My hand began to shake, and my silverware fell to the floor with a shattering sound. My son said it was all right, he would get it—and looked at me warily.
“Are you okay, Mama?”
“He’s here?” I opened the envelope.
“Of course he is. It was a reception for this conference.” I would love to see you … I’ll be in the St. Francis lobby at ten thirty. It was nearly ten.
“I have to go,” I whispered, but my son gave me a sour look as our food arrived.
“Who is he, Mama? You don’t have to be so careful. Dad’s dead, nobody minds anymore these days. You were young. I can guess what must have gone on.”
“Don’t be silly.”
He leaned over. “Was he the one you almost threw everything over for?”
Sharply: “Did your father say something?”
Sonny smiled. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you had some man, years ago …”
I rarely thought of him in all that time. When I did, it was with the distant fondness of a childhood friend. I had no photographs; he had slipped out of our lives completely. Of course Sonny couldn’t remember the man who had visited our house for six months when he was little, the summer Lyle ran away. I was the only witness still alive, and so it was almost as if I had imagined Buzz. From the few newspaper items that found their way to me over the years, I learned he lived in New York, so the city took on the air of being his city. A party with drinks on a grand piano, a balcony with a view, a famous man in a corner, an infamous woman in the elevator. And, leaning over the railing with Buzz, a new lover. In my imagination, he had found happiness after all. He must have. How startling to feel him come alive again, in his hotel room, already straightening his tie before a mirror, and if he were to walk out of one of those elevators it would be like a character stepping out of the pages of an old, tattered book.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, he was the one.”
“Aha! Tell me about this old lover of yours—”
“What was he like?”
“You’re avoiding the question! Nice, happy enough. You’ll see for yourself.” The check arrived, and he gave them his room number, and then stood to leave. “Should I stay?”
He was longing to step into my past. “No, go on up.” I looked down at myself, my old flowered dress. “I can’t meet him like this.”
“It doesn’t matter, Mama,” he said. “He’s an old man.” And by that I understood that I was an old woman, and vanity was years behind me.
I was left alone in the restaurant, with the remains of our breakfasts and the attendant vase of daffodils, trumpets on high. The laughing woman was leaving with her party, heading out through the glass door to the street, but on the other side of the room stairs led down to the lobby, where those discreet pairings of leather chairs implied old-fashioned rendezvous and not the business appointments which were their current fate. I wondered what this seemed like to my son. The thwarted passions of another age; the fetters of a tragic time. As if his own time were the perfect one in which to be born, his choices utterly free, his life without a single regret—as if he didn’t have an illegitimate child who might even now be judging those choices seemingly made in another era. He was a man of fifty. Even his generation was ceding to the next.
My mind had wandered; there, in one of the lobby chairs facing away from me, I saw the neatly parted white hair of a man. He must have entered the moment before. A tall man, in an expensive gray suit, leaning toward the flower arrangement. What was this hurry in my heart?
Holland only mentioned his name once. We were at a memorial benefit hosted by a successful colored woman. It was sometime in the 1980s, in Sausalito, across the bay near where the Rose Bowl used to be, high on a hill overlooking the water and the dark outline of Angel Island. No house blocked her view; she owned the grove below her. For all that, it was a casual party of few pretensions, not especially either staid or raucous—it was, after all, to fund a memorial scholarship—so I was surprised, when it was time to leave, that Holland handed me the car keys and said he was in no position to drive. Not until that moment did I realize he was drunk.
He stood on the garden path, among the fragrant tuberoses, leaning against the gate and staring at the view. In the moonlight, his silhouette was the same at nearly sixty as in his teens. Age had taken none of his charm, his beauty; he had instead patinaed like old bronze. In his eyes, I saw that look of blindness that overtakes the old, who stand and stare at a tree or a house, unseeing; just the simple experience of memory.
“I’m sorry,” he said, holding on to the gate for support. I wondered how many glasses of champagne he’d had, and whether anyone else had noticed. My mind was still on the party, the plump charming hostess, the businessmen and their wives and what they thought of us, the Cooks. An unseen boat rang its bell on the water.
