by Ward Just
They walked along the waterline in bare feet, feeling the cold sea and the breeze, the sand underfoot and the last rays of the afternoon sun. They walked in the opposite direction from the boats, pausing here and there to watch tiny sand crabs burst from the sand and scuttle to high ground. He stooped to pick up a green glass sphere, a fisherman’s net buoy, and moved to put it in his pocket. She stopped and opened her pocket for him, guiding his hand with the glass sphere. Their eyes locked on each other, and their fingers touched inside her pocket.
He whispered some words and she returned them. Now they were at the far end of the beach, looking upward at the high hills. There was another footpath that meandered back to their house a mile away. It was a hard climb through rocks to the footpath, and he took her hand when they started up. The sea was flat now, the tide advancing in small even curls. They paused every few steps to look at the sea and the sunset, the sun descending now over American, three thousand miles distant; dusk here, midday there. The boats were home now and the sand and the sea were empty. The color of the water changed from light blue to violet as the sun’s rays faded. A way off, bumping the horizon, they saw a white light, a small freighter or large private yacht, sailing south. The white light grew brighter as the sunlight failed.
He said, “What a hell of a good time we’ve had.”
“We’ve always had fun,” she said. “Always.” She thought, Nearly always. Last winter was not so much fun, nor the preceding fall. They seemed to go in ups and downs; this was an up time. The slow rhythm of Ireland suited them both, long afternoons on the beach, late to bed, late to rise. She thought someday she would buy a house in Ireland and live in it during the summer and fall. New York’s turbulence exhausted her and there were times when she needed to escape it fully, to think. There were times when New York oppressed her, as Dement had done; then she became restless and would take her work and leave for a while. But it was a wonderful place to come back to, the closest thing to a home she had. “Myles,” she said. “You’ve been marvelous with Cathy.”
“Nice kid,” he said. “She needs a man around.”
“She’s grown dependent, since McGee—”
He said, “To hell with McGee. Never mind McGee.”
“Well,” She smiled. “He arrives tomorrow to take Cathy for a week, so let’s wait before he goes to hell. Let’s wait ten days.”
He said, “The son of a bitch.”
She moved up against him, still smiling. “Forget it, we’re the ones having the fun.” They moved steadily up the bluff, then over it and the sea was lost to view. They would have the prisoner exchange at Shannon airport the next day. McGee and his wife arriving from London on one plane, and ninety minutes later leaving for the United States with Cathy on another. There would be barely enough time for cup of coffee, thank God. Shirley would be wearing her smart traveling suit and her tight little smile that said, I-don’t-understand-how-you-can-take-that-dear-little-girl-out-of-school-for-a-month, why-didn’t-you-take-your-vacation-in-August-like-everybody-else. McGee would be civil enough but would not approve of Cathy’s clothes. He would look at her like an objet d’art at auction, appraising her for bids. Dana would ask them if they had a nice time in Paris and McGee would reply that they’d had a dynamite time, just dynamite. Then Shirley would ask her how Ireland had been and she would reply—what? Super. She would say, “I have had a super time.”
“Do you want me to go with you to the airport tomorrow?”
She smiled; it was not the worst idea she had ever heard. Myles, so big and weathered beside McGee, lean and civilized. They would shake hands cordially, having known each other in the old days; having decided long ago that civility was—easier. Just that. It was easier. It would also give Shirley an uncomfortable moment as a distinct outsider, wondering who Myles was ... But of course McGee would have told her. She said, “No.”
“Why?”
“Awkward,” she said.
He looked at her, surprised. “For you? I can’t believe that.”
“Cathy,” she said.
He nodded. “Well, if you change your mind.”
They were moving through a tiny glen, the silence oppressive except for the splash of a stream nearby. She was following him, her eyes on the path, her hands plunged deep in her pockets. Maybe it was a good idea, after all. It would be good to have Myles there—
“I’m glad to go with you,” he said suddenly.
“I know. We’ll see tomorrow.” The truth was, she did not want to make a difficult leaving for Cathy. The truth was, there would be a certain uneasiness all around and that would communicate itself to Cathy. The truth was, it would be easier all around if just she and Cathy went. The truth was, she did not want McGee to see Myles now; she did not want to see them together, even for thirty minutes in an airport lounge. She was connected to McGee and would always be connected to him; he had been her route out. It had not been an easy passage after the honeymoon, yet it seemed to her now that the honeymoon lasted years. McGee’s drinking grew uncontrollable until he took a cure and quit altogether. But the marriage did not improve. On a Friday in June in 1969 they were together, as they had been together for eight years; on Saturday they were not together, except the divorce took a year and a half. But the marriage ended then, when he moved out. She saw it coming but was powerless to prevent it; she was exhausted from the earlier preventions. What happened? Shirley happened. Dana’d buried herself in work and tried to ignore the craziness gathering around her, and she succeeded. Married, she and McGee never achieved the intimacy of the night on Fifth Avenue. That night McGee found some part of himself and the discovery was so painful that he could neither talk about it nor forget it. He never again spoke of Eastern Europe except once in a speech. He’d been drinking. The subject was the war and when he spoke his words faltered and he looked away. From the audience she could see the pain and confusion on his face. Was the death of one god the death of all? But he collected himself and finished the speech, to cheers. Dana believed that she reminded him of his days as a soldier in the cold war; she was a living reminder of that failure, and of other failures. There was nothing she could say or do, no obvious course for her. When a psychiatrist asked her if she would do anything to get him back she had to answer honestly, “No.” So he married Shirley and moved to Washington, where he would serve various administrations.
