After This

by Alice McDermott

  She put her head against the cold window. She had said Edith Wharton because she saw herself as a woman alone, square-jawed and mannish, making do, but she had been wrong. Edith Wharton had been both married and then, at a later date, madly in love. But it hardly mattered. She had seen tonight that she was a woman alone because their life was the one she wanted and she couldn’t have it. She could imitate: she could adopt Professor Wallace’s wry smile, she could fill her rooms with books and cats, she could find a man with ginger hair, but it would all be just that, an imitation, a diminished version of the unattainable original. Elizabeth and David Wallace themselves, precisely, was what she wanted: his eyes looking over her knees, her clever mind. Their exact lives in that exact place, not some substitute, and suddenly she found her eyes filling with childish tears, like Grace’s tears, tears of utter, miserable despair.

  It was a despair she already understood because she had also, once, wanted a life with both her brothers in it.

  Suddenly, a boy slid into the seat beside her. He was scruffy-looking, a sparse beard over his pale cheeks, long hair, a long black coat. She had seen him as she got on, his feet up on the seat beside him, his back to the window and his eyes closed; she had instinctively avoided sitting opposite him. He leaned into her. “Are you all right?” he said. Aww right. She looked at him over her shoulder. His eyes were black with long lashes. He smelled heavily of cigarette smoke and beer.

  “I’m fine,” she said. There was a single tear caught on the edge of her lid and speaking made it fall. She felt it on her cheek and then her chin but didn’t bother wiping it away.

  He seemed to watch her for a few seconds and then shrugged. “Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s not worth crying over.” She had begun to recognize the flat sounds of a Midlands accent. He raised his left arm to grab the handrail on the back of the seat in front of them. It became a wall over which they spoke. A safe distance. “Trust me.” She was surprised to see that his fingernails were clean, everything else about him seemed so dirty.

  Looking straight ahead, he asked her if she was going back to the university and she said yes. He asked her which hall she lived in and when she told him, he grimaced. “Kind of a convent,” he said. She said, for lack of anything else, “I suppose.” And then he turned his face toward hers, grinning, his arm still between them but their faces as close as strangers could comfortably get. His skin beneath the patchy beard was a bluish white and his face was probably childish without it. His teeth were small. “Speaking of sex,” he said, “I was wondering if I could convince you,” he leaned down to look out into the dark street, “in three more stops, to have a drink with me.”

  She turned toward the window; they were still on the residential streets that made up the wasteland between the university and the city. “Where?” she said.

  “At my flat,” he said. He was drunk, but she couldn’t tell by how much.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Now he leaned his shoulder against hers, brought his lips closer to her ear. “I have books,” he said and then drew back a little, raising his eyebrows. He might have said caviar or Moroccan gold. “Not just books,” he said. “Fucking literature. T. S. Eliot, Pound, Byron, Coleridge,” he said, as if each one made him more irresistible. “Who do you like? Christina Rossetti? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? You’ve got Professor Wallace, I take it. I saw her husband put you on the bus. Sir Philip Sydney, perhaps? I’ve got novels, too. All the big guys. Tolstoy. Or plays? Euripides, if you like. Shakespeare, of course. Fantasy? Christian allegory. I’ve got Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I’ve got…” The bus stopped and he leaned across her lap to look again through the window. His long hair was tangled here and there, a little dusty-looking. “Two more stops to talk you into it,” he said.

  He sat up and brought his face closer to hers. “It’s too early for either of us to go home,” he said. “All alone.” His eyes, bloodshot, looked right into hers, steadily enough, although his lids were at half-mast. He brushed a knuckle to her cheek. “And all tearful,” he said.

  She said, “It’s almost midnight,” more flatly than she had intended, sounding, she thought, like Grace. He watched her for a few more seconds. His lips were full and smooth inside the scruffy beard. Then he shrugged and dropped his arm. He slumped down in the seat beside her. She turned to look out the window. The passing, narrow houses, many of them dark, one or two with single lights burning. She recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were all about to take.

  They rode together in silence for a few minutes. He let himself be jostled against her in his dark coat. “One more,” he said at the next stop.

  Her eyes fell on his hands, British pale, especially under the dark sleeve of his coat, but soft-looking, faintly freckled. Edith Wharton had been a married virgin until she was forty-five, but Annie hadn’t thought to ask Professor Wallace how anyone knew this. Was it something Wharton wrote about or was there some sexual autopsy performed at her death? Pauline, under her mother’s care, had made her first visit to a gynecologist just last year. The doctor had said he’d broken her hymen to do the exam. Her mother couldn’t understand why he hadn’t kept that information to himself, and Annie had said, unkindly, “I might have asked the same about you, Mother.”

  She said to him, falling, skidding, “I haven’t had sex with anyone since high school.”

  He smiled without turning to her. The bus was pulling to the curb. “High time, then,” he said.

