Where or When (3 page)

At the end of the bridge, the road forks. To the north is a tight string of low-rent beachfront houses, a wall of thin shacks that stretches along the coast to a power plant at the end of a rocky beach. To the left is High Street, residential until the harbor and the village itself. Here the houses are more substantial—two-story, wooden-frame homes with peaked roofs, most of them year-round. The yards are small, postage-stamp, some bounded in the chain-link favored by the first-generation Portuguese and Irish, others bordered by the hedges and white picket fences preferred by their children and the newcomers.

Sometimes now, driving this road, Charles imagines that there has been a war or at least a skirmish—something to explain the bombed-out landscape, the physical and psychic eyesore of stalled construction, additions that will never be completed and that now lie covered with torn blue tarps, condo complexes aborted even before the windows got their glass. Where once there were weathered saltboxes surrounded by sea grass, now there are abandoned foundations, signs that say No Trespassing—ugly, half-built concrete objects that mar the blue of the ocean. He passes such a sculpture, with its rusted girders pointed toward the heavens, and thinks of Dick Lidell. Two years ago, Charles sold Lidell a policy for three million, and when the home office wanted to look at Lidell's tax return, Lidell had shown four million five in cash. The man could have retired. Instead the four million five went into the Tinkertoy with its orange girders up on the hill, and Lidell, Charles knows, is now renting someone else's two-bedroom condo.

The stories are legion. Charles passes his office, a modest white Cape with dark green shutters. In the front, hanging from a wrought-iron post, is his sign: Charles A. Callahan/Real Estate and Insurance. Each year Harriet tends the garden around the front porch of the office and hangs a basket of geraniums on the post with the sign. It was Harriet who found the old wicker rockers at a garage sale, rewove them, and painted them green to match the shutters. The rockers have been on the porch for three years now, though no one ever sits in them. He hates passing his office, hates thinking of having to go to it in the morning. The building will be the bank's within a matter of weeks. He will have to move his business into his home then, a move that doesn't bear thinking about.

He knows, of course, that it was greed: an unfamiliar sin of boyhood, a ubiquitous sin of middle age, or so it seems to him now. But nearly as bad, he believes—almost as damning, almost as venal—was his carelessness, his recklessness.

At the time, the idea seemed to Charles like a certainty: All he had to do, Turiello explained, was take the equity out of the office, then leverage that cash into a one-third share of a three-million-dollar loan on the proposed office-condo complex the other side of town. Turiello had been a good client; the idea had been too seductive to walk away from. The location was ideal—a commanding precipice on the coast road, visible for miles. If the plan had worked, if the real estate market hadn't crashed, Charles, like Lidell, could have retired, and Harriet and his children would have been set. But timing (and he now knows the precise truth of this bromide) is everything. Almost immediately the market had begun to collapse, and neither he nor Turiello nor the third partner, Turiello's brother Emil, could lease or sell any of the space. At last calculation, Charles was into the bank for a million, his commission flow had trickled to almost nothing, and he now has on his desk a stack of policy lapse notices nearly half a foot high. If the bank can't sell the office soon for a decent price, Charles knows he will almost certainly lose his house as well. Already the newly compounded mortgage is crushing; his savings are nearly depleted. When he wakes in the middle of the night, the sheet below him soaked with sweat, the question he ponders is this: Will he have to put his next mortgage payment on his MasterCard?

Sometimes in the middle of the night he allows himself to think he is particularly plagued by bad luck or timing—but he has only to make this drive, as he does each day, to know he is but one of many. He can catalog the names: John Blay, Emil Turiello, Dick Lidell, Pete French . . . the list is long. Each with bombed-out fantasies, chill sweats in the night. Each scrambling now just to keep his home.

Charles rounds the last bend just before the village. Here there are Federal houses, white or pale yellow with black shutters, fading square mansions with widow's walks and larger lawns. Ship captains once built these, Charles knows, and then later sold them to the owners of the mills. Now there is only one mill owner in residence; the rest are professional offices. Two stand empty. Out in front of several there are For Sale signs. Charles's name is on some of the signs.

