After This (33 page)

 

“At m y flat,” he said. He was drunk, but she couldn’t tell by how
much.

 

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

 

Now he leaned his shoulder against hers, brought his lips closer
to her ear. “I have books,” he said and then drew back a little, raising
his eyebrows. He might have said caviar or Moroccan gold. “Not just
books,” he said. “Fucking literature. T. S. Eliot, Pound, Byron,
Coleridge,” he said, as if each one made him more irresistible. “Who
do you like? Christina Rossetti? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? You’ve
got Professor Wallace, I take it. I saw her husband put you on the bus.
Sir Philip Sydney, perhaps? I’ve got novels, too. All the big guys.
Tolstoy. Or plays? Euripides, if you like. Shakespeare, of course.
Fantasy? Christian allegory. I’ve got Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I’ve got . .
.” The bus stopped and he leaned across her lap to look again through
the window. His long hair was tangled here and there, a little dustylooking. “Two more stops to talk you into it,” he said.

 

He sat up and brought his face closer to hers. “It’s too early for
either of us to go home,” he said. “All alone.” His eyes, bloodshot,
looked right into hers, steadily enough, although his lids were at
half-mast. He brushed a knuckle to her cheek. “And all tearful,” he
said.

 

She said, “It’s almost midnight,” more flatly than she had
intended, sounding, she thought, like Grace. He watched her for a few
more seconds. His lips were full and smooth inside the scruffy beard.
Then he shrugged and dropped his arm. He slumped down in the seat
beside her. She turned to look out the window. The passing, narrow
houses, many of them dark, one or two with single lights burning. She
recalled how Pauline had fallen off a bus one night, late, went skidding
into Creedmoor. In a novel, it would have portended the fall they were
all about to take.

 

They rode together in silence for a few minutes. He let himself be
jostled against her in his dark coat. “One more,” he said at the next
stop.

 

Her eyes fell on his hands, British pale, especially under the dark
sleeve of his coat, but soft-looking, faintly freckled. Edith Wharton
had been a married virgin until she was fortyfive, but Annie hadn’t
thought to ask Professor Wallace how anyone knew this. Was it
something Wharton wrote about or was there some sexual autopsy
performed at her death? Pauline, under her mother’s care, had made
her first visit to a gynecologist just last year. The doctor had said he’d
broken her hymen to do the exam. Her mother couldn’t understand
why he hadn’t kept that information to himself, and Annie had said,
unkindly, “I might have asked the same about you, Mother.”
She said to him, falling, skidding. “I haven’t had sex with anyone
since high school.”

 

He smiled without turning to her. The bus was pulling to the
curb. “High time, then,” he said.

 

Walking into his tiny apartment, there was a moment when she
stood in the dark as he paused behind her, leaning to turn on a small
lamp. All the strangeness, and the danger, of what she was doing
appeared to her then, she even felt herself bracing for a blow, or—in
this land of Jack the Ripper—a cold blade to the back of her neck. She
felt a moment’s pity for her parents. And then, oddly enough, for
Grace, who would be the first to come to her room tomorrow,
whenever she freed herself from the Wallaces’, Grace who would be
the first to know that Annie had not come home. But then the light
came on. The room was cluttered with tossed clothes and empty
teacups, papers and books (he was a doctoral student, she’d later
learn, in engineering, not literature, although the apartment was
indeed filled with hundreds of soft Penguin editions that he would
later toss on the bed where she lay, like so many pastel rose petals). It
was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone
else’s life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business,
its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or
less predictable. It made him both less threatening and less
interesting. He was as ordinary as anyone she knew. She turned
around. He took her face in his hands.

 

On the five-hour flight over, she had told Grace, quite simply, a
younger sister and a brother, and felt the information trail off into the
darkness below them—the black ocean, the curved earth, the empty
space through which the plane was moving them, away from all that
and into another time as well as another place. She would not, she
knew, recalling Professor Wallace’s wry smile, be the first American
student to seek to remake herself in her year abroad.

