The Last Time They Met (11 page)

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Authors: Anita Shreve

Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Romance, #Adult

BOOK: The Last Time They Met
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Maria had come easily, but Marcus (prophetically) with painful difficulty. By then they were living in a house in Belmont that challenged Vincent at every corner with its banal design and shoddy workmanship. (Vincent, the son of a contractor, was a man who knew improperly mitered trim when he saw it.) Linda wasn’t teaching, and Vincent had started an architectural practice of his own, sinking whatever money he made back into the business (as was right, she thought), leaving them little at home; and if they had any stressful times together, it was then, when babies and unpaid bills stole their good tempers. But mostly, she remembered those early years as good ones. Sitting in their small backyard in Belmont (the grill, the swing set, the plastic turtle pool), and watching Vincent plant tomatoes with the children, she would be filled with amazement that, against all the odds, this had been given to her, that she and Vincent had made this family. She could not imagine what would have become of her had she not, for she saw the alternative as only a long, throbbing headache from which there would have been little relief.
One morning, when Marcus was sleeping and Maria was at Montessori, Linda sat down at the kitchen table and wrote not a letter to herself, but a poem, another kind of letter. The poem was about windows and children and panes of glass and small muffled voices, and she found over the next few days that when she wrote and reworked the images and phrases, time passed differently, lurching ahead, so that she was often startled to look up at the clock and realize she was late to pick up Maria or that Marcus had slept too long. Her imagination began to hum, and even when she was not writing, she found herself jotting down metered lines and strange word pairings; and in general she was preoccupied. So much so that Vincent noticed and said so, and she, who for months had written in secret, got out her sheaf of papers and showed them to him. She was shredded with worry while he read them, for they revealed a side of Linda that Vincent was not familiar with and might not want to know (worse still, he might be curious about who had known this Linda, for some of the poems were about Thomas, even when they seemingly weren’t). But Vincent didn’t ask, and instead said he thought they were very fine; and he seemed genuinely impressed that his wife had secretly harbored this talent he’d known nothing about. All of which was a gift to her, for she wrote with redoubled energy, and not just when the children were away or asleep, but late into the night, pouring words onto paper and reshaping them into small objects one could hold in the mind. And Vincent never said,
Don’t write these words about another man
(or even later, about himself), thus freeing her from the most potent censorship there is, the fear of hurting others.
She joined a poetry workshop at night and was stupefied (and secretly heartened) by the dull and overly confessional work of those around her. Emboldened by this, she sent out her first contributions to small literary journals, all of which, in the early months, rejected her work (once misdirecting another’s letter to her, so that she was able to quip that they’d started rejecting poems she hadn’t even written). To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose to see not as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game. Until one afternoon she received a letter from an editor who liked a poem and said he would publish it. He couldn’t pay her anything, he added, but he hoped she would give him the honor of being the first to put that particular verse into print. Far from minding the lack of payment, Linda was too thrilled to speak; and when Vincent came home that night, she was still clutching the letter to her breast. Months later, when a poem was accepted by a magazine that did pay, Linda and Vincent celebrated by going out to dinner, Vincent noting that the magazine’s check covered the cocktails.
After that, the poems came like water, flooding the bedroom in which she wrote. It was as though she had been pent up, and years of poems had needed to pass through her. Her poetry was printed with some regularity (listing prior publications had a synergistic effect), and when Maria was twelve, her first editor, with whom she now warmly corresponded, wrote to say that he was moving to a publishing house in New York and would she consider allowing him to put out a volume of her verse?
—
You’ve done it,
Vincent said when she called him at work to tell him.
—
I think I’ve just begun,
she said.
All this she was remembering as she made her way down the hotel stairs. She opened the door off the stairwell (which reeked of cigarette smoke; chambermaids on their breaks?), not certain of the number of Thomas’s room. She thought it was on the seventh floor; had Thomas said 736? But she might be confusing that number with another, earlier, hotel room of her own. She could, she realized, simply go back to her room and call. No, that wouldn’t do. She wanted to see Thomas, to speak to him. She knocked at 736, a confident knock, though she braced herself for a baffled, half-dressed businessman appearing to tell a chambermaid that no, he didn’t need turn-down service. A tall woman in heels and pearls passed her in the hallway and wouldn’t meet her eyes: would Linda seem a woman who had been locked out of her room by an angry husband? Linda rapped again, but still there was no response. Fumbling in her purse, she found a tiny pad of paper and a space pen. These missives, she thought, as she wrote
—
such old habits, such echoes.
—
My son is an alcoholic,
she wrote.
And what is the antecedent for that?
Once again, she let herself be herded onto a bus and deposited at a restaurant
—
this time Japanese, the only food she didn’t care for, having never developed a taste for sushi or for vegetables coated with flour and grease. Still, eating out was better than sitting alone in her hotel room and having to resist the temptation to call either Marcus or Thomas, though she was intensely curious as to where each was exactly. Had Marcus gone to Brattleboro already? Had Thomas left for home? She wanted to ask Mary Ndegwa, with whom she ate dinner, if she knew what Thomas had done during his panel to so scandalize an audience she would have said was scandal-proof; but she worried that such a query might bring on a discussion of Thomas’s history, which she did not want to address just then. Mary Ndegwa and she, though they had never formally met, had a shared history and passed a nostalgic meal together, Linda enjoying the evocative rhythms of the poet’s Kikuyu accent even as they discussed her husband’s release from detention, the banning of her own work in Kenya, the horrendous aftermath of the elections of 1997, and the terrible bombing at the American embassy. Kenya was more dangerous as well, Mary Ndegwa told Linda, and though Linda chose to remember the shimmering green tea plantations of the Highlands and the white dhows of Lamu, she could as well recall the great-coated askaris with their pangas and the horrifying cardboard shanty towns of Nairobi.
