by Sue Miller
He spoke easily of the various cities he’d already been to. The bookstores. The size of the audience. Where he was going next. How long he’d be “on the road,” as he called it.
He was enjoying it, he said. He’d done almost nothing for his earlier books, so this felt like an opportunity. “To, you know, give it a boost if I can. And of course, given the isolation of the work I do, ‘the solitary life of the writer’”—he’d made his voice pompous—“it’s kind of a treat, really. To be out and about.” He looked at her and then smiled, leaning forward toward her over the table. “But you must understand that—you live the solitary life too. You’re a painter, am I remembering that right?”
She had a quick small shock at his mistake. But then it seemed reasonable, it was so long ago. “You’re in the realm anyway,” she said. “The visual arts. I’m a photographer.”
“Ach!” he said, and hit his temple lightly with the heel of his hand. “The old errant brain.” He smiled. “Do you find it happens more and more to you, too?”
They talked about it for a while, a conversation she’d jokingly had with various acquaintances. The familiar litany of forgetfulness—where had you parked the car? why had you come into this room? what was the name, goddammit, of this very person you were exchanging pleasantries with? where had you left your glasses?
They laughed. They moved on. He spoke of his sense that he had one more book in him, and as part of that discussion, she learned his age—seventy-four. He said he had a wonderful young editor—“Young to me, anyway”—and that this guy had given him hope, at long last, for his future in the publishing world.
They were quiet for a few seconds. It seemed too long to Annie. She said, “I have a coincidence for you.”
“Good. I love coincidences. I’m a writer, after all.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, what would we do without them—coincidences—those of us trying to make fiction?”
“But they’re useful in life too, aren’t they?” she said. “Or interesting anyway.”
“Yes, they are. Sometimes very interesting. This evening being a prime example.”
She felt shy suddenly. She sensed she was blushing. “Well, I hope you’ll love this one too,” she said. “This coincidence. It has to do with Lucas.”
“Lucas.” He looked puzzled. “Lucas McFarlane?”
“Yes. I’ll give you a hint,” she said. “It’s my name, too. McFarlane.”
It was only now that it occurred to her, with a little jolt, that this might have been something he would have noticed when he first met Lucas—if he’d remembered her name from MacDowell.
It might even have been something he would have asked her about earlier this evening, she thought. If he’d remembered that.
“God, that is amazing!” he said.
She was silent, feeling suddenly unsure of what he might have recalled about her, what he might not. Finally she said, “And that’s the least of it.” She could hear the change in her own voice.
After a moment, he said, “Am I supposed to guess?” He tilted his head, a faint smile playing on his lips.
She smiled back. It’s okay, she thought. It’s going to be okay. She said, “No. You wouldn’t be able to, I don’t think.” She lifted her shoulders, her hands. “It’s that he’s my stepson. Lucas is. My husband’s son. By a first marriage.”
“Jesus!” he said. His face was openly surprised.
“I know,” she said. “We figured out the connection, that you were a writer of his, at Thanksgiving, actually, and it was exactly that surprising to me, too.” She sipped at her whiskey. “I think I said ‘Jesus,’ too.” She laughed, lightly.
“God!” He shook his head slowly. “Unbelievable!”
They sat in silence for a long moment. He grinned at her. “Well, I guess I’ll be smiling at Lucas a lot more than I used to.”
“He’ll enjoy that, of course.”
He was quiet again. Then he said, “But it’s a bit embarrassing, really.”
“Is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Why would it be?” Annie asked.
“Well, what I imagine is that now, when I look at him, I’ll be thinking of you.”
“That wouldn’t be so awful, would it?”
“No, not at all, not at all.” He sipped at his beer again. Setting it down, he grinned at her. “God, some of those nights in your studio . . .” He shook his head. “Pretty damn memorable. All of them were, actually, those nights. It was . . . an amazing couple of weeks, wasn’t it?” He leaned across the table toward her, his soft voice a kind of beckon to intimacy. “That was one residency I was sorry to see the end of.”
Annie felt an almost physical recoil. He was thinking of someone else, obviously. The painter, perhaps.
And then it occurred to her: maybe not even the painter. Maybe one of any number of other people, other possibilities. As she had been: a possibility. A possibility that hadn’t quite panned out, certainly not in the way the person he was remembering had.
She didn’t know what to say. Her breath was coming short. He was watching her steadily, ready to smile again. “There was only one,” she said quietly.
“One what?”
“Night,” she said. “And actually it was an afternoon.”
His face changed. Maybe it was coming back to him, the difference between the person he was sitting across from now, and whoever it was he’d spent all those memorable nights with.
“Hnn!” he said. “I . . . I didn’t remember that.”
“No,” she said.
They sat in silence for a few long moments.
“Another brain fry, I guess,” he said, and tried smiling at her.
“Yes,” she said.
The waiter passed by just then, and she signaled him for the check, making an imaginary mark in the air.
“Hey, you don’t need to . . .” He reached across the table to her.
