Where or When (19 page)

“I love you,” she says.

“I know.”

“But I feel bad.”

“Why?”

“I didn't bring you a present. There was nothing I could find that you could have taken home, that seemed to say what I want to say to you.”

He ponders this. “What might you have gotten me that would have said what you wanted to say that I couldn't have taken home?”

She smiles, thinks. “A lake, maybe.”

He laughs.

“Or a small country.”

“Possibly this hotel?” he suggests.

“Perfect,” she says. “Or a plane.”

“A plane?”

“Mmmm. And flying lessons.”

“I'd like a biplane. I've always wanted a biplane.”

“Or years,” she says.

“How many?”

“Thirty or so.”

“Past or future?”

“Both. How many years do you think we have left?”

His heart leaps. She
does
think of them together. “My grandfather lived to be ninety-six,” he says, “in full possession of all his faculties.
And
he drank Jack Daniel's and smoked half a pack a day.”

“I've got it,” she says, looking pleased with herself. “The ideal present. A videotape of us together here when we were kids. Of the whole week. What we sounded like. What we looked like.”

He tries to imagine what she sounded like as a fourteen-year-old, wishes he could, for a moment, hear her voice. “We know what we looked like. From the picture. Anyway, I don't need a present. I don't want a present. Your being here is enough.”

“It's not enough,” she says.

“No. You're right. It's not.”

She leans forward, folds her hands across her knee. “I wonder,” she says, “if we had all the time in the world, if we knew we could be together for the rest of our lives, would we not care anymore, would we grow bored with each other—or fight?” She laughs.

“I doubt it,” he says.

“We'll never know.”

“Don't say that. Please.”

“And I also wonder,” she says, “if we
had
been together all this time, what would we be feeling now? Would we be as happy as we are now? Would we even know what we had? Without having known the loss of it, I mean.”

“I'd like to think we'd know,” he says, “that we'd have known all along.”

“You probably wouldn't have liked me when I was younger,” she says. “You'd have thought me too stiff or too repressed or too serious or whatever. I was a virgin, technically, until I was twenty-two. And even then, I didn't really get it. I think my erotic life got lost or was buried somehow—possibly by the church. It's one of the reasons I won't send Lily, though Stephen's mother thinks I'm damning her.”

“I lost my virginity when I was nineteen,” he says. “It seemed late at the time.”

He looks away, unwilling to linger on the image of Siân losing her virginity—at any age. “No,” he says, turning back to her. “I'll tell you this: No matter when I'd met you in my lifetime, no matter when, I'd have left what I was doing or who I was with to be with you.”

A flicker of alarm passes briefly across her brow.

Though he has thought of little else, and he knows now that she has to have thought of this too, they have never actually mentioned leaving their respective homes to be together.

“You know we have to be together,” he says quietly.

She shakes her head. She says nothing.

“Siân.”

She turns her face away. “Not now,” she says. “Please.”

He takes a breath, exhales. “All right,” he says, “but you know we have to talk about this sometime.”

“I just want this one night to be a happy one,” she says. “Without complications. Or is that not possible?”

“I'm sorry,” he says, getting off the bed and walking to the chair where she is sitting. “It will be.”

He slides the robe gently off her shoulders so that it falls open and along her arms. He kneels, looks at her breasts. They are small and round. Below them there is the curve of her abdomen—from her babies. He bends forward, kisses her belly, then her left breast.

“Is this the one?” he asks.

“What one?”

“On the bench, that first day.”

She thinks a minute. “Yes, I suppose it is.” She gathers the robe across her chest, covering herself.

“They're small,” she says.

He looks at the crumple of fabric where she is holding it with her hand. “Well, look at it this way,” he says. “They'll never sag.”

She laughs. “Yes they will.”

“No they won't.”

He bends to her again.

“They're little,” he says, “but I know for a fact they like to be kissed.”

 

“Mr. Callahan.”

The maître d' nods at Charles, indicates that he should follow him to what has become, in the several weeks they have been visiting the inn, their table. The snow outside the windows is thinning out; the storm, it seems, is nearly over. Charles follows Siân across the long dining room, his hand lightly at her waist. She has worn her hair down; it falls in a loose fan along the back of her dress. Pearls circle her neck. Charles orders immediately, as he has planned, a bottle of champagne.

They sit side by side, and he takes her hand. Siân crosses her legs, touches a heavy silver spoon. He surveys the room. Only three other tables are occupied tonight; he suspects that the storm has kept most people away, though he has never eaten here in the evening. Instead of flowers in the center of the room, there is a Christmas tree—a small, simple tree with white lights. Boughs of spruce, interspersed with white candles, decorate the fireplace mantel.

“Pretty,” he says.

She nods. Her mood seems altered, shaded.

“What's wrong?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “Nothing's wrong.”

“You seem pensive.”

She smiles. “It
is
pretty. I'm sorry.”

The waiter brings the champagne, pops the cork, fills the glasses. Charles raises his to Siân.

“To presents we can't give each other,” he says.

“Yet,” she says.

She takes a sip, doesn't meet his eyes. She puts her glass down.

“What's it like?” she asks. “Your Christmas?”

He sighs. So that's why she is pensive. He studies her mouth, the long curve of her lower lip. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” he asks. “It might be better if we didn't.”

“No, I'm sure. I'd like to be able to picture what you're doing that evening, that day.”

He hesitates. He has a feeling that he has often: a sense that no matter how he answers this question, the answer will be the wrong one. “Are you writing?” he asks instead.

She turns her head slightly away. She seems surprised by the question. “Not much,” she says. “I write to you. I can't work well now. I'm too . . . preoccupied, I guess you would say.”

“I know the feeling.”

“You're trying to change the subject.”