You must return,
Mary Ndegwa said.
You have been lost for too long.
The African woman laughed suddenly, hiding the gap between her teeth with her hand. Mary Ndegwa, as always, found Americans mysteriously hilarious.
During dinner, Linda noted that Seizek kept his distance, which pleased her inordinately; and the Australian smiled in her direction twice, conspiracy having made them something more than just acquaintances. There was a moment, during the interminably long dinner (which hurt her knees, unused as she was to sitting cross-legged on the floor), when she mused that had she been available for a brief affair, she might have had one with the cowboyish novelist. But brief affairs had never appealed to her (so little investment, despite the momentary reward; and it was the investment that mattered, was it not?), and then she thought about the word
available
and pondered its meaning: Was she truly not available? And if not, to whom or what was she engaged? To the memory of Vincent? To her history with Thomas? To herself as sole proprietor of her own body?
The returning bus made several stops, and only she and an elderly Canadian biographer disembarked at the hotel, Linda slightly (and shamefully) uncomfortable with the association with greater age; and perhaps she emerged from the bus with a slightly jauntier step than was warranted.
He was sitting in a chair facing the entrance when she moved through the revolving door. He stood and they faced each other for an awkward second, a second during which they might easily have embraced. But having missed the moment, now could not. Behind them, the revolving door spun with couples dressed for a Saturday night.
—
I know this is highly inappropriate,
Thomas said.
But would you like a drink?
—
Yes,
she said simply.
I’d like that very much.
The mahogany was shiny, without fingerprints. Linda noted white linen cloths stacked high upon a shelf. The bartender was a pro, his movements long practiced, as fluid as a dancer’s. He made a sparkling martini that was like a package she did not want to ruin by opening. She’d thought, briefly, about ordering a scotch, for old times’ sake, but she knew that she could no longer stomach the smoky drink, and she marveled, as she sat there, at how, years ago, she’d drunk them down like orange juice. (All her own drinking seen now in perspective. . . .) Men, sitting at the bar, appraised her as she entered with Thomas; but then she wondered if their glances were, in fact, directed at her at all: might it not be Thomas who had caught their eye? (The men wouldn’t even know they’d looked, she thought, the need to look so ingrained.)
—
You’ve had a haircut,
she said to him with her own appraisal.
He rubbed the short gray bristles, unused to the feel of his own head.
—
It’s cute,
she said.
Even in high school you didn’t have a crew cut.
—
I thought you’d like me more,
he said.
—
You want me to like you more?
Daring to flirt a bit.
—
I do, as a matter of fact.
Together, as was expected, they clinked glasses.
—
Would you like to talk about your son?
—
In a while,
she said.
I need a minute. Of nothing.
Thomas, who would understand needing minutes of nothing, sat beside her on a stool. They exchanged glances in the mirror over the bar.
—
You’d think that after all this time, your aunt would forgive you,
Thomas said.
Isn’t that what the Catholic Church teaches? Forgiveness?
—
She goes to Mass. I don’t know that she necessarily forgives.
Her aunt spent her days in a cramped and darkened room the family had always called the den, sitting on a sofa upholstered in a scratchy plaid fabric. Two windows were draped with lace curtains; the TV was the centerpiece of the room. A bag of crocheting and a missal lay on the maple table beside the sofa. Linda was grateful for the daily excursions to Mass: at least her aunt had to leave the house and walk.
—
I mind because when I see her, I want to ask her how you are, and I can’t,
Thomas said.
Linda was silent.
—
So how are Michael and Tommy and Eileen and all the rest?
Thomas asked, having been denied information about herself. He picked at a small bowl of nuts. He would know her cousins mostly as names with faces attached, though he had played hockey with Michael and had been fond of Jack. But how to reduce six complicated lives, six different lifetimes filled with sorrow and success and shame into six sentences? She thought a minute and then counted off her fingers.
—
Michael lives in Marshfield with a woman who has two boys. They’ve had a tough time of it financially. Tommy, who didn’t go to college, bought Cisco when it was 17, and now he’s worth millions. He never married. Eileen is probably the happiest of the lot. Her husband is a lawyer in Andover. (That made her happy?
Thomas interjected.
) Vincent and I used to see quite a lot of her and her family,
Linda added.
She has three children, all through school now. Patty is a banker in New York. Never married, which galls my aunt. Erin is in California. She’s had problems with drugs. She’s spent some time in jail, actually.
Linda paused and watched Thomas’s face register his shock; he’d known Erin as only a pretty preteen in a pink dress.
I guess you haven’t heard about Jack, then,
she said quietly.
He turned his head to look at her. He who might always expect the worst now. Or perhaps he’d heard a catch in her voice.
—
He died . . .
She stopped, surprised by the threat of fresh tears.
Of leukemia, when he was forty. My aunt’s never gotten over it. He was her baby.
Linda picked up a bar napkin in case she needed it.
To think the youngest of us would be the first to go. He left a wife and two babies, twins.
Thomas shook his head.
I taught Jack to ice-skate,
he said, disbelieving.
—
I remember.
She blinked with other memories.
It was a terrible death. It sometimes makes me glad that Vincent went the way he did. So quick. He might not have known what happened to him.
She stopped, remembering Thomas’s prayers for Billie. She wiped her nose and sat up.
So there you have it.

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