“It’s all right, you had a good time. I didn’t notice you drinking,” I said.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do it.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
He motioned to the house and the view, and his gesture included the tuberoses, the path, the moonlight and dark island before us. “I couldn’t give you all this.”
I laughed. “Well of course not! Let’s get you—”
“I should have!” he stated, blinking. “I should have let him give it all to you!” Then he shook his head. “But I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry. I know it’s what you wanted.”
That was when, out of nowhere, softly, surprisingly, with a pop on the first consonant and a hum on the last, my husband said a name I had not heard in thirty years.
Neither of us changed position: him looking out at the water, me looking at him. We were as quiet as parents in the room of a sleeping child. The clamor of the party was muffled behind the flowering bushes, and from an open window floated the sound of piano playing. I watched my husband as he listened.
“I did not want it,” I said.
His face turned slowly and surprised me. It was fixed in bewilderment. Of course it was. After all of our years, all my work to understand him, in the end, I was the greater mystery. The inexplicable Pearlie Cook. There was no fathoming the girl who sat by him in the dark room of his mother’s house; who found him on a beach; who clipped his paper and bought a barkless dog and a bell that cooed instead of rang. A glove with a bird in the hand. What a series of riddles! The whole episode, from the moment he saw me with Buzz in that living room until that night, sitting beside him by the radio, when he looked at me to ask what I wanted and I said nothing to stop him. Sitting with a glass of bourbon, his hand making the ice shake. And no word from me, no struggle. To have his first love—the girl he stared at in school and whose hand he took on a walk along the road to Childress, the girl for whom he committed a crime so he would not have to leave her—to have her say “Goodbye” and know that in an hour it would be over. What a lonely hour. How had I missed it? All those years of marriage, I thought I was studying him, but the entire time he was watching me more carefully, more ardently; like an old Kentucky dowser, stepping across the dry land with a forked branch, waiting for some sign of what lay deep below. The source of me. And all those years, poor man, he got me wrong.
“It was all for you,” I said quietly. “You wanted it, I was sure.”
We think we know the ones we love.
In his eyes I saw the doubt of many years resolving. “No,” he said at last. “No, I never did.”
There we stood, in the warm scent of the garden, the piano music drifting in. Around us spread the black water, the blacker island, and the years of misunderstandings and doubt. We stood looking at each other for a very long time. There would be more evenings like this, with the moon passing from the trees and the fog held back by the bridge like a curtain. Beautiful evenings, with Holland looking up at me with the moonlight on him. There would be more parties, more drinks and wanderings to find the car, more flowers, more boats, more bells, more death. More and more and more,
until his kidneys turned on him at last. And it was I, the widow, who would choose what to put on his gravestone: that he was loyal, and decent, and served his country in a war. That is what Holland would have written down for you, and it is what I wrote for the stonemason. Just that. And if you came to see that grave, you might walk away and think it all dead ground without a flower. You would never guess.
“Take my arm,” I said at last, and he leaned on me as I guided him toward the gate. There would be more. But we would never talk about the past again. We had closed it up like a house too big and drafty for old people to live in, and instead we lived in the small warm place our marriage had made.
“This way,” I said, and he followed.
The hotel lobby, the man in the chair: one moment it was my old friend, and the next it was not. A mangled hand pulling out one of the flowers; or no, a play of light. Through the swinging door, I could see gingko trees blooming along the street and a silver balloon in one, almost within reach; a young man in a hat stretched for it, a girl watching expectantly beside him. I looked back at the man in the gray suit, still waiting. It was him. I stood up from my seat.
It had been folly for Buzz to think he could force old love to return exactly as it was. Just like the sensation of awakening in the middle of the night, torn out of a pleasant dream. You try to thread yourself back into that dream. You convince yourself it can be done: you close your eyes, remembering just where you left off—a rosebush, a picnic, a long-dead mother. So you fall asleep, and sink into a dream—but never, never back into that dream. It is always gone forever. For we can no more revive old love than we can return to that awakened dream.
An old love, an old friend. The man in the chair; I knew so little of his life. A wealthy man in New York City, a political donor, sitting in a room full of other well-dressed men, laughing, and a lover’s hand on his knee, patting it gently. He could not have thought of me much in that time, not with people, worries, illnesses, and death. No more than I had thought of him. And now, to revive it all.
