This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  Laurie removes a baguette from its paper bag, cuts the bread across as far as the opposite crust, and spreads the slices with garlic butter. She takes a sip from her wine glass, then approaches the second baguette. With any luck, Nicola has forgotten about making a rémoulade.

  Nicola is turning the pages of an old Sarah Orne Jewett novel that she found in the bookcase when Steve crosses the deck and enters the porch. He has a long face that has improved in the fifteen-odd years she’s known him, hardening at the jaw line. His fine straight nose is more pronounced, and it gives his expression authority. You can see that he’s become accustomed to making crucial decisions and profiting from them. His dark hair has only a touch of gray in it.

  “Where’s Laurie?” he asks.

  “In the kitchen. Feeding the kids, I guess.”

  Briefcase in hand, he moves to the rattan chair and grasps Nicola’s shoulder, his fingers pinching into her flesh.

  “Cut it out, Steve. That hurts.”

  “Why did I let you invite yourself here? What in hell was I thinking?”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “Goddamn it, Nicola.”

  “How did the meeting go?”

  Without replying he walks across the porch, the heels of his polished Oxfords firm on the splintery floorboards, and enters the house.

  The kids are tucked in bed, at long last. Steve and Nicola, well into a third bottle of the good French Muscadet, sit out on the porch. They chip thin fragments from a wedge of Stilton and converse on literary topics. In the kitchen, Laurie stands at the sink scrubbing grit and barnacles from a pail full of mussels.

  Before Laurie knew him, in college, Steve was an editor of a little magazine called Quadrat. Between its sober buff covers appeared his reviews and essays; he likes to joke that one day the stacks of unsold copies moldering in their basement will be collector’s items, worth a fortune. When Laurie moved East with him, back to his former haunts, they’d often have his Quadrat friends over to their Cambridge apartment. Although Steve still read The New York Review of Books and considered himself up on literary matters, by then he was working at Channing Kittredge and putting in ridiculously long hours. He enjoyed mastering skills that don’t come naturally to English majors. Laurie sensed his genial contempt for the kinds of jobs his old friends took to keep body and soul together: Staples employee; computer repairer; used bookstore clerk. Even worse off were the PhD candidates, who’d get their degrees years hence, loaded with debt, and then customize other people’s party invitations or install their software.

  Early the following year Nicola Delepine came to Boston to confer with someone at Little, Brown. She’d also been a Quad Rat, as that select group referred to themselves, a poet and interviewer of writers in the literary limelight. Steve invited her for dinner; Laurie remembers cooking a veal ragout with morels. Over dessert Steve talked about the satisfactions of prospering in a climate of risk and competition—the real world.

  “Ah yes, the real world,” Nicola said.

  “Don’t mock. One of these days you’ll have to cave in and find a proper job,” Steve told her. Nicola was at the time manuscript reader cum copy editor cum cocktail-party caterer for an obscure poetry journal in New York. “Or a husband.”

  She just smiled.

  In June Steve and Laurie were married in Appleton Chapel. Her parents drove out from Indiana and his up from Greenwich; Laurie baked her own wedding cake. That same month Steve heard from another Quad Rat that Nicola had taken off for Beijing with an activist Chinese writer she’d somehow hooked up with. In spite of Nicola’s knowing not one word of the language, she traveled all over China with him, meeting with dissidents in places like the back rooms of noodle shops.

  The week Nicola’s book-length poem about the dissident movement was nominated for a National Book Award, Laurie happened to catch her on the Today show. Nicola told the interviewer about passing as a native so as not to attract the suspicion of the authorities. In a public toilet, she’d chopped her hair to just below her ears using somebody’s penknife. “What a fantastic story!” the interviewer exclaimed. Fang of the Dragon sold fifty thousand copies. Prominent on the jacket cover was a photo of Nicola, with her delicate, vaguely exotic features and that striking black hair, which luckily had grown back in. As it turned out, Nicola Delepine did just fine in the real world.

  Laurie rinses the mussels under the tap and dumps them into a kettle. Time to mix a salad dressing and light the oven for the garlic bread.

  Last month Steve ran into Nicola on the street in Manhattan, where he’d gone on business. They had a drink together, and on the spur of the moment it was decided that Nicola would join them here. Odd, Laurie thought when she heard about the pending visit: Steve had been out of touch with his Quadrat friends for years, ever since he got his first promotion and they bought the house in Newton Corner.

  But maybe not so odd, after all, that he’d want to see an old Quad Rat. It occurs to Laurie that the energy and excitement with which he used to speak of his work on the magazine has been missing from his voice for some time. And maybe not so odd that Nicola would want to see him. The sweetest joy in making it must be gathering tribute from those who knew you when.

  Five days ago Nicola arrived at the airport in Portland with a leather carry-on bag, the modest size of which rather relieved Laurie—but like a magician, Nicola has since pulled numerous silky outfits from the bag’s interior. Who can tell how long she plans to stay?

  By morning steady rain has settled in. Laurie’s been up a couple of hours, playing Parcheesi with Helen and trying to divert Cameron from dismantling the cottage. The damp brings out the smell of the ancient straw matting and the musty sofa cushions.

