by Anita Shreve
So, too, did their physical proximity, Sydney unable to bear, even for insanely short periods of time (such as when Jeff stood in line at the café car to purchase boxed lunches) his absence. It was as though she had, since the night on the beach, entered an altered state, simple facts and a clear head entirely irrelevant.
Jeff seemed to share her physical need. They sat hip to hip, thigh to thigh, Jeff touching her constantly, dozing on her shoulder, running his fingers up and down her back and under her hair, a surprisingly intimate gesture that sent Sydney into a nearly hypnotic swoon.
“Your skin is delicious,” Jeff whispered into her ear, causing a shiver all along her spine.
Each imagined Julie’s Hélène, neither of them getting it right. Sydney pictured, having all too briefly seen the real thing, a wiry athletic woman with slick black hair. Jeff imagined— surely a male fantasy, Sydney thought—a lipstick lesbian with blond curls, an image in which he persisted in believing even when presented with Sydney’s meager evidence to the contrary.
Jeff remained in their hotel room while Sydney took a taxi to the address given. Hélène, who met Sydney at the door of her fifth-floor walk-up in the old quarter of the city, was neither a lipstick lesbian nor dark-haired, but rather a petite woman with light brown hair and distinctly European features (the wet suit had elongated; the water darkened). Julie hopped off her stool in the corner and embraced Sydney with ferocity. Not the ferocity of the relieved, Sydney thought, but rather that of the newly liberated.
Hélène, mindful of the sensitivities, did not touch Julie during the visit—no caresses, no gestures of possessiveness—but did allow Julie, in her exuberance, to embrace her from time to time as she managed tea from a spartan kitchen, an indication of household discipline that held throughout the small apartment, even to the simple bathroom with the good accoutrements: the Frette towels, the marble pedestal sink, the cut-glass dispenser of remarkably effective hand cream.
The most extraordinary feature of the otherwise modest flat was an expanse of windows on the street side. They were set above dark-paneled wainscoting and had sixteen leaded-glass panes per window. In certain lights (Sydney visited often), she felt transported to seventeenth-century Holland, as if, turning her head, she might find Julie, with her Dutch-beauty face, in layered robes, embroidery hoop in hand.
“I’m sorry, Sydney. I’m so sorry. I should have told you. I just thought. . .” Julie stumbled through her apology, heartfelt and contrite.
“It’s okay,” Sydney said. “I understand. I do. It’s just that the way you did it was frightening for your parents. For all of us.”
“But you’d all have stopped me!” Julie protested, nailing her defense.
Sydney summoned Jeff from the hotel room. When he appeared in Hélène’s apartment, Sydney had the unnerving sense of being on a double date.
While Sydney had been restrained but polite with Hélène (not wanting to precipitate a crisis that wasn’t warranted), Jeff was harsh. He demanded to know how Hélène could have persuaded Julie to leave her home and family, and it was only after a lengthy discussion over tea and excellent pastries, Hélène’s accented English and the Vermeer windows lending a distinctly foreign note to the occasion, that Jeff could be persuaded that Julie had begged to go to Montreal.
Jeff called home with the news. Though Mr. Edwards, understandably, could hardly be expected to view the bulletin as welcome (he missed his beautiful daughter and would be lonely, Sydney suspected, not to mention the fact that Julie would be dropping out of school), a compromise was agreed to.
Julie would return to the beach house the following weekend with Hélène and Jeff and Sydney. A civilized detente would be the goal.
Julie’s passport was mailed so that she could legally cross the border. (One could cross the border into Canada without a passport, Sydney learned, but one could not get back into the States.) Jeff and Sydney spent the week—Jeff’s vacation week—not at the beach house, where all was suspended chaos, but rather in Montreal, in the small hotel room with its two exceptionally narrow iron beds.
Returning from that first visit to Julie, Sydney noticed that Jeff’s hands were trembling.
“Do you think they’re lovers yet?” he asked as they entered the early-twentieth-century hotel elevator.
