Where or When (11 page)

 

 

 

 

I
T IS ONE MINUTE PAST NOON
when the small black car—a Volkswagen Rabbit?—makes its way along the drive. The car executes what seems to be a practiced turn into the parking lot, comes to an abrupt stop. It is a VW, perhaps five years old. A woman is behind the wheel—a woman his age, and he has just the briefest sense of prettiness, in her profile, in her chin—and his heart leaps. But from her short, quick gestures as she emerges from the car, snaps the door to, and locks it, he thinks: Someone who works here, the hostess perhaps. He opens his own door, turns toward the VW, and stands, but the woman's face and body are a blur as she spins away from him. She wears a long black coat over what appears to be a suit, and she has on dark glasses despite the overcast day. He can see black high heels, a pocketbook slung over her shoulder. The hair may be the right color, though—a kind of dark blond with just a hint of red—and the woman wears it up, pinned back at the nape of her neck. It could conceivably be she, he thinks. He watches as she walks without much hesitation to the entrance of the inn. She disappears inside the building.

The heavy door opens to a long foyer tiled in black and white squares, in the center of which is a highly polished wooden staircase. He remembers the staircase now; it was on its wide steps each night that the entire camp, the children and the counselors, assembled for an event called “Stairway Sing” just before bedtime.

He opens large glass French doors to the left and to the right of the foyer and finds unoccupied sitting rooms. He then remembers that the dining room is at the top of the stairs; his memory is jogged when he hears sounds tinkling down the stairway. He climbs the stairs, his hand on the banister, a serious knot beginning in his stomach.

On the landing, he is aware of an abundance of brass and wood, thick white paint, massive bouquets of freesias and lilies, a rose Oriental at his feet. A small, thin man in a tuxedo offers to take his coat. As Charles turns obligingly, pulling his arm from the sleeve, he sees her standing by the maître d's desk. She is watching him speculatively, making no sign or gesture to commit herself. She has on a black suit with a white blouse, a silk blouse with soft folds along its deep neckline. He can see the bones of her clavicle, and a thin gold chain around her neck. She has on her sunglasses still, but he recognizes the gold earrings, simple circles, heavy gold circles at her earlobes.

“Siân?”

His voice cracks slightly on the name, as if he has not spoken in some time. He clears his throat.

She tilts her head.

“Charles?”

She takes the dark glasses off, allowing his scrutiny. Her eyes are nearly navy, with flecks of gold, and he remembers that now, the contrast, almost startling, of the dark eyes with the pale skin. There are wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and below them, but her forehead is unlined—high and white and unlined. He pauses at her mouth.

“I'd have worn the bracelet,” she says, “as a sign. But I ran out of time and couldn't find it.”

She smiles, her lips together, and tilts her head again, as if questioning him, or waiting. She is tall in her heels, nearly as tall as he is. He supposes she is five nine, five ten in stocking feet, the length of her, he can see at once, in her legs. The skirt she is wearing is simple and straight, falling slightly above the knee.

But her voice is new to him. As he knows his must be to her. In their voices they must be strangers. He wonders if his voice had already changed when he met her, or was changing that summer. Her voice is deeper than he expected. She speaks slowly.

“I didn't need the bracelet,” he says.

It seems she smiles again, glances in the direction of the maître d', who has been waiting behind Charles. Charles, feeling that he must gather himself together and take charge somehow, gives the man his name, says nonsmoking when he is asked, then wonders. He turns to her, but she shakes her head. He thinks of his mother, smoking in automobiles with the windows shut tight. He waits while she puts the dark glasses into her pocketbook, takes out another pair of glasses, clear glasses with thin wire frames. She removes them from their case and puts them on. He did not know she wore glasses, and he tries to remember if she had them when they were children. Thinks now that she may have, though she almost never wore them.