 

The boy was thin and pale and startlingly comfortable out of his
clothes. He remained consistently comic in response to both her
reticence and her ardor. He did a funny bit, a kind of magic trick with
condom as coin, that she suspected was a well-rehearsed routine. He
pulled the books from his shelves and tossed them onto the bed like
so many pastel-colored rose petals and then climbed over them to land
in her lap. When some of the tissue-thin pages tore, he pulled the
damaged copies out from under them and set each on the

 

floor. He said she should take the worst of them home with her. “And
when you’re old and gray,” he said, “and nodding by the fire, you can
take down this book and say, ‘What is this funny stain on this
wrinkled page?’ “

 

When the sun came up, merely a lightening at the single window,
a shaded version of the gray that would mark the full day, he let his
head fall back, one arm under her neck, the other stretched to the edge
of the mattress. His body was white and thin and boyish, it might
indeed have been carved out of marble. As if it were carved out of
marble, she thought there was beauty in it as well as tremendous
sorrow. Because of Jacob, she knew, she would for the rest of her life
see the bodies of young men in this way—lovers, husband, her own
children, if she were to have them. It was not what she wanted to do,
but she had no choice in the matter, it was no longer the life she had
wanted, after all.

 

On the mattress between them, at their feet and over their heads,
were the scattered paperbacks. One was pressed uncomfortably into
his side, spine up, just under his ribs, and she reached out to pull it
out from under him. She held it up to the light, it was Malory’s
Morte
d’Arthur.
She laughed out loud, thinking of Susan: sex and death.
Fucking literature. Playfully, she placed the open book on his chest. He
stirred a little and then, gently, brushed it away.

 

With the changing light, the room seemed to grow more familiar.
She was thousands of miles from home with an utter stranger at her
side and yet she was falling into a pleasant, comfortable sleep, she was
anticipating, with pleasure, perhaps, what the new day would bring.
There was, there would always be, the snag of disappointment—it
would not be the life she had wanted—but there was, at last, as well,
something it would take her until the end of the year to begin to
understand. At the end of the year, when she moved to London with
him, quitting school, quitting home, dealing

 

her parents (it could not be helped) another blow, she would recall the
story Professor Wallace had told them that night, she would begin to
see the wisdom of it—the wisdom of scattering, each to a different
corner of whatever shelter they had found, so that should the worst
happen, happen again, it would not take them all.
T
ONY PERSICHETTI
got religion—or religions, his sister said. He’d
spent some months on an ashram in Pennsylvania, a few more
with some Krishnas in New York, then traveled across Europe with a

 

Brooklyn girl and ended up on a kibbutz where his whole day was

 

spent, he’d said, shoveling chicken shit. And where, inexplicably

 

(mixing his religious metaphors, Susan said), he shaved his head.
Michael Keane laughed. “Sounds like Tony,” he said.

 

And then home again, thin and weather-beaten, looking more like

 

a convict than an aesthete. He came into her room and ran a hand

 

down one of the wood panels he had helped their father to install,

 

pressed it gently inward and withdrew a small plastic bag of brittle

 

hash. “I’ve been thinking about this, waiting here for me, for months,”

 

he said.

 

“Did you think about Mom and Dad,” Susan asked him. “You

 

stupid fuck. They were waiting here for you, too.”

 

Not to say that that did the trick, Susan told Michael Keane, but

 

the next Sunday night, Tony cleaned himself up and went out and

 

came back some hours later and called them all into the living room,

 

his mother and father, Susan herself who was only home for the

 

weekend because the prodigal had once again returned and her parents

 

had begged her to help welcome him. He announced that he
was an alcoholic. That he’d just gone to his first AA meeting. And that
with God’s help and theirs, he would get his life together at long last.
Susan couldn’t help it, she told Michael, this back and forth with
Tony had been going on for so long. The crazy Vietnam-vet cliché had
worn pretty thin. “Do you have any particular God in mind?” she’d
said.