“Yes, I do,” Sydney answered, minding the slight dip with each stop. She didn’t like elevators in which she was reminded of the possibility of cords snapping, pulleys malfunctioning.
“I just. . .It seems so. . .”
“I know,” she said.
Jeff leaned against a padded bar at the back of the small compartment. He seemed spent. “Did she look happy to you?” he asked.
“Very.”
“She’s only eighteen.”
“I’m happy for her,” Sydney added.
“You don’t think Hélène’s just using her?”
“Using her for what?”
“For sex? As someone she can control?”
Sydney thought. “Both might be true. The sex is obvious. Julie is beautiful. She’s also trusting. But I’m not sure that controlling Julie is as easy as you might think. I didn’t do a very good job of it. I was with her essentially all day, and yet I never knew she was seeing Hélène.”
“Should I worry?” he asked.
“We should worry some,” Sydney said, including herself. “And keep an eye on them. I did manage to extract a promise from Hélène to let us know if they planned on traveling. I don’t want your father to have to go through all that again.”
“Did you. . .,” Jeff began, seemingly considering how exactly to phrase what might be a delicate question. “Did you notice anything that would have led you to believe that Julie was gay?”
“It was as surprising to me as to you.”
“I just wondered if she’d ever. . .”
“. . .made a pass? No.”
The elevator dipped and stopped. “How old do you think Hélène is?” Jeff asked.
“She’s twenty-five. I asked.”
The door opened and Sydney stepped out into the dark corridor of the old hotel. Jeff led her through a warren of wallpapered hallways to their room. He unlocked the door and stepped aside to allow Sydney to enter. A maid had already drawn the curtains.
“Are you hungry?” Jeff asked. “Do you want to eat? I should have asked you before.”
“I just want to lie down,” Sydney said. She slipped off her sandals and lay on the narrow bed. Jeff, too, removed his shoes.
Sydney felt the relief of the bed. She watched as Jeff undid the first three buttons of his shirt, a gesture that pleased her. For a moment, he was a man lost in thought. She knew he was still worrying about Julie, running vast scenarios in his mind, trying out old formulae, hypothesizing, examining data. When finally he turned to Sydney, she made room for him on the bed. Barely a foot of space.
He laughed.
He studied the length of her, lingering on her bare legs. His face was changing, the alertness behind the eyes fading, the jaw losing its tension. There might be no more words.
He knelt on the rug and kissed her knees. He raised her skirt by inches.
Sitting on the bidet in the hotel bath, Sydney could not, even when she tried, remember the sexual details of former lovers and husbands. Tenderness she could recall, but not positions or single events. She thought this a female trait. She had no doubt that Jeff, if asked, could remember dozens of specific encounters.
When she returned to the room, Jeff was dressed. “Let’s go out,” he said. “I’m starved.”
They walked through side streets to an inviting bistro. Sydney checked her watch. It was nearly ten o’clock, and people—even families with children—were just sitting down to dinner.
Sydney ordered moules frites. When the mussels and french fries arrived, she ate without speaking for a good ten minutes. When she looked up, she said to Jeff, “I think this may be the best meal I ever had.”
A few minutes later, elbows
on the table, Sydney studied Jeff.
“You look like your father,” she said.
“I do?” Jeff asked, taking a sip of the house red.
“Your eyes. Your build.”
Jeff nodded slowly, taking it in.
“I think you’re like him, too. A decent man.”
Jeff, reaching for a frite, seemed surprised by the compliment.
“You think so?” he asked.
“Your mother struggles for position,” Sydney said. “Your father has it effortlessly.”
Jeff took from his pocket a pack of Gauloises, and, much to Sydney’s astonishment, lit one.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” she said.
“I bought them at the hotel while you were gone. It seemed the thing to do. When in Rome. . .”
Sydney glanced around. He was certainly not the only one smoking in the small restaurant.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
“Not the odd one here or there,” she said.
Jeff took a long drag, a bit too long, Sydney thought, for someone who smoked only occasionally. “I’m not sure anyone has ever put the family dynamic so succinctly,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Sydney said. “I shouldn’t. . .”
