Jennifer Haigh (24 page)

All of which explained why Heidi looked familiar. Gwen saw the tour guides only in the cafeteria—the women in dresses, the men in ties. (The collections staff wore flannel shirts and blue jeans.) Never, in Gwen's memory, had a tour guide come over to the collections side.

Her résumé made Heidi unusual. Even stranger was her reaction to Gwen. Day after day, Heidi invited her to lunch, morning coffee, happy hour cocktails at the bar down the street.
She likes me
, Gwen realized, irritated and perplexed. Instinctively she refused these overtures. She wasn't sure why. Her
no
, immediate and reflexive, seemed to come from deep within her. Her impulse, always, was to protect her solitude—a way of life she clung to and protected fiercely, yet didn't especially like.

But Heidi kept asking, and Gwen finally relented, haunted by her own creeping loneliness. Her social calendar was empty, her other coworkers pleasant but distant. Only Heidi seemed to notice she was there.

They made an odd pair; walking down the street together, they invariably turned heads. Gwen had been watched by strangers her whole adult life, but in Heidi's company the attention was different. Heidi wasn't beautiful, but that didn't matter if you were blond and buxom and wore tight sweaters and short skirts. In her teetering heels Heidi was six feet tall; she dressed more like a teenager than a woman of forty.

Gwen's mother would have raised an eyebrow at the bright colors and trendy styles. Any woman's best color, she often said, was beige.

But Gwen loved Heidi's warmth and brightness, her vibrant plumage. She loved Heidi's indiscreet laugh, her bottomless thirst for margaritas, the bawdy stories she told. Her aggressive driving, her willingness to flip the bird in traffic, her unselfconscious way of being in the world. Early on, over margaritas, she'd asked Gwen bluntly:
So what's your story? Are you married, single, what?

I haven't had a boyfriend since grad school
, Gwen said, her heart hammering.
Eric is married now. I haven't seen him in ages.

She hadn't spoken of Eric Farmer in years, and was surprised by how it affected her. Confiding was a pleasure she'd always denied herself. It occurred to her that except for Eric, Heidi was the only friend she'd made since childhood, since becoming a Turner; and that she badly needed a friend.

She'd met Eric Farmer her first semester at Pitt. He was the graduate assistant who taught her Physical Anthropology class—a minister's son from rural Indiana with a sweet, choir-trained voice that vibrated with excitement when he talked about primate evolution. His enthusiasm evoked snickers from the bored sophomores who'd expected an easy elective; but to Gwen his passion was inspiring. The lecture hall was enormous, twice the size of the classrooms at Wellesley, but Eric commanded it confidently despite his size. Showing a slide of Pygmy tribesmen in Africa, he had joked about his own height—five feet five, by Gwen's best guess. Her
spatial difficulties
notwithstanding, she could estimate a stranger's height with remarkable accuracy. She had been practicing for years.

They met again a few years later when, a grad student herself, Gwen spent a summer working as a research assistant to Andreas Swingard. She'd refused her mother's entreaties to come back to Concord for the summer. Paulette's loneliness frightened her. Scott was MIA in California, and they'd scarcely seen Billy since he started med school.

We could rent a place in Truro
, her mother suggested.
Just the two of us.

Gwen imagined it: the family disbanded; the Captain's House, sold years ago, now inhabited by strangers; herself and Paulette in a rented cottage on the Cape. The most pathetic figure would be Gwen herself, her defensiveness, her petulance. In her adult life she was sharp and competent, reserved but unfailingly pleasant. In her mother's presence she regressed to a moody teenager. Her own behavior sickened her.

Paulette, whatever her faults, had been a loving mother; she didn't deserve such treatment. Gwen knew when she was being insufferable.

She simply didn't know how to stop.

All things considered, it seemed wiser to spend the summer in a cluttered little office in the cavernous Forbes Quadrangle—built on the site of the old Forbes Field, where her beloved Pirates had once played, where Babe Ruth had hit his final home runs. In June the campus was dead, the army of undergrads discharged for the summer; only Swingard's PhD students stopped by the office. Gwen spent the day transcribing tapes from Swingard's fieldwork
,
hundreds of hours of interviews with his Amazonians. At lunchtime she walked in Schenley Park. One morning she was sitting under headphones, rewinding for the umpteenth time, when a familiar, resonant voice penetrated the white noise.

"Hey, I know you."

She looked up, startled. Eric Farmer stood in the doorway.

"You were in my 201 class a couple years ago," he said. "Gwen, right?"

"Good memory," she said, blushing. "There must have been a hundred students in that class."

"And exactly one interested one." He sat on the edge of her desk.

"You're in the grad program now?"

Gwen nodded.

"Swingard's my adviser," said Eric. "You must be pretty good if he's letting you near his tapes."

Gwen laughed. Swingard's protectiveness of the tapes bordered on neurosis. Her first day he'd spent half an hour instructing her in the operation of a cassette player, as though it were some sophisticated piece of equipment only a career anthropologist would know how to use.

Eric came by the office several times a week, to meet with Swingard or drop an envelope in his mail slot; and each time he stopped to chat with Gwen. Late one Friday afternoon, after Swingard had left for the day, Eric stuck his head inside the office door. "Happy weekend," he said."Let's drink beer."

They spent two hours on the outdoor patio of a pub near campus, eating greasy things from plastic baskets and drinking Stott Golden Ale. After that, Friday-night beer became a weekly ritual, one Gwen looked forward to for days beforehand. She loved hearing about Eric's boyhood in Indiana, the omnipresence of the church, the strict father he was desperate to escape. He was an only son, the only Farmer male in four generations to refuse the ministry. When he admitted to believing in evolution, his father had tried to call forth his demons.

"I'm impressed," Gwen said.

