The Journey Prize Stories 24 (11 page)

He says, “No, she’s not asked me to come along. I probably could have. Work drops off in the fall.”

Millie titters with something like fear. “Well, I think she ought to have. You deserve some travelling as much as she.”

He squints at her. “I guess she just wants to do something for herself.” He keeps his eyes on Millie as he says it. She can hardly believe she is getting all this from him. What passes through her head is, What doesn’t Amanda do for herself these days?

She says, “Oh, I don’t know. Has she said that?”

“That’s what I think, anyway. I don’t actually know, she doesn’t explain too much.”

“She doesn’t?” Millie’s heart rate quickens.

“You know how she is.”

“So secretive. Oh, I can’t tell you how it worries me. Just tell her you want to go with her.”

Earl smiles. “She’s free to do what she wants,” he says. Millie thinks of what to say next, but it does not matter – it is too late, the minute has passed, and Earl is readjusting his work gloves and smiling, and she knows of course what that means.

Jude invited Amanda to a music performance.

“That Allejo is a kind of magician, isn’t he,” Arthur, sitting at the table with them, had said. Amanda had her hands on the
table and on hearing the invitation interlocked her fingers. But the tone of Jude’s statement so faintly resembled the tone of an invitation that she hardly knew how to answer. He had said, “You should come with me to a concert on Friday,” and the suggestion sounded hypothetical and indifferent. Only the old man’s just perceptible encouragement suggested it may be something else. Amanda was afraid to accept what had not necessarily been offered.

Jude said, “I like to walk over from the park; you can meet me there and we can walk together.” He knew that she was here with others and that she shouldn’t have been desperate for company.

“Yes,” she said, “I will.” She thought, I will tell the others Arthur will be going too, and Lula, and other people. But ought I not to invite Earl, if not Millie and Grace? Well, she had already said yes. She would find a way.

He had not mentioned dinner, but after the performance he guided her to a restaurant.

“So you are a graduate of literature,” he said.

“No,” she corrected, “of media arts.”

“Ah,” he said. “I don’t believe we have an equivalent of that here. Do you have siblings?”

“No, only child.”

“Ah. I have six, but they are all half-siblings. So in a way I am an only child too. In a way I grew up alone. Did you grow up alone?”

“I grew up in a huge house and all the friends I had in school always ended up playing at my house. My parents let us go into almost any room. They were what I think people call modern parents. They were very happy, that’s what I remember
about them and my childhood. I would exist all day in some imagined world, a fortress of couch cushions, and emerge suddenly into their presence, a shock of happiness.”

“My parents seemed to me like such public people – you know? I think I was shy of them most of my childhood. If I caught them in an intimacy, my dad in his shorts, I would get embarrassed. You’re here with your family.” There was a pause that seemed to stress the absence of her family from this table, here, now.

“Yes, they like it.” That was not what she had wanted to say. “We live together.”

“In the huge house?” He smiled. She smiled and nodded.

“My aunt, my mom’s sister, came to live with us – we could not keep up the house, my mom alone couldn’t, not without others. She is reluctant to sell it.” He nodded vigorously, as if to show he understood all about the weight of houses.

“It’s a unique house. Architecturally speaking.”

“Lula wants a house – though my father has several flats we can choose from. She’d like to put all we have into a house. I prefer to keep something on the side – for travel, pleasures.”

“A house is a lot of work,” Amanda said, thinking of Lula’s droopy eyelids. “I would not put all I have into a house.”

“We are the same age, you and I, are we not? Your boyfriend is older.”

“Yes. I was young when we started dating. I mean, compared to him; I was seventeen. He was thirty-one. My mother, at first, ignored the whole thing so that it might go away.”

“Of course,” he said, “of course. But you didn’t care? I mean it didn’t stop you.”

“Oh, it could have. But I guess the happiness was already
cracked by then and I didn’t have a complete terror of spoiling it.”

“Right.”

“Only ordinary fear.”

“Of course. Should we order dessert?”

“I like your father,” she said after a pause.

“Your mother seemed very pleasant. There is quite a resemblance with the three of you, you and your mother and your aunt. You return on the Sunday, you’ve said?”

For the first time in the conversation she didn’t know what his words were intended for. The guilt had not yet started pouring in for her. The lights of all the restaurants, the glassware on the tables, shimmered. She was a woman talking earnestly over dinner with a man. It was what a person wanted from travel, memorable connections. A memory of light reflecting off wine glasses and a stranger’s life unpeeling in front of you. No pulsating tenderness, no shame, no love or remorse. Only civility, freshness. Possibility.