Myles said, “Shirley be with him?”
“His letter said she would.”
“They probably deserve each other,” he said.
She hooked her hand around his belt and said, “Pull. I’m getting tired.” She was following him as they wound upward on the footpath.
“She’s not bad looking,” Myles said.
“Mn,” Dana said.
He turned around, smiling. “Don’t you think so?”
She said, “Mouse-brown hair.”
“Well,” Myles said. “They look alike. And it isn’t mouse brown. it’s mouse gold.”
“They do not look alike.” Dana was indignant. She believed that happily married people came to resemble each other. It was true that Shirley was tall and thin as McGee was, but she had a petulant mouth and pampered skin. She always looked prepared, having spent a sizable portion of her life in clubhouses and cabanas. She said, “They are not alike in any way.”
“We ought to give Cathy a good time tonight,” he said after a moment’s pause. “We can take her to the dog track.”
She laughed. That was pure Myles. He’d been trying to get them to see the dogs for two weeks. “Well, she loves animals.”
“I’ll have to explain to her about the mechanical rabbit,” he said solemnly. “But Kelso has offered to go with us, anytime we want. Explain the betting. Kelso owns a dog himself. Kelso knows ...”
She listened to him explain about Kelso, the local squire. She jerked twice at his belt, wanting to feel the hardness of his body; wanting to feel him. He put his hand back of him and she took it and they moved on through the glen, towar
d the house. This one, she felt comfortable with him; loved him often, though not always. Myles was an itinerant, changing jobs the way other men changed suits. Now he was working for a foundation, well paid for distributing someone else’s money. The job had lasted for a year and now she could tell he was ready to move on to something else. Not something new because he’d already done everything—worked for universities, magazines, political candidates, governments foreign and domestic, and once, disastrously, a bank. A job came up and he was incapable of refusing it, believing that life was a series of possibilities and one was obliged to accept whatever came along. “Work is an episode,” he’d say when quitting a job. Once he’d written a thriller, not a very good one but commercially successful. He had no desire to write another, any more than McGee would ever write a true memoir.
McGee had gone back to the law firm in Boston and stayed there, satisfied; until “my government” called again, which in due course it did. She still had the original manuscript of McGee’s book; he had not even thought to take it when he moved out. What were their names? Sweeney and Johnson. No, Johnson was the alias. She had met Sweeney once by chance: years later she and McGee were flying to Chicago and Sweeney was in the seat opposite. She was fascinated by him, one of the most strikingly handsome men she had ever seen; he had beautiful manners and looked like a film star. McGee was nervous throughout the flight and she and Sweeney made conversation. She smiled at the memory; he’d tried to pass himself off as a recording executive. When he said it, she laughed out loud and he blushed; McGee merely looked uncomfortable. But Ambissador’s Journal was never published, and while the reasons—his reasons—seemed to her at the time perfect, even noble, they seemed a little less perfect and noble as time went on. In the beginning he refused to publish for the sake of his foreign friends and at the end for his own, and Sweeney’s and the others. She believed him absolutely at the time; he’d been irresistible that night in New York. She’d been moved beyond words. But his reasons could not be hers. She believed him and honored him and knew in her heart that he was wrong. He was wrong but could do nothing else and she understood that, too. For herself, the truth was not poisonous. The truth was the truth; concealed, it was no better than a lie. So six months later she quit and quickly signed on with another, better publisher. She and Noah avoided each other at parties; they’d not spoken a dozen consecutive words to each other in more than ten years. She could never forgive betrayal, and he could never forgive her knowledge of it. Now Noah was out of publishing altogether and she was doing what she’d always done and loved, she loved it no less now than then. How many books had she edited? More than a hundred now, books of all kinds: fiction, biography, journalism, history. Books threatened to crowd her out of her apartment; they were piled everywhere, books, galleys, manuscripts, paper. But stilt—there was something surrounding her that she could neither name nor understand. She felt herself aloft, out of touch with the common things of her experience. She regretted nothing; there was nothing to regret. But she wished at times that she had not been so—resolute, that she had been willing to pretend a little. Or that the people around her had been more resolute. She did not attract resolute men, with the exception of McGee. And resolute men did not attract t her, with the exception of McGee. The resolute men that she knew were cannibals, men of banking or insurance or law or the government, though it was also true that she was on guard. She liked surprise, that was the truth of it. She supposed that was why Myles attracted her so. When she was with him. in her apartment or a restaurant, talking about books or about each other, she was entirely herself. She was the woman she had become. Myles was part of her maturity and had no claims on her past. The truth was, he made her laugh. “Work is an episode,” whatever that meant. Did nothing last