16

The night before Emma leaves, Sophie – in plaid boxers and a T-shirt – arranges figs and crackers and cheese on a small plate. Uncle Leo and Joe watch a ball game on television in the front room and the sound of it – the crack of the bat, the crowd – travels to the kitchen in modulated bursts. Sophie nibbles on a fig and then she says, quietly, “What do you think will happen with Uncle Leo?”

Emma shakes her head. “Others who did less have gone to prison.”

“How can they put an angel like him in prison?”

“He broke the law.” A glass of wine nearby, she folds clean dishtowels, thinking to create order that she secretly hopes will be maintained in her absence. In Latin, Tiff says, the word for hearth is focus. Will she lose her focus? She has cleaned out the refrigerator, paid bills, vacuumed, and changed the sheets. Still, no task has ameliorated her central question: How can I go? Should I? Even now, the night before she sets off on her hero’s journey, she resists it.

“Do you think Uncle Leo shouldn’t’ve?”

“Definitely not. I admire him.”

“Have you ever?”

“I went to a few anti-war events. But no, I’ve never gone that far. Not even close.” 

And Emma thinks, This is good. She’s stepping outside herself.

“Chanti would’ve done what Uncle Leo does.” And then, “I see him sometimes. Do you?”

Emma says, “Yes. I do. I half-expect him and then I see him.” It feels like a potentially downward spiral they would have to ply together. A late night might be required; liquor might be necessary.  And that would be fine with Emma if she would be allowed the comfort of Sophie confiding in her.

But no. Sophie gets up and brushes the fig stems from her plate into the trash. She says, “Sleep tight, Ems.”

 

Later still, Emma gets into bed with Joe; she curls toward him. He opens his arm and she tucks under, her cheek on his chest. She thinks of a word her mother would use: spooning. She wants to spoon. But they are out of practice. A wooden feeling comes between them.

“I’m relieved,” Joe confesses. “Not to be going.”

 “When did you know?”

“Does that matter?”

“It might to me.” 

“Traveling like that feels useless to me.”

Something is dissolving. Teaching third grade is mostly about the creation of forms, the organization of self with language, and if you’re lucky, dissolution comes later in life, much later. Emma tries not to think about it; at an elementary school an excess of optimism is called for. She says, “You didn’t used to be this way.”

“I think I was. It’s just that when we –.” Joe clears his throat.  He sounds on the verge of irritation.

So much is not articulated that last night. What do we know?  All the multifarious bits and surfaces, confessions and nightmares spoken aloud in the pocket before dawn, all the walks taken and gifts given, all the tenderness at night, all bossiness, misunderstandings, all the tentative wondering about where we might have been if not here, twenty-seven years, twenty-seven Christmases, twenty-seven summers – after all that, what do we know?

We are blood relatives. We have children.

He says, “I don’t know what I want.”

This is news to Emma: she always thinks Joe wants the same old, same old. But she doesn’t slow down, doesn’t even ask him what he means. Later, she will wonder why. Basie hops upon the bed and scootches against Emma’s back. She says, “I’m sad.”

“You’ll be fine. You’re going to love this. Without me.  I would not be a plus-feature.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I have to say it.”

The skeleton of abandonment – her parents breaking up – rattles alive in Emma’s closet of hurt. The timer buzzes on the clothes dryer. A door shuts: Sophie must be having trouble sleeping. Would there be one last chance with Sophie, if she were to get up, make a hot drink, and sit at the kitchen table in a pool of dim lamplight? Would Sophie stop being frosty?

Joe wraps Emma in his arms.

She feels a heat that begins in her face and spreads like an allergic reaction. Joe strokes her back. Peggy Lee hops up on the bed, and the feeling of the bedding, cat fur, too many bodies so close: it’s suffocating and Emma pulls away. It might be that she needs the space to fall asleep. It might be nothing personal: she wants it to seem that way. Goddesses skirmish over Emma: Hera and Demeter whisper stay in her ear; Aphrodite craves intensity, the danger of sex when she should know better; late-blooming Artemis calls her to a circle of sisters, but Emma is deaf to that. 