He follows her through the dining room, his breathing tight, his heart missing beats. Other diners look up at her when she passes, in the way that people notice a tall woman walking through a room. The maître d' leads them to a banquette against one wall. He pulls the table out, gestures for her to sit. Charles sits beside her, turning his body slightly in her direction. He lays his arm along the back cushion of the banquette. She seems uneasy with the side-by-side arrangement, crosses her legs. Her skirt rides up slightly on her thigh. He allows his eyes momentarily to fall on the span between her knee and the hemline of her skirt. Her stockings are sheer, with a dark tint. He orders a Stoli martini, bone dry, with a twist, and wishes he could inject it. She orders a glass of wine.

“The tape,” she says. “At first I didn't want it. I didn't want you to be sending me things. But last night I listened to it finally. It was . . .”

She stops, unable to find the word.

He waits, and when she doesn't finish the sentence, he says, “It was meant to be lighthearted. A joke. Kind of.”

He thinks it may have been partially intended as lighthearted, but he knows, and he knows she knows, its true intent was something larger and deeper.

“I hadn't heard any of those songs in years,” she says. “They . . .” She puts her fingers to the gold chain at her neck. “It was a kind of excavation. I felt it as that.” She looks down, as if she may already have said too much.

“This is very strange,” she says.

“It certainly is.”

“Can you remember it? What do you remember?”

“I remember some things,” he says. “Some things very vividly. Other parts are a blur now.”

A waiter arrives with the drinks. Charles picks up his glass, swirls the ice, takes a swallow. He watches as she brings her glass to her lips, pauses, then looks at him. She moves her glass in his direction.

“To . . . ?”

He does not hesitate. “Reunions,” he says.

“And time passing,” she adds, nearly as quickly.

He nods. He catches her eyes as they both simultaneously take sips of their drinks. When they are finished, he says, recklessly: “To the next thirty-one years.”

She seems startled. As if there were no reply to this.

She surveys the room. “I was surprised,” she says, “that the place is so unchanged. I thought somehow it would be different.”

He studies her profile, the same profile he saw briefly in the car. It has always intrigued him how much one can tell about a person with one quick glance at a profile—age mostly, also weight, sometimes ethnic background. Her profile is classic, but she is not a classic beauty, he thinks, and he suspects she probably never was, the forehead too high, the eyebrows too pale. Yet he is certain he has never seen a more arresting mouth. And he doesn't know if this is because it is a feature he has remembered all these years, the prototype by which he subconsciously judged others; would he find it so if he met her today for the first time? Her neck is long and white. Closer to her now, he can see that there are small discolorations, like freckles but not, on the backs of her hands and inside the neckline of her blouse. Her nails are cut short, unpainted. Like him, she wears a wedding ring.

He examines the dining room with her. To one side are floor-to-ceiling windows that, he knows from memory, give onto a sloping lawn leading down to the lake. The windows are arched at the top and let in a diffuse light that spreads across the room. The ceiling is high, vaulted, with fading cherubs depicted in blue-and-peach mosaics. He remembers now that there were jokes at dinner about the naked cherubs. When they were children, they ate at refectory tables—eight, ten, twelve to a table. The chairs scraped the floor. Now there are banquettes against the south wall, small dining tables covered with heavy damask linen, upholstered chairs in red-and-white-striped silk. There are white flowers in delicate vases on each of the tables.

“Do you suppose the food is any good?” she asks.

“It can't help but be an improvement over what we ate when we were here last.”

She smiles.

“It was actually kind of a classy camp, I think now,” he says. “As camps go.”

“Yes, it was,” she answers. “Though I don't suppose we knew enough then to appreciate the fact.”

“I don't think I noticed much of anything then,” he says, “apart from you.”

He lets his hand slip off the banquette cushion and rest on her shoulder, the shoulder closest to him, and as he does so he can feel her stiffen. The touch to him is momentous, charged, the first touch since he last saw her. Of course, she is a stranger to him, a woman he has known only minutes; and yet he is certain he has known the girl forever.

He removes his hand.