Some do try. Is it folly—or the best use of our lives to try?
I would walk down those three steps to the lobby and approach the chair. I would wait for a moment behind him, steadying myself, feeling the strange contraction of time taking place. A hurry in the heart. Then I would step into view—Hello, Buzz—and he would rise in astonishment—Look at you!—and we would both laugh at how the years had altered us, and everything around, and left us here, just as many travelers had laughed before us, meeting overseas and finding each other in this very lobby, these same worn leather chairs. We would embrace, and talk about our present lives, happy enough. That slightly broken nose, those sapphirine eyes still flashing, his hand on mine. And then we would talk about the past. I’m sure Sonny told you that Holland died. An old wound, like shrapnel, would twist inside us both. An old door, bricked up and plastered over years ago, would be revealed again; another life; each of us would stare at it, move our hands along the surface until we could feel the edges.
So we would come around at last to the real purpose of his note. I’m sure seeing my son’s name at a fund-raiser was a shock and delight to old Buzz; surely it seemed like a chance, in old age, not to be missed. The little boy, grown into middle age, who did not remember him. An innocent conversation, some harmless prying into the past, and then the note, an impetuous leap. I’m sure he took pleasure in the thought of seeing me, his old accomplice in a failed endeavor, just to go to that memory once again and this time touch the bottom. But he had not come all that way merely to see my face. He had come, I knew, to put an old question to rest. Sitting before me and smiling, a tremor in his one good hand, old age nearly disguising him. But I could not answer it for him. I couldn’t say: In the end, he loved me more. That would not be kind, or even really true. Leaning forward in his chair, those blue eyes fixed on me: “Tell me, Pearlie, why did Holland do it? Why did he stay?”
How could I possibly explain my marriage? Anyone watching a ship from land is no judge of its seaworthiness, for the vital part is always underwater. It can’t be seen.
Why did he do it? we ask of the conventional professor who runs off with his student. And of the doting girl who breaks her engagement: Why didn’t she? It’s what we always ask of others’ lives. Luck was all before them, fortune and happiness; for some reason they turned and stepped off the precipice. What vision did they see there? Passion and beauty explain nothing—these stories are everywhere, and few of us are beautiful. The balance tilts both rich and poor. It might be the folly of youth, or the whims of old age, but this madness does not discriminate: an old widower about to remarry might change his mind, his middle-aged children in the pews, and be unable to state his reason. What could he say that would not sound like folly? We think we know people, and dismiss the scenes as aberrations, as the lightning strikes of madness, but surely we are wrong. Surely these are the truest moments of their lives. Why did that old man in the chair, Buzz Drumer, sell off his family’s property, and fortune, and legacy to be with one man, long ago? Why did my husband, at the last hour, stay rather than leave? We cannot know until one day the vision appears to us: that chances are few, and death comes soon enough. Take rapture if it’s in your grasp; take love if you can reach it. For Buzz, the love was Holland. For Holland, it was Sonny and me. Not madness. Perhaps: in commonplace lives, our single act of poetry.
“Happy enough,” my son had said.
I sat a long time at my table. People came and went but the old man waited in his chair. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the silver balloon dip low and the young man leap to catch it. The girl beside him clapped each time he did this, jumping fruitlessly, once, twice, arm stretched to the sky. And then, losing his hat, he caught it. He pulled it down. He handed it to the girl beside him, laughing. At that, as if it were the signal I was looking for, I stood and walked to the door, stepping out into the startling day.
About the Author
Andrew Sean Greer is the author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, the story collection How It Was for Me, and the novel The Path of Minor Planets. He lives in San Francisco, California.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
novels
The Path of Minor Planets
The Confessions of Max Tivoli
stories
How It Was for Me
Copyright
First published in the United Kingdom in 2008
by Faber and Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2008
All rights reserved
© Andrew Sean Greer, 2008
The right of Andrew Sean Greer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–24609–0 [epub edition]
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
I
II
III
IV
About the Author
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Copyright
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The Story of a Marriage Page 19