 

 

 

17

The next day at O’Hare, Joe wrestles Emma’s luggage. Damon Ray Dillon ought to be done watering by now.  It’s good to think of Damon Ray, his reliability.

The sky’s hazy, pollutant-ripe. His nose drips from whatever’s in the air, and he can’t quite manage to reach the soft white handkerchief he jammed into his rear pocket earlier, at home. They are surrounded by baby strollers, plaid and pink and denim, huge self-contained bivouacs for single infants, equipped for all predictable eventualities. What was it Damon Ray told him that Johnny Depp had said about babies? “It’s like caring for a very small drunk. They vomit and fall down a lot.” Each human being he sees – all girls with pierced tongues and boys in sports jerseys and slim, black-clad young people with concave chests and headphones grafted to their ears and women in their mid-years trying too hard, in leopard-skin prints and Lycra, and the injured or ill in wheelchairs and the blind with their ever-vigilant dogs and work-week weary suits with dollar signs for eyes and ancients, seniors, like him, all travelers, all stay-at-homes, all bad blood, all hard-working, all congenial and hot-tempered, all glamorous and plain, all races, all human mortals, all – had to be cared for in order to survive, and not simply for a few days or a month, but for years. He can’t get over how many survive.

Inside O’Hare, public art catches his eye. A ten-foot column of metal, brass or faux brass, with a pinkish marble sphere the size of a bowling ball about to roll off the column. The marble sphere – world, globe, let’s be honest here, it represents the world about to roll willy-nilly into the abyss and why would anyone choose anxiety-provoking art for an airport – that sphere at the edge of the column is about the potential for permanent separations, about irrevocability.

He stands patiently in line with Emma so that she can check one bag. He waits until the very last minute to hand over her carry-on. He says, “Got everything now, sweets?” And in the hustle, the heartbeat of the airport, the echo of the husky voice over the public address system, the slapping of bags upon the security conveyor, Joe neglects to kiss Emma goodbye. Before he knows it, she is beyond his reach, slipping off her Munro flats and stepping under the metal detector. She makes it through security, scoots aside, and turns around to make bright-eyed contact with him, grinning. She settles her blue beret at a slant. And he blows a kiss. She walks a little ways, turns around again, waves. In the Skylark, tears in her eyes, the last thing she had said to him was: “Joe. I don’t want to drift away from you.”

 

 

18

That drifting: you know when you’ve lost that loving feeling. Still, it can come as a surprise. And then you’re alone again. Like Professor Lamb. My friend who teaches American Lit. We belong to the same club – IAA.  I’m Alone Again. Benny is a provisional member. Benny will be fifty soon. He wishes he had settled in a place with pastel buildings, art deco trim. Somewhere in California, maybe Pasadena. He wishes he had taken up a more portable art. He wishes he could play the saxophone. He wishes there were more attractive women his age who were interested in men his age. He wishes Angelica Huston made more movies. He wishes he had flatter abs. He wishes he hadn’t gone bald or that, if it were inevitable, he wishes he had the money for transplants. He wishes he had taken up sports as a boy. He wishes he had not gone to confession in his teens and delivered up to the priest all the gory details of his fragile sex life. He wishes he hadn’t fallen in love with our cousin Leslie when he was fourteen; they had sex one experimental beery night and Benny’s adolescence was marred by that love. He wishes he had the nerve and determination to confront our parents about their inconsistencies and minor cruelty when we were children. He wants an apology. He wishes he had children of his own. Benny and Emma have this in common: in spite of generally sunny dispositions, they daily add complaints to their restless litanies.

Sometimes Benny reminisces about the fiery comedic actress. Her gravelly voice, her kindness, her laugh. He misses her laugh around the studio. “Did you know,” Benny says, “that your chance of divorce drops to two percent if you manage to stay together fourteen years?”  I don’t remind him that they were never married. “I heard it at the gym on Dr. Phil,” he says.

