Where or When (9 page)

And just at the point when he was poised to suggest the where and when of a meeting, she wrote that she was leaving for England. He was thrown into the unreasonable confusion of a teenage boy. It occurred to him when he got that letter that something was seriously wrong with him; it (again, the nebulous “it” they'd created—
he'd
created—only with words) was merely a fantasy, a figment of his imagination. How could he miss a woman he'd never even met? He'd met the child, the girl, but he couldn't say, in any lucid moment, that he knew the woman. And yet he remembers vividly the night he got her letter, how he walked outside into the backyard and looked up at the night sky with all its stars and imagined a jet taking her to England. And he wrote the next day that he missed her already. Surely that was madness.

But then there was the letter with the photograph, the one she found and sent to him before her plane was leaving. He'd been moved by the picture—it was one thing to remember himself as a child with her as a child; it was quite another actually to see the two of them together, with his arm around her, her eyes cast down, the two children clearly in the throes of some charged emotion—yet even more moved by the way in which she'd written about the photograph, by the very fact that she'd had to find the picture at all. Yes, it did mean that once they had been together, that she was, after all, just as he had imagined her. But didn't it also mean that she had needed to see some tangible proof as well?

From that he took encouragement and wrote her the longest letter, the one in which he told her he'd once fallen in love at first sight and that something similar may have happened when he saw her photograph three decades later; that he was looking for an “open connection”; that he wanted to hold her hand. And she wrote that she wanted him to stop. He had no choice then but to push blindly ahead, to ignore her request. He was, after all, a salesman. He had to be able to see her again.

Yet even so, he doesn't know if she will come today. It was risky to have arbitrarily set a day and time: What if she has a class? What if she's already arranged to be in the city with her publisher? He knows, however, that he has at least to try to meet her, to try to bring the “it” to fruition. He can no longer focus on his work; he hasn't been able to concentrate on his business for weeks now. He cannot somehow put aside the notion that meeting this woman is the single most important task he must accomplish, and he hopes (or is it that he fears?) that seeing her will somehow take the edge off—that Siân Richards in the flesh will dispel the fantasies he has created.

He emerges from the shower, and the tune and the words are still with him. He hums a bit, takes it to the end. The song is with him all the time now, sometimes as a repeated melody, sometimes as a code he cannot entirely crack. He knows he has sung it silently hundreds of times since September. After that afternoon at the beach, the afternoon when he first heard its echoes floating across thirty-one years, he sought it out, found it finally, as more phrases came back to him, on an old album in a secondhand-record store. The familiar rendition, he discovered, was by Dion & The Belmonts (he ought to have known that), but he is aware now that there have been many other versions, and he has unearthed some of them. The song is old, 1937, Rodgers and Hart. He remembers playing the 45 endlessly as a boy (that and its flip side, “That's My Desire”) during the era he met Siân Richards—the song hit the charts in the summer of 1960, the summer they met at camp. He is puzzled now, however, by how the boy he was can have interpreted the lyrics, can have understood them at all, apart from the sense of pure longing. They seem almost to require the mystery of loss and rediscovery—states of being he can't possibly have been familiar with at fourteen.

Beyond his humming he can hear activity in the house. Harriet will be up now, will be negotiating the children through their breakfast. He wonders, not for the first time in the past several weeks, how his wife can have failed to notice his distraction. He hasn't slept or eaten well in days. He wipes the mirror of condensation, peers at his reflection. He looks like shit. His eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep, the skin below them is wrinkled; he has bags under his eyes for the first time in his life. His hair is thinning, considerably more gray than brown now. He thinks of the tall boy with the crew cut in the photograph, the promise of that boy. Christ, couldn't this have happened to him when he was thirty-five, when he had all his hair and a flatter stomach? He looks more closely into the mirror, sees the beginning of a pimple under his cheekbone. That's all he needs. He shaves carefully, puts a Stridex tab on the incipient pimple. He brushes his teeth twice. He has planned to wear his gray suit, wonders now if that mightn't be too conservative. No, he'll stick with the gray suit, a white shirt, a dark tie. Keep it simple.