 

The AA meetings were held at St. Gabriel’s, in the basement
cafeteria. Tony had breathed in a lungful of his old grammar-school air
and found God again. Or God found him, there where he had
hunkered down with his bologna sandwiches as a kid. Easier, he said,
to pick up an old belief than to talk yourself into a new one. Now he
began his day with 6:30 Mass, then went to the job his father had
gotten him at Creedmoor, an office thing, then took classes at Queens
College. He was headed for a master’s in social work. He was dating a
girl he’d met at school.

 

Her parents, she said, were holding their breaths, not yet certain,
it seemed, that the troubled Vietnam-vet thing was something they
could say was finally over.

 

“And you?” she asked. They were in a bar on the East Side, they
were being jostled, backs and arms, by the after-work crowd. He told
her he had a job at a Catholic school, in Brooklyn, seventh grade. He
said the pay was lousy but the kids were great. “Déjà vu all over
again,” he said. He was sharing an apartment in the city with three
friends from school. “Finally,” he said, “out of the basement.”
And because she knew the story, she said, “How’s crazy Pauline?”
Susan was blonder than he’d remembered her, prettier, too. He
added, “I’m thinking of going to law school,” not sure yet if it were
true.

 

Susan said, “The guy I live with goes to law school. NYU. It’s
good.”

 

Michael nodded. His roommates were spread around the room,
the familiar hunt for connections.

 

“He knows you,” she said. “You caddied together one summer. He
was in high school. You were home from college.”

 

“This is a high-school sweetheart?” Michael said.

 

She slowly closed her eyes, smiled a drawn smile. “A reacquaintance,” she said. Begun when he had called her, out of the
blue, to say, “There was a rumor when we were in high school and I
wonder if it’s true.” Jill O’Meara’s name was mentioned. Susan’s eyes,
when she opened them, were darker still. “Sometimes it’s easier to
pick up an old boyfriend than to talk yourself into a new one.”
“A pickup, then,” Michael said, and recognized his father’s sense
of humor.

 

“A serious relationship,” she said coyly to disguise what a
complicated thing it was, her life with this boy.

 

Michael raised his glass. “Good for you.”

 

“Annie seems happy,” Susan said, an apology for not being free,
because she liked Michael Keane, would have loved to go out with him
when, as she thought of it, she was young. “She likes it over there.”
“She really does,” Michael said. For the first time since they saw
each other, he looked beyond her, toward the other women in the
room.

 

“And Clare’s good?” she said. “Still at dear old Mary Immaculate
Academy?”

 

“One more year,” he said. “Then college.”

 

“Your parents will miss her.”

 

But Michael shook his head. “They’re already planning their
golden years in Florida. Though God knows what they’ll do with
Pauline.”

 

“Poor Pauline,” Susan said.

 

And now their eyes met again, a prelude to separating once more.
Michael had an impulse to say—so simple—and Jacob’s teaching,
too, out on Long Island. Better at it than I am. Over at last, that crazyvet thing. (Or no, he amended the tale—Sorry, Jacob): Never really did
do that crazy-vet thing. Whatever was terrible over there kept to
himself, the blanket pulled up over the shoulder, the head turned to
the wall. The courage it took, for a kid so fearful, to keep so much to
himself.

 

Jacob’s fine, he had an impulse to say. And for just a second there
would be the misapprehension on her face, for just a second, the solid
past would loosen its grip. Jacob’s same as always. Too nice. Married
Lori Ballinger. A couple of beautiful kids yet to be born.

 

“It was good to see you, Michael,” Susan said.

 

He bent down to kiss her cheek. “Good to see you, too,” he said.
“Say hi to Tony.”

 

And then walked away with it written all over his face—his
friends said later, kidding him—disappointment, the failure to
connect, the sorrow of a lost opportunity.
C
LARE KEANE
returned to school that fall looking grown up. That’s
how some of the teachers put it. “You’ve grown up.” Not that
this was surprising to them, especially the older of them who had been

 

witness to it for decades: the bony freshman come back as mature

 

young woman for senior year—the time in between seeming no more,