by Dawn Tripp
“Actually, we were on our way in to find something to eat.”
“Fish,” Bridge adds. Henry smiles.
Alyssia looks at her coolly. “You must be Luce Weld’s little sister.”
“Yes.”
“Well isn’t that just grand.”
“It has its moments.”
“Come on, Alyssia,” Will says. “Leave them. We’ll catch up with Henry later.”
Alyssia glances at Bridge, then back at Henry, a sly look in her eyes, and he can see that she is about to add a remark, and he knows it will be cruel.
“Later,” he says quickly, with a subtle but definitive intent, a warning or a promise depending on how she chooses to read it.
Alyssia bites her lip. “I will hold you to ‘later,’ ” she says, and she shoots him a winning smile, then takes her husband’s arm. They walk back toward the other end of the terrace that looks out onto the sea.
“I’ve heard she keeps jasmine flowers,” Bridge says, looking after them.
“She does.”
“Have you seen them?” She does not look at him. Her voice is measured, even, and he knows what she is asking.
“Yes,” he replies after a pause. “A few years ago. I’ve had no interest in them since.”
They fall into silence. Notes of a new jazz music strike up from the gramophone. Bridge looks toward the doors. Her eyes sweep the room inside. She spots her brother in a corner, leaning against the wall. He is talking to a woman in a slim black dress. His glass is filled with a ruddy whiskey. He drinks it off and picks up another from the end table next to him.
“Do you want to go in now?” Henry asks her.
She smiles. She doesn’t look at him. The lights from the room inside play across her face. “I did miss you,” she says. Her voice is still and soft and deep, complicit. He cannot take his eyes off her. He cannot see any other thing, has no desire for any other thing except her face—the thin arch of her brow, the delicate line of her jaw. She turns and looks at him, and he feels that he is falling toward a place inside her that has no floor.
“Are you still hungry?” he asks slowly.
“No.”
“They’re going to have dancing later. A band outside. Fire-works.”
“Where’s your car?” she says.
“Next door.”
“Let’s go.”
He does not ask where. They go outside into the night, through the narrow alley between the houses, across the yard to the second drive.
“Give me the keys,” she says. He looks at her for a moment, then hands them to her. She slips behind the wheel.
They don’t speak. She drives along East Beach then north up Horseneck, past Bald Hill and the Glen. She kills the lights as they make the second left-hand turn. She cuts off the engine and lets the wheels roll on their own down the lane.
He knows now where she is taking him. He can see her face in the darkness beside him, the lean angles of her profile against the window glass, the eerie reflected glow off her skin, and he wants this moment to go on, this suspended pause as they coast down through the darkness toward the bottom of the hill.
Ahead and to the left, he can see the glass roof of Alyssia Borden’s greenhouse set in off the drive. Bridge lets the car roll past it. She twists the wheel slightly and steers across the lane into a turnoff by the brook. She lets the front hood of the car push into the brush. The wheels come to a halt.
They walk back twenty yards to the drive. They walk in silence, slightly apart, this last, carefully maintained distance between them. They reach the door. Bridge presses down on the latch with her thumb. The bar lifts. The door swings open on its hinges with no sound.
He follows her through the rows of plants, the peat pots, the galvanized buckets, the watering pails, past trays of seedlings set on stepped shelves. She leads him through the steam, the warmth, the soft-brushed scented light until they come to a cluster of jasmine plants.
She stops and points to the flowers on one—five-starred and open. She points to the buds, slight pale bulbs on long-stemmed necks among the leaves.
“You can’t touch them, you know,” she says. “They won’t open if you do.” She takes his hand then and places it on her neck, his fingers at the edge of her throat. His mouth grows dry. His hands feel awkward on her skin, and he wants to explain it. He wants to explain that for years he has let his hands grow numb, unable to feel.
“No,” she says quietly, as if she is reading his thoughts. She puts her finger to his mouth. She touches the side of his face, and in that gesture, so simple and complete, he can feel his body begin to thaw. It is painful—so much more painful than he could have imagined— those first few moments of returning—the blood winding back in a slow and knifelike rush.
He slips the strap of her dress off her shoulder, and she takes his coat and lays it on the floor. She pulls him down with her. She is warm. Her body is so warm. Her skin tastes of salt and he can smell the jasmine. There is sweat in the curves behind her knees, and he is holding her tightly. She cries out.
Afterward, as they lie together on his coat on the cool dark floor split by circles of thin light, he tells her that he wants this. He wants her. It matters. She looks at him, but she does not answer. Her face is inscrutable in the soft, warm darkness.
“I need this,” he says quietly. “You. I want you to need me.”
“That might not be a practical thing to want.”
“Come home with me.”
“No.”
“Tonight.”
“No.”
“Please.”
She kisses the side of his neck, then presses her mouth into his shoulder. “Do you see the moon?” she says. He turns his head toward the window with the ring of yellow light through the beveled glass.
It has been cut. The space between them. She has cut it easily.
“Your life is your life,” she says gently, her mouth still against his shoulder. “My life is mine. What you’re looking for, what you need, has nothing to do with me.”
