Where or When (20 page)

“You don't understand,” she says, her eyes rimmed red, her cheeks wet. She reaches up for toilet paper, blows her nose. “My husband gets up early and makes doughnuts on Christmas morning. He's giving me a leather-bound edition of my book. On Christmas morning, we drape a blanket across the entrance to the living room, so that Lily can't peek at her presents, and then we ceremoniously drop the blanket, and she squeals with delight. My daughter loves Polish food. Even I like the pirogis. Don't you see? We can't undo that.”

Her voice has reached a pitch he has never heard before. He watches as she leans her head back, sighs deeply.

“I'm finished,” she says. She closes her eyes. She looks worn, exhausted. “Families once took us away from each other, and now families are taking us away from each other again.”

“I'll help you,” he says.

She shakes her head. “You can't help me,” she says quietly. “Neither one of us can help the other, and that's the truth.”

He lifts her to her feet. He watches while she washes her face at the sink, towels it dry. She sloshes mouthfuls of water, spits them out. She runs her fingers through her hair, pulling the wet strands back.

“I need some fresh air,” she says.

“I know,” he says. “I'll get our coats.”

 

He returns from the room with their coats and scarves and her boots. She exchanges her shoes for her boots in the hallway.

“Wait here,” he says to her before they go outside. “I'll be right back.”

When he rejoins her in the hallway, he is carrying a broom.

“I got it from the kitchen,” he says.

“What's it for?”

“You'll see.”

Outside, the snow across the lawn is a vast cascade of white, unmarred by footsteps of any kind. He calculates, as they make their way down to the path, that the accumulation must be somewhere between four and six inches. A moon has risen and shines through the last patches of cloud. It will be a clear night and cold.

He takes her arm, helping her through the snow. Her boots are dress boots with heels, not meant for hiking. When they are halfway down the lawn, he turns to see the inn behind them. The facade is ablaze, the glow from inside making golden pools of light on the snow. In the darkness, it seems as if inside the inn there were a large party, a Christmas party, with many guests dressed in velvet and gold and black, holding champagne glasses, smiling under holly, their faces lit by candlelight. He has a fleeting sense of having left something important and warm behind.

Amidst the pines, the going is rougher, the light from the moon partially obscured. Beside him, Siân has begun to breathe more normally. He carries the broom over his shoulder like a rifle.

When they reach the clearing, they can just make out the shape of the benches in the snow. He walks with Siân to the one closest to the lake, the one they sat on a few weeks ago, brushes it off with the broom.

“That's what the broom was for?” she asks.

“No, not exactly,” he replies.

She sits on the bench, her hands in the pockets of her coat, her body drawn inward against the cold.

“I'm going to test the ice,” he says.

The snow on the lake is faintly blue from the moon. He is not sure exactly where the shoreline ends and the lake begins, but when he reaches the ice, the soles of his shoes slip against the hard surface. He is destroying his shoes, he knows, and his feet are frozen from the snow. He walks twenty-five feet out onto the surface of the lake, takes a test jump; the ice feels solid. He begins then to sweep. The snow, so new and light, blows effortlessly away like dust. When he has cleared a patch the size of a small bedroom, he slips across his newly created rink and walks to where Siân is sitting.

“We're going to walk on water,” he says, reaching for her hand.

“You're crazy,” she says.

“Well, we knew that.”

He holds her hand, then her whole arm when they reach the ice. She makes one small tentative movement onto the ice, leans into him for support. When he takes her weight, he is afraid for a moment that his footing will give and they might both go down, but his shoes hold and he steadies her. Together they slide forward, first one foot and then the other.

He lets go of her arm, but not her hand. They glide across the ice, she occasionally clutching him when she feels herself about to lose her balance. They are dark shapes on the lake; he can barely see her face.

“I'll always love you,” she says.

“I know,” he says.

A bird—an owl?—hoots at them from across the lake. But the snow, all around them, is a buffer, smothering the sounds of the outside world.

In the center of the small square he has made, he turns to her, then holds her arm out in the classic dance posture. They execute a few slippery steps, draw closer to each other for support.

“What are you listening to?” she asks.

“You won't believe this,” he says.

“I might.”

“The Brahms Second Piano Concerto. Do you know it?”

“I think so. Where are you?”

“I'm in the third movement. The quiet one. The one that begins with the cello.”

“Oh.”

“It's a concerto, but it's like a symphony,” he says. “I used to think it was the most beautiful piece of music I'd ever heard, and I'm not sure I don't still think that. Sometimes, when everyone is out of the house, I put it on full blast and just luxuriate in it. I believe it's the longest concerto ever written. Brahms himself was the soloist at its premiere. God, how I'd love to have heard that. I have a number of versions, but I'm partial to Cliburn with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although the Rudolf Serkin is absolutely—”

“Charles.”

She puts her gloved hands to his face.

“What?”

“Stop.”

“Stop?”

“You're as bad as I am with the Polish food.”

Her face is white, drained by the moon. She looks, despite her warm coat and scarf and gloves, naked to him, her face unmasked, her eyes, in the cool light, black and open. This is, he knows, one moment that they have, one moment in time, one pearl on a short string.

“If you're skating on thin ice,” he whispers into the frosty night, “you might as well dance.”

