Overseas

by Beatriz Williams

  “So…” I took another drink of wine, deeper this time. “So you traveled through time.” My brain zoomed out, hearing the words from a distance, and marveled at their matter-of-fact tone. As though we were discussing the Yankees game. So, a walk-off home run. So, time travel.

  He looked surprised, as though he’d never considered another possibility. “Yes. I suppose that’s what you’d call it. Apparently someone had found me in a field, with my ears oozing blood, and called an ambulance.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. The chap disappeared. But a letter arrived at the hospital the next day, addressed to me, typewritten, with instructions not to speak to anybody about my past. Included in the envelope were the keys to a locker at Amiens railway station. When I opened it a week later, it held a knapsack with clothes, money, papers: everything I needed, more or less, to start a new life.”

  “Like it was planned, somehow. Weird.” I stopped for a brief sarcastic laugh. “Now there’s an inadequate word. Weird.”

  He fingered the rim of his wineglass. “I was in shock for a while. As you’d expect. It’s the most supremely disorienting experience you could imagine. At first I thought I was dreaming, or dead; then I was only glad to be alive. And then I started thinking about things, other things. Everything I’d left behind. What might lie ahead in the future.”

  “And you moved to New York.”

  “Yes. Mucked about Wall Street for a bit, and eventually started Southfield.”

  “You’ve adjusted pretty well.” I stopped and shook my head.

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. This is insane. Am I dreaming? You really are Julian Ashford? The Julian Ashford?”

  “I am, I’m afraid.”

  “Corpses half-unearthed. What was it? Jaws wide in silent shriek. That was you?”

  “Ah. You know the poem, then?”

  “Oh, please, Julian.” I cocked my head, taking him in. “And all this time, you were alive? Running a hedge fund in New York City?”

  “I had to do something.”

  I smiled. A giggle escaped me, and another. He looked at me strangely for a moment, until his own lips started to tug upward. I leaned forward, still laughing, and pressed my head into my forearms. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s like some kind of weird satire, in a way. Running a hedge fund. I mean, what’s Rupert Brooke doing, do you think? Surfing in Baja?”

  He shook his head and chuckled. “Brooke’s an ass.”

  “You knew him?” I sat back again, facing him, one knee on the sofa.

  “We were at Cambridge together, briefly.” He reached out with one hand, touching mine, feathering his fingers on the ridge of my knuckles.

  “Of course you were,” I breathed. “You knew everybody, didn’t you? You were probably friends with, like, Churchill.”

  “Well, he was older, of course. But we were acquainted.”

  “What was he like?”

  “More or less as you’d imagine. Tenacious. Opinionated. Ruddy good company at a dull dinner.” He began to massage the tips of my fingers, sending shivers up the length of my arm to gather pleasurably in my scalp. “That was rather gratifying, you know,” he went on, a wry smile crossing his lips. “Finding out he’d gone on to save the free world and all that.”

  As you might have done.

  He looked remarkably at ease now, relieved, as he said, that everything was in the open at last. His broad shoulders settled into the sofa, veiled by his white dress shirt; his collar still fit stiff and neat against the pale gold of his corded neck, though he’d loosened his blue necktie; his firm jaw angled upward, as if the memories he sought had drifted upward to the plaster ceiling. The lamplight gathered like a nimbus around his head, pulled in by the irresistible gravity of him.

  I had the strangest sensation, then, of the entire world opening up before me. That, far from being terrifying, this shocking revelation of his was a good thing, an illuminating thing. That, sitting here on this sofa with this dazzling man, radiant and powerful as a young prince, I had been entrusted, for no particular virtue of mine, with a precious gift it would take me years to fully unwrap.

  “Tell me everything,” I said, leaning in toward him. “I want to know everything.” I looked down at his hand, caressing mine, and slid my fingers under his sleeve. “Tell me what really happened to your arm.”

  “Shrapnel.”