  Walking into his tiny apartment, there was a moment when she stood in the dark as he paused behind her, leaning to turn on a small lamp. All the strangeness, and the danger, of what she was doing appeared to her then, she even felt herself bracing for a blow, or—in this land of Jack the Ripper—a cold blade to the back of her neck. She felt a moment’s pity for her parents. And then, oddly enough, for Grace, who would be the first to come to her room tomorrow, whenever she freed herself from the Wallaces’, Grace who would be the first to know that Annie had not come home. But then the light came on. The room was cluttered with tossed clothes and empty teacups, papers and books (he was a doctoral student, she’d later learn, in engineering, not literature, although the apartment was indeed filled with hundreds of soft Penguin editions that he would later toss on the bed where she lay, like so many pastel rose petals). It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else’s life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable. It made him both less threatening and less interesting. He was as ordinary as anyone she knew. She turned around. He took her face in his hands.

  On the five-hour flight over, she had told Grace, quite simply, a younger sister and a brother, and felt the information trail off into the darkness below them—the black ocean, the curved earth, the empty space through which the plane was moving them, away from all that and into another time as well as another place. She would not, she knew, recalling Professor Wallace’s wry smile, be the first American student to seek to remake herself in her year abroad.

  The boy was thin and pale and startlingly comfortable out of his clothes. He remained consistently comic in response to both her reticence and her ardor. He did a funny bit, a kind of magic trick with condom as coin, that she suspected was a well-rehearsed routine. He pulled the books from his shelves and tossed them onto the bed like so many pastel-colored rose petals and then climbed over them to land in her lap. When some of the tissue-thin pages tore, he pulled the damaged copies out from under them and set each on the floor. He said she should take the worst of them home with her. “And when you’re old and gray,” he said, “and nodding by the fire, you can take down this book and say, ‘What is this funny stain on this wrinkled page?’”

  When the sun came up, merely a lightening at the single window, a shaded version of the gray that would mark the
full day, he let his head fall back, one arm under her neck, the other stretched to the edge of the mattress. His body was white and thin and boyish, it might indeed have been carved out of marble. As if it were carved out of marble, she thought there was beauty in it as well as tremendous sorrow. Because of Jacob, she knew, she would for the rest of her life see the bodies of young men in this way—lovers, husband, her own children, if she were to have them. It was not what she wanted to do, but she had no choice in the matter, it was no longer the life she had wanted, after all.

  On the mattress between them, at their feet and over their heads, were the scattered paperbacks. One was pressed uncomfortably into his side, spine up, just under his ribs, and she reached out to pull it out from under him. She held it up to the light, it was Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. She laughed out loud, thinking of Susan: sex and death. Fucking literature. Playfully, she placed the open book on his chest. He stirred a little and then, gently, brushed it away.

  With the changing light, the room seemed to grow more familiar. She was thousands of miles from home with an utter stranger at her side and yet she was falling into a pleasant, comfortable sleep, she was anticipating, with pleasure, perhaps, what the new day would bring. There was, there would always be, the snag of disappointment—it would not be the life she had wanted—but there was, at last, as well, something it would take her until the end of the year to begin to understand. At the end of the year, when she moved to London with him, quitting school, quitting home, dealing her parents (it could not be helped) another blow, she would recall the story Professor Wallace had told them that night, she would begin to see the wisdom of it—the wisdom of scattering, each to a different corner of whatever shelter they had found, so that should the worst happen, happen again, it would not take them all.

  TONY PERSICHETTI got religion—or religions, his sister said. He’d spent some months on an ashram in Pennsylvania, a few more with some Krishnas in New York, then traveled across Europe with a Brooklyn girl and ended up on a kibbutz where his whole day was spent, he’d said, shoveling chicken shit. And where, inexplicably (mixing his religious metaphors, Susan said), he shaved his head.

  Michael Keane laughed. “Sounds like Tony,” he said.

  And then home again, thin and weather-beaten, looking more like a convict than an aesthete. He came into her room and ran a hand down one of the wood panels he had helped their father to install, pressed it gently inward and withdrew a small plastic bag of brittle hash. “I’ve been thinking about this, waiting here for me, for months,” he said.

  “Did you think about Mom and Dad,” Susan asked him. “You stupid fuck. They were waiting here for you, too.”

  Not to say that that did the trick, Susan told Michael Keane, but the next Sunday night, Tony cleaned himself up and went out and came back some hours later and called them all into the living room, his mother and father, Susan herself who was only home for the weekend because the prodigal had once again returned and her parents had begged her to help welcome him. He announced that he was an alcoholic. That he’d just gone to his first AA meeting. And that with God’s help and theirs, he would get his life together at long last.

  Susan couldn’t help it, she told Michael, this back and forth with Tony had been going on for so long. The crazy Vietnam-vet cliché had worn pretty thin. “Do you have any particular God in mind?” she’d said.

  The AA meetings were held at St. Gabriel’s, in the basement cafeteria. Tony had breathed in a lungful of his old grammar-school air and found God again. Or God found him, there where he had hunkered down with his bologna sandwiches as a kid. Easier, he said, to pick up an old belief than to talk yourself into a new one. Now he began his day with 6:30 Mass, then went to the job his father had gotten him at Creedmoor, an office thing, then took classes at Queens College. He was headed for a master’s in social work. He was dating a girl he’d met at school.