When he enters the kitchen, Harriet is at the counter, making school lunches; Hadley is thoughtfully working her way through an English muffin. She has a textbook open beside her. She is the only one of the three children who resembles him—wide brown eyes, prominent ears, straight teeth, slightly off center, light brown hair as his once was. He feels the guilt again, the seaweed. He pours himself a cup of coffee, sits across from Hadley. He asks her what she's reading; she looks up at him and answers, Geography, a test. Like him, Hadley has always been an early riser and even as a small child dressed herself and was down for breakfast before any of the others. He thinks of her, too, as the most responsible of the three, though that might simply be her age. He cannot say, however, that he loves her more than he loves the other two; he has never been able to compartmentalize his love like that, to feel more for one than for the others. His love for them is of a piece, and that is how he thinks of it—a vast, diffuse, protective warmth that surrounds and envelops all of them.

Harriet asks him from the counter what his day will be like, a question she asks him nearly every morning so as to determine better the shape of her own day, and he tells her, as he has rehearsed, that he will be away in Boston, two clients and a late lunch, and as he does so it seems to him that his voice thins out, that the sentences sound not only rehearsed but also blatantly untruthful. He watches for a sign that she has perceived the falsehood—a shift of her head, a tensing of her shoulders—but instead she deftly slices three sandwiches, packs them into plastic bags. He is aware of the heat in his face, and when he turns to Hadley he sees that she is staring at him. He smiles at her, takes a sip of coffee.

“I'm off, then,” he says. “Just get some papers.”

He pushes his chair into the table, bends over and kisses his daughter. Harriet does not turn around. Some years ago he gave up the custom of kissing his wife when he left the house. He cannot now remember what year it was, though he remembers well the morning he decided to forgo the ritual. He had passed through the kitchen and was standing at the door when he realized he could not possibly walk the seven or eight steps to his wife at the sink, could not experience again the reflexive and pursed pecking at the mouth, their bodies not touching, as if they were birds, or distant, strained siblings. And oddly, though he watched for some sign of unease on her part and was prepared to resume the custom if she pressed him, she seemed not to mind the lapse at all, nor even to notice that they no longer touched outside of the bedroom. He sometimes wonders guiltily what messages they are giving their children by never being demonstrative, but it seems to him a small, forgivable parental transgression that he lacks the will to do much about now.

He leaves the kitchen and walks into the office, the old front room, a room now swimming in papers, unopened boxes, and electronic equipment, a room too small to absorb the contents of the building he once called his office and has now irretrievably lost. He puts a sheaf of random papers into a briefcase, tucks his briefcase under his arm, walks again through the kitchen. He takes his topcoat from a clothes tree in the corner and watches as Harriet turns, gives a small wave with her hand. Have a good day, she says, and smiles, and he says back to her, You too. He does not look again at his daughter.

Outside, the day is gray and raw, not unusual for the first week of December, but disappointing to Charles, who has wanted sunshine, some bright omen. He has planned his route—west on 95, north on 7—and it should take him just under three hours. He'll be there before ten, but that's all right. He needs to see the place, walk around, gather his wits before she comes.

He puts a tape,
the
tape, into the tape deck. He's made a duplicate of the one he sent Siân. He has in his office dozens of rejects—tapes on which the sequence wasn't perfect, on which there were gaps that weren't acceptable, on which he'd put songs he decided wouldn't do after all. At first he was tickled by the project, then he became obsessed. He sequestered himself each evening in his study with his turntable and his tape player, listening to albums and 45s he'd found in old record stores, sifting through his own albums. He spent hours with his Sony in quiet bars, hunting down old tunes on jukeboxes. Astonishingly Harriet did not ask him once what he was doing in his study in the evenings (what can she possibly have thought of the music emanating from the room night after night?), though she has mentioned once or twice that she is concerned about his “stress level.”