  “Well, obviously shrapnel,” I said, trying to sound worldly. I set down my wineglass and slipped his cufflinks free and rolled up his sleeve, just as I had before, not so many days ago. “It’s so jagged,” I said, tracing the scar with one weightless fingertip.

  “A glancing wound, really. I was lucky. I’d only been in the trenches a week; it was rather humiliating to be sent back down the line so quickly.”

  “Humiliating. When you could have been killed. Or… or lost your arm completely.”

  “Shrapnel’s nasty stuff,” he admitted, looking down at the scar. “They stitched me up pretty well. Wanted to keep me in hospital, but I hated to be away so long.”

  “So you made them send you back. With nerve damage and everything.”

  “It wasn’t that serious, really. Looks worse.”

  I looked at his face for a moment, trying to erase the horrifying image from my head: Julian hurt, bleeding, his arm torn open. His teeth ground shut, confining the agony. “Thank God,” I said, “thank God this… this thing happened. Brought you safely here, before something else could get you.”

  His mouth flattened. “Do you think so?”

  “My God! Of course! You’re sitting here with me, instead of buried in France somewhere. One of those white headstones. I’d never have known you.”

  “Perhaps that would have been better.”

  “No. No.” I shook my head and squeezed his hand. Hard, so my fingernails left tiny crescents in his skin. “Don’t start that. I won’t let you slide back into some survivor guilt funk.”

  “Survivor guilt?”

  “You know, feeling guilty because you’re alive, when everyone else…”

  He pulled his hand from mine and leaned against the back of the sofa. “Kate,” he said, “we’re not discussing an abstract psychiatric condition. I’d abandoned everyone who needed me.”

  “Not by choice, Julian!”

  He stared into the empty fireplace. “I haven’t even had the heart to look up my old company. Who was killed. Who spent the rest of his life in shell shock.”

  Killed. Shell shock. I heard the alien words in my ear, felt his withdrawal in the air between us. I turned and leaned back against his chest; lifted his heavy arm and placed it around me, entwining my fingers firmly around his hand. His ribs rose and fell steadily behind me, and I soaked it all in: his warmth, his vitality. The mere fact, the mere miracle, that he was alive at all.

  “Did you have shell shock?” I asked at last.

  His shoulder moved beneath my ear. “Not really. Just the odd nightmare. Taking fright at certain noises, which is rather a nuisance.”

  “What was it like? What were you like?”

  A little laugh. “Muddy. Dirty. And the smell! My God, that charnel-house smell! I still remember it, the rot of a million dead bodies, soaked into the earth around us. You can’t imagine. It’s not possible to describe it. And long stretches of boredom, of mindless administrative duties, of interminable waiting. Then everything in a panic, or else going on some sort of patrol and balancing on the knife edge of life and death. Thrilling. Horrifying. Ennobling. Soul-destroying.”

  I closed my brimming eyes. “Well, that clears it all up,” I observed, stroking his finger joints patiently. “So was it hard? Shooting at people?”

  “If you’re asking whether I actually killed anyone…”

  “I guess I am. But you don’t have to answer.”

  “I have,” he said simply.

  “Does that bother you?”

  He took his time to answer me. “No
t exactly. Not really. Perhaps abstractly, or rather unconsciously, but not in a rational moral sense. After all, they were trying to kill us.” He paused. “Does it bother you?”

  “No. If I saw someone trying to hurt you, I’d want to pick up a gun and kill him myself.”

  “That’s my line, darling. I’m supposed to come to your defense.”

  “It’s a two-way street in this century,” I said. “But you’d probably be much better at it than me. You’ve established that pretty well, so far. In the park, I mean.” I let out a laugh, remembering. “That poor guy. He had no idea what he was up against.” Another laugh, a small disbelieving shake of my head. “A First World War infantry captain, for God’s sake. You just never know who you’re going to run into in that freaking city.”

  His lips touched the tip of my ear in a fragile kiss. “I did tell you I had a complicated past.”

  “Yet, strangely enough, I never figured time travel.” I said it lightly, but the words seemed to take on weight, rotating slowly between us.