Eric ordered a second pitcher, and Gwen found herself telling him things she'd never confided to anyone. She talked about her parents' divorce: her mother's neediness; her own paralysis. How disorienting, how lonely, the defection of her two brothers: one superachieving, one delinquent, but both so checked out that Gwen felt like an only child, swatted between her feuding parents like a red-haired tennis ball.

"A red-haired tennis ball," Eric repeated, grinning broadly.

A moment later they both dissolved into laughter, the kind of sickening, belly-aching laughter Gwen had shared, in childhood, with Billy or her cousin Charlotte. When the laughter subsided, one of them had only to repeat the phrase "red-haired tennis ball," and they were off again.

"They're going to throw us out of here," Eric said finally, wiping a tear from his eye. He glanced at the check and took a bill from his wallet.

Because he had not done this before—in grad-student fashion they'd always split the check—Gwen felt momentary alarm. Was this dating? Were she and Eric on a date?

She stood, slightly wobbly. She was drunker than she'd imagined.

Except for a man sitting alone in a corner, they were the only ones left on the patio.

"You okay?" said Eric.

He seemed tall to her, but not distressingly so. She was twenty-three and last kissed in childhood, by some reluctant Drew cousin in a game of spin the bottle. She leaned in and kissed him on the mouth.

"Let's get out of here," Eric said.

His car was an ancient Pontiac Ventura riddled with rust. Cruising down Schenley Avenue Gwen felt a heady vertigo, not unpleasant, that reminded her of sailing—her uncle's boat, the
Mamie Broussard
, riding a salty wind.

Eric parked on the street in front of her house. Dark windows in the first-floor apartment; it was after midnight, and Mrs. Uncapher was long asleep. They stumbled up the stairs.

She had rehearsed in her mind the way to undress for a man. It was less difficult than she'd imagined. Darkness helped. Drunkenness helped.

The heat of his body startled her, the wetness of his beery mouth.

It hurt a great deal. Her doctor, scolding her again to take her medication, had explained that this was likely. But Gwen hated the pills, which gave her stomach-curdling headaches. She'd stopped taking them long ago.

Is this okay?
Eric whispered, stabbing at her.

She had learned early in life that certain pains were necessary. Vaccinations hurt, and bone setting and cavity filling; but these were all to the good. That night on her lumpy futon, panties looped around one ankle, Gwen McKotch surrendered herself to the ancient procedure—salutary, she firmly believed, possibly lifesaving. She allowed Eric Farmer to save her.

Yes
, she said.
Good.

She woke in the dark a few hours later, parched and sweating.

Eric was putting on his clothes.

"I have to go," he whispered."I'll call you, okay?"

She watched from the window as the Pontiac Ventura disappeared around the corner. In the morning she drove to the pharmacy and refilled her prescription.

A day passed, then two. Was this normal? Gwen had no idea.

She considered asking her brother Billy for advice, but quickly came to her senses. Such a conversation would be mortifying to them both.

The week dragged on, the days endless. Finally, on Friday morning—a full week later!—Eric appeared at Swingard's office.

"We should talk," he said, hovering near her desk."Friday night, that was great. But I just don't, I can't really—" He stopped, blushed, tried again."I'm up to my neck in this thesis, and I don't have room in my life for a girlfriend. What I'm trying to say is that I really like you.

And I think we're better off as friends."

Fall came. Gwen was offered a teaching assistantship, but the thought of standing in front of a classroom horrified her; instead she continued as Swingard's assistant. She saw Eric occasionally around the quadrangle. A few times he stopped by Swingard's office to chat.

But never again did he appear on a Friday afternoon to invite her out for beer.

Then, one morning just before Christmas, she saw Eric cross the campus with a girl.

A pretty girl, petite and dark haired. She appeared to be no more than five feet tall. At most a few inches taller than Gwen.

At most!

Later, when she ran into Eric at the anthropology office, he seemed in a hurry. "I've got to run," he said, glancing at his watch.

"I'm heading out to the airport."

"Do you have visitors coming?" Gwen asked, avoiding his eyes.

"Going, actually." He hesitated."My fiancée came out for a visit."

Gwen stared at him, speechless. Four months ago he'd been too busy for a girlfriend. Now he had a fiancée.

Jill had been his high school sweetheart, he explained, but in college they'd gone their separate ways. A few months ago she'd gotten back in touch.

A few months
, Gwen thought.
Before August, or after?
"Wow," she said stupidly."I mean, congratulations. I had no idea."

"Me neither. It just, you know, happened."

They stood a long moment looking at each other. Gwen felt her heart working inside her. For once she couldn't keep silent.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she blurted out. "You never even mentioned her."

"I didn't think you'd want to hear."

Gwen flushed miserably. He knew, then: how incessantly she thought of him, what that one night had meant to her.

"Don't be silly," she said quickly."Of course I'm thrilled for you.

When's the big day?"

"Next month. Over winter break."Then, seeing her shock:"We've been apart so long already. And Jill—both of us, actually—wants to start a family."

Family.
The word hit Gwen like a slap. She'd given little thought to children, her inability to have them. What did that matter when she couldn't even find a date? That the two things might be related had never occurred to her. Had Eric Farmer guessed she couldn't have children? Was this something men—young men, her own age—even thought about?

To her relief he didn't invite her to the wedding. He took a tenure-track job at a college in Minnesota and kept in touch through annual Christmas cards. In later years the cards would be replaced by photos, printed with a generic holiday greeting:
Blessed Christmas to our friends and family.

Love, Eric, Jill, Joshua, Hannah, and Michael.

That she never saw him again was a fact that still astonished her.

She had allowed few people to enter her life, and none before had left it. It was a lesson most people learned much earlier: that even deep friendships could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.