After You've Gone (16 page)

“Oh no, don't worry. But you take care of your cold, now. I put the bottle of C pills right next to your bed.”

She came home very late, explaining at breakfast that there had been a party at the Taylors', who lived out of town. She had not wanted to wake Duncan with a phone call. She had driven O'Donahue back to the Hilton, where he was staying. The reading was good. He was nice. She thought she would
go downtown to do some shopping. Would probably not be back before Duncan's afternoon seminar.

And Duncan returned late that afternoon, after the seminar that included a sherry hour, to find her note. Gone off to Ocracoke Island, with Brennan O'Donahue.

The Village restaurant in which Duncan meets Emily for dinner is a comforting surprise, however; a most unfashionable homey old-bohemian decor, checkered tablecloths and multicolored candles in fat dark green wine bottles, a look dearly familiar to Duncan, who spent feckless youthful years in this neighborhood. Then he was a handsome young man, very easy with women—with a great deal to say about literature, he thought.

Emily, at least at first, seems determinedly nice. “It's wonderfully corny, don't you think?” she says of the restaurant. “But with our luck this look will come back and be madly fashionable. Oh dear, do you suppose it has, and we're the last to know?” And she laughs companionably. “I'm taking you to dinner,” she tells him. “We're celebrating a grant I just got.”

“You look splendid, my dear, you really do,” Duncan tells her gratefully as they are seated; he has never been taken to dinner by a woman before, and he rather enjoys the sensation. This is feminism? And it is true that Emily in early middle age, or wherever she is, has never looked better. A tall woman, she had put on a little weight, in her case very becoming (but can you say that to a woman?). Short curled gray hair, gray eyes, and very white teeth. She looks strong, and immensely healthy. “You look so—so very
fit
,” Duncan says to her. “Do you, er, jog, or something?”

Emily laughs again. “Well, I have, but I didn't like it much. Now I just walk a lot.”

“Well, I must say, I'm glad to hear that. I find runners such a grim group, they quite scare me,” Duncan confesses.

“Oh, me too, they never smile. But, dear Duncan, why are you smiling in that somewhat odd way?”

“I've lost a tooth.”

“Well, we all do,” Emily tells him. “But you don't have to twist your mouth that way. It's only a gap.”

Quite amiably then she talks about her work: painting, teaching, a summer workshop in Provincetown—until Duncan suspects that she is being consciously nice to him, that she is purposefully not mentioning Cath (whom he himself has determined not to talk about).

Well, if that is the case he surely does not mind; nice is perfectly okay with him, Duncan decides, and then he wonders,
Are
women after all really nicer than men are? (He does not voice this question, however, not just then wanting to hear Emily too strongly agree.)

But Emily does at last bring up the subject of Cath, though gently. “I am sorry about Cath,” she says. “That must be rough for you.”

“Well, yes, it is. But it's nice of you to say so.” Which it was.

“I'm sure your literary friends have been enormously comforting, though,” Emily in a changed tone goes on, her irony so heavy that Duncan is quite taken aback until he remembers just how much she disliked his “literary” friends, especially Jasper Wilkes, who was still a poet when Emily knew him.

Duncan can only be straightforward with her now. “You're right,” he says. “The friends I've talked to have succeeded in making me feel much worse. I had it coming, seems to be the general view.”

Emily smiles, her eyes bright. “Oh, you could say that to almost anyone, I think. It's even said to cancer patients. But it really doesn't seem to me that you've been any worse than most men are.”

Grasping at even this dubious compliment, Duncan smiles, and then he further complains, “You know, even well-deserved pain is painful.”

“Of course it is.”

Why did he ever leave Emily, who is as intelligent as she is kind—and attractive? But he did not leave Emily, Duncan then recalls; Emily left him, with sensible remarks about not being cut out for marriage, either of them. Which did not stop her from marrying an Indian painter a few years later, and a sculptor soon after that—nor did it stop Duncan from marrying Janice, and then Cath.

In any case, kind or not, right or wrong, Emily is far better to talk to than Jasper or Marcus. Duncan feels safe with Emily—which leads him to yet another confession. “I did one really dumb thing, though. At some point I told Cath that she should have an affair. Of course I spoke in jest, but can she have taken me seriously?”