  “So you’ve accepted it?” he asked, after a moment, his voice quite low.

  “Accepted it? Julian, I… I mean, I have to, don’t I? You’re here, aren’t you? You’re not a hallucination. You can’t be lying; it’s just too massive and complicated and unnecessary to lie about. Or maybe I’m dreaming the whole thing, but it doesn’t feel like a dream, either.” I paused. “And you know something? It just fits, somehow, bizarrely. You were just so different; I couldn’t figure you out. It was like one of those 3-D movies, before you put the glasses on: the images blurring, not quite matching up. And now I’m wearing the glasses, and you’re leaping out at me, a thousand times more clear and real and vivid than before. You make sense, now.”

  “And it doesn’t frighten you?”

  The breath left my body in a rush: part laugh, part gasp. “Frighten me? Julian, it terrifies me. If I sit here and close my eyes and think he was born a hundred years ago, he dropped through some wormhole or whatever, it just… sounds so… unreal. It is unreal. Not just that you’re here, but you are who you are. You’re a historical figure. I don’t know how to begin to deal with that. If you let go of me, I’d be shaking.”

  His arm pulled me in; his head bent down against mine. “Kate, sweetheart, it’s only me, there’s no need…”

  I interrupted him. “And then I open my eyes, and you’re real again, and I know you; you’re the most familiar person on earth to me.” I turned my face to his, until our cheeks nearly touched. “And I think about how you held me last night, and how I felt then. How I feel now.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Cherished. Safe. And the fear goes away, until it—until this, you—seems almost… normal.” I shook my head, not quite believing in my own belief. My eyes fastened on the pool of wine in my glass, red-dark and still; I reached out one finger to circle the stem. “So, okay. I’ll buy it. You’re Julian Ashford. Which is really, if I think about it objectively, pretty cool.”

  “Cool?” He began to laugh, shaking my torso. “That’s the best you can come up with? Cool?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, laughing too. “That was pathetic. How’s this: you’re Julian Ashford, and it’s remarkable. Miraculous. The most wonderful thing I’ve ever known, and I am just so grateful for it. You’re Julian Ashford, and you’re alive, thank God, thank God, sitting here right next to me, and…” I paused, my voice dwindling into nothing.

  “And?”

  “And you’re mine.” The last word wavered upward as it came out.

  “Kate,” he said, gathering me close, dipping his head back down, “I’m yours. Believe that, at least.”

  The warmth of his cheek spread into mine, linking us, and all at once I did believe it. I understood everything. What had been enigma resolved into clarity, into the keen marrow-deep certainty that I existed to give Julian Ashford’s uprooted soul a home in this modern world. That his happiness had been placed between my palms, a divine mysterious charge. That he was mine. That I was his.

  I lifted my hand and rested it against the other side of his face, holding him in place. “So what do you think, anyway?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  “Modern life. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Technology.” I paused. “Career women.”

  “Well, it’s not as if you invented them all, darling. When I was a boy, it seemed every week some new machine or discovery was announced. All sorts of upheaval, social and technological. A fascinating time to be alive. I read magazines, books. H. G. Wells, that sort of thing. And music!” He chuckled. “My parents were appalled at us. Ragtime. All the new dances.”

  I twisted to look at him. “Oh, no. No. Tell me you didn’t do the turkey trot!”

  He cast his eyes to the ceiling.

  “Get out! You did! Oh, that is freaking hilarious!” I leaned backward on the sofa, laughing from deep in my chest. “The turkey trot! Will you show me?”

  “Absolutely not.” But his mouth edged upward.

  Eventually my laughter settled down and I eyed him a moment, smiling. “But you weren’t that naughty, were you? Not compared to today.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Especially the girls, I guess. The ones in your crowd.” I reached out to grasp the bowl of my wineglass and lift it to my lips. “No more blushing virgins today.”

