Where or When (12 page)

He thinks this is true. There was a priest, he recalls, a tall, athletic fellow with thick black hair—Father Something; Father What?—who doubled as a swimming teacher. A number of lay counselors. Not a single nun.

“What was the priest's name?” he asks.

She thinks a minute. “Father Dunn?” she asks tentatively.

He smiles. “Thank you. You're right. They soft-pedaled the religion. Mercifully. And wisely too.”

“I remember the pool, but I didn't see it on my way in.”

“We can take a walk,” he says.

She shifts slightly, moving her shoulder away. As if she might not acquiesce to a walk.

“You don't look like a poet either,” he says. “Though I don't really know what a poet is supposed to look like.”

Her hand is on the banquette, resting there between them. He covers her hand with his own.

The room spins for a second, as if he were already drunk.

“Does this upset you?” he asks her quietly. She shakes her head but doesn't look at him.

They sit there for minutes. She seems unwilling to withdraw her hand; he is unable to remove his. He feels the warmth of her hand beneath his, though he is barely touching her. He sees the waiter across the room. He will kill the man if he comes to their table now.

When she speaks, her voice is so low he is not sure he has heard her correctly.

“When you wrote about holding my hand . . .”

He waits, poised for the conclusion of the sentence. He rubs the top of her hand lightly.

She leans slightly toward him, an infinitesimal, yet highly significant, millimeter closer. She looks down at his hand over hers. She slips her hand from his, but gives her face to him. Her eyes are clear, unclouded.

“I had a son,” she says quickly. “He was killed in a car accident when he was nine.”

“I'm sorry,” Charles says.

“His name was Brian. It was six years ago.”

She tells him these facts in a steady voice, as if she had planned to tell him, as if she could not proceed without his knowing. He feels then the full weight of all that each of them has lived through, all of the separate minutes she has had to experience, to endure. The time they have been away from each other has been a lifetime—a lifetime of other people, other loves, sexual love, children, work. She has had to bury a child. He can barely imagine that pain. They once knew each other for one week; they have not seen each other in three decades. The imbalance staggers him.

“I'm not hungry either,” he says quietly. “Why don't we get our coats and walk down to the lake. We can always eat later if we want to.”

She opens her mouth as if to speak, closes it. She seems to be trying to tell him something, but cannot. She touches the back of his hand on the banquette lightly, briefly, with her fingertips.

 

He places the coat over her shoulders. She wraps herself in it as if it were a cape. In the foyer, he finds the door to the back, the one leading down to the lake. When she steps outside, she pulls the coat around her more tightly. The breeze is stiffer here, the day still overcast and cold. They hear a windowpane rattling. The wind loosens her hair a bit, makes stray wisps at the sides.

He has his arm at her back, guiding her across a wide stone porch.

“Wait here a minute,” he says. “You'd probably rather have a thermos of hot coffee right now, but I brought something to celebrate our reunion.”

When he walks to the car, his legs feel loose, boneless. He's aware he's moving too quickly, but he does not want to leave her alone, even for a minute, as if, after so brief a reunion, she might disappear again. He has few conscious thoughts, no plans. In his ears there is a pounding, a kind of desperate beat. His fingers tremble as he unlocks the trunk. The glasses are plastic, bought in the deli. He minds now that he didn't think to bring champagne glasses.

When he returns, she is standing at the edge of the porch, leaning against a stone railing, looking down toward the lake. She has the collar of her coat up, her arms wrapped around her. Before her, there is a sloping lawn, then a thicket of trees. Beyond the trees, they can see the far edge of the lake, a thin silver oval.

“The path is here somewhere,” he says.

“Yes, I remember it.”

“Can you manage in those shoes?”

“I think so. I can give it a try anyway.”

She puts her hand on the railing, balances herself as she descends the stairs. She has a slight limp, and she explains: “My knee. From a skiing accident.”

(He adds then another image to his mental collage—she's in a ski outfit, her poles dug into the snow. But whom is she with? Her husband? A friend?)

He walks slightly behind her and to her right, the bottle in one hand, the glasses in the other.

“Do you think they mind us drinking our own champagne,” she asks over her shoulder, “walking all over their property?”

“This is America. We can do anything we want.”

She looks at him and smiles. They are on the lawn, and he is at her side. She seems brighter now, more relaxed, the sadness in the restaurant momentarily dissipated.

“Well, we know that's not true,” she says quickly. “I hope you're not going to tell me you're a Republican.”

“I knew you were going to ask me that. Is it important?”

“Yes, of course it's important.”

“Well, I've never voted, so I guess that lets me off the hook.”

“You've never voted?”

“And another thing you're going to hate.”

“What's that?”

“I drive a Cadillac.”

The backs of her heels are sinking into the lawn. When they reach the lake he will offer to clean them for her.

“So it was you in the parking lot,” she says.

He laughs. “You looked right at me. I couldn't believe you looked at me and walked so quickly away. I thought I'd scared you off.”

“Well, I didn't really look at you, and even if I'd known it was you, I can promise you there wasn't a chance on God's earth I was going to walk across that parking lot and introduce myself.”

“I thought you were the hostess.”

She seems taken aback. “The hostess?”

“You drove in so quickly, as if you were late for work. As if you knew the place.”

“I was just nervous.”

“Why?”

They reach the pathway in the woods, the one that will lead them down to what was the outdoor chapel by the lake.

“I was just about to call you
Cal
,” she says. “It's hard to think of you as Charles now. I had the tape on. Roy Orbison. ‘Crying.' A wonderful song.”

“He not only sang all those songs, but he also wrote most of them.”

“I don't know much about that music. But I do remember it.”