“No, no, I do, I need to go. I actually . . . my cat is outside, and I ought to get him in. I was in such a rush to . . . to get to the reading, that I couldn’t wait for him. The cat.” Never had the truth sounded more like a lie, she thought.
“Well.” They sat for a moment. He smiled at her again, a smile that was a lie, too. “Well, it was good to see you, Annie. A wonderful break for me from all the idle chatter of the tour.”
“I can imagine.”
He said a few other similar things, she did too, they managed it pretty well, and then the waiter set the folder with the check down, equidistant between them. They both reached for it, but Annie was quicker.
“Annie,” he said sadly, “I’ll take it.”
“Oh, let me treat you,” she said. She should pay for him, she thought. It would be like paying a tax on her vanity, on her foolishness. “It’s the least I can do.”
It was colder when she stepped outside, and some of the melt on the bricks seemed to have frozen, so that Annie found herself walking even more slowly and carefully than she had earlier.
He’d been apologetic about the mistake as they waited for her credit card, and she’d been politely, falsely reassuring. When she’d stood up to go, he tried to persuade her that they could start the conversation over. She doubted it, she said. And she did need to get back to the cat. “He’s real,” she said as she pulled on her coat. “And he’ll be pissed.”
Now, starting on her cautious way down Mount Auburn Street, she was thinking again that she was glad she’d paid. He’d taught her something tonight, taught her almost painlessly. Almost.
She’d thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not.
It wasn’t a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with.
She felt small and foolish. Exposed.
She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter. She didn’t even know Ian. He didn’t know her.
Though she wondered what he had remembered of her. Something, anyway: he’d recognized
her, after all. Across a crowded room. He’d been ready with her name.
But it struck her suddenly that he might not have remembered even that. Yes, probably he’d read it, read it on the Post-it Olympia had stuck on the cover of the book.
“Thank you, Olympia,” she said aloud. She shook her head and laughed quickly, making her way down Mount Auburn Street.
She came to the bookstore. As she was passing its windows, she saw that it was busier than usual at this hour. Clearly, some of the audience from the reading had stayed on to move around the aisles, to stand among the shelves, browsing. She stopped outside, looking in.
And then she realized what it was, the detail that had bothered her when she entered the bookstore earlier tonight.
It was the chairs. The chairs were gone, the big, comfortable chairs Graham had loved so. The chairs where people sat and read through whole chapters of books they hadn’t bought yet and perhaps had no intention of buying. The chairs, and so, of course, also the floor lamps that had sat next to them, with their shades glowing a welcoming deep orange in the evenings.
Their absence made the big room look more like a store, less like a library or a study in someone’s home, and maybe that had been one of Sid and Olympia’s reasons for getting rid of them; but she was overcome by a sense of loss as she turned to start her long walk home. She had sat in one of those chairs the first night she and Graham spent together, sat in it watching Graham behind the counter and pretending to read her book, October Light, while she waited for him to finish work so she could walk him home. She had read the same sentence over and over, and each time she lifted her eyes to look at Graham, he was always there, looking back at her.
The wait had seemed endless to her, but finally the lights blinked off and on several times, and the store began to empty out. She watched Graham talk to the last customers as he rang them up, watched him lock the door and turn the sign so it would say “Closed” to passersby, watched him turn off the lights and then come over to stand in front of her in the partial dark—the bluish light from the streetlamp reached in only at the front of the store.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” he said in his deep, rumbling voice. “You’ve got a promise to keep.”
Now, making her way down the snowy streets, she was thinking of that other walk, their meandering, distracted walk down the summer sidewalks back to his apartment all those years ago.
She remembered how excited she’d been—almost dizzy with it: she kept bumping into him. He’d taken her hand, finally. Once they’d threaded through the nighttime crowd in Harvard Square (the jugglers, the people gathered around the street bands, some of them dancing), once they’d passed the tall brick fencing surrounding the dark of Harvard Yard and crossed Quincy Street into the emptier streets beyond, he had stopped and bent down to kiss her, gently, but searchingly.
“There,” he said, standing straight again. “That’s done.”
Ash Street was treacherous, worse than Mount Auburn, the slippery shoveled pathways in front of the houses narrowed by the heaped-up snow on both sides. Sometimes there was no path at all, so that Annie had to climb over the crusted bank and then more or less skid down it on the outer side in order to walk in the street, watching for another cleared sidewalk to open up.
Most of the houses she passed were lighted inside. Here and there you could see someone, usually reading, sometimes watching television. In one case, a pair making music, he on the violin, she the piano. You could faintly hear its sweetness ringing out into the icy dark. Annie felt surprising tears rise in her eyes.
Now she came to Garden Street and turned left. The wider, civilized sidewalks here in front of the church and then the hotel were shoveled and salted, so for several blocks she could walk almost normally. She felt her body relax.
But when she crossed the street at the light and turned right into the relative darkness of Chauncey Street, her pace changed. She began to make her way more cautiously again down the icy sidewalks here.
32
Annie was in a strange room as she came up from somewhere black. From nowhere—a deep, deep hole. She wasn’t sure why she was here, or even where here was. There were voices from beyond a curtain, far away.
