The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  The questions stopped — it wasn’t clear by whose mysterious signal — and the applause that followed could be felt in the armrests. Some even stood, as at the theater. Unskilled and unpracticed at accepting praise, Thomas left the stage.

  She might have met him backstage and embraced him in mutual exuberance. And perhaps he would be expecting her, would be disappointed by her absence. But then she saw him in the lobby, surrounded by adoring fans, the torturous words inside his head put aside, and she thought: I will not compete for his attention.

  Needing air, she walked out into the night. People stood in gatherings, more exhilarated than subdued. She didn’t intend to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help but hear the words “shattering” and “brilliant,” though one woman seemed incensed that a poet would turn a daughter’s death to advantage. “Opportunistic,” Linda heard, and “rape of other people’s lives.” A man responded dismissively. “Dana, it’s called art,” he said, and Linda knew at once the two were married.

  She walked around the block, the experience in the theater seeming to require it. The drizzle turned to serious rain and soaked her hair and shoulders before she could return. She entered a side theater and listened to a Rwandan woman catalogue atrocities. Linda sat benumbed, exhausted of feeling, until it was time for her own reading.

  She was taken backstage, snake-infested with coils of electrical cables. Her eyes, not adjusting quickly enough to the darkness, made her stupid and overly cautious, and she knew she was being seen as middle-aged by the younger organizer. Seizek appeared beside her, his breath announcing him before his bulk. He put a proprietary hand on her back, letting it slide to the bottom of her spine — for balance or to assert some male advantage, she wasn’t sure. They were led, blinking, onto the stage, which was, indeed, harshly overlit. They sat to either side of the podium. Seizek, ignoring manners and even his own introduction, staggered to the podium first. Nearly too drunk to stand, he produced a flawless reading, a fact more remarkable than his prose, which seemed watered down, as if the author had diluted paragraphs for the sake of length, made careless by a deadline.

  The applause was respectable. Some left the theater when Seizek had finished (bored by Seizek’s reading? not fans of poetry? not interested in Linda Fallon?), further reducing the audience to a desperate case of acne. She strove to overcome, by act of will, her seeming unpopularity (more likely the wished-for anonymity) as she walked to the podium; and by the time she had adjusted the microphone, she had largely succeeded, even though she couldn’t help but notice that Thomas wasn’t there. She spoke the words of her verse, words she had some reason to be proud of, words that, though they could no longer be fresh to her, had been crafted with care. But as she read, her mind began to drift, and she thought of Thomas’s suggestion that she turn her images into prose. And she found that even as she said the phrases, her second brain was composing sentences, so that when a stray word jolted her from her reverie, she felt panicky, as if she’d lost her place.

  The applause was that of an audience made good-humored by promise of release to beds and dinners. There were questions then, one oddly similar to the dyspeptic complaint of the woman who thought it opportunistic to use another’s life for purposes of art (why this should so rankle, Linda couldn’t imagine, since it was not her life in question). The line in the lobby to buy Linda’s books was no deeper than twenty, and she was, actually, grateful for the twenty. She contrived to linger longer than she might have, wondering if Thomas would appear after all for the dinner they’d felt was owed to them; but she did not stay long enough to feel foolish if he did eventually arrive. When she left the theater, she walked out into the night and was stopped by a streak of white along the roof of the sky, the low clouds having caught the light of the city.

  Water’s silk, she thought. Trampled stem.

  There was comfort in thinking the worst had happened. She was twenty-seven, washed high upon a tide line and left to wither in the sun or be swept away by another wave. She had been beached in Cambridge, where she walked the streets incessantly, her body all legs and arms inside her skirts and blouses, a miniskirt no more remarkable in that season and in that year than a dashiki or a pair of bell-bottoms. What was remarkable was her hair: wild and unruly and unstylish, though no particular style was called for then. It had taken on, in Africa, more color than before, so that it now ran a spectrum from mahogany to whitened pine. From the walking, or from lack of ceremony with food, she had grown lean and wiry as well. Life now was walking in the rain or in the sunshine with a freedom she had never known and did not want. Each morning, she slipped on her sandals and fingered her gold cross, preparing for days filled with guilt and recrimination, and having no wish to erase the event that had bequeathed this legacy. Sometimes, hollowed out, she leaned against a wall and put her head to the cool stones and gasped for breath, struck anew by the magnitude of the loss, the pain as sharp as if it had happened just the day before.