I am poised to re-marry my first husband, business manager for his father’s galleries in Saugatuck and Harbor Springs. Some wise man once wrote that when people divorce and re-marry each other, they are enamored of the story of marriage rather than the messy relationship they actually have. Soul mates, etc. When Benny says, “Why do you feel a need to marry him?” I say, “He blesses me when I sneeze.”  Benny shoots me that look: he won’t let me weasel out of it. But I digress. 

 

 

 

 19

From the seat behind Emma, a man says, “I’m might be sick of Ireland already.” Hoping to forestall his grievances (Emma recognizes her tone), his companion (his wife?) says, “The crossing was rough.”

The pilot in his radio-smooth brogue reassured them, yet Emma found herself gripping the armrest, and she wished that she had been able to grab Joe’s hand. She felt lonely in the turbulence. In spite of all they have been through, she had hoped for cuddling and possibly sex with Joe on the trip. And the sweetness after. It has been eight months since he reached for her near midnight. She came with his tongue in just the right spot and it was fun and loving and whispery. She returned the favor. Her orgasms are not as seismic as they once were, but still, it’s a tonic – she feels healthy and years younger afterwards. Her cheeks rosy. When was the last time he kissed her mouth? And he might have last night. If she hadn’t pulled away. They might’ve had goodbye sex. Hope springs eternal – that’s what Tiff would say, dryly.

They’re stuck in Dublin on the tarmac, waiting for a gate. There is the foul odor of the toilets to contend with. An Irish song –“The Town I Loved So Well” – crackles from the plane’s loudspeakers. Emma pops a breath strip, a greenish paper-thin rectangle, into her mouth.

The last time she made her way to the restroom she looked gaunt, her complexion sallow; still she had allowed herself satisfaction that the trip had begun, a dreamy leap ahead to a shower, or bath. To Danny’s flat. Emma thinks of Danny’s mother in school bus yellow rubber boots; she thinks of his father in country-tweeds at a parent-teacher conference, his elbow on her desk, saying, “Danny’s the best boy, don’t you think?” Will Danny’s liveliness be contagious?

Her third graders had been lively at the end-of-year outing to Wrigley Field (where they watched the Cubs lose 5-1 to the Mets, and the high point, for the children, was singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”). Another day, they had spread a picnic on the grass outside the zoo, and her children demonstrated cartwheels – mesmerizing whirl of color and huffing and puffing – and it would have been a perfect June day with her students if not for what they’ve been through. Since her birthday she has not mentioned quitting teaching; the children have been a distraction.

Since. They rarely say since Chanti died. Instead they say, Since. Since that night. Since this. The word this was code for the crush of daily waking up to it, crying in corners of the house, the failure of language to come to their aid. And for Emma, the constant worry about Sophie. And the kite-tail of that, confusion about where she ought to be. 

She wants Danny to rescue her.

A joke or two, the banter of a young couple in the morning. It isn’t much to ask for, is it? She misses the banter of Chanti and Sophie, the trickle of tango throughout the house. Ordinary trees flatline in the distance, below the industrial haze of Dublin.  She grieves, For this I left Sophie?

The big-bellied plane swings into its gate. The seat-belt light dings and with a collective sigh people are up and chattering and hauling luggage from the overhead bins. One flight steward says to another, “I could use a pint, but my Mum’s waiting. A pint before noon’s the last thing she’d go for.”

The Dublin airport has the porous feel of airports in the U.S. mid-20^th century. Emma moves with authority; she doesn’t have to cooperate or explain things to Joe. She bought a phone card and changed a little money at O’Hare and she has enough to ride the bus into the city. Juggling the bags, finding the Blue Express Bus – everything works out the way she imagined it would. Recently Joe griped, “How did we manage when we were young? And why? Why was it so important to us?” He meant, Why did we teach abroad? Why did we make life hard? And she said, “If you hadn’t been teaching in Switzerland, we’d have never met.”