  Her parents, she said, were holding their breaths, not yet certain, it seemed, that the troubled Vietnam-vet thing was something they could say was finally over.

  “And you?” she asked. They were in a bar on the East Side, they were being jostled, backs and arms, by the after-work crowd. He told her he had a job at a Catholic school, in Brooklyn, seventh grade. He said the pay was lousy but the kids were great. “Déjà vu all over again,” he said. He was sharing an apartment in the city with three friends from school. “Finally,” he said, “out of the basement.”

  And because she knew the story, she said, “How’s crazy Pauline?”

  Susan was blonder than he’d remembered her, prettier, too. He added, “I’m thinking of going to law school,” not sure yet if it were true.

  Susan said, “The guy I live with goes to law school. NYU. It’s good.”

  Michael nodded. His roommates were spread around the room, the familiar hunt for connections.

  “He knows you,” she said. “You caddied together one summer. He was in high school. You were home from college.”

  “This is a high-school sweetheart?” Michael said.

  She slowly closed her eyes, smiled a drawn smile. “A re-acquaintance,” she said. Begun when he had called her, out of the blue, to say, “There was a rumor when we were in high school and I wonder if it’s true.” Jill O’Meara’s name was mentioned. Susan’s eyes, when she opened them, were darker still. “Sometimes it’s easier to pick up an old boyfriend than to talk yourself into a new one.”

  “A pickup, then,” Michael said, and recognized his father’s sense of humor.

  “A serious relationship,” she said coyly to disguise what a complicated thing it was, her life with this boy.

  Michael raised his glass. “Good for you.”

  “Annie seems happy,” Susan said, an apology for not being free, because she liked Michael Keane, would have loved to go out with him when, as she thought of it, she was young. “She likes it over there.”

  “She really does,” Michael said. For the first time since they saw each other, he looked beyond her, toward the other women in the room.

  “And Clare’s good?” she said. “Still at dear old Mary Immaculate Academy?”

  “One more year,” he said. “Then college.”

  “Your parents will miss her.”

  But Michael shook his head. “They’re already planning their golden years in Florida. Though God knows what they’ll do with Pauline.”

  “Poor Pauline,” Susan said.

  And now their eyes met again, a prelude to separating once more.

  Michael had an impulse to say—so simple—and Jacob’s teaching, too, out on Long Island. Better at it than I am. Over at last, that crazy-vet thing. (Or no, he amended the tale—Sorry, Jacob) Never really did do that crazy-vet thing. Whatever was terrible over there kept to himself, the blanket pulled up over the shoulder, the head turned to the wall. The courage it took, for a kid so fearful, to keep so much to himself.

  Jacob’s fine, he had an impulse to say. And for just a second there would be the misapprehension on her face, for just a second, the solid past would loosen its grip. Jacob’s same as always. Too nice. Married Lori Ballinger. A couple of beautiful kids yet to be born.

  “It was good to see you, Michael,” Susan said.

  He bent down to kiss her cheek. “Good to see you, too,” he said. “Say hi to Tony.”

  And then walked away with it written all over his face—his friends said later, kidding him—disappointment, the failure to connect, the sorrow of a lost opportunity.

  CLARE KEANE returned to school that fall looking grown up. That’s how some of the teachers put it. “You’ve grown up.” Not that this was surprising to them, especially the older of them who had been witness to it for decades: the bony freshman come back as mature young woman for senior year—the time in between seeming no more, they told one another September after September, than the blink of an eye. Clare was only a little taller, and, like most of the girls, freckled and tanned, streaks of sun in her reddish brown hair. Her braces had co
me off—there was that difference. But there was also the way she carried herself. She had lost—one of the Sisters confided to a lay teacher and the lay teacher heartily agreed—that childish look she used to wear, wide-eyed and eager to please. She’d always been smart enough, there was no doubt about that, but there had also been about her an air of innocence that belonged, perhaps, to an earlier time, an air of innocence that in this day and age—even the Sisters said it—seemed to indicate a lack of depth.

  But this fall there was a new quickness in her eye and the range of her emotions did not seem limited in its illustration to a wide smile or a solemn frown. She laughed more. She socialized with some of the more troublesome and popular girls. She had learned, apparently, over the course of what she described to everyone who asked her as the best summer of her life, that there was a hierarchy to her interests and her pleasures after all. Although there was still something childish about her body, especially in the outdated shirtwaist dress that had been for too long now the school’s summer uniform, there was, also, finally, an assuredness in her movements that had not been there before. She had found a boyfriend this summer. (Of course of course, the teachers, even the nuns told each other, indulgent and naïve. Those who had been at the school when Annie was a student said, with a shrug, Life goes on.) His name was Gregory Joseph. She wore his heavy high-school ring on a gold chain around her neck.