“I went to a concert of his once. In Providence. An incredible concert. Now, there was a man with a lot of pain in his life. He was riding motorcycles with his wife, and his wife was hit and killed instantly. And I think he lost at least one and possibly two sons in a fire.”

As soon as he has spoken, he realizes what he has said. She is in front of him, walking single file along the path, watching her feet so that she will not stumble.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “I'm sorry.”

She shrugs slightly as if to say it doesn't matter. They walk along the path in silence for perhaps a hundred yards. Overhead are tall pines, their tops swaying in the wind. Down below, on the path, it is quiet, with few sounds—the rustle of an animal in the bushes, a flock of geese he can hear flying and calling somewhere out of sight.

They emerge to a clearing of simple rough-hewn wooden benches on a carpet of pine needles. The clearing opens to the lake, an expansive view across gray rippling water. In the center of the clearing, at the edge of the lake, is the place where the cross—a wooden cross vaguely a man's height—used to be.

“I remember this,” she says beside him.

He steps ahead of her and walks to the bench closest to the lake. He sits down and looks out. He puts the two plastic glasses on the bench, works the top of the champagne bottle. She sits, her hands in the pockets of her coat, on the other side of the glasses. The cork pops, flies toward the lake. He catches the spill of champagne in a glass, hands it to her. He fills the other glass, takes a sip. He wants to make another toast, looks out at the water instead. The water seems to be moving, an optical illusion. He wants to say the word “destiny” but does not. He remembers their sitting there as children, can remember holding her hand as if it were yesterday—the deep, sexual thrill of that gesture.

“What I tried to tell you in the restaurant and couldn't,” she says, breaking the silence, “is that somehow a death keeps you together, even if you shouldn't be. . . .”

He waits.

She waves a hand outward. “To help remember, is what I think I'm trying to say.”

“That's the pain in your poetry?”

“Oh, I don't know,” she says. “That's a hard question to answer. And I'm not sure it's pain exactly.” She takes a long swallow of champagne. He raises the bottle to fill her glass again, and she lets him.

“What did you mean by ‘the shit'?” she asks. “You said in your letter you were trying to ‘transcend the shit.'”

“It's not important,” he says. “It's just financial stuff. I'm not in particularly good shape at the moment.”

“No one is these days.”

“I suppose that's true. I didn't like it when you went to England.”

“You're funny. You don't even know me.”

“I'm not so sure about that. I loved the postcard you sent.”

“You'd have loved the pub.”

“The forty kinds of malt whiskey. It was your birthday.”

“Yes.”

“So how old are you now? Forty-six?”

“Yes. When's yours?”

“New Year's Day.”

“So you're . . . ?”

“Forty-five now.”

“Then I'm older than you.”

“By two months. An older woman.”

“Did we know that then? I wonder. My sister named a goldfish after you. Cal.”

“And you think
I'm
funny.”

“I guess I talked about you incessantly when I got home from camp. When did you give up the name?”

“Sometime in high school, I think.”

She looks out at the water, as if at an apparition there. He looks to see what she is seeing.

“Charles, what happened to us that week?”

“I think it's simple,” he says. “We fell in love.”

“Is that possible, for two fourteen-year-olds to fall in love?”

“What do you think?”

She looks off to the side, into the woods beyond the clearing. “Where is it? Do you know?”

“I think it must be in there, where you're looking.”

“It's strange. For months afterward, possibly even longer, I thought that I would marry you.”

“I cried all the way home in the car,” he says. “My mother never let me forget it. It was a three-hour car ride. I told you what she said when I told her I'd given you the bracelet.”

“I wish I could have found it.”

“It probably disintegrated or turned green. I think I paid a dollar and a half for it at the camp store.”

“That was a lot then.”

He laughs. “I remember that summer I saved up twenty-four dollars from my paper route and bought a turntable and a bunch of forty-fives.”

“The songs you sent. They were from then?”

“Most of them. ‘Where or When' was from the summer we met. I played it endlessly.”

“The lyrics . . .,” she says. She takes a sip of champagne, swallows thoughtfully, as if pondering the words of the song.

“They're extraordinary,” he says. “Though what's more extraordinary is how I can possibly have understood them then. I suppose . . .” He looks out over the lake—a flat surface of sterling. “If I played it so often after I met you that summer, which is what I did, I had to have been envisioning a future reunion. In other words, I wasn't experiencing the song as it's meant to be experienced—a man remembering a former love—but rather I was the boy already imagining meeting you again after some time had elapsed. For instance, the line ‘The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore . . .' I'd have been thinking of finding you one day, and you'd be wearing the thin cotton dress that came just below your knees.”

“Or Bermuda shorts.”

“Or Bermuda shorts.”

“‘It seems we stood and talked like this before . . .'”

He looks at her, adds another line: “‘We looked at each other in the same way then . . .'”

“‘But I can't . . .'” She seems unable to finish.

“‘ . . . remember where or when,'” he says quietly.

He sits, one leg crossed at the knee, a glass in his hand. He wonders if these are the exact same benches they sat on when they were kids. He shakes his head. He knows he will never understand this. They are, simultaneously, the children they were then and the man and woman they are now. As the water itself, this ancient lake, is the same and yet not. As the trees overhead are the same and yet not. He has never been able fully to comprehend time, now knows it is infinitely more mysterious than he ever imagined.

“There's another line I like,” he says after a time. “It's in the original version, but not sung by Dion & The Belmonts. ‘Things you do come back to you, As though they knew the way.'”

A flock of geese flap noisily overhead. She bends forward suddenly, her face in her hands.

He puts his hand on her shoulder, tries to pull her up toward him, but she resists.

“What is it?” he asks.

His heart is tight, his chest in a vise.

He is going to lose her, he is thinking. After all these years of not even having her.

“Oh, God,” she cries.