Joe was supposed to say, “We’d have met somehow,” or “That’s the reason we went to Switzerland.” Or some such affirmation.

But matter-of-factly Joe said, “No, we wouldn’t have.” As if that would have been no big deal.

Dublin trundles by; pubs with their bright red facades, butcher shops, cricket fields, and dive-y fish and chips storefronts. But she has little attention for it. To hear Sophie’s voice – that’s all she wants.  

She gets off the bus, and it’s chilly out, windy morning. At the curb, when the driver has hauled her bags from the luggage compartment, Emma tips him and begins the trudge two blocks east on Talbott, a street reminiscent of home, with hole-in-the-wall music stores painted matte black inside and groceries with smudged windows. She goes into a newsstand to buy cigarettes, a half-pack of Silk Cuts Mild, chic in size, a slim white box with purple trim, able to fit into a pocket or evening bag. She wants her cigarette.

At Danny’s, flowers spill from a lattice-work basket hanging from a shepherd’s hook in the little patch-of-grass yard. Next door is a youth hostel. A sandwich board on the sidewalk announces the Irish breakfast. Young people lounge about on the steps, seeming a little the worse for wear, unkempt. The boys have scruffy beards; the girls’ toenails are painted blue or black. They could be the children of the men and women Emma traveled with around the Caribbean in her early twenties.

The young women bring to mind the affairs she had then. In the Caribbean, in Mexico. Pre-AIDS days. Before the teaching job in Locarno. How she and a boy would go on road trips or mail boat trips to visit friends and upon arriving they would throw down their sleeping bags and tell their friends, “We need to go to bed a while,” and they would close the door and fuck. No questions asked. No alibis. Everyone understood. This is a memory she would have squelched if Joe had been beside her. Later they would rise and clean up and wander out to the living room in their shorts and T-shirts and there would be joints to smoke and reggae and rum. It had felt carefree and not particularly illicit. Now she thinks: it’s a miracle I didn’t catch anything. Marrying was the farthest thing from their minds. They sought a defiant sensorial field – what GG would have skinned her alive for if she’d known.

Emma rings the bell. Danny’s name is printed in calligraphy on the water-stained label above the bell. Katie Dunmoor is also there: his girlfriend. Someone peeks out the window, cuffing back the lace curtain. A young dark-haired woman opens up, wearing a beaded choker and a velvet blazer over a slinky georgette skirt and leather sandals that are too rough, too sporty, for the outfit. Frosty blue smears her eyelids.

“Mrs. March, it is, isn’t it?”

“Katie?”

Katie glares over one shoulder. “Aye, I’m Katie.” 

“Is Danny home?”

“Danny’s not here, Mrs. March –“

“Not here?” Emma whispers, as if she might be able to keep the news at bay.  “You were expecting me, weren’t you?”

“Aye, we were. We were.” Katie steps out onto the porch, which is more of a landing, crowded. 

A whistling man walks by, led by a St. Bernard on a leash. At the corner pub, men roll kegs of stout down a gangplank and into a cellar. Katie leans toward Emma, confidentially. The sun in the sky beams coolly; they are farther north than Chicago. She doesn’t like Katie; she’s not sure why.

“I’m not gonna feed you a spoonful, Mrs. March. Danny’s not the man you thought he was. He’s kited off. With another girl.”

Ah, Katie, bearer of bad tidings. She says, and she wants to sound sincere, wants to be sincere, “Katie, I’m sorry.”

“No one’s sorrier than me. But he made arrangements. You’re to go out to his mother’s in Glendalough. He’ll come visit you there. He sees his mother quite a bit, he does. Every blade of grass and bit of gorse out there is precious to her. It’s the mountains, the Wicklows, and you’ll find it smashin’. More than smelly old Dublin. I can’t take you in. You wouldn’t expect that, now, would you, after he’s left me.”

Her brass earrings – parentheses – dangle around her cheeks. She gives Emma a rearing back stare, daring her to disagree, being both conciliatory and controlling. She’s stalwart in the doorway of the flat, arms crossed. Beyond her sail rosettes of kitchen odors, caramelized onions and sausage. The turn of her head when she stares creates the effect of one bulging eye, smeared with that winter frost eye shadow. 