He wonders, briefly, if she might be reticent about physical love, and then he has, almost simultaneously, another thought, an unwelcome one, a way to measure out the time lost, the thirty-one years, the measurement being the sum total of all the sexual experiences she has had, all the boyfriends, all the nights with her husband. The realization buffets him, makes him slightly ill, so that when she speaks, he has to ask her to repeat the sentence.

“Tell me about your wife,” she says again. She reaches forward to the table, picks up her glass as if to take a sip.

He stalls, still awash in the confusion of his previous thought. He thinks about her question and then understands that it is for the hand on her shoulder. He drains the vodka, bites into the lemon peel. “She has short, dark hair,” he says. He hesitates; he feels lost. “She's a good person,” he says lamely.

“Do you love her?”

He pauses. He must get this right. He must not lie. He senses she will know a lie. He swirls the ice cubes and the lemon peel in his glass. “I love her more than I used to,” he says slowly and deliberately.

She brings the glass to her lips, as if pondering his reply. As he looks at her, the space between them becomes flooded with images: the two of them as children; the picture she sent him; the girl she might have been at seventeen; the woman she might have been at twenty-eight or thirty-five; herself in the embrace of another man—her husband? Her husband, about whom he knows almost nothing but who almost certainly has more hair than Charles does and probably (Charles winces inwardly) a flatter stomach. He imagines her lying on a bed with her hair undone. He sees her nursing an infant. The images elide and collide. He feels light-headed, signals the waiter for another vodka.

“Do you want another glass of wine?” he asks her, and she surprises him by finishing her drink and nodding.

“It's hard to take it all in, isn't it?” she says. She shakes her head slightly, as if she truly cannot digest the fact, as if, like him, she can barely believe she's been alive thirty-one years, let alone known someone that long. Though of course they haven't known each other, he thinks.

He looks out at the other diners in the restaurant: a table of businessmen, several tables of couples, mostly older couples. The waiter brings them menus, recites the specials of the day. Charles dutifully listens to the man, as does she, but for his part he cannot absorb a word. He won't be able to read the menu either—he's left his reading glasses in the car.

“Are you hungry?” he asks her when the waiter has left.

She shakes her head.

“You're right,” he says. “You don't look like your picture.”

She seems embarrassed. “I think they were trying to make me out to be more interesting and glamorous than I really am,” she says with a wave of her hand.

“That's not what I meant,” he says. “I meant you look more familiar to me now than you did in the picture. You look very familiar to me.”

She turns away from him toward the waiter across the room. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she says. “I've brought something. I found it in the trunk with the pictures.”

She bends down to retrieve her purse, a black leather pocketbook with a long strap, opens it, and removes a mimeographed newsletter, several pages stapled at one corner. She hands it to Charles.

“It was a kind of newspaper they gave us on the day we left. It has a brief history of what happened that week, and at the end there are all the addresses of the campers and the counselors.”

Charles riffles through the newsletter, looks again at its cover, at the hand-drawn cross with the words “The Ridge” above it, and the dates of their attendance below. He puts the newsletter on the banquette between them.

“I've left my reading glasses in the car,” he says.

“It's odd,” she says, “but I didn't recognize a single name there, except yours.”

Her eyelids are slightly hooded; a soft tint in her glasses takes the edge off the navy of her eyes, makes them appear almost charcoal. She wears little makeup, at least as far as he can tell, and there is just the faintest suggestion of a dark rose color on her lips. He knows he should ask about her husband, as she has asked about his wife. And there are facts he would like to know about her marriage, though not necessarily from her. He does not want to hear her speak of her husband—not today, not right now.

“You certainly don't look like the wife of a farmer,” he says lightly.

She laughs for the first time. “Well, you don't look like a salesman,” she says.

“What's a salesman look like?” he asks. He would like to ask her what she thinks of him—has he aged hopelessly? is she disappointed?—but, of course, he cannot.

She glances again at the newsletter with the cross. “I don't remember much religion from that week,” she says. “It's strange when you think about it. Except for the epiphany I wrote you about, and the services down by the water. Though they seem, at least in my memory, not very Catholic. Not very ornate. Having more to do with nature than with God.”