Someone came in and bent over her, looking curiously at her. Frowning. A woman. Annie didn’t recognize her. Big nose. Iron-gray hair.
Now a pleasant, perhaps condescending, smile bloomed and changed the woman’s face. “You’re awake!” she said. Her voice was very cheerful, so Annie smiled back. “Yes,” she said.
The woman set something down on Annie’s bed and reached to smooth the covers over her.
“Much pain?” the woman asked.
Annie couldn’t guess who this woman was or what she was asking about. Then she did feel it, yes, pain. Her arm. “No,” she lied. “Not too much.”
“Good. We’ll try to keep it that way.”
Bending over Annie, she began to talk. She was going to send Annie home with some medication, she said. She started to tell Annie details of when to take it, how often.
It was confusing. Annie was trying to write it down as the woman spoke.
After a moment the woman stopped, right in the middle of what she’d been saying. She was looking at Annie’s hands, still moving. “What are you doing?” she asked. Her voice had changed, sharpened.
Annie felt ashamed. “Just trying to get it all down,” she said. “There’s so much.”
The woman looked hard at Annie, and Annie too looked down at her own hands, her empty fingers bent around the pen that wasn’t there. There was mild surprise at this. Actually, more in the way of bemusement than surprise.
When she spoke again, the woman’s voice was different. Kinder. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’m going to come back in a little bit. I want to let you rest for a while more. And then we’ll call . . .” She looked down at the thing she was holding. A clipboard, it was. “We’ll call Mrs. McFarlane, to let her know to come and get you,” she said.
“Oh, no,” Annie said. “It’s Mr. McFarlane. It’s Graham. My husband. He’ll come and get me.” This was the first thing Annie knew, and she felt an amazing welling up of pure relief: she remembered now who she was. And it was going to be all right. Because Graham would come. He would take her home.
The woman was silent for a moment. “Well, we’ll figure it out,” she said. She was speaking to Annie as if to a child. “For now, you just rest.”
After the woman left, the light somehow grew dimmer in the alcove Annie seemed to be consigned to, so it wasn’t hard to obey the woman. She closed her eyes, and she slept.
When she woke, she remembered it all.
Who she was, where she was, everything that had happened to her—and she wished she were no one again, waiting for Graham.
She’d fallen. On the way home from her drink with Ian, she’d fallen. She’d been carrying the book, Ian’s book, in her left hand, so as she felt her feet leave the ground, she shot her right arm out, her free arm, to catch herself. But when the heel of her hand hit the ice, something in that arm gave way with a sharp, unforgiving pain, and then she was landing on her knees and her stomach. Her chin hit the icy sidewalk last, and her head was slammed upward—her head, which she’d been trying to hold up safely, out of danger, as she fell.
That was all of it, apparently.
She lay still for some moments on the ice, panting, feeling mostly relief—relief to be conscious, to be alive. Relief that it was over.
She became aware then of the pain, mostly in her arm, but also in her jaw, her chin. She ran her tongue over the inside of her upper lip and tasted blood, felt the dents her lower teeth had made in its surface as they were shoved upward into it.
When she rolled to the side to try to begin to stand, the astonishingly sharp pain in her arm stopped her.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t move.
But after a while—a minute maybe?—she tried again. This time she held her right arm pressed against her bo
dy with her left hand, held it as steadily as she could manage to while she lurched forward and up.
Her right knee was throbbing, burning, as she put her weight on it, as she stood, gingerly. “It’s okay,” she said aloud to herself. She didn’t recognize her own voice. “It’s okay. Just slowly, just slowly, just slowly, just slowly.”
She tried a few steps. The knee was not too bad, she could walk. But the arm—it was broken. It had to be broken.
She could feel the warm blood on her chin now, her mouth tasted of it. Her head ached too, but she thought she could make it home. She had to let the cat in. The real cat. Then she’d figure out what she needed to do.
Every step on the remaining long blocks made the pain jolt through her arm. When she turned the corner onto Prentiss Street, she felt such relief she could have cried.
From the foot of the driveway, she could see Sam waiting under the light by the front door. When he saw her, he yowled his outrage over and over. Annie fumbled with her left hand into her purse for her keys, and then fumbled again to turn the key in the lock. Her right arm dangled, useless. The pain, which she couldn’t have imagined could get worse, flashed with her slightest motion.
Inside, the idea of filling Sam’s dish seemed impossible. Instead, she squatted and reached under the sink with her left hand for some of his dried food and tossed it across the kitchen floor.
Then she sat at the big table for maybe five minutes—or maybe ten, she couldn’t have said. She let the tears rise and slide down her face—tears for the pain, for the terror of the moment of the fall, for her aloneness in all of this. When she’d finally calmed down, when she’d stopped crying, she went upstairs slowly and carefully, up to the landline telephone in Graham’s study. Pressing her arm against the desk there, she used her left hand to call herself a cab to take her to the hospital.
“What does the other guy look like?” the cabdriver said, staring at her in the rearview mirror as she gingerly lowered herself into the back seat.