“How far is. . . Glendalough?”

“Not so far. I’ll help you find the bus. St. Kevin’s bus. It goes twice daily from St. Stephen’s Green. You’ll get a taste of Dublin as we go. We’ll walk in Grafton Street.”

From within her dress pocket a cell phone rings melodically, bah-bah, black sheep. She turns her back to Emma and answers the phone. “I’ll be there. Not to worry.” Long pause. “Well, he’s not stupid. He knows which side his bread’s buttered on.” She is young and drama rolls off her like smoke from a burning house.  

What would Joe say? He’d tug at her hand, pull her down the steps. “What’re we doing, Emma? Why would we do what she says? We don’t even know her.”

“We came here to see Danny, to see Danny’s Ireland.”

“We could find a hotel. Decide for ourselves.”

“I want to see Danny.”

What is she to make of these dialogues with Joe? And does he hear her speaking, too?

Katie grabs the heftiest suitcase. They set off, Katie chattering. “Dublin’s the big smoke to the natives,” she chirps. “You’ll breathe easy out in the Wicklows.”

They circle around the Customs House and weave through a construction site; they cross a street to the River Liffey, lit by the morning, silvery in what Katie says is infrequent sunlight. She guides them, block after city block, toward St Stephen’s Green, all the while filling Emma in: Danny’s been writing for a travel magazine; he went to London to do a piece on theatres being restored; he met a woman – a TV personality – and when he came home, it was over. “She has a charmin’ cottage in a mews near Hyde Park,” Katie says. “She’s the mews-y type, she is. With family money. When these things happen you have to find a reason.”

“Yes, you do,” Emma says. “But sometimes the reason is buried. There’s so much sediment to dig down into.”

“Sediment,” Katie says. “You could call it that.”

At the bus stop other passengers wait, surrounded by candy-colored duffels. Katie reaches into the pocket that holds the cell phone and brings out a scrap of paper and hands it to Emma: on it is written Kit O’Neill and a phone number. While they wait, Katie lights a cigarette and ostentatiously smokes, as if she is a new smoker, as if the cigarette is her best prop. Katie says, “You’re to call her. She’ll drive down to the visitor center where the bus’ll stop. She’ll fetch you.”

She can’t quite hide that she is sloughing Emma off.

Hurry-scurry, the St. Kevin’s Bus arrives and Emma climbs aboard and Katie is gone, wriggling into the crowd of Grafton Street, where four girl violinists in jeans play a soul-soothing classical piece that Emma caught a fragment of while walking by. Their violin cases laid out before them, the royal blue lining dotted with coins. She would have liked to have stood there for a half hour, drinking in the music, and she feels the loss of Dublin; she doesn’t know why she allowed herself to be bossed around; the trip has taken its toll on her brain, which seems jet-lagged, sluggish, unable to make decisions, unable to consider what decisions need to be made. Once she dozes. Once she looks up Glendalough in her guidebook. There’s a monastery ruin. A national park. Two lakes. Hiking trails. But it is not what she planned. Danny vanishes. Dublin vanishes. She thinks of the floor plan of the National Gallery of Ireland; she had downloaded it from the Internet at school and nearly memorized parts of it. She wanted to see Vermeer’s “Lady Writing a Letter” and Mary Swanzy’s “Pattern of Rooftops.” She imagined sitting before them, in the museum’s subdued light. Hoping the absence of Joe would be bearable in an art museum. Hoping she wouldn’t miss Sophie too much. But the unexpected has begun, and so soon. Is it an omen of what’s to come? Joe doesn’t approve of omens and premonitions.