  Shortly past nine, looking somewhat hung over, Steve emerges. Last night, as they have every night since her arrival, he and Nicola stayed up drinking wine after Laurie went to bed. Even with earplugs in, she could hear their voices murmuring through the balsa-thin wall that separates the living room from their bedroom. Grumbling about the shitty weather, Steve leaves for town to buy newspapers and bagels. Laurie starts a second pot of coffee brewing.

  Nicola appears wearing peach silk trousers and a loose top with a mandarin collar. She takes her cell phone and a mug of coffee out to the screened porch, shutting the door behind her. She’s going to call her lover, the famous poet Emil Pertek. According to an article in People that Laurie happened to see in the dentist’s office, Nicola is “utterly devoted to Pertek, her mentor, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author almost twice her age.”

  When Steve returns from town, he and Laurie sit in the dining room off the kitchen. On a decent day they’d eat breakfast on the front deck while Helen and Cameron played in the sand. Today the kids are watching a noisy rerun, tuned in by Laurie, on the vintage TV in the living room.

  “They say in town it’s going to be a three-day blow.” Between glances at the front page of The Wall Street Journal, Steve spreads cream cheese on a pumpernickel bagel.

  “Terrific. Cameron’s worn me to a frazzle already.”

  “Renting a beach cottage was your idea.”

  “I forgot about rain.” After a silence Laurie says, “Just before dawn I woke from a weird dream. It’s very vivid still.”

  He lifts his eyes from the newspaper. “Tell me about it.”

  From the beginning, back when Steve was in business school and she was working as a graphic designer, he’s been interested in Laurie’s dreams. Sometimes she suspects he takes her unconscious self more seriously than her conscious self. Remarkably, he claims never to dream himself.

  “I was in a large flower garden,” Laurie says, “blooming with perennials. A man was locked inside the house, behind French doors. I knew there was something malignant about him—deranged. Doctors had put him on a psychedelic drug to control his behavior.”

  “Psychedelic?”

&nb
sp; “In the dream it made sense. I couldn’t see him through the glass, only my own reflection.”

  “Who was this man?”

  “I don’t know. As I walked in the garden I began to realize that the irises were opening with crumbling black spots that had ruined the blossoms. I pulled a bud apart and saw tiny maggots chewing away its insides.”

  Steve stirs his coffee but doesn’t drink it.

  “Then the man was in the garden, and I turned away, not knowing how to deal with him. He grabbed me from behind. I realized he’d gotten hold of the needle with the drug in it and was going to stick it into the back of my neck. I struggled, expecting at any instant to feel the puncture.”

  “Sorry,” Nicola says. “I called Pertek to check on him, and he went on and on.” She slides onto the bench next to Steve. “Puncture? What are you talking about?”

  “Just a dream Laurie had.”

  Nicola slices a plain bagel in half and breaks off a piece. “Scientists say dreams are no more than random electrical firings in the brain. Freud and Jung were wasting their time.”

  Laurie expects Steve to dispute this—how can dreams not have meaning?—but instead he turns to Nicola and asks, “How’s Pertek?”

  She shrugs. “He can’t write if he doesn’t smoke. If he smokes he can’t breathe.”

  Even though puddles have collected on the floorboards and mist clings to every surface, Nicola has retreated to the porch with her laptop to escape the racket of the TV and the kids. The truth is that she works extremely well in distracting, uncomfortable situations. Much of the first draft of Fang of the Dragon was composed in trains, railway stations, tiny apartments crammed with people chattering in some Chinese dialect.

  Finally, in the afternoon, the rain stops falling and Steve comes out to put on his sneakers. He’s going for a walk, he says.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  The shoelace snaps. He ties the broken end to the other with a knot he’ll later have to cut off. “I think it would be better if you didn’t.”

  But she lifts an army-surplus poncho from its nail by the screen door and slips out with him. They walk as far as the jetty without speaking. “I don’t know how she stands it,” Nicola says at last.

  “She’s a good mother.”

  “Of course she is. That’s not the point.”

  “Nicola. If the ambience around here annoys you, you can always go home to your famous prize-winning poet.”

  The water is roiling. The last high tide, swollen with the storm, left stinking heaps of junk on the sand: yellow plastic rope, decomposing parts of sea creatures, seaweed yanked from the bottom, chunks of Styrofoam. Sappho said that if you don’t want to find something rotten, don’t go poking into beach debris.

  “You sound jealous of him,” she says.

  “I’m not jealous of him. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you treat him very well.”

  “Sorry.”

  They pass a dozen beach houses, each of which looks desolate and hunkered down, the inhabitants having abandoned them for cineplexes or outlet malls. Swimsuits and towels flap dismally on outdoor lines. She knows how conscious he is of her body: that’s why he won’t look at her. Her nipples, under silk, chafe against the heavy rubberized cloth of the poncho.

  She touches his thigh. “I’m not married to Pertek, you know.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “I owe him only so much.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Why are you giving me such a hard time?”

  He laughs bitterly. “Because what we’re about to do scares the shit out of me.”

  “I’ve never known you to be a fearful man, Steve.”