“OK. OK. Here's what happens. My wife's parents and my parents and my wife's sister and her kids come over on Christmas Eve, and basically I hang out in the kitchen, cooking.”

“You have Christmas on Christmas Eve.”

“The adults do. We open our presents in the evening, after the children are in bed. The kids open theirs in the morning.”

“Oh. And do you go to church?”

“I don't. And Harriet doesn't . . .” A flicker of something crosses Siân's eyes. He wishes he hadn't mentioned his wife by name. “ . . . but my parents go to midnight mass, and maybe my daughter Hadley will go with them. I'm usually doing the dishes.”

She is silent next to him. He knows what she is picturing, what she is imagining, what she wants to ask and won't: Do he and his wife exchange presents? When do they do this: when others are present or when they are alone? He watches as she drains her glass, pushes it forward on the table as though to ask for another. Silently he fills her glass again. She raises it, nearly drains it at one go.

“Siân . . . ,” he says.

“Do you want to hear about my Christmas rituals? So you can picture what I'm doing?”

“Siân, don't,” he says.

“It's quite interesting. Really, Charles, you should let me tell you.”

There is a slightly manic note to her voice that he has never heard before. She drains her glass, nudges it forward yet again. “The champagne is delicious,” she says. “You have excellent taste. I feel like getting drunk tonight. Why not.”

Reluctantly he fills her glass again. “Why don't we order?” he suggests.

“In a minute,” she says. “I'm going to tell you about Christmas Eve on a Polish onion farm. You haven't lived until you've had Christmas on a Polish onion farm.”

“Siân, why are you doing this?”

“Actually, I used to like this ritual. I used to like rituals of any kind to break the silences. I used to like as many people in the house as possible. . . .”

“Let's talk about something else.”

“It's called Wigilia,” she says, “the Christmas Eve dinner. We have it at our place, all the relatives—well, all Stephen's side of the family. We visit my father the day after Christmas. I cook for days beforehand with Stephen's mother. I bet you can't picture that, can you, his mother and me in my kitchen, making pirogis. Well, I do. You can't imagine how good they are. You like to cook. You should learn how to make them. . . .”

“Siân.”

“I fill them with sauerkraut or potato or farmer's cheese and potato or prunes. The prune ones are especially delicious. . . .”

“We can go upstairs, come down later to eat if you want,” he says. Her face is flushed, her eyes too bright.

“And we never have meat. Only fish. We have pickled herring. Do you like pickled herring? And pike and carp. And borscht. And sometimes cabbage soup. And sauerkraut and sardines. And a kind of poppyseed bread. And figs and dates. And everybody eats as much as he can. And oh, I almost forgot: You have to leave a place for the unknown visitor. You know who the unknown visitor is, don't you?”

He looks out across the long dining room. The heavy white linen seems extraordinarily beautiful to him—comforting, weighed down by anchors of silver. When he turns to glance outside the long windows, he sees that the snow has finally stopped. Within the dining room, and without, there is an unearthly quiet, the quiet of a building surrounded by a new snow. And is it only his imagination, or is everyone in the room actually frozen, listening intently to Siân's voice, at once animated and brittle, as if it were a piece of crystal that might soon shatter?

“Well, it's for Jesus Christ. That's who.”

She puts her glass down on the table. She stands up slowly, with inordinate care, and slips through the small space between the banquette tables, as though each movement had been choreographed. She turns delicately without looking at him. He watches her walk the long distance through the dining room, her pace unhurried, her back straight. Her heels click rhythmically on the wooden floor. He follows her with his eyes until she rounds a corner and he can see her no more.

The champagne was a mistake. They have not eaten all day. He will give her a minute, then follow her back to the room. Perhaps she ought to have a short nap before they eat. He will suggest it, rub her back. The dining room must be open late; he'll speak to the maître d'. He knew it was risky territory; he tried to warn her off. And yet, he thinks, this had to happen. It's his own anger too. At what might have been and wasn't. Will he ever be able to listen to her talk about her life, or she his, without the hurt?

He looks up. A waiter is at his elbow.

“I'm sorry, sir,” the man says, “but I thought you'd like to know.”

“Know what?”

“Your friend appears to be ill.”

Charles stands up. “Where is she?”

“She's in the ladies' room, sir.”

He finds her kneeling in a stall, her feet splayed out behind her. A waitress, standing in the center of the room as if not wanting to approach any nearer, is the only other person present. Charles nods to the waitress, dismisses her. “I'll handle this,” he says.

Siân retches once into the basin, reaches up with her hand to flush the toilet. Charles moves in beside her, squats down with his back against the stall. Siân's face is white, with pearls of sweat on her forehead. He holds her hair back with one hand, puts the other to her forehead to brace her.

“It's all right,” he tells her. “Let it out. Let it go. Don't fight it.” It is what he tells his children when they are sick in the night.

“I can't do this,” she cries. “I can't do this.”

“It's OK, Siân. It's OK.”

“No, it's not OK. It's not OK at all. My daughter is at home without me. I have to lie all the time. We didn't have all those years, and now it's too late, we won't be able to have any time at all. We have families, and they need us.”

“We'll work it out,” he says quietly.

She retches again into the bowl, wipes her mouth. He flushes the toilet for her.

She sits back against a corner of the stall, her knees raised. She doesn't seem to care about her ungainly posture, her knees spread as if she had on jeans and were resting against a stone wall. He takes a handkerchief from his suit pocket, hands it to her. Her face is bathed in sweat, her hair curling along its edges in wet tendrils. In the fluorescent light, her face washed of color, she looks every bit of her forty-six years—a middle-aged woman, he would say now—and curiously, studying her, he can see all of her, all the women she has been or will be, from the young girl to the old woman. The clarity of the images frightens him, but he is aware only that he loves her, that he wants nothing more in life than to be allowed to take care of her.