Then she is swept up in the arrival of the bus at the National Park Visitor Centre, with the ancient monastery in ruins to the north, the lakes bright, the greenery profuse – scotch pine and gorse, little blue flowers and puffy white flowers (she yearns to discover their names) – and a wooden sidewalk zigzagging across the blanket bog and heath, leading toward the lakes. Mary Swanzy, Irish painter, lived to be 96 years old. Did she come here? Was she free to contemplate the monastery? Was Mary Swanzy ruled by Artemis, an autonomous woman who sought and realized her own goals? Act III is all about what you’re ruled by. Emma wants to bring it up in Goddess Group, wants them to study the lives of women painters. And of her own life, she wonders, What would it be like to live forty-two more years with her present anxieties hounding her? For Emma intends long life. She intends to be one hundred and walking on trails like Georgia O’Keeffe.

She telephones Kit O’Neill, competent at figuring out the phone card. She likes the air, its clarity. In the time it takes her to use the restroom, Kit O”Neill arrives in a blue panel van, a blue like a dusting of snow, with Gram’s Garden faded on its side, and Emma is pleased that she’s wearing gardening clogs caked with soil and her knee patches are damp and her hands dry from digging down deep with her fingers. She seems familiar. Joe would have liked her; Emma will write him a letter and describe everything; perhaps they will win each other back with letters.

 She thinks it will all work out.

She writes her sweet letter and finds herself collecting bits of the trip to share. The puppies -- hairless, mewling, mutts – born Emma’s first day, on a striped blanket behind the Swedish stove. Kit’s house high on the mountain above one of the lakes. Down below, the wooly sheep bleat and buck. Walkers wander to and fro, criss-crossing the bottom land and the hills. Kit’s house has the feel of a chalet, with glossy wooden floors and a kitchen warmed in the morning by a cylindrical Swedish stove ornamented with forget-me-nots. Kit gardens, sews, bakes precious pastries you don’t want to spoil by eating, and cares for animals. Kit has focus; she is Hestia, keeper of the hearth. Content in widowhood, no need for another husband. Emma feels the differences between them; she is unsettled in a way that perplexes Kit. But they don’t talk about it. Emma misses Tiff; she’d like to telephone her, but Tiff and Russ are backpacking in the Canadian Rockies. Emma has been given an upstairs room with a view of the lake. Screens keep out the midges. She drifts into sleep early in the night, while the iridescent northern dusk still swathes the sky. She collects all of this, like souvenirs.

When she telephones home, no one answers. Not Sophie or Joe. She leaves Kit’s number, but no one returns her calls. At meals, she finds herself staring at the black phone on the wall and calculating time zones.

She is not alone; it’s a fallacy to think that a mother can travel alone. She would like to be the protagonist in this novel and her mythic journey, but if you have children, you’re never quite whole again. There’s a reason why they’re called your flesh-and-blood – gobbets and shavings, crumbs and scraps, of your body careen across life’s stage like Tinkerbell & Company on rollerblades.  What mother doesn’t wait for phone calls?

Even self-sufficient Kit checks the message machine for a call from Danny. But apparently the mews-y London woman has him enthrall. 

On the third day, phantom Joe says, “Goddamnit, Ems. How long’re we going to be here?”

After lunch Emma dawdles over her coffee, nibbles a homemade apple turnover. A man enters the kitchen, with Kit right behind. He is stubby, bearded, with curling blond and gray hair, wearing broken-in hiking boots and a flannel shirt. Around Emma’s age. Meaning, somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five. She can’t tell. He seems outfitted with exuberance. He has a wen – small scarlet tumor like a bird’s egg – on one cheek. Kit says, “My brother, George. From Galway. Emma March. Emma’s visiting from Chicago.”

George invites her for a ramble above the lakes. “Unless it sounds too much like a forced march,” he says, winking.

“Make no mistake,” Kit says, “it’ll be a forced march. He took me on plenty of forced marches when I was a girl.”

“Sounds lovely,” Emma says.

And they go. There is something perfect about him, Emma decides. It’s the perfection of someone you don’t know but you might get to know. 

