by Anita Shreve
This house is fucking freezing. I pay $600 a month for heat, and I have to sit here in my overcoat.
I want to kiss your other breast.
I want to believe that this thing that we are doing would have happened—it was just a question of time. My timing in this could not have been worse, and it could not have been better. To meet the woman you were meant to be with is timing that cannot be argued with.
Charles
Friday, 11 A.M.
Dear Siân,
I still cannot sleep. I haven’t eaten since Wednesday night. I’ve been drinking Coors Light since I got home from The Ridge, but it hasn’t made a dent. I know I should try to lie down, but I have to tell you one more story before I mail these letters off.
I went to the bookstore to buy another copy of your book of poems. The first copy, I discovered earlier this morning, is on my wife’s dresser. I went in to change my shirt, and it was sitting there like a radioactive isotope. Why she should have chosen that book out of all the books in my study to read I have no idea, but I certainly can’t touch it or ask her for it back.
I went to the front desk at the bookstore, and a man and a woman were behind it. I asked the man to find the book for me. The man started to enter the name into the computer, and I said, “I know you have it, or had it, because I bought a copy here several months ago.” Then the woman said, “Yeah, it’s got a picture of some blond all over the back cover.” I said, “Yes, I guess that’s the way they market books these days.” Then she said back to me, “Yeah, even the academic stuff, they make the women take their blouses off.”
I said to her, “She’s pretty embarrassed about it herself.”
“You know her?” the woman asked.
“She was my girlfriend when I was fourteen,” I said.
Charles
HE HAS ALWAYS LIKED watching volleyball: the movements of the players, the high leaps to block shots, a dozen arms in the air at once, the smash at the net. They are late, Hadley is already on the court, and the gym is half filled with parents and siblings who have rushed an early dinner. He spots Hadley at once in her blue T-shirt and white shorts, her ponytail whipping behind her as she rises straight off the ground. Charles follows his wife and two other children to the side of the gym where there are bleachers. He has not wanted, for Hadley’s sake, to miss this game, but as he quickly scans the crowd he wishes he could disappear. Whalen is there, and Costa. Charles has twenty-seven messages on his machine just from this day alone that he hasn’t returned—though he knows already whom they are from. Whalen from the bank, who will probably nab him tonight. GMAC pressing him for a payment on the Cadillac. The telephone company. Optima. His Citibank Visa. MasterCard. He is fairly certain that Harriet doesn’t know yet just how bad their (his) financial situation is, an intuition that is borne out when his wife waves at Eddie and Barbara Whalen, sitting downcourt. Charles lifts Anna onto his lap and in doing so catches Muriel Carney’s eye. Tom is in the hospital. Has been there since Thanksgiving.
The gym is large, part of a building that was once the town’s high school and has now passed on to the middle school. The girls at the center of the blond wooden floor look small and innocent, children still, though they mimic, as Jack does when he plays baseball, the movements of the older athletes they have seen on television or at high school games. Odd, Charles thinks, how many of his peers have girls Hadley’s age. Whalen, Costa, Carney. Lidell’s Sarah is there too. He cannot make out who is winning, asks the woman beside him for the score. Hadley’s team is down two. He can see that his daughter, at the net, is sweating slightly. She is among the tallest of the players on her team, though, he knows, she doesn’t have all her growth yet; he guesses she will be close to five ten before she is seventeen.
Hadley leaps, blocks a shot, spikes it straight to the floorboards. The crowd cheers. Charles calls her name. He looks at Harriet, who is smiling broadly, and in doing so he can see that Whalen is making his way along the bleachers, decorously holding his topcoat closed with his hand in the vicinity of his crotch, sliding with apologies past the other parents. Asshole. Whalen will nail him, with Harriet sitting beside him. There is no escaping this. He feels a twinge of the panic, can feel his blood pressure rising. He stares straight ahead, knowing his face is suffused with color.
“Callahan.”
Whalen has perched himself behind Charles, up over his left shoulder. Whalen has soft white skin, thin wisps of hair combed across a bald pate. Charles, glancing quickly at Whalen, makes a silent promise to himself to go bald without attempts at camouflage.
“Eddie.”
“Called you all last week. Today.”
“I know.”
Charles looks over at Harriet, who returns his glance and frowns slightly. She seems surprised to see Whalen sitting behind Charles.
“I don’t have the money,” Charles says, turning away from Harriet toward Whalen.
“You’ve missed three months.”
“I know that.”
“We can’t carry this mortgage forever, Charles. If you could just give us some indication of when . . .”
Charles is silent. He hates Whalen’s whine. It comes through even on the telephone. Charles knows he cannot pull out of this but doesn’t want to have to admit it to Whalen, not right now, not in front of Harriet.
“I’d like to cut you some slack, Callahan,” Whalen says, the whine rising a notch. “You know that. But times are tight right now. We’re down to the bone ourselves.”
Charles removes Anna from his lap. He shifts slightly on the bench so that only Whalen can hear what he is saying.
