by Anita Shreve
He slips out from between the sheets, walks naked into the bathroom. The tile floor is ice against the soles of his feet, the air so frigid he begins almost immediately to shiver. He minds that he pays six hundred dollars a month for heat and can still see his breath in the morning. He turns on the shower, watches as clouds of steam boil over and around the plastic curtain. His face in the mirror disappears; the bathroom fills with mist. He steps into the shower, adjusts the water temperature so that it is just below scalding. He turns, bends his head, lets the water pummel the back of his neck.
It has not, he knows, been an innocent correspondence. In the beginning he tried to tell himself that it was harmless, simply intriguing, but he knew, even then, that from the very first sentence of the very first note, there was nothing innocent about it. If he wrote her, as he had, that he had the same feeling looking at her picture as he had when he first saw her in the courtyard of The Ridge thirty-one years ago, what did that imply? And although he has not permitted himself to think of Siân Richards sexually—he cannot, despite his childhood memories, despite the temptation, for to do so might allow the “it” to spiral out of control—he knows that however chaste his thinking is, it is not innocent. Not to have told his wife, to have shielded Siân’s picture with his elbow, was to have given the “it” a life. He remembers sitting in the car at the beach that rainy Sunday afternoon, drafting and redrafting that first letter, trying to strike just the right chord, find the right tone—a tone somewhere between revelatory and careful—and how he waited for days after that, convinced that the letter had been lost in the mailroom of her publisher, that it had not been forwarded after all.
But then she had replied. He remembers still the delicate blue surprise of that letter, how his hand trembled as he withdrew the envelope with the unfamiliar hand from the postbox, how he sat outside in his car and opened it and read the letter, not once but many times, before he was calm enough to start the Cadillac and move away from the post office. Her handwriting was tiny, cramped, with the capitals strangely pointed, and he had to look at several words twice or three times before he could decipher them. But she had used the word “delighted,” had remembered him as Cal. And at the end of the letter she had all but invited him to write to her again: If he knew what she looked like and what she did for a living, she said, oughtn’t he then to tell her what he looked like and what he did for a living?
He got her letter on the twenty-fifth of September, had responded the next day. And then there was what seemed like an interminable wait for a subsequent letter. Each day he went to the post office, looked for the small, cramped penmanship. He thought of what he had written her, became convinced that something he said had put her off. Perhaps he’d been too forward, too bold. Too suggestive. Once, telling Harriet he had business in Boston, he got into the Cadillac and drove across Connecticut and New York and into Pennsylvania, to the town on the return address of Siân’s envelope. He had no intention of making an unannounced visit; he simply wanted to see where she lived, as though from that he might derive more clues as to whom she had become. He knew, even as he was making the drive, that he was behaving like a teenager, not a grown man with a wife and three children, but he was unable convincingly to talk himself out of making the journey. (He thinks now, standing in the shower, perhaps that was the point of the trip after all: He was reliving something he hadn’t been able to do as a teenager—the bike ride across three states.)
The trip through Connecticut and New York was exhilarating. He had Roy on the tape player and another tape he’d bought in September, in search of the song he remembered at the beach, a tape of golden oldies from what he had already come to think of as “their” era, and the day was fine. Crisp and golden, pure fall.
But he wasn’t at all prepared for the sight of her town, stranded, it seemed from his vantage point as he followed the map across the border and over the mountain, amidst a vast black desert. He knew only from the poems that what he saw had to be the “black dirt” she wrote of; if it wasn’t for the poetry, he’d have thought he’d spun off into the surreal, that the land west of the small mountain was sealed with tar, that he’d somehow stumbled upon a foreign landing strip. He descended the winding road cautiously and drove straight into the town, and as he did so he felt the exhilaration of the journey dissipating. The light over the black dirt was unearthly and pale, and even though the sun still shone, the houses looked washed out or smudged. He decided then that the effect was created by the blackness of the soil; the light was sucked up, he thought, swallowed by the dirt itself.