As a summer place, the town has always been marginal, not a town that attracts the Volvos and the Range Rovers. It is and always has been a Rhode Island fishing town, mostly Portuguese and Irish, too working-class to have supported the massive summer places farther south and west or along the coast of Connecticut. For the most part, the town has remained undiscovered, not yuppified, and Charles is glad of this, though he thinks he shouldn't be.

He passes the bank at the end of the village—The Bank—the largest building in town, an imposing stone edifice with beautifully proportioned windows and two monstrous white columns that make it look deceptively solid. It is a singular institution, a family bank, not part of a chain, the only game in town. If Charles hates passing his office, he hates having to pass this building even more, loathes particularly the fact that lately the bank is almost always on his mind. From habit, he averts his eyes, studies a knitting shop across the street.

He takes the first right at the end of the village, brings the car to rest in the driveway of his house. A hundred and forty thousand on the clock. Christ, he wonders, can the old Cadillac make it another sixty?

Charles steps out of the car, looks at the incomplete addition at the side of his house, the foundation with no building, the addition that was to have been a new kitchen for Harriet, then later an office for himself, and will now stand empty, filling up with water in a rain, and he knows it is folly to imagine oneself as the repository for all the economic troubles, that somehow it all ends with oneself. For beyond him is Antone Costa, then Costa's three sons, one of them married already, two grandchildren in eventual need of college educations. And beyond them, who? Carol Kopka, a single mother with two kids, at the checkout counter down at the A&P, the last to have been hired before the troubles? Bill Samson at the Dodge dealership, who's running thirty percent behind this year in sales? Christ, even Tom Carney at his gas station? He wonders if there is anyone in town who has escaped unscathed.

Harriet, he sees at once, has already been on the mower. The front lawn has shot up in the cooler weather, but the back lawn is trim. He could put the office in the front, he knows, where they have now a living room they hardly ever use, favoring, as they do, the family room, off the kitchen. He has been thinking about this for weeks, has reached no conclusions. He likes his house, though it is too grandiose and impractical. The house is frigid in winter, and the plumbing is mystifying—yet it's an elegant building, even if its nineteenth-century lines have begun to sag. Harriet mows the lawn, keeps the exterior tidy and painted, and minds that Charles has not solved the riddle of the plumbing—his part in this particular unspoken marital bargain.

Harriet is in the kitchen, wrestling with a large white softball of dough in a mustard-colored bowl. She has on her Sunday clothes—a pink sweatsuit and sneakers—and Charles can see that she hasn't had her shower yet: Her short, nearly black hair is still matted at one side from sleep, and there are smudges of teal blue below her lower lids. She doesn't speak as he walks in. He could tell her that he ran into Joe Medeiros, that Medeiros is pulling out of a deal, and that this will mean another stall on the addition, thus eliciting, possibly, a glance of sympathy or, at the very least, a change of subject, but as he watches her kneading the dough angrily, he decides to forgo the solicitation. More than likely, the news will simply frighten her. He puts the doughnuts on the counter, the milk in the fridge. He asks, “Where are the kids?” and she answers, not looking at him, “Outside.”

He takes the newspaper into a small room off the porch that is a kind of sanctuary, a library if one were to be so formal, which he is not inclined to be. This, too, is a room that could be turned into an office, though it is a bit cramped, and he does not like having to think of giving up his retreat.

There are books in uneven stacks on the floor of the room, nearly covering the small Oriental Harriet gave him last year for Christmas. Across one of the books is a tie he wore a few days ago. A second pair of dress shoes is in a corner, and for some reason he cannot quite fathom, a pair of jeans is flung over a chair. It is another unspoken marital bargain that Harriet never enters this room, and as a consequence it is seldom cleaned, seldom tidied.