“Listen, asshole,” he says slowly and deliberately, punctuating asshole, knowing as he does so that he is sealing his fate. “I’m watching a fucking volleyball game in which my daughter and your daughter are playing, and I’m sitting here with my wife and two other kids, and I’m not going to fucking discuss my fucking mortgage right now. Is that clear?”
He looks at Whalen long enough to see the man’s face turn the color of his shirt, a grayish white. He watches Whalen open his mouth and close it. Charles swivels back to the game, a din ringing in his ears. It’s his blood pressure, and his right hand is balled into a fist. Behind him he can hear Whalen stand abruptly. On the court, Hadley is serving. She faults twice, forfeits the serve. Charles winces inwardly for his daughter.
There was no letter today. He went to the post office two, three times. He has calculated that the earliest a letter could have arrived from her would have been today, though she’d have to have written it and mailed it almost immediately upon returning home from The Ridge on Thursday, which seems highly unlikely. He’s not sure she could have made it home before five o’clock, the hour the post office closes. He doesn’t even know if she will write him now, if he will ever see her again. He sent his own packet of letters to her on Saturday morning, calculating that they would arrive tomorrow. It’s entirely possible that she will not respond, will refuse to meet with him. She said at the car that she might not be able to do this. . . .
He lets his eyes wander to the court. He has no idea who is winning. Did Hadley’s lost serve cancel out the gain of the blocked shot? He could ask Harriet but does not want to speak to her just now. She might ask him about Whalen. There are several good players on the other team, he can see, focusing on them for the first time. The visitors are wearing black shirts, red shorts. There’s a small girl from the other side with a surprisingly powerful serve; no one from Hadley’s team can return it. Costa’s daughter makes a valiant try, misses. He sees then another girl, a girl from the visiting side who is at least Hadley’s height, a girl with dark blond hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head. She’s standing in the back row, waiting for the serve. She glances down at her feet, puts her hands together briefly, poised for the shot. A coach calls for a time-out; the girl relaxes her posture. She brings her hand up to the back of her neck, idly touches her hair. She does not have the obvious stance of an athlete, but h
er pose is graceful, self-contained. The players wait while Costa’s daughter reties a shoelace. The tall girl from the visiting side is sweating slightly, on her upper lip, at her temples. She glances up at Charles, across the court, as if she knew that he was watching her.
He might be hallucinating. He is hallucinating, he decides. The girls move, the game resumes, but he sees only Siân, a central presence in a swirling collage of outstretched arms and small thin bodies leaping from the shiny wooden floor. He feels light-headed, dizzy, but he is certain he is watching Siân. He knows the hallucination is a product of his unraveling. He hasn’t eaten or slept in days. And yet the vision seems also to be a gift, a peering into a past that has been denied to him. He watches the girl arc her body off the ground and knows that it is Siân he sees. He aches sharply for the loss of her, feels his eyes fill suddenly, as if he’d been stung. He glances quickly at his wife, realizes that Harriet has been staring at him. He looks back at the game. The hallucination fades as quickly as it came to him. He wonders then: Was he seeing Siân as she really was, or as he imagines her to have been?
He feels a hand on his knee, looks down. It is Harriet’s, reaching across Jack and Anna, their children.
“Charles,” she says.
In bed that night, when his wife reaches for him, he knows that this time he cannot refuse her. It is not exactly a challenge—he and Harriet do not engage each other in that way—yet he knows that in the gesture there is a question. He lets her touch him, prays that his body will respond, but in the darkness, even with his eyes shut, he sees only other faces, other images, that distract him. Siân as a young girl, Siân’s face by the lake, her breast exposed to him. The images are not sexual; they make him want to cry. He is afraid he will cry, thinks instead of Whalen’s whine. His body is hopelessly limp, unresponsive. He does not want to hurt his wife.
“I want you to come first,” he whispers, shifting his body quickly, putting his hand to her, hoping she will allow this, will accept this, will let his own failure go.
She puts her hand on his hand, makes him stop.
“I’m just exhausted,” he says feebly.
She takes his hand away from her body, rolls over with her back to him.
He is at the post office before eight, the Cadillac humming, waiting for Harry Noonan to arrive and open the front door to the postboxes. This morning, Charles was out of bed before Harriet, so as to avoid a reprise of the previous night. He showered, shaved, dressed, drank some coffee, and sat in his office, trying ineffectually to clear the debris off his desk while he listened to the early morning sounds of his wife and children in other rooms. He thinks briefly of his outburst with Whalen at the gym last night, nervously taps the steering wheel as a familiar knot forms in his stomach. It was not smart, he knows, to have let his anger boil to the surface. The bank will foreclose, he is certain of this now, but with children in the house, they’ll have to give him at least sixty days to find another place to live. Harriet and the kids will have Christmas in the house, and it’s conceivable he may not even have to tell Harriet until the new year.
Christmas. New Year’s Eve.
She has said she may not be able to see him again. There may, at this very moment, be a letter inside the post office repeating that intention. Or worse (or perhaps not worse), there may be no letter at all.