In the center of the small village was a dark Catholic church with a parking lot to one side and a cemetery in the back. Opposite the church was a row of storefronts—a video store, an uninviting bar with faded blue curtains covering the windows, a real estate agency, and a restaurant, The Onion Inn. He had a sandwich there, asked the waitress if she could direct him to the street he was looking for. He wondered, while he ate his sandwich at the bar of the inn, if he would know Siân Richards if she walked in now, if when their eyes met she would know him. He’d been replaying various scenarios for days, imagining their first encounter after thirty-one years. Sometimes he imagined kissing her before he even spoke to her. He examined every woman in the restaurant—those at the tables, those who entered while he sat there—but none of them remotely resembled Siân. He didn’t know what he’d do if he did encounter her that afternoon. She’d have thought him deranged if she knew he’d driven more than four hours just to see the town in which she lived. And almost certainly that information would have frightened her off. Yet it was all he could do to refrain from asking the waitress if she was familiar with the name.
He followed the waitress’s directions to the address he had asked about. The road wasn’t hard to find; there were only three leading from the village—one to the north of the onion fields, one to the south, and one that seemed to bisect the dark desert like a canal. Hers was to the north, the farms arranged along it as along a shoreline. He drove by the house twice before he realized it was the address he wanted: The number was hidden from view behind a post on the front porch. It was a gray house with black shutters, a farmhouse with an ell. Out on the front lawn was an ancient elm, its leaves this time of year just beginning to catch fire. He saw, in the three or four times he passed the house after he realized which was hers, that there were white curtains at each of the windows, that the red barn in the back belonged to the farmhouse, and that there was a flower garden at the side. To the other side was a massive yellow tractor in the driveway. Each time he passed the house he slowed the car down and held his breath, wanting to see a woman and yet not wanting at all to see a woman, but there was no activity as he came and went—not a movement behind a window, not a child playing in the yard, not a man walking toward the barn. He’d wondered where she was, what precisely she was doing then.
Later, after he’d driven the other roads leading from the village and had seen all there was to see of the town—primarily other farmhouses, most of which had been painted in odd, pastel colors that seemed to obliterate whatever charm the buildings might intrinsically have had in some previous era—he crossed another small mountain in order to reach the university, and he had thought that the bleakness of the valley, however dispiriting (but was it bleakness, he wondered, or was it simply the fear of being swallowed up by the black dirt oneself?), was somehow encouraging: If he had discovered Siân Richards living in a pretty village, on a sunlit street, with a Volvo station wagon in the driveway and a ten-speed Motobecane on a front porch (or, in an imposing fortress on Manhattan’s East Side, with a doorman out front and a Porsche in a garage somewhere down below), might he not have felt more inhibited in his pursuit of their much-imagined reunion? And yet he had to concede as well that possibly Siân Richards was perfectly happy at her farm and in her marriage that the despair suggested in her poetry—the suggestion of pinched lives—did not come from her own circumstances but was a metaphor for something l
arger, which he might better grasp if he knew more about poetry.
The university was a small one in population, though it did have a large agricultural school, and it was through fallow fields that Charles drove to reach the main campus. Classes were in session that day, and he wondered if Siân was there, teaching. He hadn’t seen a car of any kind in the driveway of her house. He walked a series of footpaths under bare trees and between red-brick buildings until he had crisscrossed most of the central campus. Girls in thick sweaters and boys in neon parkas looked at him as they passed by. He studied each older woman he encountered—hopeful and panicky at once that he might stumble upon her. Occasionally his own years at Holy Cross came back to him. He was certain, when he left finally (too late to make it home in time for dinner, and he had to compose yet another lie in the car), that he had not come face-to-face with Siân Richards, though it was easier to imagine her there, on that campus than it was to envision her in the gray house by the onion fields.
After that day, he developed a habit of going to the post office three, four times a day in search of a blue envelope in his box. For weeks, it seemed, there was nothing, and then finally she wrote him. Hers, he thought, was an odd correspondence, one that was, at its heart, not always easy to decipher. Sometimes she seemed encouraging; at other times, occasionally even in the same letter, she appeared to withdraw. It was a kind of feinting: a touch here, then a retreat. His own correspondence to her, he was certain, was not difficult to read. He was pushing her, he knew, even at the risk that she might close up altogether. He thought that he had taken a terrible leap by describing the “awful loneliness” of her poetry, but she hadn’t seemed to mind that. And sometimes he thought he detected humor in her letters, as when she echoed his comment about her husband in her comment about his wife, or when she said thanks, but she wouldn’t need a chaperone. (He imagined—hoped for?—a dry wit.) Yet she could unnerve him as well. She said that he would be disappointed when he met her. What did “disappointed” mean? he wondered for days.
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 o
ut, 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.