  “No, not that many.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  He took a moment to choose his words. “Kate, I can’t blame you for belonging to a different world. My own wasn’t perfect. I don’t suppose human beings have ever figured out how to order these things very well.” He lifted one hand to rub his temple. “I’m jealous,” he admitted, “but I’ll try to be modern about it.”

  “And you? Did you… was there anyone?”

  He knew what I meant. “Yes. One,” he said. “During the war.”

  “And not since? With all the willing women thrown your way?”

  “Not since.”

  “And how long is that, exactly?”

  He paused. “Twelve years,” he said reluctantly.

  “For real?” I drew away, so I could turn around and look at him.

  “Why are you so astonished? You know I don’t go out.”

  “But you have needs, don’t you? I mean, you’re a man.”

  “I deal with it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, at least you can’t play the virgin card with me.”

  His face relaxed. “No, I can’t.”

  I considered for a moment. “Most men would have kicked up their heels. Taken advantage. Enjoyed themselves.”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  He frowned at me. “Because I couldn’t go to bed with a woman without telling her the truth. It wouldn’t be fair. And I never found the right sort of woman for that.”

  “What do you mean, the right sort of woman?”

  “Fishing for a compliment, are you?”

  “No. I really want to know. Because you didn’t actually tell me the truth, did you? I found out on my own.” I paused for a drink of wine, feeling a blush coming on. “Which is fine. You’ve been understanding about my… about where I’m coming from, and I can do the same. The guest bed was actually pretty comfortable.”

  “Darling, you’ve got it all wrong.”

  “I must,” I said rapidly, “seem pretty slutty to you. Throwing myself at you. That… that stuff on the phone today.”

  “I didn’t mind that at all.”

  “I just want you to know it’s been years for me, too. Since college. Because it turns out you were right. Sex is a big deal. It was too big a deal for me. So it always turned out to be a disaster, and I wish…”

  “Wish what?”

  “Wish I’d know you then, I guess. You would have been much kinder.”

  “Kinder?”

  “When it ended. When you were over me.”

  He gazed at me for a moment; then he took my glass from me and, togeth
er with his own, set it on the coffee table. He placed one hand on either side of my hips and leaned in close to my ear. “Tell me,” he said, “what do I have to do to convince you of my sincerity?”

  I felt myself grin. “Well, we could start with mind-bending all-night sex.”

  His laugh tickled my neck. “Kate, Kate. You’re killing me.”

  “Why not, though? Don’t you believe me? Or is it the moral thing? No sex before marriage?” The word darted from its mental crevice before I could trap it.

  He looked at me a long time, his green eyes soft and glowing, until I could feel each distinct cell of my flushed skin as it scraped against my clothes. “When I saw you in that conference room,” he said at last, in his low coaxing voice, “all I could think was there she is! I’ve found her at last. I meant to woo you properly, Kate. To marry you. I’d forgotten, for the moment, in the elation of having found you, that I was a freak of nature. That to ask you to stay, to be mine, meant forcing you to share it all with me, and who knew what might lie ahead for me? I couldn’t ask that of you.”

  “And so you pushed me away.” I felt the beat of my heart, trotting eagerly to some unknown destination behind my breast, and raised my hands to the curving angle of his cheekbones, to that beautiful face of his, filled just now with an expression of deep longing, of passion held just in check. I held him there for a moment, letting my eyelids drift downward to better collect the sensation of his skin, warm and intimate, against my palms. “What changed your mind?”

  He answered without hesitation, in a hard flat voice. “When I saw that man attack you in the park. I’d never felt anything like it. Not during the worst moments of the war.”

  My hands slipped down his jaw, his throat; I loosened the knot of his necktie and drew it free.

  He closed his eyes. “I’m the most selfish being alive, wanting you to stay.”

  “No, you’re not.” Delicately I unfastened the top button of his shirt, and then the next. “You’re lonely.” I dipped my lips into the hollow of his throat and felt him tremble. So large and so capable a man, and yet I could make him tremble. “You need this. You need me.”