  They leave the sandy cove now and climb over heaped round boulders, which shift disconcertingly under their feet. Beyond a weathered sign lies land owned by the Nature Conservancy. From there they cut inland, across scrubby juniper and wild cranberry, to a grove of jack pine. They use the poncho to lie on, and when they get up, it’s covered with brown pine needles and bits of lichen.

  At 2:34 a.m., according to the clock on the dresser, Steve drags himself out of their damp, lumpy bed to go pee. When he returns, Laurie whispers, “I’m awake.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “No, I’ve been awake. For hours.”

  “It’s the bed. Next time we rent one of these places I’m going to check out the bed before I sign a thing.”

  “It’s not the bed, Steve.”

  He won’t roll over and go to sleep until she has aired whatever is troubling her. He’s a responsible husband.

  “What is it, then?”

  “Were you and Nicola involved when you worked together on the magazine?”

  He grunts. “We were all involved, Laurie. We were trying to do something new, with zero funding, in the face of a lot of establishment bullshit.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  It’s too far from the water’s edge to hear the tide lapping on the beach. The only sounds are the refrigerator rumbling at the back end of the cottage and Steve’s sinusy breathing. Abruptly the fridge kicks off. He says, “I wasn’t even under consideration.”

  “Did you want to be?”

  “Why are you asking these questions?”

  “What about now? Are you under consideration now?”

  “Nicola’s a friend. You have no reason to upset yourself.”

  Steve often says that the most valuable commodity investment bankers trade in isn’t stocks and bonds. It’s confidence. Distortions of fact, if not outright lies, might well be used to bolster that confidence, she figures. That’s the way it works in the real world.

  Next door, Helen moans softly in her sleep. The fridge starts up again. Steve’s breathing has become regular.

  Laurie never managed to shed the extra ten pounds after the dead baby’s birth. Her pale hair won’t take a perm and it sticks to her skull in the cold, dry, staticky Massachusetts winter. She doesn’t have reliable clothes sense; she’s not quick on the conversational uptake; her children are difficult and either too much like her or too little. Once she had some talent as an artist—professors whose opinion she respected thought so. Steve thought so. She isn’t sure where that talent has gone or whether it really existed in the first place.

  She thinks about the novel Steve wrote, the summer between college and business school. He mentioned it to Laurie several times when they were dating, back in Ann Arbor, but wouldn’t show it to her. “A juvenile effort,” he said dismissively. Years later, during the move from Cambridge to Newton Corner, she came upon a stack of yellowing pages in a box that also contained balled-up underwear, perhaps hastily stuffed in as packing material. Feeling like a voyeur, hoping for insights into his secret emotional life, Laurie began to read the manuscript while Helen napped. But all that happened in the novel were endless discussions on philosophical questions between characters named Krebs and Widmer. She replaced the novel in its box, confused and disappointed—yet also somehow relieved.

  When he came back to her after their months of separation, Steve said, “You are the only woman I could ever live with.” She has remembered his words many times and found comfort in them. But what, exactly, had he been telling her?

  In the morning she’s surprised to find that she must have gone back to sleep, and in the meantime the weather has cleared.

  They’ve been eating lunch on the deck: an impromptu salade niçoise. Laurie feels dazed by the heat of the sun and a glass of beer. There’s talk of going for a swim to cool off, but no one moves.

  Nicola says languidly, “Do you know that dragons live down under the sea?”

  Steve chews away the flesh from an olive, palms the pit, and tosses it over the railing.

  “ . . . in palaces.”

  Looking out at the sparkly band of sea, Laurie wonders what dr
agon palaces might be like. She imagines structures made from the intricate skeletons of marine animals, watery passageways shimmering with phosphorescence.

  “Chinese dragons,” Nicola says.

  Steve scowls. Having taken the cottage’s rowboat out this morning to go fishing, and fought with the balky outboard, and wasted eight dollars worth of bloodworms, and caught no fish, he’s in an irritable mood. “So tell us, Nicola, how does a Chinese dragon differ from your common garden-variety dragon?”

  Serenely Nicola replies, “Chinese dragons are benign. They represent the rhythms of nature, change and transformation. Dragons are shape-shifters. They can make themselves visible or invisible, as they please.”

  With belligerent sound effects Cameron is driving a fleet of Tonka backhoes and steam shovels up and down a grassy mound of sand.

  “If they’re so fucking benign, why do they have fangs?” Steve says.

  Laurie sees a look pass between them.

  “Dragons take a variety of forms. The Mang, the temporal dragon, symbolizes the power of the State. As such, it needs to be able to bite.”

  “And what,” he asks, “do dragons do in their palaces under the sea?”

  Nicola smiles, showing small, even, white teeth. “You have to go there to find out.”

  Steve pours more beer into their glasses. Three or four yellow jackets circle the salad bowl. Their nests seem to be in the grass between the cottage and the road behind it.

  “I don’t want to.” Helen’s querulous words reach them from the pebble-strewn beach, where she’s playing with another little girl. “You can’t make me.”

  “She’s a whiner,” Nicola remarks, as if making an objective observation. She pulls back an apricot-colored sleeve and lifts her glass.