She starts to roll away from him, to push herself up, but he grasps her wrist and pulls her back. “What I need,” he says, “has everything to do with you.”
She stares at him for a moment, then shakes her head. “No. That’s not true. What time is it?”
“It is true.”
“What time is it?”
He looks at his watch. “Ten past one.”
She smiles. “We’ve been gone for two hours.”
“Come home with me.”
She shakes her head. “Come on. Let’s go.” She stands and straightens her dress. She rakes one hand through her hair, then turns toward the small pots of jasmine on the table. She picks over a few, finds one she likes, and she takes it. They walk through the rows of plants to the door.
Outside, they walk in silence to Henry’s car. Bridge puts the jasmine on the floor of the passenger seat. Then she comes around to the driver’s side and steps up onto the running board.
“Let me drive you the rest of the way home,” he says.
“It’s an easy walk,” she replies, and she leans through the window and presses her mouth on his. “Go,” she says, stepping away. “Go.”
Bridge
Luce is waiting for her, half stewed, at South Westport Corner. He peels out of the darkness and steps in alongside her as she walks.
“Whoring, were you?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Weren’t you?”
“Get yourself gone, Luce.”
He takes a step ahead, then turns sharply so he is standing in front of her. She stops.
“I saw you leave with him.”
“You’re loaded.”
“He’s got a wife.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Didn’t know that, did you? He don’t see her, I guess. Don’t live with her. But a wife’s a wife.”
“Who cares, Luce? This has nothing to do with him.”
“Oh yes, I think it does.�
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He pulls a cigar out of his vest pocket, bites off the tip and spits it on the ground. He strikes a match. The light rakes his face. He inhales, bluish smoke leaks out of his mouth.
“He’s not the kind you should go with.”
“I will do what I want. I’m tired now. I want to go home.”
He takes a step toward her. She takes a step back. He looks at her for a moment, then laughs.
“These here are fine cigars. Cost me something, you know.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Maybe now, though, they’re not fine enough for you.” And as he moves in again toward her, she can see that this time is different, she can sense a vague incoherent threat as he reaches for her arm. She slips away and begins to run. Her heart is pounding in her chest, and she can hear him, for a good half mile up the road, calling her name through the broken dark behind her.
At the house, she comes into the kitchen and lights the woodstove. She blows up the fire, pumps a pot of water and sets it on the heat. She drags out the tub. She stands by the stove and watches the bubbles as they sprout in small crowds. They scurry together and grip the floor of the pot. They thicken and rise. The water comes to a boil. She pours it into the tub. The steam is wet on her face. She strips off her clothes, turns down the lamp, and climbs into the tub, and she lies there, her body still, her ears below the surface, as the fire settles in the woodstove. She listens to the underwater sound of her heart. She watches the skinny shadows spar on the walls, and she lets her mind drift back over the night: Henry, the soft red light off the Japanese lanterns, the first time his hand touched her arm, the greenhouse and its cool hard floor, his skin warm, the scent of him, her body underneath him—she feels it all now. She wants to see him again. She smiles to herself quietly. He was right, wasn’t he? It was true. What she felt, what she wanted—it did perhaps have everything to do with him.
Henry
He wakes soaked, an oily film of sweat on his skin, his mind in dreams—dreams of having her, loving her, losing her—dreams of black rivers, corridors, dead ends. He feels too much. He wants too much. He tries to remind himself that he has lived thirty-four years of a life without a trace of her—a stock of over three decades when she was not even a footprint in his brain. He tries to be rational, to remember the laws—the theorems, pithy axioms and their proofs—life tends toward chaos, sunlight kills the plague. In the past they have steadied him. In the past they have always been enough to calm his nerves. He tries to be rational, to balance himself between clear values of true and false. Practicalities. Probabilities. He tries to ground himself in reason. It has been three days since he was with her—three days since that night in the greenhouse. He has eaten one half of an apple since then, and in the sweat that soaks the bedsheets, that soaks his nightclothes and his hair, he can smell that telling ammonia reek, the sign that his own body has begun to consume itself.
In the months after he returned from France he woke this same way, with this same stench, this same sense of dread, his thoughts in havoc, as if someone had come and doused his mind with kerosene and set the lot of it on fire.
The sweat has pooled in the cavity under his ribs. He gets out of bed. He washes and shaves. He dumps out the basin of soiled water in the bathroom sink. The soap foam collects around the drain, strung through with bits of his scruff. He turns on the tap and rinses the basin down.
It is half past five in the evening.
He goes downstairs to the front room, rifles through the bookshelves until he finds his volume of Epicurus. Epicurus, that great and ancient philosopher of the garden who did not believe in Providence or fate and claimed at best a lazy God.
Henry sits at one end of the sofa and reads. He skims the text until he finds what he is looking for—the three possibilities of a body in motion—and there, that third declination—the occasional, free and inexplicable swerve of an atom off its normal path.
She has said she is not on his path. She has stated it clearly. More than once. His life was his life, and hers was— He doesn’t want to think about it. He slams the book closed, puts it back roughly on the shelf, not where it belongs, but somewhere else. He goes back upstairs, pulls on his clothes and leaves the house.