Then he actually sent the tape, the small player, and the headphones. It was the most reckless gesture of all, one he regretted the minute he watched Harry Noonan behind the counter at the post office toss it into the Priority Mail bucket. He expected the box back unopened almost immediately, dreaded going to the post office each day and finding the little pink slip announcing that there was a package waiting for him. He was positive, too, that the picture he sent along with the package, the picture of him holding the fish, was going to backfire. It was a terrible picture, but it was the only one he could find that showed him alone—without one of his children or Harriet.

He listens to the first song on the tape, Dion's “A Teenager in Love.” He has tried, in the correspondence, for a tone of lightheartedness, and he sent the tape in the same vein, though he is certain—and he suspects this has been all too obvious to her as well—that his entire life hangs in the balance of her response. He
has
felt like a schoolboy, a teenager, with a teenager's innocence and longing.

He is confident, too, though he understands this less well, that she has been there all along, all through the years, a kind of subterranean rhythm or current. He knows this because he has always favored women who looked like Siân—tall, small-breasted, blondish (and it has often puzzled him that he married a woman so unlike this image)—and he knows Siân was the first, the antecedent. And her name, her strange Welsh name, has bubbled up into his consciousness over the years, often when he has least expected it. In college, he roomed for a year with a boy named Shane, and he frequently slipped and called him Sean, the spelling different but the pronunciation the same as hers. He remembers, also, a client he had seven or eight years ago, a Susan Wain, and how he twice addressed correspondence to her, Dear Siân, without the accent, somehow transposing letters subconsciously from the last name to the first, but again echoing the antecedent. He hadn't realized his mistake until the client pointed it out to him.

He knows as well that through the years he has been drawn to things Welsh, a subconscious draw, as if one were trying to find something lost in childhood—a piece of music, the shape of a room, the way the light once filtered through a certain window. He remembers reading Dylan Thomas and Chatwin's
On the Black Hill
not too long ago, and another book, Jan Morris's
The Matter of Wales,
and deciding that if he ever got to Europe he might begin with Wales and then make his way south to Portugal. (Though when he drives to the beach and looks out, he never imagines looking at Wales—it's too far
north,
he thinks.) He will have to ask her, but he thinks he has remembered this correctly, that she has a Welsh father and had an Irish mother, both first-generation immigrants after World War II, and though there was no lilt in her own voice as there was in her father's (he remembers the father's accent vividly from that phone call he made when he had returned home from college: the strange vowels, the crescendo and sudden swift fall in the rhythm of the sentences), it was evident, looking at her (particularly on that first day at camp and, more recently, even in the photograph in the newspaper), that she had Celtic origins. It is in the shape of the mouth possibly, or in the high forehead, or perhaps it is the eyes with their pale eyebrows.

The second song is on now: “Angel Baby,” Rosie & The Originals. He loves Rosie's nasal twang, is not sure they ever had another hit. Great slow beat on this one, though. For months after they left each other at camp, he and Siân corresponded. He wonders if she might still have those old letters—hers to him, he knows, were lost when his parents' basement was flooded and everything that had been stored there for him was destroyed. He doesn't now know why the correspondence ended; he suspects it began to seem more and more hopeless as the months wore on. He had thought and planned endlessly, he remembers, to find a way to see her again, and these adolescent schemes now seem comical and sad to him. However was a fourteen-year-old boy to make his way across three states to see his girlfriend? At that age, one was a prisoner of one's parents. He certainly had no car, did not even know anyone with a car except for people his parents' age, none of whom was likely to drive him to Springfield, Massachusetts, from Bristol, Rhode Island. If only he and Siân had met at sixteen, when seeing her again, seeing her continuously over the years, might have been possible.

He turns up the volume. He loves this one: “That's My Desire.” He waits each time for the falsetto at the end, sometimes tries to imitate it himself. He remembers as vividly as if it were yesterday the agony of that final and irrevocable separation, the anticipation of that separation all that last morning of camp and, indeed, even the entire day before. If one week at camp were the experiential equivalent of a lifetime together, then the last day and a half has to have taken on, in the savoring of each minute, the totality of years.