George is a glass-blower, divorced, with an ex-wife he still sees once a month. An amiable arrangement. “We had our grudges. But they seem to have disappeared. We get on fine.” He comes to Glendalough to sell his glass to the shop in the big hotel near the monastery.

Emma pries: “If you get on so well, why . . .?”

“We never really spoke the same language.”  He turns and grins. They are proceeding up a long grade, on a gravel road. He takes the opportunity to catch his breath, a hand on his chest, the other waving away invisibilities: His ex? His memories? His doubts?  “Oh, she’s English. She speaks English. But, well, she wears a hardhat at work. She works in a Mini assembly plant.”

“A hardhat.”

“That seems to exemplify our differences.”  He marches on beside her. He takes her hand, but not in a flirty way, merely friendly; she pulls it back. “Let’s not get into all that tripe, shall we not?”

When asked about her family, she says, “Two grown girls. And my husband has a shop beneath our flat. Baseball memorabilia.”  She decides that she will not tell him about Lukas. It is the first time she will make this choice, but not the last. It changes everything to speak of someone close to you dying, and recently. She pretends to breeziness, joie de vivre.

They ramble for nearly two hours until he does something she finds disconcerting. He has taken out a lumpy, well-used handkerchief from his back pocket. He’s a nose-blower, very loud. “Allergies,” he apologizes. She wants to ask him if he has a new significant other, to take the focus off the mucous-y handkerchief. He seems to read her mind and volunteers, “I date three different women.” He offers thumbnail sketches of each: a barmaid with a degree in engineering; a painter with three children; a widow ten years older.

“And do they date three different men, as well?” It sounds like a telephone tree in an emergency.

“At our age, we’re not that interested in settling down. Why should we?”

Emma is put in the awkward position of defending settling down, when she herself has asked that very question, recently, lying abed next to Joe as he sleeps. Counting question mark like sheep.

“For companionship?” she offers.

“Yes, yes,” he says absent-mindedly, for he has stopped to admire a crop of flowers growing out of stone, tough, lavender, shaped like stars. He charms her again with his boyish enjoyment. Joe was once like that. Then and now – her thoughts of Joe bifurcate into then and now.

 

By the time they are coming down the switchbacks, into the twilight, he has invited her to dinner at the hotel, where, he promises, there will be a piano player. A local farmer. George describes the old man, his misshapen hands, his red suspenders. As if every detail is cause for celebration.

On the footbridge over the frisky creek, right before they reach the narrow blacktop, George says, “This’s been grand, Emma.”

The exertion of the walk has given her wings. Her calves are shapely; her joints loose as if well-oiled; her cheeks flushed. “It has,” she says.

Back at the house, a note is tacked to her door: Your husband telephoned. He will try to call back later. What exactly does “will try” mean? In the intimate, too-tight hall, with its tallboy dresser and framed prints of sheepdogs and oak trees, George has to squeeze past her to get to his room. He aims to touch her lower back, a gentlemanly gesture, but in the close quarters, his hand grazes her hip. To her, an electric sensation.  He is a man accustomed to having his women within reach. Would she someday be a story he would tell? He says, “So glad you’re free for dinner.”

Folding the foolscap note in half, Emma says, “My husband’s calling later.” Big sigh of resolve, a false smile.  “I’ve been wanting to talk with him. I think I’ll have a bite here, after all.”

“I understand.” 

Emma glances into his bedroom, lit by a rouge sunset. A tartan flannel shirt shrugs off the rocking chair.  There’s a stack of folded clean handkerchiefs on the dresser. Kit has turned down the bed early; a chocolate wrapped in foil perches like a ring upon the feather pillow.

“Wait right there, right there,” he says. George turns into his room, bends low into a crate. He comes back with a pebbly glass plate the size of a bar of bath soap: red and purple, with gold triangles in each corner. A jewel. “Take this home with you. To remember our walk.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Likewise.”