He gets into his car and drives. He drives to forget her. He reminds himself again of the reasons. There are so many reasons. They are too different, a universe apart. He is, technically, married. She is just a girl. He is almost twice her age.
The sun is low in the sky on the hills across the river.
He drives north. He will drive to the store at South Westport Corner. He will buy some food. He will take the long way home, down Drift Road, through the Point, across the bridge, back to the beach by John Reed Road. He will cut a few vegetables, cook a light supper. He maps it all out in his mind.
There is a crick in his neck, a tightness in his shoulder. He shifts his hand on the wheel, cracks his head to the side to stretch out the muscle, to loosen the ache. It is a crick from sleeping wrong, he thinks, from sleeping too much, from living too long in a box and twisting himself in order to fit inside it.
But that is not about her. No. She was right. She must have been right. His life has nothing to do with her.
The grass heaves off the side of the road as he takes the curve just past the farm. There is a fallen branch on the road ahead of him. He swerves around it. He draws up a list of groceries in his head. He won’t think about her. He won’t even think about not thinking about her. He will make a stew for supper.
He remembers the pale dusty light on the floor of the greenhouse, how it nicked the edge of her hair as she moved underneath him in the dark. It had surprised him, how easily she opened herself to him, and how when she came, her body tensed to the hardness of wood.
But there was no reason to remember that. There was every reason not to.
A beef stew. Carrots, potatoes, beans. Spices if they carry them. A jar of bay leaves. Would they be likely to sell bay leaves?
He presses his foot down on the gas, takes the Model T up to forty, forty-five. The needle on the speedometer quivers at the speed, the car rattling as if the frame will shake loose off the axle.
It will not be difficult to forget her. He tells himself this. There is no bend in the road beyond this. No path at all. He will take a blade to what he feels. He will cut it down and pack the pieces away in the back of a dark, locked room.
After supper, perhaps a banana. A banana would be fine.
That should be enough. That should be all he needs.
He passes the second farm, its fields sloping down toward the river, squares of land patched out by stone walls, some ancient and some new, long black shadows, the ruffled scalps of trees.
The road dips, then curves into the trees. Splinters of indirect light. Cool, evening light. The road rises again, the land on either side dropping down into the fields, and he sees a figure on a bicycle pedaling toward him on the opposite side of the road. He lifts his foot off the gas to slow the car as he passes by. It is her. He can see that it is her.
His foot lands heavy on the brake—the car lurches—he eases it onto the shoulder. He can see her in the rearview. She looks back once, then continues on.
“Turn,” he murmurs. “Turn around.” He keeps his eyes fixed on her. But she keeps pedaling south, away from him. She disappears around the bend.
He puts his head in his hands against the steering wheel. This is the way it is, he thinks to himself. This is the way it is supposed to be, a searing pain behind his eyes. They live in the same town, a small town, and he might see her, from time to time, around. That is just the way it will be.
He continues driving down the road, and for the first time in a long while, longer than he can remember, he feels a little free. There was a choice and she made it. It was not the choice he would have wanted. But it was the choice that she had made. And it was done.
He takes the left turn onto Hix Bridge Road at the corner. He passes the post office and p
ulls up in front of the store just as Maddox Tripp is latching the windows to close for the night. Henry parks the Model T behind the mail truck and takes the three steps onto the front porch.
“You’ve got five minutes,” Maddox says. “You know what you’re looking for?”
“A few vegetables, coffee.”
“Coffee’s second aisle on the right. Vegetables are in the back.”
“Do you have fresh peas?”
“Sold out.”
“Oh.”
“Got the peas in the cans though, that aisle there, by the California lima beans.”
“What about bananas? Do you have any bananas?”
Maddox takes him in with a glance, then looks away and goes on wiping down the counter. “Have to go to the Point for them. Not even sure he’s got ’em now—now being the early part of the week, and if he did, they’d be over-ripe from last week.” Maddox refolds the rag and starts again on the counter, using the clean side. “Bananas come in on Thursday,” he goes on. “In time for the out-of-towners.”
“Oh right,” Henry says, and he can feel the flush spread across his face.
“Closing in three minutes,” Maddox says.
“You mentioned that.”
“So get what you need.”
“What I need—” Henry starts to say, then stops himself. He steps into the second aisle, takes a tin of coffee off the shelf and a can of stewed peaches in their juice. He is standing there, debating whether or not it will be worth it after all to make a stew, when he hears the door open. He turns, and she is standing there, the last raw light of the day balanced on her shoulders. She steps inside.
“We’re closed here, Bridge,” Maddox says, annoyed.
“Not quite, it seems,” she answers, looking at Henry.
“Two minutes.” Maddox’s voice is gruff. “Two minutes, I’ll be turning the lock on that door.”
Bridge nods. She steps into the aisle next to Henry. She is very close to him. She turns away and picks a jar of black olives off the shelf.
“I saw your car on the road,” she says, examining the olives. “Wasn’t that you? I saw your brake lights go on. Did you stop?”