“He installed these fans—” She pointed to the ceiling.
“Nice.”
“You’ve got your plantation shutters, your glass tables—” As she led him, Brenda was doing a routine, acting like a game-show hostess and waving her hand, caressing furniture. “You have your entertainment center, and out here—”
“I already saw it.”
Stopped now before the open door wall, Brenda turned to him. She appeared almost opaque to Schmidt’s sun-strained eyes. “I was here earlier, remember?” he said. “That’s how I knew to look up the greenskeeper.”
“It’s so horrible to me, Charlie,” Brenda said. “His wife, and then the other. I couldn’t understand how someone could get through that. Sweeney was this jolly charmer on the plane. You know, all Irish blarney, telling me bad-boy stories about his life as a lobbyist. When I heard about his wife—it was an impulse, going to see him. I didn’t think about it, I didn’t have some idea. I thought it would be better not to eat alone, for both of us. That was all.”
“Take it easy,” Schmidt said. “It’s all right.”
“No—” she shook her head “—that’s a lie. I went there to ruin it between us. You and me. To do what I always do.”
“Come on,” he said. “You were doing someone a favor. You hear this story, and think to give the guy some company. That’s you. You’re generous that way.”
She didn’t say anything, just kept shaking her head slowly. I mean it, Schmidt thought. What’s the matter? What’s the big deal? You meet a guy, go to his house, have some carry-out—
Then he got it.
He laughed, a single, involuntary bark. In the last seconds his eyes had adjusted. He could now see her features outlined in the open entry. Blue pool water floated behind her head. He took a step, both to see her better, but also to make sure she saw that he finally got it. That at last, dense old Charlie Schmidt understood the reason behind her remembering he’d been painting, and naming food he liked, doing a game-show routine. She was standing as she had on first seeing him, hands at her sides. Ready to take the oath, Schmidt thought. Ready to tell the whole truth and nothing but.
“It was stupid,” she said. “Dangerous. All I can say is, I didn’t mean it.”
“Dangerous how?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“I don’t,” he said. “Are you talking about safe sex? He didn’t use a condom?”
She took a breath and let it out.
“‘I didn’t mean it,’” he said. “I’m supposed to know what that means?”
“I guess not.”
“Good. We agree on something. I’m slow, it takes a while, but I’m trainable. So, why don’t you tell me what it is you didn’t mean?”
“Let’s not do this,” Brenda said. “Not now.”
“You want to pencil it in for later in the week? Not now?”
“We’ll eat something,” she said. “It’s no good fighting on an empty stomach.”
He laughed again. It was bitter-funny to him. “So, you’re going to whip up one of old Charlie’s favorite snacks,” he said. “Give him a couple drinks. Then we can kick back and talk about how you didn’t mean it when you fucked someone you met on a plane.”
“I didn’t fuck him,” she said, angry herself now. “I made love to him. I stopped fucking people years ago. Before that, I fucked them for recreation. For gym. Back in college I was the anything-goes girl. Really, that’s what they called me. You could find my name and number in toilet stalls all over Davison Polytechnic. Maybe you still can. By dangerous, I was talking about us.”
Schmidt had the mental sensation of stumbling, of not being able to catch up with his thoughts. His feelings. He felt both superior and humiliated. He felt stupid. Looking at her, all at once he flooded with relief—his suitcase was still in the car. The meaning of this was out of all proportion to what it had meant moments before. But his joke over a ridiculous car now made him feel foolish. Exposed.
And she wanted them to eat something. But he regretted saying fuck. It meant he had lost some kind of advantage. She had made him pay for it, and now, for just a moment, learning for the first time about her name scrawled on toilet walls—it softened him before her strained, pretty, sharp-featured face. Her chaotic hair. It’s always out of control she said of it, which was true, and Schmidt realized he was already being nostalgic. Thinking of her in the past tense. This, too, hurt. The idea of it.
Brenda turned away. She stepped down to the deck, moved to the pool’s edge and looked at the water. “Maybe we should jump in,” she said. “Just trust to water.”
Schmidt’s sympathy vanished. She wanted to just wash it away. Wanted to take a header into someone’s pool and call it a day. She turned and looked at him. “It’s there to do,” she said. “Enter a new medium. Anything’s possible.”
If there was a reason, Schmidt didn’t see it. But her words now made him think of the frozen lake. Last night, he had ridden a snowmobile alone on the medium of frozen water. It had cleared his head, helped him to make up his mind. He had been as alone as the sole survivor of a crashed moon rocket. For no reason, remembering himself driving the snowmobile brought back his sense of gratitude and expectation. He had raced back to the cabin and made a sandwich, eating as he flopped open his suitcase and scraped hangers in the closet.
“It takes time to meet,” she said.
“Not for frequent fliers.”
“Charlie, that’s not meeting. You know it isn’t. It’s the opposite. It’s what makes meeting someone take so long. I’m not just talking about you and me. I’m talking about meeting myself.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “To me, that’s monkey talk.”
“We met last April. Really, how was it different from meeting on a plane? We were attracted immediately. In a strange place. Adventure. Disaster. We