 

Around the curtains there is light. They are naked in the bed, she folded into him, like spoons. He is hard when he awakens, knows it instantly, knows too that this is not generic lust, that she was there in the dissipating dream: He sees her face in a fragment before it drifts away. He finds her breast, the small nipple, nearly always erect. Her belly, the softness there. She does not exercise, and, somehow, this appeals to him. He makes a light circular motion with his hand, and she awakens, turns onto her back. He knows he must look like a pterodactyl, his thinning hair in a sculpture all its own, but she smiles, embraces him, shifts slightly so that in one movement he is above her. He enters her immediately without needing to be guided in. She is slippery already, as though waiting for him in her dream.
Was
it a dream that produced this, he wonders, or is it left from an earlier time—how many hours ago?—in the night? He straddles her legs; he feels welded to her, and he can see her face. Her excitement is contagious, fuels his own, as his, he knows, triggers hers. He watches now as her mouth opens; he circles her tongue with his own. He smooths her hair from her forehead. He raises himself up, his weight on his hands. Her eyes dart from his face to his shoulder and back again. He watches as a flush of color begins at her throat, suffuses her face. They are locked in a deep, slow rhythm, the ebb and flow of waves. In time, studying her, he sees the slight arch of her neck that tells him she is close. He has wondered if it might be possible, but now it seems almost inevitable. He feels himself there, holds back, examines the tilt of her chin. In a few hours they will leave each other, sucked back into lives of lost meaning. There is only this now; this is everything. The frame of the world around them increases his urgency. He waits for her to close her eyes, as she almost always does near the end, but this time, she opens them immediately, astonishing him.

“I want to see you,” she whispers.

And saying that, she comes, and he is with her, and it is only seconds later that he hears again the mingled bewilderment and pleasure of their simultaneous cries.

 

 

 

 

It was brief, and yet it was a lifetime. I used to think it was something I would never have, that the era in which I was raised and the church I nearly wed had bred it out of me, or had leached it out. But you gave it to me, or I gave it to you, and now I cannot separate your body from your words, nor mine from my thoughts. I cannot separate what we did from who we were. Every image is erotic, or within the fold, etched in stone now, engraved blossoms.

 

In December, the black dirt held the warmth long after the other soil had frozen, as if, along with the light, the dirt had swallowed up the sun. Consequently, the early snows melted on the onion fields, like snow falling into the sea.

That December, I touched my daughter often. Stephen worked on machinery and taught at the school, and when we chanced upon each other, in the kitchen or in a hallway, he held himself away from me, in self-preservation. I believe now that he knew before I did that I was leaving him, that he felt it in the silences, in the unreachable distance, even as he denied it to himself, refused to imagine it.

We spoke sometimes and were careful with each other—unwilling yet to disturb the separate peace each of us had made.

The week before Christmas, I went into the attic, where I had found your picture, and brought out garlands and tinsel, colored lights and a star. The ornaments were heavy, the garlands weighted, and it was an effort to raise my arms to the tree. Lily asked me often what it was I was looking at, and I answered her that I wasn't looking, I was thinking.

I was thinking about equations: Is one hour spent doing X equal to thirty-one years of doing Y?

On Christmas morning, my husband left the bed early. I waited until I could smell the fried dough and the coffee, and I went down to join him. He was wearing an ocher flannel shirt, and I was thinking: Are you wearing a similar shirt, one that I have never seen, may never see at all? Are you with your wife, your children? Do you hold your wife in the bed when you sleep? Do your children join you in the bed on Christmas morning, making a sandwich of bodies, as Stephen and I sometimes did with Lily and had done with Brian when Brian was with us?

It wasn't possible, of course, ever to forget Brian, or that he should have been there with us. Christmas was the worst, though I don't know how I can say that. Every day was the worst; the pain was not dulled by time, not filled up, not muted. He had died in a friend's car on the way home from a soccer game at school, died when the car in which he was traveling was hit by a metallic-blue Corvette that had run the light. In the few seconds just before the intersection, the last few seconds of his life, Brian, for reasons that will never be known to us, had unfastened his seat belt. For days, for weeks, for months afterward, I replayed that scene in my head, willing time to stop, so that I could crawl into that car, into the back seat, and refasten the seat belt for my son.

Stephen finished frying the doughnuts. In his flannel shirt, he made an effort to be festive. Lily came, with a bright anticipatory smile. With a flourish, Stephen let down the curtain, and Lily ran to the tree.

We ate the doughnuts as Lily opened up her stocking and her presents. Stephen and I made a show for each other, each pretending to be happy. I opened the leather book: It was beautiful, and I said so. I had given Stephen an easel and a set of costly oil paints, and I saw at once the confusion behind his smile: How could he take up again this hobby while he was under siege?

We were sitting in the living room, awash with colored paper, toys underfoot. Stephen made a fire, brought us more coffee. I was thinking that in each house on the street, in all the pastel houses, there were children and colored paper, and women and men who might or might not love each other, who might or might not have indelible connections of their own. And it was then that I remembered another present for Lily, one I had hidden away. It was a sweater, a rose-colored sweater that she could wear through the winter.

I laughed. I've forgotten a present, I said.

Stephen said, You do this every year.

I said, I hide them so well I sometimes forget about them. I'll just get it now.

Stephen was standing. No, I'll get it, he said. I'm already up.

I looked at him against the window, the overbright light from the snow outside causing him to be in silhouette.

Yes, OK, I said. It's in the dresser in my closet, the third drawer down.

I sat back, took a sip of coffee. Lily had on her lap a jewelry box with a secret compartment that intrigued her. The hot coals from the fireplace filled the room with warmth.