Kit has gone out with a friend to a club meeting in a nearby village. After her bath, and changing into a flowered sundress, in the kitchen, Emma ferrets out a leftover slice of mushroom pie for dinner. Halfheartedly, she reads a gardening magazine Kit has left lying about; her dinner under tinfoil heats in the toaster oven. The puppies suckle in their rag bed, a slightly moist squeaky noise. George pops his head into the kitchen and says, “I’ll leave early in the morning. If I don’t see you, safe journey.”

“Oh. Yes, thank you. I enjoyed the day.” She thinks, “Take me with you. Take me to your leader. Abduct me.”

She eats her homely mushroom pie in the near-dark. The telephone rings just as she has washed her plate and set it in the dish rack.

Joe says, “Emma. How’s it going?” She has antennae, radar, for his moods: this call is perfunctory. It is like prying open a grave to get answers out of Joe.  The waited-for telephone call lasts not quite five minutes. This is when she remembers what a therapist on TV once said: “The ability to withstand disappointment portends a long marriage.” Is that ability like your immune system, degraded with age?

When they hang up, Emma goes out to the kitchen balcony and smokes a cigarette. What she remembers is falling in love with Joe.

Zermatt, years ago, arriving there in June, before the season began, to wait for him. She had finished her first year teaching at the Swiss boarding school near the Italian border. Joe had taught art there for years. He had made a prior arrangement to visit a friend passing through Geneva, but Emma had gone on to Zermatt. She watched the fair Swiss women kneel and plant their annuals along the stone walkways. 1973. She wanted Joe so badly she could think of little else; at night she had thrashed half-asleep for months; the memory of his smell – the waxy crayons, the charcoal sticks, and beneath that, a slightly ripe grainy odor; he was a health nut then, not an aficionado of donuts like now – that memory would beset her as soon as she lay down to sleep on the iron bed in her room on the third floor of the girls’ dormitory, where she had been stationed to be a good role model. Virtuous, studious, thrifty, and kind. She would caress her own stomach, her downy thighs, thinking of him in the art studio beneath the dining hall, willing him to wash the porcelain slip from his hands and come to her window. He would ping the glass with gravel and she would open the window and they would speak in stage whispers and in code. The students might be eavesdropping. Later, the liquid moon seeped in; what hormones rushed along inside her, spree of desire. 

Some memories disperse like steam; some she will never forget. People warned her about getting involved with a man so much older, but she did not heed the warnings.

How easy it is, she thinks, to be judgmental.  Other people’s lapses, their sea changes, appear daft or unfair. Danny running off to London, for instance. 

Like its opposite – love – drifting away from Joe seems to come at her from outside her ken, a force visited upon her – by what goddess?

The telephone rings once more and she answers. This time it’s Sophie, who laughs and tells her tales of Basie, their old cat. It is the first time Emma has heard Sophie laugh in six weeks. She feels the grip of betrayal; Sophie is being a good daughter, but Emma has foregone being a mother. For now. Just now. Sophie says, “Ems. Enjoy yourself. You deserve it.” And in one chamber of her heart, a weight is lifted; absolution has been set before her, if only she can bear to claim it. 

She goes up to her room and turns on the desk lamp and takes out the pristine journal Sophie gave her. What married woman of a certain age hasn’t thought about what she would do if she were alone? If her postponed dreams were to emerge from the fog of wifely, teacherly, motherly routine? If post-menopausal zest could be worn like an estrogen patch? With ink the color of poppies, she writes the date in the journal. But after that, nothing comes except an odd doodle. The smiling star she scribbles at the top of very good student work. 

She straightens her hair – which is silvery, bright, healthy – and she adds a lick of lipstick. Then a chenille sweater. Outside, the night is neutral, not cool or warm. She is of the night. Gravel scratches beneath her feet. The wind picks up and moonlight riffles on the lake. The lights of the big hotel shimmer. Drawing nearer, she can hear the piano, a lighthearted American tune: “Cheek to Cheek.”

And it comes to her, not all at once like a pearl of wisdom, but in distasteful increments, that all the complaints she has about Joe are little stories she tells herself to shore up her own desires. And walking down to find George, she weeps to think of how she has deceived herself.