Emily frowns. “Well, jesting or not, that's really worse than dumb. That's cruel. It's what men say to wives they want to get rid of.”

“Oh, but I surely didn't mean—” Crestfallen Duncan.

Fortunately just at that moment the food arrives, and it is after some silence between them that Emily asks, “You do know that she'll be back?”

“Oh no, no, of course I don't know that at all.” Duncan feels dizzy.

“Well, she will. She's basically very sensible, I think. She'll see that Brennan O'Donahue is no one to live with. Running off with poets is just something young women do. Or some of them do.”

“Oh? They do?”

“She'll come back, and if you want her to stick around you'd better be very kind. Just remember, a lot of women have been
really nice to you. Be understanding. Sensitive. You're good at that.”

He is? Entirely flustered, Duncan gulps at wine, hitherto untouched in his swirled dark blue glass. “I find it extremely hard to believe that you're right,” he tells Emily, “that she's coming back.”

“You just wait.” She gives a confident flash of her regular, somewhat large teeth, and then she frowns. “The real problem may be whether or not you really want her back.”

“Oh, that's more or less what Jasper said.”

Emily's frown becomes a scowl. “
That
expert. Well, probably you shouldn't listen to anyone, really. Just see what happens, and then see what you feel like doing about it. But I'll bet she does come back. And quite soon, I'd imagine.”

Once more picking up his key at the hotel desk, as he notes the absence of any phone message, nothing pink, Duncan's tremulous, wavering heart informs him that he has actually feared as much as he has been hoping for a message from Cath. He is so tired, so extraordinarily tired; he has neither the stamina for Cath's return nor for her continued absence. Which is worse? Oh, everything is worse!

In his room, in bed (so depressing, the great size of hotel beds, when you travel alone), feeling weakened rather than tipsy from the moderate amount of wine that he has drunk, nevertheless Duncan's imagination begins to wander quite wildly, and he thinks again of assaulting Ocracoke—oh, the whole bloody island, all those couples, the tall blond lovers, all racing around. As waves crash, as winds hurl sheets of sand, maybe even a hurricane.

Sleepless, disoriented, Duncan feels the sharp anguish of someone very young—of a young man whose beautiful wife has been stolen away. The forsaken merman.

He feels in fact as though he had been forsaken by everyone
—by Jasper and by Marcus, even by Emily, with her great superior health and all her hoards of female wisdom. By Cath especially of course, and by Brennan O'Donahue. By all the people on Ocracoke Island—that most beautiful, isolated and imperiled scrap of ground, the one place to which he can never, ever go, and for which Duncan's whole tormented landlocked soul now longs.

Some trick of lighting in this particular small, low-ceilinged auditorium makes the audience more visible than most audiences are, here in Boise—but is Boise in Idaho or Utah? The lecturer, a woman named Brendan Hallowell, decides that it must be Idaho; Salt Lake City, Utah, is where she was last night, when, lecturing, she could see no one at all out there. In any case, as she approaches the end of her talk, she can see faces, mostly women's, all quite rapt, and so—so surprised. She is not what they expected; she does not look like her photographs, does not sound like her published work, which is highly serious, slightly academic. But quite startlingly (especially to herself), now, this year she is widely popular, sought after. A success. On a lecture tour.

Coming to the end more quickly than anyone would have imagined—those sympathetic, slightly startled faces seem to expect more, possibly more than she can give them?—Brendan feels her hair begin to fall down from its knot, her hair
slipping down to her shoulders, so straight and slippery, such difficult hair. Red hair, quite unexpected from the black-and-white jacket photos, in which Brendan looks tall and composed, not a small, squarely built red-haired woman, now becoming a mess.

