss it, a gesture she felt would be both formal and intimate, and respectful. But he didn’t kiss her hand. She smiled a smile that lifted only the corners of her mouth. It seemed to her a smile that made her invulnerable.
Though she knew the H
amptons better than he did, she felt directionless, and let him lead her. Five minutes into the date she found herself wishing she were in her room, lying on her bed in a dim room, the blinds drawn against the sunlight.
The restaurant, chosen by him, was in a large, white clapboard house with a massive fieldstone fireplace, their table at a window with a view of the sunlight on the ocean.
He said, “I do like a view.”
She hadn’t before noted the view as special, though she’d been to the restaurant often with her parents. She realized she had hardly spoken, leaving talk up to him and she responded briefly, distracted, but not able to say what distracted her. She must make an effort.
“Do you go to places for the views?”
As if incidentally, he said, “My wife liked views. When she was ill, I made a point of taking her to places she particularly liked for the views. We went to Scotland, to the Highlands, because she had a great desire to see the stark mountains. That was the last. Afterwards, she wasn’t capable of travel.”
“A longing to see the stark mountains.”
“A great desire. That’s what she said. I didn’t, and don’t, understand, but I sat with her on a bench outside the modest bed-and-breakfast where we were staying, about ten miles from the house of some good friends of mine, and I wondered what her great desire was in looking at the mountains ranging before us. I remember there was a deep valley between the mountains, and rivers and waterfalls in the valley.”
“And you were never able to understand her longing?”
“Longing? No, not longing, that’s a word I would never use. It was all I could do not to make a joke of her desire for views. She knew I wouldn’t understand, knew, I’m sure, that I would deride her, gently, I suppose, but deride her for her pretensions for such views.”
Nancy asked, “Pretensions?”
And he said, “Let’s order,” and they did, and as if he had intended to continue what he had been saying because it was important that she understand him, this elegant man from, maybe, Egypt, said, “I actually think she relied on me for my derision. I knew she didn’t want me to take her soulful longings seriously. I might say to her, when she withdrew as if alone with her vision, ‘Darling, let’s just have sex,’ and she’d laugh.”
