that when she did, she would be gone.
It took a week. One Thursday night we were in her car, doing what we always did, when she announced that she felt something missing. “Is it your blouse?” I said. She laughed and drew close to me, but in drawing close she pulled away for good. She was giving me a farewell gift. The next evening, she left early. “I’m going out with friends,” she said. “See you Monday.” It put me in a black mood that permitted me to see everything else all the clearer, as a man in a darkened room at night has full vantage of the sky outside.
My situation, at any rate, was trivial compared to what happened to that little world I had inhabited. It had been teetering, I now saw, and before I could truly understand what that meant, it fell. Schiff and Mortenson were through with each other. It happened very quickly: one shouting match in the conference room in which the model was mentioned as proof of incompetence, withdrawn, and then thrust forward again with a stabbing motion. Mortenson stormed out and did not return, not the next day or the day after that. When he did, it was with a stack of papers that he said were for the purpose of dissolving the partnership. None of us could believe it, and we believed it less when they began to sign the documents. Schiff’s signature on top, Mortenson’s on the bottom: It was difficult to understand this togetherness in the service of separation.
Mortenson was the one who left, which was predictable. He was mobile. In fact, he could not stop moving, and the minute he was gone it seemed like a small miracle that he had ever been there at all. Schiff never regained his balance, morally speaking. After he parted ways with Mortenson, he became sullen and capricious. He would not come out of his house except to go to his office, and vice versa. Two weeks after Mortenson’s departure, Lisa left to return to school. That was how my summer ended, and how the things in it ended, too. I went back to school. I graduated, aged, did my best not to let time do its worst to me. I wrote Lisa one long letter that I never mailed and eventually threw away, keeping only the envelope, which was addressed to her but not stamped. Years later, I drove by the building, checked the nameplate, relived that summer. Then I returned the car to the airport and flew back home.
ABOUT FOUR MONTHS AFTER my visit to Florida, I was traveling by train to my sister’s home in Delaware, and as we pulled out of the Philadelphia station, I looked up and saw Lisa standing in the aisle. I had already experienced a sense of displacement, thanks to a young man I had seen when I was boarding the train. His hair was uneven to the left, as if put to the side by an idea, but other than that he was exactly what I was at that age. I put up my bag. I sat down, read a little bit of history, looked up, and Lisa was there.
We were in our fifties by then. Or rather, I should say that I saw with a start that she was, and I realized that I must be, too. I debated whether to reach out and tap her on the hip, and when I realized that the only thing deterring me was the idea that the gesture might be perceived as flirtatious, that was enough to push me forward. She turned and smiled even before she saw who it was. Then her smile vanished and returned, somewhat dimmed and thus more powerful. She sat down next to me. I tried to see her as she was, hopeful that it would help her see me as I was. Can a man be happy in memory or only lonely?
We had a grand old time, looking out the windows until night fell and making light of what we saw. After that we traded stories about the lives we had lived, and those we had failed to live. She had married a man who owned a small lumber company. The two of them had been through good years and bad years. They had two children who gave them equal parts joy and trouble. “I’m happy, but like everyone, I didn’t do nearly what I wanted to do,” she said. She did not, despite her story, look like a woman who had made sacrifices.
For my part, I told her that my first wife had been a poet, by which I meant an heiress, and that the union had ended badly, and that I had spent quite a bit of time living the bachelor’s life before eventually finding a second wife. “No children,” I said. “That’s maybe the one abiding regret.” We got, after a time, on to the matter of the office. I told her about my recent visit. “Same little building,” I said. She asked me if I had heard that both Schiff and Mortenson had died. I said no but that I had assumed so. We sat in silence for a little while. She hummed, and I tried to recall her as a younger woman, when her papery skin was a pliant pink and the clothes she wore suggested their own absence.
“I remember that summer so well,” she said. “Do you?”
“A little,” I said, lying.
“Remember Jeff?” she said. I nodded. Now she was back in the past with me, or more accurately without me. “We had such a wonderful trip that week. I’m afraid I didn’t let him work on the model even for a minute.” She smiled at me. “You and I had quite a discussion about it, if I remember correctly.”
We had not, of course, at least as far as I remembered. And I would have remembered. Still, it didn’t surprise me; I may have suspected as much at the time, and by now I was far past being harmed even by confirmation. Still, and despite all the wisdom I believed I had acquired, I was overcome by a sense that all the time since had been miserably misspent, and that fear propelled me up from my seat.
“I could use something to wet my whistle,” I said.
“Wet mine while you’re there,” she said, laughing. Her eyes went up coyly, as if she were a much younger woman.
I went off to the dining car. At the far end I noticed the young man I had seen boarding the train, the junior version of me. He was pushed up close to a young woman, speaking animatedly. “I don’t know how you feel about me, exactly,” he said. “You don’t say.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t say.”
His head bowed in sadness. He was better than me at being me, right down to the failures.
I walked farther down the train, bought two small bottles of gin, and walked back up the train, and Lisa and I poured ourselves drinks and came back to the past. She had given me a story and so I gave her one in return. At forty I had thought I would remarry, but I lost the woman I loved—not to another man but to illness. At forty-five, I thought I would never remarry. At fifty, I met a woman in a downtown bar. I was with a man who fancied himself a poet. She was a dancer twenty years my junior, so beautiful she made me feel both too old and too young. I drank too much, as I always did in those days—“how else to ascend / the twin peaks of Truth and That Which Could Not Be Said?” as the poet had it—and I treated Mary, for that was her name, to a recitation that, I am ashamed to report, contained a rather lavish description of her physical charms. “It was as if my entire personality had its shirttails out,” I said.
“And how did she respond?”
“She married me,” I said. I put a twinkle in my eye.
“Wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.” She settled back into her seat. The train clacked along. I felt guilty for having lied. Or rather, for having told the truth without telling the whole truth. Mary was the kind of woman who was easily mortified. She had a distaste for confessionals, outsized announcements, and any other type of behavior in which decorum fell under the wheel. That day she had looked at me with dread and left the bar. She married me, but only after nine months of silence, and nine more months of begrudgingly cordial conversation. I was not restored to anything approaching amity until we had spent a chaste summer in the company of some friends on the Cape. Then came the romance, and the rigors, and the loss, and the retrenchment, and the courtship, and the comedy, and the declarations (mine) and the withdrawal (hers) and the reiteration of the declarations and the marriage.
I did not explain any of those things to Lisa. The past cannot learn from the present, no matter how much it aspires to. As we neared Delaware, I let the string of the conversation out to her. She was funny on the matter of her children, one of whom was adopted. She told me about vacationing out west when they were young and how the boys invented a game called “square-ball.” I helped her stand when the train came into the station. Her arm was frail beneath my fingers. Time had taken its toll on the young bodies we remembered using for disreputable ends.
HER HAND
(Atlanta, 2015)
THE WOMAN INSPECTS HER HAND. SHE HOLDS IT AWAY FROM her face and looks at it as if it does not quite belong to her, as if its history is something she has read. Thirty-two years before, the hand had gone into her mouth regularly. Sixteen years before, it had unbuckled the belt of a young man who was watching television