  She did not know the city as it was supposed to be known. She did not live as expected. What was expected were lengthy walks among the sycamores, not forgetting that this was hallowed ground. What was expected were conversations that lasted long into the night, watched over by the ghosts of pale scholars and exasperating pedants. In flagrant violation of entitlement, she returned to cheerless rooms in which there was a bed she could scarcely bear to look at. For her, Cambridge was remembering that sordid kissing behind an office door had once been elevated to the status of a sacrament (she who had now been excommunicated); or it was the bitter thrill of a sunset that turned the bricks and stones of the city, and even the faces on the streets (those entitled scholars), a rosy-salmon color that seemed the very hue of love itself. Cambridge was sitting in a bathtub in a rented apartment and making experimental slits along the wrists, slits immediately regretted for the fuss they caused in Emergency. (And mortifying that she should be just one of so many who’d had to resort.) Her skirts hung from her hipbones like wash on the line, and in September, when the weather turned colder, she wore knee-high boots that ought to have been stupendously painful to walk in and weren’t.

  She was living then on Fairfield Street, in a set of rooms that had a bathtub on a platform in the kitchen (majestic locus for sacrificial rites). She had matching china and expensive crystal from another lethal ritual and the subsequent marriage that had corroded from the inside out, like a shiny car with rust beneath the paint job. (Though she had, in the end, crashed that car head-on.) These she had placed on a shelf in a cupboard in the kitchen, where they gathered dust, mute testament to expectation. She ate, when she ate at all, on a Melamine plate she’d bought at Lechmere’s, a plate that held no associations, a dish no lover or husband had ever touched. In the mornings, when school started up again, Linda stood by the door and drank an Instant Breakfast, pleased that so much could be taken care of in so little time. She went out in her miniskirts and boots (staggering now to think of wearing such clothing in front of seventeen-year-old boys), and got into her car and merged into traffic going north to a high school in a suburban town. Within the privacy that only the interior of a car can provide, she cried over her persistent and seemingly inexhaustible loss and often had to fix her face in the rearview mirror before she went into the classroom.

  On the holidays, she went to Hull as if threading a minefield — fearful at the entry, mute with gratitude when the fraught journey had been negotiated. And occasionally she was not successful. Against all better judgment, she would sometimes drive by Thomas’s family home, trying to imagine which car was his (the VW? the Fiat? the Volvo?); for he, like her, was necessarily drawn back for the holidays. But as much as she feared or hoped for it, they never met by accident, not even at the diner or the gas station. (To think of how she would tremble just to turn the corner into the parking lot of the diner, hardly able to breathe for wondering.)

  To ward off men, who seemed ever-present, even on that mostly female faculty, she created the fiction that she was married (and
for the convenience of the lie, to a law student who was hardly ever home). This was a life she could well imagine and could recreate in detail at a moment’s notice: the phantom (once real enough) husband returning home after a grueling stint in moot court; a blow-out party at the weekend, during which her husband had become deathly ill from bourbon and cider; a gift needed for a professor’s wedding. Cambridge was leaving these lies behind and arriving home to quiet rooms, where there was time and space to remember, the space and time seemingly as necessary as the Valium she kept on hand in the medicine cabinet (the Valium an unexpected boon in the aftermath of Emergency).