“Presume away.”
“Well, I didn’t mean. . .”
“Anyway,” Jeff said. “You’re not prying. Only observing. To hear Julie and Dad tell it, you’re practically one of the family.”
“I think your mother might see it a little differently,” Sydney suggested lightly.
Victoria, from whose bed Jeff had so recently risen, intruded upon Sydney’s thoughts, a spectral vision in a yellow sundress.
“Do you think about Victoria?” she asked. “Are you happy with your decision?”
“How can you even ask that?” Jeff asked, bringing a cup of espresso to his lips.
Sydney stared.
“I knew the moment you walked out of the ocean,” he added.
Victoria, it would seem, was Sydney’s ghost only.
They took the rest of their evening meals with Hélène and Julie, who were caught up in a sexual bliss of their own making. Sydney had a vague notion of what might be happening in the bed in the apartment with the seventeenth-century Dutch windows but did not dwell on the details. Though Julie was not a child and had every right to sexual fulfillment—indeed, she had never looked more luminous—it might take more than a week and a few indisputable facts for Jeff and Sydney to adjust to Julie’s new life.
And indisputable facts did emerge. After Julie’s foray into the water the day Sydney had taken her by the hand (and Julie’s odd shout I’M OKAY, the repetition of which, in Julie’s note, had jogged Sydney’s memory), Julie had dressed and gone back out to the beach. There she had sat, arms wrapped around her knees, watching Hélène surf. As inarticulate as ever, Julie could only report, “It looked so beautiful,” a reference either to Hélène in the wet suit or to the act of surfing.
When Hélène beached herself, the pair struck up a conversation. A party was discussed.
“Where?” Jeff asked, still smarting from his futile search.
“The cottage on the beach where all the surfers go,” Hélène answered politely.
That Julie had gotten drunk had been unintentional and unfortunate. Hélène had extracted Julie’s address from the girl (more information than Julie had given Sydney that night) and had driven Julie home. She’d walked her to the door, trusting in Julie’s body to do the rest.
And there it might have ended had not Julie repeatedly sought out Hélène on her walks along the beach. (What walks? Sydney wanted to know. Had Julie left the house each day just minutes after Sydney had?) It wasn’t clear if the sexual relationship had started that first drunken night or had developed over time, but neither Jeff nor Sydney felt inclined to ask.
When it was time for Hélène to return to Montreal after her vacation, Julie begged to go with her. Hélène had at first demurred but then finally had said yes. (Had happily said yes, Sydney imagined.)
Hélène had not known that Julie’s suitcase contained canvases and paints until the smell of turpentine and linseed oil had made its way from the trunk of the old Peugeot to the front seat. By that time, the pair were in Burlington and in no mood to turn back.
Julie’s happiness was palpable, tangible, destined to eclipse the happiness of anyone nearby. Though Sydney had no doubt that Hélène was truly fond of Julie, the French Canadienne’s joy seemed subdued by comparison.
Jeff and Sydney’s happiness, too, seemed muted in Julie’s presence, a fact that bothered Sydney, as if in the realm of rapture, she and Jeff could never quite measure up.
Alone with Jeff, however, Sydney’s life felt complete. The food, the wine, and the constant feeling of lassitude resulting from frequent and spontaneous sex contributed to a sense of pleasure and of ease. The week seemed but a happy passage of time that just below the surface dictated future expectations and fond reminiscences. Possibly, too, there were slight hints of incompatibility. Sydney noted, but did not then mention, the desire on Jeff’s part to take long walks by himself while Sydney read in the hotel room, as well as the frequent lapses in attention, his mind elsewhere. Nor did Sydney point out, though she noticed, a subtle change in Jeff’s personality, the city igniting in him a kind of wanderlust, an excessive fondness for things European, particularly its cigarettes and wines. She thought these small matters, hardly worth mentioning.
When the week was over, the four crossed the Canadian border by train and drove from White River Junction to the beach house. Sydney’s status, instantly elevated, would never again return to that of employee, a circumstance that sometimes caused her to wonder if complex algorithms involving joy, disappointment, sexual tension, and barely concealed anti-Semitism could ever be resolved within the context of the family dynamic.