Years back, in her graduate student days, Brendan's hair was always a mess, and her small apartment, in Madison, Wisconsin, was messy too, quite hopeless, but intellectually she was never in disarray. At that time she began a series of scholarly studies of “creative women” (even then she herself winced slightly at the term), mostly somewhat offbeat; avoiding Virginia Woolf, she concentrated on Mrs. Gaskell, Emily Hale, Hepzibah Menuhin, and the almost unknown sisters of Jascha Heifetz. She continued in that vein with occasional articles after her doctorate, her various teaching jobs, her marriage; even married to punctilious, hyper-efficient Tom, for whom she made every effort at neatness, efficiency, Brendan continued to write her feminist but not strident, scholarly but not dry articles. And now her new book is a big success: a sort of collected works, a hotshot young editor's compendium of many of those articles, entitled (by the editor)
Sex and Creativity.

But still her hair falls down, and her new shoes hurt.

“—for the act of creation is, after all, an act of love.” Repeating her final sexual metaphor, her essential message, Brendan tries to remember the hotel room to which here in Boise, Idaho, she will eventually go, to which she will mercifully be released. A Hyatt? She thinks not; no, that was in Salt Lake, in Utah, and before that in Winnetka, Illinois, and Albany, New York. Brendan lives with Tom in Bethesda, Maryland, but sometimes she has trouble remembering that house, and even Tom shifts in and out of focus in her mind.

Tom was opposed to this trip, but he never quite said why.
Was he afraid that she would not enjoy it? So far this has certainly been true, as Tom, a lawyer and more experienced in these matters, would have known; still, that seems just slightly unlikely, as does a possible fear on his part that she might “meet” someone, Tom being neither markedly solicitous nor sexually insecure. The point is, she can't quite tell what he meant, or felt. They do not—ever, quite—communicate.

And now, as Brendan wades down into those faces, those bodies, and that applause, with a sudden clarity she does recall her room, here in Boise, so unlike other rooms, in other hotels, how could she have forgotten? It is oddly shaped, very high, with long windows, and Victorian as to decor: a spindle bed, a small, ornately carved bedside chair, white-ruffled vanity table.

“You mean so much—”

“—for years!”

“—enjoyed so much—”

“Good of you—”

Pushing at her hair, and longing for wine (is Boise dry, or is that Utah?), Brendan accepts it all, with her wide impersonator's smile: she is impersonating a successful woman, a woman whom everyone loves, who has something to say to people. Although she wishes, really, that someone would hand her a comb, or some hairpins; all hers seem to have fallen somewhere.

Or a glass of wine.

Or she really wishes that from out of this undistinguished, overeager crowd a dark man would emerge, a large man with a knowing look, a serious smile. They would talk for a while, discreetly, very likely finding friends in common (academic circles are like that, she knows; he could have also been at Wisconsin, have studied there, possibly in some related field).
They would drink some wine together, killing time until in an offhand way he would offer to take her back to her hotel, her funnily named hotel, with its old-fashioned wooden bar in the lobby. The hotel that she now remembers vividly, and longs for.

“Ms. Hallowell, can I get you a glass of wine?”

“Oh yes, thank you. I'd love one, so nice—” Nerves, as always, make Brendan talk too much. How nice it would be, she sometimes thinks, if at the end of a lecture she should conveniently lose her voice.

She watches as the girl goes off for wine.

Many of these women at the present lecture are extremely young, young girls, undergraduates, from the look of them, with pale, intense faces, unkempt hair, and saggy sweaters. And yet how appealing they look! And how enviable, with nothing much expected of them but work, those so easily come-by good grades. How Brendan envies them now, their happy companionableness among themselves, their passionate love affairs with sexually guilty (but sexy, very), intellectual young men.

“Do you mind if I ask, are you, uh, married, Ms. Hallowell?” The girl, who has brought back wine, has hair as red as Brendan's, but hers is curly, very short. She is blushing, asking this bold question.

“Oh yes, I mean, yes, I am married for quite a long time. Seven years, is that long?” Brendan laughs, to her own ears an odd, high sound. “My husband is a lawyer, in Washington.” As though that explained anything.

Emboldened, though blushing still, the girl further asks, “Children?”

“Oh no, I mean actually not. I somehow can't imagine, I mean, can you? Children?”

Brendan understands at least two things at that moment:
one, that she is not making sense; and, two, that it does not matter at all what she says at this point. Only her smiling is important, and the fact that she gets out words.