  She was a decent teacher, and sometimes others said so (I’m told your classes are; You are my favorite), but it seemed a shriveled life all the same. She supposed there were events that impinged upon her consciousness. Later she would recall that she had been a Marxist for a month and that there had been a man, political and insistent, to whom she had made love in a basement room and with whom she’d developed a taste for marijuana that hadn’t gone away until Maria. And for a time she would own a remarkable set of oil paints in a wooden box, a reminder of an attempt to lose herself on canvas. Oddly, she did not put pen to paper, afraid of conflagration, as if the paper itself were flinty.

  But mostly she walked alone, down Massachusetts Avenue and onto Irving Street. Along the Charles and to Porter Square. On Saturdays, she walked to Somerville or to the Fenway. She had no destination, the walking destination itself, and sometimes, when it was very bad, she counted rhythmically, the closest she ever came to chanting a mantra. What impressed her most was the endurance of the suffering: it seemed unlikely that one should mind another’s loss so much. It was shameful to go on at length, she knew, even in the privacy of one’s mind, about personal disasters when so many truly were abused. (More shameful still that news of Entebbe or rioting ghettos put suffering in perspective for only moments at a time, the self needing to return to self; and sometimes news of battles, both foreign and domestic, made the suffering worse: one longed, after all, for someone with whom to share these bulletins from hell.)

  On a day in September — there had been months of walking — Linda entered a café in which wooden tables had been set perpendicular to a counter with a glass encasement of sweets. She ordered coffee and a peanut-butter cookie, lunch having along the way been missed, and brought them to her table, where she had laid out grids for lesson plans. It eased the tedium of the job to work in a café, and for a time she lost herself in the explicated themes of Ethan Frome and The Glass Menagerie. Outside, the sun had warmed the brick but not the people who practiced hunching into their jackets in anticipation of winter. A commotion in a corner claimed her attention, willing to be claimed. A woman with two poodles had set them improbably in booster seats on chairs and was feeding them bits of expensive macaroons from the glass case. She spoke to them as a mother might to toddlers, wiping snouts with a lacy handkerchief and gently scolding one for being greedy.

  Linda watched the scene, incredulous.

  —She’ll keep their ashes in the cookie jar, a voice behind her said.

  Linda turned to see a man with vivid features and eyebrows as thick as pelts. A wry expression lay easily on his face. A cosmic laugh — unfettered, releasing months of grim remorse — bubbled up inside her and broke the surface. A sheaf of papers fell off the table, and she tried to catch them. She put a hand to her chest, helpless.

  There were introductions, the cosmic laugh petering out in small bursts she could not control. The laughing itself was contagious, and the man chuckled from time to time. She put a hand to her mouth, and the girl behind the counter said, What’s so funny? One of them moved to the other’s table (later they would argue who), and Vincent said, apropos the cosmic laugh, You needed that.

  He had wide brown eyes and smooth skin tanned from some exercise or trip away. His hair was glossy, like that of an animal with a healthy coat.

  Turning, her foot bumped the table pedestal, causing coffee to spill onto his polished shoe. She bent to wipe it off with a paper napkin.

  —Careful, he said to her. I’m easily aroused.

  She looked up and smiled. As easily as that. And felt another tide come for her at last.

  * * *

  —He was good to you?

  —Very. I can’t imagine what would have happened, what I’d have become.

  —Because of me.

  —Well. Yes. And me as well.

  —I used to live in Cambridge, Thomas said. On Irving Street. Years later, though.

  —I didn’t know that.

  She wondered how often she had walked along that street, which large house he’d lived in. She was leaning against the ferry’s bulkhead, watching the northern city slip away. Wind whipped her hair, which stung her face, and she turned her head to free it. She wore, as she did almost every day that didn’t require something more inspired, a white shirt and a pair of jeans. And today the raincoat, buttoned against the breezes. Thomas still had on his navy blazer, as if he’d slept in it. He had called before she was even awake, afraid, he’d said, that she’d go off for the day and he wouldn’t be able to find her. Would she like to take a ferry ride to an island in the lake? Yes, she said, she thought she would. She boldly asked him why he hadn’t come to her reading.