The first meeting with the parents struck Sydney as fortuitous. Because so much attention was focused on the clearly besotted Julie and the petite Canadienne, Jeff and Sydney escaped scrutiny. Indeed, the couple functioned as diplomats, seating themselves between the Edwardses on the one side and their daughter and her lover on the other. Occasionally, Sydney acted as interpreter.
“I think what Julie is saying is that she feels she is old enough to make her own decisions,” Sydney found herself explaining.
The next day, Julie and Hélène headed north with assurances from Mr. Edwards that he and his wife would visit (“always wanted to see Montreal again”), while Sydney and Jeff drove south to Cambridge, the farewell remarkable for the singular occurrence of Mrs. Edwards’s—albeit without embrace—thank you to Sydney for fetching Julie. Not a word about the hours of tutelage or the happy accident of discovering Julie’s talent, though almost certainly, Sydney thought, the talent would have burst forth on its own. The pears in Montreal had been exceptionally good.
Jeff’s apartment resembled that of a bachelor who made a decent salary but had chosen to spend it in ways other than decor. Newly renovated, it had, through a break between two buildings directly on the Charles, a slim view of sparkling water. A leather couch and two good lamps had perhaps been purchased in an initial attempt to make something of the large front room with the bow window and the view. But this small stab at aesthetics had been eclipsed by either work or indifference, for the coffee table was of another era altogether and badly scarred as well (a hand-me-down from Needham?). The rest of the rooms struck Sydney as barren in a decidedly masculine way.
Clearly, Victoria had not lived in Jeff’s apartment, though Sydney found in a front-hall closet a pair of alligator boots, size seven and a half, and rolled into the back of a drawer that was otherwise empty (“Vicki’s drawer,” it must have been) a pair of designer jeans that Sydney, in a moment of weakness, tried on. They fit in the hips, but bunched at the ankles. Sydney rolled them back up and stuck them in the drawer. When Sydney spent the night at Jeff’s, she consciously avoided the dresser, using her suitcase as a kind of burea
u.
Though Jeff’s apartment was motley, it was spacious, dwarfing Sydney’s stifling one-bedroom, which overlooked a RadioShack in Waltham. Upon entering her apartment for the first time in months, she could see at once why the offer of a summer at the beach had sounded appealing. The furniture was good (she and Daniel had together bought some fine pieces), but the apartment felt like a place in which no one had ever lived. When she had rented it, she’d had no interest in making it a home. She had simply wanted shelter.
In the fall, Sydney was accepted to graduate school at Boston University for the spring semester. She started in January in a program similar to the one she’d been in at Brandeis, though only a few of her credits and none of her research had been transferable. She crossed the Charles River often, sometimes arriving at the apartment before Jeff, who had regular office hours and teaching. At night, they drank wine (a lot of wine, it seemed to Sydney, a fact about which she was inclined to be apprehensive) and ate a meal she had cooked, or they met one or the other of Jeff’s friends at a neighborhood restaurant. Ivers, a sportswriter at the Boston Globe, knew more about the inner workings of the Boston Red Sox than anyone Sydney had ever met. Frank, who had once been Jeff’s restless colleague at MIT, was now unemployed and trying to make a go of it as a writer. Sahir, an old college roommate who worked for a bank downtown, sometimes received phone calls from exotic places. He spoke in Urdu, emphasizing, again and again, a single word that sounded like a sneeze: Achaa! Slight, Muslim, and looking like the Pakistani he was, Sahir had been detained by the Boston police twice since 9/11 and had once been chased out of a bar. Oddly, he seemed at peace with this harassment, as if this were simply his burden to bear. And then there was Peter, who could repeat verbatim the entire dialogue of Office Space. Nights with Peter, who ran the particle accelerator at MIT, were entertaining and full of laughter. None of Jeff’s friends was married. None seemed particularly distraught over Sydney’s replacement of Victoria.