A Glancing Light

hesitated, suddenly apprehensive. Our recent telephone conversations had been exuberant and happy, filled with laughter. But now, in retrospect—and faced with actually meeting her—I'd begun to wonder if there hadn't been something counterfeit about them; an edgy, forced glitter stemming more from the awkwardness of not having talked for so long than from anything else.

What were we going to say to each other now? When you came down to it, what had we actually said on the telephone? That we were looking forward to seeing each other. That was what second cousins said, or business acquaintances who meet at a convention once a year. Were we—was I—trying to drag out past its allotted time something that wasn't there anymore? How did I know that Anne didn't intend this as a civilized farewell, the final tying up of a few troublesome strings before she went on with her life?

I turned away from the staircase, chewing my lip. This was no way to approach things. I needed to calm myself down, compose my thoughts. Fortunately, I had a tranquilizer at hand. No, I don't carry around a handy vial of Valium. But I was standing in a gallery full of eighteenth-century Dutch paintings, and if browsing for a while in that lovely, peaceful, orderly world didn't unruffle me, nothing would. I took a slow breath and began to wander through the small ground-floor rooms.

And within a minute or two, I thought I could feel it working. With a few monumental exceptions, Dutch artists painted little to raise the blood pressure or inflame the spirits. Nobody ever got overexcited looking at Still Life with Turkey Pie or Cheese Seller's Stall at Dordrecht. Josef Capek described Dutch art as the work of seated artists for sedentary burghers. Just the thing for the fevered mind. Knee-deep in metaphor, of course, but only the scholars worried about that nowadays.

I went slowly, stopping only twice, once to pay homage to Vermeer's View of Delft, the wonderful townscape that revolutionized the painted depiction of light. And then again, before his simpler Girl with a Blue Turban, which has no particular claim to fame other than its being so achingly beautiful. If that didn't soothe me, I decided, I wasn't going to get soothed. So at last I made for the stairs, looking back over my shoulder at the Girl.

Her limpid brown eyes, you will be interested to learn, followed me every inch of the way.

Anne had her back to me when I saw her. She was standing in front of a picture of a cow, her face turned up to look at it. Her honey-colored hair was darker than I remembered it, and a little shorter; her shoulders more delicate. She was in civilian clothes—a belted jumpsuit, fashionably baggy at the hips and tight at the ankles, with a jacket over her arm. She looked absolutely terrific. My confidence level, such as it was, ratcheted down another notch.

I came up behind her, my heart in my mouth. 'Hi there, Captain.'

She turned. 'Dr. Norgren, I presume.'

'Sorry I'm late.'

'Oh, that's all right. You look wonderful.'

'So do you—just great.'

From that fatuous beginning things got worse. We walked through the museum, hardly seeing it, both of us timid, skating clumsily around each other, searching for something riskless to talk about. How was my flight? What had her meeting been about? How had I liked Sicily? Had she had any interesting assignments lately? Had her brother-in-law recovered from his kidney-stone operation? Had she—

 Finally, she put a finger to my lips to get me to shut up. 'Let's sit down a minute.'

Docilely, I sat next to her on an out-of-the-way bench. Around us were peaceable little scenes by de Hooch and de Heem and Terborch—ordinarily the names alone would have been enough to lull me—but they weren't doing me any good now. I was filled with misgiving, terrified at what she might be going to say to me.

'Chris,' she said soberly. 'I've been giving things a lot of thought.' Her eyes, usually as near to violet as eyes come, had deepened to a glowing blue-black. She looked down at her hands, clasped on her lap.

'And?' I said, or squeaked.

'I've been miserable since San Francisco,' she said, talking rapidly. 'I miss you awfully. I want us to give it another try—that is, if you want to.'

'Me too!' I blurted, practically dissolving into jelly with relief. We leaned our foreheads together and laughed, a little jerkily from the release of tension. I realized that she'd been as worried as I had. A few museum visitors glanced at us with understandable irritation.

'Whew,' I said, and grabbed her hand. 'Come on, let's get some air.'

We left the museum, walking around the corner and then along the edge of the Hofvijver, the square, fountained, 'lake' that sets off the dignified old Parliament buildings.

'So,' I said, 'what do we do?'

She smiled and squeezed my hand. 'Seems to me we're already doing it.'

'I mean after today. How do we handle it? You have to stay in the Air Force—'

'I want to stay in the Air Force. For one more year, anyway.'

'And I have to and want to stay at the Seattle Art Museum, six thousand miles away.'

'True. What would you suggest?'

'We could get married,' I said, startling both of us.

'Married?'

I shrugged. 'In for a dime, in for a dollar.'

She burst out laughing. 'You just got divorced. You've been single all of five months.'

'Right, I gave it a fair try. Between you and me, it's not what it's cracked up to be.'

She stopped and studied me. 'Are you serious?'

'Of course. Well, I think so. I just thought of it.'

'But how would getting married change anything? I'd still be in the Air Force, you'd still be in Seattle.'

'So what are we supposed to do?' I asked again. 'Just see each other from time to time, whenever I get over to Europe or you get to the States?'

'Why not? Why do we have to do anything? Why can't we just take it as it comes, see how it turns out? When my tour of duty's up, we can see how we feel.'

'Well, sure, I suppose we could,' I said doubtfully, 'but—'

'Chris, did anybody ever tell you you have this need to tie everything up into nice, neat, black-and-white packages?'

'Yes,' I said.

Only Tony called it 'trying to deoptionalize nonprogrammable contingencies.' Louis saw it as 'a counterproductive aversion to ambiguity due to faulty self-esteem.' I forget what Bev called it, but she had a name for it, too, I was starting to think maybe they had a point. Either that or everybody liked ganging up on me. And even Louis had never accused me of having paranoid inclinations.

'Isn't it enough to just be together again?' she asked. 'To be friends again?'

She had moved closer to me, putting her hands against the lapels of my jacket and looking directly up into my face. There was a barely noticeable little twitch in the soft skin below her eyes, something that showed up when she was anxious or insecure. Anne wasn't even aware when it was there, but for me it always had a compelling, waifish poignancy. I embraced her; for the first time in five months I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. Unexpectedly trembling, I bent my face down to her hair and inhaled the fragrance. I could feel her shaking, too.

It was more than enough.

The paintings had put us in the mood for some plain, hearty Dutch cooking; the sort of thing that would have looked right on one of those scarred old tables in a scene by Ian Steen or Adriaen Brouwer. In most Dutch cities it would have been easy to find an appropriate restaurant. Dutch cooking may not often figure in discussions of the world's great cuisines, but of plain and hearty there isn't any shortage. The Hague, however, is the least Dutch city in Holland, as the Dutch themselves like to say. Full of foreigners on expense accounts, it's easier to find a plate of escargots a la bourgignonne than a bowl of humble, nourishing erwtensoep.

All the same, with half an hour's diligent perusing of the sedate, embassy-lined streets, we managed to locate a signboard with a red, white, and blue soup tureen on it. In Holland this signifies a small restaurant