Four past eight. Harry Noonan finally drives up in his gray Isuzu Trooper. Charles nods through the windshield at Noonan, waits for Harry to unlock the front door before getting out of his car. Charles’s early arrival at the post office is not unprecedented—he often begins his day by getting the mail—but he does not want to appear particularly overeager today. After a minute or two, however, he follows Noonan through the lobby with the postboxes—the mail won’t be in them yet—and into the main room, where Noonan is already sorting through a large stack of envelopes, his parka still on.
“Callahan.”
“Harry.”
“You heard anything this morning about the storm we’re supposed to get?”
“No. It’ll probably just be rain. Freezing rain. Screw up the roads.”
“Probably so.”
Noonan sets aside a small pile of familiar-looking envelopes—one from the phone company, others from Citibank, the cable company, the bank (The Bank)—and one large unfamiliar manila envelope. No blue envelopes, but Charles focuses on the manila envelope, reaches for it. The handwriting is hers; there is no return address. His hand begins at once to shake; he feels his chest constrict. He tucks the envelope under his arm, puts his hands, to still them, into the pockets of his overcoat. He wants to get back to the safety of his car, tear open the gummed seal.
“Thanks, Harry,” he says, turning to leave.
“Callahan.”
Charles looks back at Noonan, who is studying Charles over the rims of his half-glasses.
“You forgot your mail.”
Charles holds the envelope in the car, taps it twice against the steering wheel. He feels as he used to as a kid, opening his report card or an admissions letter from college—pausing on the brink of relief or disaster, mumbling incoherent prayers. He takes a deep breath, exhales. He slits open the seal. Inside are three blue envelopes, marked “1,” “2,” and “3.” He opens the first envelope, quickly scans the letter, devours it like a junkie. His eyes fill; he blinks. A strangled, muted sound—something between a sob and a sigh—escapes him. He cannot read the other letters here. He lays the opened letter and the two unopened letters on the passenger seat, puts the key into the ignition, and, nearly blind, backs out of the parking lot. A sharp, stinging rain begins on the windshield. He drives to the bridge and the beach.
Thursday night, 11:20 P.M.
Dear Charles,
I will write this letter. My hand has been poised over the paper for fifteen minutes—the equivalent of a kind of speechlessness that comes from having too much to say and not being able to find the right words with which to say it.
It is easier to sit on a wooden bench or to listen to imagined music than to explain why I can think of little else and why, walking across the lawn to the parking lot, I felt different to myself. It is possible that today I have begun to become unfrozen. That would seem to be a good in itself, yet I wonder what it will do to myself and to my family.
I found your presence reassuring, your body and your voice familiar to me, as I seem to have been to you. How that can be so, I cannot say. The two of us together, down by the lake—it seemed that we were both reality and metaphor at once for something I barely understand.
My fantasies are simple ones and are products of what I think is a kind of emotional exhaustion—the result of trying to hold myself and my family together all these years. I dream of having my hand held. I don’t really dream of sexual passion. That, this afternoon, was unexpected.
You did not ask about my husband, though I asked about your wife. I tried at lunch to convey something of my marriage, but I suspect I did it badly. When I met Stephen in graduate school, I mistook his silence for a kind of appealing reserve. I didn’t know then that I had met him during the two happiest years of his life, when he was as far from the farm as he had ever been.
He is wedded to the farm, even more than to me, but he has never really been happy here. It is, for him, his own peculiar kind of destiny.
I feel extremely disloyal writing even this much.
I must go to bed now, but I doubt that I will sleep.
I imagine us meeting intermittently over a period of many years—possibly even into old age—a thread running through our lives.
When I move a certain way, I can smell you on my skin.
Siân
Friday, 9:20 AM.
Charles,
I’m glad I wrote that letter to you, and I will send it along with this one, but in the early morning light of family and a child and a house and a life, I know this is not going to be possible. I think somehow, somewhere, you know this too. There is, probably, a great affinity be
tween us—perhaps that’s what drew us together as children and again yesterday. But I know this is not going to be manageable. There must be, on your part, some relief in reading these words.
It was tantalizing for me, the vision I had of how this might work. But did I really imagine I could see you from time to time and then forget about you and go on with my life in the intervals?
I know that you understand that what happened yesterday was not casual, that it was, potentially, the first step of a thousand steps, and that ending it now is essential. What happened between us on that bench, for those few brief moments, was dangerous.
Yesterday, driving home from The Ridge, I felt deliciously female and wanted, as though I were carrying around inside me a wonderful secret.
I did not sleep all night.
I do not want you to do anything to hurt your wife or your family.
Siân
Friday, 6:45 P.M.
Charles,
You will think me deranged, or descending into madness.
I wrote the letter to you this morning, then I took my daughter to the playground. It was very quiet and peaceful there—it’s really too late in the season to go to the playground, but Lily was bundled up and warm. She went immediately to a small sandbox, and I was grateful for the opportunity to sit on a bench and think.