  —It was unnerving seeing you sitting there at mine. It’s always harder when someone you know is in the audience. I thought to spare you that.

  And in this, he was, of course, correct.

  —Your work, she said on the ferry. I don’t know when I’ve ever heard . . .

  Thomas wore an expression she herself had sometimes felt: pleasure imperfectly masked by modesty.

  —Your work will be taught in classrooms in a decade, she added. Maybe less. I’m sure of it.

  She turned away, letting him have the pleasure without her scrutiny.

  —Why do you call them “The Magdalene Poems?” she asked after a time.

  He hesitated. You must know why.

  Of course she knew and wished she hadn’t asked. For the asking invited confidences and memories she didn’t want. You spell it Magdalene, she said. With the e.

  —That’s the way it’s spelled in the Bible. But often it’s spelled Magdalen without the e. There are many versions of the name: Magdala, Madeleine, Mary Magdala. Did you know that Proust’s madeleines were named after her?

  —You’ve been working on the poems a long time.

  —I had to let them go. After Africa.

  There was an awkward silence between them.

  —They transcend any subject, she said quickly. Good poetry always does.

  —It’s a myth, her being a fallen woman. They thought that only because the first mention of her follows immediately the mention of a fallen woman.

  —In the Bible, you mean.

  —Yes. It hardly matters. It’s the myth we care about.

  —And they were lovers?

  —Jesus and Mary Magdalene? “She administered to Him of her substance,” the Bible says. I’d like to think they were. But the farthest most scholars are willing to go is to say that she let Him be who He was as a man. Seems code to me for sex.

  —And why not? she mused.

  —All we really know of her is that she was simply a woman not identified as being either a wife or a mother — interesting in itself. And, actually, she’s touted now as being her own person. A woman important enough for Jesus to consider a sort of disciple. Important enough to be the first to carry the message of the Resurrection. That’s the feminist interpretation, anyway.

  —What was the reference to the seven devils?

  —Intriguing to speculate. Luke says, “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out.” We don’t know. Was she afflicted with a malady such as epilepsy? Was it an emotional or spiritual or psychological malaise from which she needed respite? Was she simply mad?

  —Your poems are exquisite in any event.

  On the port side, Linda saw Robert S
eizek grasping the rails as if he were the captain of the ship. Perhaps he was studying the horizon as people do who are about to be seasick. She doubted he would remember his reading the night before, or even that she had been there. On the ferry’s benches there were teenagers, underdressed for the outing, small silver rings catching the sun at their navels, despite the chill. Their presence reminded her that it was a Saturday. Each girl wore her hair parted in the middle and pulled tightly against the head into a ponytail. Her own hair dating her because she herself couldn’t manage the current, sleeker style. The ponytails flicked in the wind like their namesakes.

  —Whatever happened to Peter? Thomas asked, lighting a cigarette. The question took her by surprise.

  —I don’t know exactly. He went back to London. Once when I was there, I looked in the phone book, but there was no one by that name in the city.

  Thomas nodded, as if the disappearance from one’s life of someone to whom one had once been married were commonplace. The sunlight that was reflected from the water was unforgiving, showing every imperfection in his face, never perfect even in his youth. She didn’t want to think about her own face and struggled against the urge to put herself in shadow.

  —Have you ever been back? Thomas meant to Africa.

  —No. I would have liked to take my children there. But it was always so expensive, and somehow I never did.

  —It’s a dangerous country now.

  —We thought it was dangerous then.

  —It was dangerous then. But it’s worse now. I’m told tourists need armed guards.

  Inexplicably, it was warmer on the island, and, after they had landed, they had to take off their coats. Thomas removed his blazer, and she found herself studying his hexagonal shoulders in his white shirt. She was conscious of her blouse, of the weight of her breasts, that familiar heaviness. Lately, she’d occasionally had the sensation of milk letting down, and thought it must be hormones run amok.