“Do you remember when the happiness had started to crack, as you said?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

It’s the early morning of the day of the wedding, Saturday. Amanda and Earl are in her room; the room is shuttered and lines of light coming through the shutters stripe the furniture. Amanda keeps it this way most of the time. She and Earl sit propped up on the bed. Her long hair hangs down the sides of
her face and part of it touches his shoulder; that’s how close they are. He’s ventured to put his hand on top of her hand. She used to put a lot of work into her hair. He touches a strand of it with his free hand. He has not physically changed since they’ve met. His fingers are the same. His beard is the same, and the skin on his face is still perfect. He observes the room like a visitor. There is a magazine on the table near the window and a plain glass vase, empty. The room reveals nothing. He puts his arm behind her and around her shoulder, though he knows she might squirm away. This time she doesn’t. This is not right, he would like to say. One ought to be able to hug one’s girlfriend without fear that she’ll pull away as if she’s been poked with something sharp.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he says. She closes her eyes. He wishes to not feel as if he were torturing her. “I got a contract for October,” he says.

“Oh, good,” she opens her eyes. She sits there in fear of what he will ask of her that she won’t be able to give.

“Spain will be warmer than here this time of year,” he says.

“I suppose,” she says. “I might even come back tanned.”

“What day do you return?”

“The sixteenth, I think. I have to check the ticket. It’s in the drawer there, you can look.”

But he won’t. Something about that feels false, she telling him to look at the ticket. He doesn’t want to look at it. He moves his hand from behind her back.

Maybe he can take her out of this room, out of whatever fortress she has built for herself. He smells her hair, covertly. She leans into him; she leans into him. He won’t move, won’t ask for more, won’t say something and spoil it. He can get her
out of it. It doesn’t matter what will happen later, but he sees now he can get her out of it.

“What is it?” he says. “Because we can change things.”

“Don’t – don’t talk. I don’t know. It – when we were in Barcelona, that woman who got hit.”

“Which?”

“At the stand. I was going to buy a print – it doesn’t matter what – they just walked by and hit her, with – a cord or something. I don’t know. It’s just that nastiness.”

“Who were – did they hurt her?”

“No – you mean, was she bleeding or something? No.”

“You’re scared that it could happen to you?”

“It doesn’t have to happen to me. It’s only that it’s out there, always.”

There is a timid knock at the door. They don’t move to answer it; they know it’s Millie. Then Amanda sighs and straightens.

Earl grabs her hand, says just what he means: “I can get you out of this.” If not now, he will lose her. She is looking at him. He could cry but doesn’t. Millie calls apprehensively, “Hello?”

At supper the previous night Amanda mentioned the good deal she got on her flight. The definitiveness of a plane ticket put Millie in a panic. Until Amanda brought it up, the supper was festive: Millie had cooked, Grace had picked out a fine champagne left in the pantry since the days of Dan. It all threatened to destroy Amanda’s resolve. Just yesterday morning all she could think was away, away – that while listening to Earl’s humming as he brushed his teeth and Millie starting the juicer. Then in the evening, while Grace was setting the table, Millie knocked on her door, opened it, and said simply, “Amanda, my
love, darling.” That
darling
cut like a polished, well-prepped blade. Later, sitting at the table, Amanda thought, this is all my mom needs, her family about her, light conversation, an occasion to justify putting out the good china. Me, looking content. And who else but Earl would live in this house and grow to love this family of hers? Barcelona was a risk: it was one thing to be alone in a house full of people, and another to be alone in a stranger’s apartment beyond which strangers waited for their bus.

So when Earl came to her room this morning, she was already worn down with a sleepless night and the dread of indecision and the struggle to hold on to the certainty that had been wavering consistently. It would have been a superhuman effort to change tracks and reach out, hold on to him so he might help her. And when Millie knocked on the door, the easiest thing was to open it.

By the time Amanda opens the door, Millie is gone. Millie hurries down to Grace, who will not look at what Millie wrote for Earl.

“Earl is devastated,” says Millie, refolding the letter, “he doesn’t have to say it – I can see it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Grace says, “it’s only a goddamn course.” She thinks, enough of you and your letters. “Do you really think Amanda would have anything to do with that bland Englishman? She’ll be back before you notice she’s gone.” The latter platitude is of course impossible, since Millie notices everything to do with Amanda, but Grace is exhausted. Since Dan left it has been too much of this. God bless Larry.

“You’re always welcome here, Grace.”

“I know,” Grace says, “I read your last letter.”

Millie again starts to unfold the letter for Earl. Grace turns away from the lined notebook paper. She has an idea of what Amanda wants in Barcelona; it’s not Jude. Earl could have seen that, if not Millie. But Grace is not about to tell them. She has her own life to consider, thank God, and she will not get caught again; no, she will not read any more letters. Instead she will visit with baking for an evening or an afternoon, and her presence in the house will be only the breeziest, lightest caress of a kind hand.

At the airport in Barcelona it is indeed Jude who picks her up. She is sick – physically nauseous from the turbulent flight and sick with fear. She packed for the stay as if moving through a dreamscape, as if she were a soldier who doubts the mission, gets a bad feeling in the stomach from thinking of it, but must put her hope in the wisdom of those who planned it. In this state she was driven to the airport, Earl driving, Millie in the backseat. In this state she kissed Earl and hugged her mom, letting Millie hold her tightly for a moment at the airport security checkpoint.