from today to tomorrow? These parts of her life ... She knew that she clung to her job as something more than a job, a chore she was good at and well paid to do. It was the single thing in her life that was continuous, that and Cathy and the yearly trips to Dement. She had left home fifteen years ago and each time she returned she felt—dread. Returning home, she expected to be presented with bills; long-forgotten debts requiring immediate payment. What these debts were she could not imagine, yet they lay unspoken in every conversation, and in every look or gesture. What had she done that was wicked? She had sought her fortune and found it. Married for love and found love, until her lover decided to love someone else. Live by the sword, die by it. Brother Frank’s generous words of two decades past. The trouble was, she had learned no lessons. She was half in love with McGee as she was half connected to her family, and had lost both. She could still go numb at the memory of McGee in the middle of Fifth Avenue, when he’d opened his heart to her; and glow inside remembering her grandfather at his desk, she in his lap peering into the recesses of a desk drawer ... And tomorrow she would meet an Aer Lingus jet at an unfamiliar airport and hand over her daughter to a stranger. She put her hand around Myles’s waist. He was still talking about the dog track. He was the one she depended upon now, and how strange that was; he was the least predictable man she knew. The truth was, he depended upon her just as much. Myles was like the wind, strong one day, weak the next. He was not motivated the way other men were motivated. But he had a distinct silhouette and he enchanted her and he was not a cannibal, and he was what she wanted now. “Myles,” she said.
He paused in the middle of a sentence. “What?”
“I like you so much.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, smiling at her. He was always embarrassed when she said it.
“You’re a very fine man.”
“Dana, dear—”
“It’s true.”
“Dana, dear,” he said patiently. “People have called me many things in my life—”
“A very fine man.”
“—nice, amusing, an excellent drinking companion. On occasion, an adequate lover—”
“Myles?”
“They have never called me ‘a very fine man.’ I am not ‘a very fine man.’ That implies security, stability, strength, selflessness, success—”
“Myles,” she said and suddenly began to cry.
THE CHILD had been put to bed and they were sitting in front of the fire in facing chairs, feet in each other’s laps. He was reading the Irish Times and she was sewing a button on Cathy’s blue coat. Making everything shipshape for Dad, she thought. The coat was a bit thread-bare but Cathy liked it and looked cute in it. Perhaps for the occasion she would dress her in organdy, patent leather shoes and a little yellow hat with a ribbon hanging from its brim. White stockings. Gloves. And a curtsy to Shirley, and perhaps a few words of Gaelic, This would be a child who would not speak unless spoken to, a child as good as gold and unfailingly polite. She looked across at Myles, deep into an account of the Troubles. She pushed her foot into his belly and he tickled her instep, not looking up from the newspaper. She giggled and turned back to the button. Then the phone rang.
He watched her disentangle herself from the coat and the chair and his lap and move off to the kitchen. This was an event, he thought; the telephone never rang. Then he returned to his newspaper, stretching in the chair. He could hear nothing from the kitchen; it was a room and a corridor away. Then the door slammed and he heard her feet running down the corridor, and his name twice called. He was half out of his chair and she was in the room, moving blindly toward him, her arms stretched out and fluttering. Her face was red and contorted. Instinctively, he said it was all right; whatever it was, it was all right. Then her arms were around his neck and she was making choking sounds, her body heavy against him. She was limp and he was half supporting her. He eased her to the floor in front of the fire and sat beside her a moment, cradling her in his arms. He was smoothing her hair with the palm of his hand and murmuring to her, it was almost a croon, saying over and over again that it was all right. Then she turned toward him and said, sobbing, that her mother was dead, dead. That was her father and her Uncle Tony on the telephone, her fat
her had been with her when she died. Why was her mother in the hospital at all? She had not known about it, she thought her mother was home, as she had always been home. On the telephone her father was not making sense. Dead, she said to him. She died early this morning. She went into the hospital yesterday, they tried to cable us but the cable never got through, That was all could talk about, the cable. My father said he’d been trying all morning, the telephone, the cable. She looked at him, her face breaking. My mother’s dead, she can’t be dead.
He said firmly, “Wait here. Don’t move.” Myles ran to the kitchen and poured a tumbler of Scotch and brought it back. She was sitting on the floor, slack, staring at the carpet, her lips moving soundlessly. He forced the glass into her hand and her hand to her mouth. She drank, gagged, and drank again. He took the glass from her. Then she began to tremble and reach out for him again. He took both her hands and knelt beside her and began to talk. He talked so she wouldn’t talk, and he could feel her begin to settle and come to rest. Finally he said, not knowing the truth or falsehood of what he was saying, but believing it to be correct, “She had a good life, Dana. A long life—”