He drops the heavy Sunday paper on top of his desk, itself awash in inches of unopened mail, half-read magazines, and more books. Slipping the sweatshirt over his head, he tosses it in the direction of the chair with the jeans. On a bookshelf he has his turntable, and he puts on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, a piece he plays often, never tires of. It seems to him a hopeful concerto, nearly a symphony, appropriate somehow for a Sunday morning, even though the news this particular Sunday morning has not been especially hopeful. Outside, Hadley, his eldest daughter, is squealing as she takes the long, looping ride on the rope he hung for her from the tall walnut, a sail through the air that ends with a whomp in a large, forgiving pile of leaf mulch. Jack, his son, two years younger than Hadley's fourteen, is with her and is loudly demanding a turn for himself. Charles can see him through the small window of his study, squirming with impatience. He wonders briefly then where Anna, his five-year-old, is—not with them, for he would see or hear her. But he quickly dismisses the query; Harriet will know, will be watching her. For the moment he can relax.

He picks up his reading glasses from the desk, puts them on. Usually he begins with the magazine: a quick perusal of the cover story, a glance at the recipes, a longer look at the crossword to see if it's one he might tackle. This week the recipes are about blueberries—not interesting. He would study them if the dishes were Italian or Spanish or Indian. He is the cook in the family, though Harriet likes to bake, and his children often complain that what he concocts is inedible. The cover story is about the savings-and-loan scandal. He will look at that later. He picks up another thin magazine inside the paper, the weekly literary supplement.

He is thinking, as he turns the pages, of a book he has ordered at the bookstore and forgotten about; he must call to see if it is in yet. It's a volume by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur; it must definitely be in now: he ordered it—what?—in July, he is sure. Perhaps, he is thinking as he idly peruses the table of contents, the bookstore did call, and Harriet answered and has simply forgotten to mention it to him. And it is then, in the middle of this thought, that he turns the page and sees the photograph.

His hand stops. He looks at the photograph. He lays the paper flat.

He lets his breath out slowly. He looks at the picture, reads the print around it.

It is Siân Richards. Of course he knows by the name. Another woman might conceivably have this name as well, though he thinks that unlikely. More than the name, it is her photograph that makes him certain. It is, without question, the same face, the same expression in the eyes. He brings his hand up to his face, smooths his jawline with the back of his fingers. He puts his hand down on the desk, on the newspaper, and notices that it is trembling.

He studies the photograph. The woman in the picture is now forty-five, he knows, the same age as he is. Would he know this from the photograph? He cannot say for sure. Her hair is loose, wavy; he remembers it as a kind of pale bronze, particularly in the sunlight, with glints of fresh copper wire, though it seems from the black-and-white photograph that the highlights may have become muted over time. Her face is somewhat tilted, slightly turned, so that though she looks directly at the viewer, the sense is that her face is in profile. She is not smiling, but the gaze is steady—serious yet not sad. The suggestion from the eyes is that she is poised or waiting somehow, though he cannot imagine what precisely it is that she seems to be waiting for. She is wearing large gold earrings, simple circles, and what appears to be a black sweater or soft shirt with an open neckline, like that of a ballet dancer. The photograph stops just below her breasts. He remembers her mouth.

The mouth is generous; he has not forgotten that.

He reads the print again. She is a poet. She has a book.

He holds the newspaper up—looks across the desk at the picture. He remembers the high white forehead. He cannot escape the feeling that she is looking at him.

How many years has it been? The number staggers him. He remembers with absolute clarity the first time he ever saw her. He puts the paper down, again flat on the desk. He reads the smaller print about the book of poems. He notes the publisher's name. He hears then a sound, the soft brush of fabric on wood, and he looks up to see that Harriet is in the doorway. She stands, arms crossed over her chest, resting against the jamb, observing him. Her face is not angry, but it is closed. She seems about to speak, to ask a question.

He might lift up the literary supplement and show Harriet the picture. He might say to his wife, You'll never guess who this is. Instead he does something that surprises him, that makes a faint blush of heat rise from his neck to his face and lodge behind his ears. He leans forward over the desk, arms spread, elbows cocked. With his left forearm, he shields the picture of the woman in the newspaper.