The New Yorker Stories

“My first husband, Cadby, collected butterflies,” she says. “I could never understand that. He’d stand by a little window in our bedroom—we had a basement apartment in Cambridge, just before the war—and he’d hold the butterflies in the frames to the light, as if the way the light struck them told him something their wings wouldn’t have if they’d flown by.” She looks out to the ocean. “Not that there were butterflies flying around Cambridge,” she says. “I just realized that.”

I laugh.

“Not what you were talking about at all?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Lately I catch myself talking just to distract myself. Nothing seems real but my body, and my body is so heavy.”

She smiles at me. She has long auburn hair, streaked with white, and curly bangs that blow every which way, like the tide foaming into pools.

Both sons, she has just told me, were accidents. “Now I’m too old, and for the first time I’d like to do it again. I envy men for being able to conceive children late in life. You know that picture of Picasso and his son, Claude? Robert Capa took it. It’s in Sven’s darkroom—the postcard of it, tacked up. They’re on the beach, and the child is being held forward, bigger than its father, rubbing an eye. Being held by Picasso, simply smiling and rubbing an eye.”

“What wine was that we drank?” I say, tracing a heart in the sand with my big toe.

“La Vieille Ferme blanc,” she says. “Nothing special.” She picks up a shell—a small mussel shell, black outside, opalescent inside. She drops it carefully into one cup of her tiny bikini top. In her house are ferns, in baskets on the floor, and all around them on top of the soil sit little treasures: bits of glass, broken jewelry, shells, gold twine. One of the most beautiful is an asparagus fern that now cascades over a huge circle of exposed flashbulbs stuck in the earth; each summer I gently lift the branches and peek, the way I used to go to my grandmother’s summer house and open her closet to see if the faint pencil markings of the heights of her grandchildren were still there.

“You love him?” she says.

In five years, it is the first time we have ever really talked.

Yes, I nod.

“I’ve had four husbands. I’m sure you know that—that’s my claim to fame, and ridicule, forever. But the first died, quite young. Hodgkin’s disease. There’s a seventy-percent cure now, I believe, for Hodgkin’s disease. The second one left me for a lady cardiologist. You knew Harold. And now you know Sven.” She puts another shell in her bikini, centering it over her nipple. “Actually, I only had two chances out of four. Sven would like a little baby he could hold in front of his face on the beach, but I’m too old. The body of a thirty-year-old, and I’m too old.”

I kick sand, look at the ocean. I feel too full, too woozy, but I’m getting desperate to walk, to move faster.

“Do you think Oliver and Craig will ever like each other?” I say.

She shrugs. “Oh—I don’t want to talk about them. It’s my birthday, and I want to talk girl talk. Maybe I’ll never talk to you this way again.”

“Why?” I say.

“I’ve always had . . . feelings about things. Sven made fun of me when I said at Christmas that the pool would crack. I knew both times I was pregnant I’d have boys. I so much didn’t want a second child, but now I’m glad I had him. He’s more intelligent than Craig. On my deathbed, Craig will probably bring some woman to the house who’ll steal the covers.” She bends and picks up a shiny stone, throws it into the water. “I didn’t love my first husband,” she says.

“Why didn’t you?”

“His spirit was dying. His spirit was dying before he got sick and died.” She runs her hand across her bare stomach. “People your age don’t talk that way, do they? We fought, and I left him, and that was in the days when young ladies did not leave young men. I got an apartment in New York, and for so many weeks I was all right—my mother sent all the nice ladies she knew over to amuse me, and it was such a relief not to have to cope. That was also in the days when young men didn’t cry, and he’d put his head on my chest and cry about things I couldn’t understand. Look at me now, with this body. I’m embarrassed by the irony of it—the dry pool, the useless body. It’s too obvious even to talk about it. I sound like T. S. Eliot, with his bank-clerk self-pity, don’t I?” She is staring at the ocean. “When I thought everything was in order—I even had a new beau—I was trying to hang a picture one morning: a painting of a field of little trees, with a doe walking through. I had it positioned where I thought it should go, and I held it to the wall and backed up, but I couldn’t quite tell, because I couldn’t back up enough. I didn’t have any husband to hold it to the wall. I dropped it and broke the glass and cried.” She pushes her hair back, twines the rubber band she has worn on her wrist around her hair again. Through her bikini I can see the outline of the shells. Her hands hang at her sides. “We’ve come too far,” she says. “Aren’t you exhausted?”

We are almost up to the Davises’ house. That means that we’ve walked about three miles, and through my heaviness I feel a sort of light-headedness. I’m thinking, I’m tired but it doesn’t matter. Being married doesn’t matter. Knowing how to talk about things matters. I sink down in the sand, like a novice with a revelation. Barbara looks concerned; then, a little drunkenly, I watch her face change. She’s decided that I’m just responding, taking a rest. A seagull dives, gets what it wants. We sit next to each other facing the water, her flat tan stomach facing the ocean like a mirror.

It is night, and we are still outdoors, beside the pool. Sven’s face has a flickery, shadowed look, like a jack-o’- lantern’s. A citronella candle burns on the white metal table beside his chair.

“He decided not to call the police,” Sven says. “I agree. Since those two young ladies obviously did not want your crappy silver, they’re saddled with sort of pirates’ treasure, and, as we all know, pirate ships sink.”

“You’re going to wait?” Barbara says to Craig. “How will you get all our silver back?”

Craig is tossing a tennis ball up and down. It disappears into the darkness, then slaps into his hands again. “You know what?” he says. “One night I’ll run into them at Odeon. That’s the thing—nothing is ever the end.”

“Well, this is my birthday, and I hope we don’t have to talk about things ending.” Barbara is wearing her pink T-shirt, which seems to have shrunk in the wash. Her small breasts are visible beneath it. She has on white pedal pushers and has kicked off her black patent-leather sandals.