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  I broke off, feeling my eyes welling up, a sob in my throat. But I managed to stifle it and say:

  ‘And here’s the question with which I keep torturing myself – had Eric never set off on that bicycle, would the entire course of my life have been different? Would I be a doctor somewhere now? Would my brilliant husband still tell me how extraordinary I am? Would I feel loved? Would I be happy?’

  Seven

  ‘WOULD I FEEL loved? Would I be happy?’

  Those words lingered for a very long moment after they were uttered. They filled the silence that followed them. A silence during which Richard took my other hand and fixed his gaze directly on me. Then he said:

  ‘But you are loved.’

  This statement landed with such quiet force that I felt myself involuntarily tense. Having avoided Richard’s gaze while telling him that very long and terrible story, now I could not take my eyes off him. Though I wanted to say exactly the same thing – ‘But you too are loved’ – an innate fear kicked in. I was now in a terra incognita that I hadn’t known since I was eighteen. But when I fell so madly for Eric, I knew nothing of life’s larger intricacies and the disenchantments that begin to pile up within you. Having decided in recent years that there was little future prospect of intimacy, passion, ardor, yet alone the possibility of actual love . . .

  No, this was all too strange, all too fast, all too perplexing. I was terrified of being even somewhat adjacent to all that I was feeling right now, to all that I wanted to blurt out in a mad romantic rush . . . and which I knew I couldn’t bring myself to do. Because that would mean taking my foot off the emotional brakes for the first time in more than twenty years.

  I withdrew my hands from Richard’s grasp.

  ‘Have I said the wrong thing?’ he asked.

  I took my eyes off him, using the swizzle stick from my cocktail glass to draw invisible circles on the paper coaster in front of me.

  ‘No,’ I finally said. ‘You said a wonderful thing. But one which I can’t . . .’

  Synonyms came rushing to mind: accept, acknowledge, concur with, mirror, embrace, agree with, acquiesce to . . .

  I didn’t finish the sentence. My swizzle stick kept making manic circles on the paper coaster. I told myself: You are being absurd. You are closing down the possibility of something for which you’ve longed since . . .

  Soon after Eric’s funeral, I drove myself in his Volvo to a river not far from our apartment. It was a perfect late-spring afternoon – the sun at full wattage, not a cloud up above, the water unruffled, becalmed. I couldn’t help but think: This is an immaculate day that I can see, but Eric can’t. Just as the realization hit that I would never hear his voice again, never feel his touch, never have him deep inside me, whispering how much he loved me as our passion rose. My grief that afternoon was so new, so raw, so overwhelming and acute that I felt as if the very act of breathing was an affront to Eric’s memory. I so remember being so numb, so spent, that I could no longer cry – having spent the past week crying nonstop. Staring at the river, considering that I had lost the man of my life, I told myself that I would never, ever encounter such love again – that there was nothing but emotional sterility ahead. And yes, I do know how wildly melodramatic and bereavement-laden all that sounds now. But in light of what Richard just told me – and my timorous backing away from it – another uneasy rumination clouded my mind. By deciding all those years ago that I would never know such love again, had I actually set myself up to ensure that this prophesy came true? Was that the reason I married Dan – because I knew he could never be the man that Eric was? As such, our relationship – so lacking the zeal and heat of my time with Eric – would ensure that my sense of loss would never dim?

  Out of nowhere, I reached for Richard’s hands again.

  ‘The truth of the matter is,’ I said, ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘And when did—?’

  I stopped myself just before the pronoun ‘you’ came forth.

  ‘When did I know?’ he asked. ‘From that moment yesterday when you recited that poem.’

  ‘As bleak as it was?’

  ‘It was hardly bleak. It let me know what I had sensed from the start – the fact that, like me, you have been lonely. Lonely for years.’

  My hands tightened within his.

  ‘You got that one right,’ I said.

  ‘And that story you just told – the story of Eric – the fact that you perceive yourself to have walled yourself into a life you don’t want . . .’

  ‘I know that’s your story too.’

  ‘Just as I know you are everything I’ve hoped, dreamed, of finding . . .’

  ‘But how can you know after just a few hours?’

  ‘Because when it is right you can know after five minutes.’

  ‘And have you ever known . . .?’

  ‘Certainty like this? Never.’

  ‘And real love?’

  ‘Like what you had with Eric?’

  ‘Yes, love as profound as that.’

  ‘Once. When I was twenty-three. A woman named Sarah. A librarian in Brunswick. At the college library there. And—’

  He broke off for a moment, then said:

  ‘This is not a story I want to tell.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Because it’s a story I’ve never told.’

  ‘Because . . .?’

  ‘Because she was married at the time. Because I made a huge mistake. Because I’ve regretted that mistake ever since. Because . . .’

  Now it was his turn to withdraw his hands from mine, and to drum his fingers anxiously on the table, something my ex-smoker father used to do when he was trying to push away that desperate craving for a cigarette.

  ‘Go on,’ I said quietly.

  More finger-drumming on the table. I could discern the tension coursing within him. A secret lived with for years – never discussed, never re-examined in front of another sentient being – is the most private form of sorrow. Especially if it is the confidential mirror you hold up to everything that has happened in your life since then. From the way that Richard was resisting divulging anything further than her name, the fact that it was an affair, and (to his mind) an error . . .

  ‘Sarah Radley,’ he said, avoiding my eyes. ‘Her full name. Sarah Makepiece Radley. As you can gather, just a little WASP. In fact, ultra-WASP. A big Boston family that had fallen on its uppers, as they say in a certain kind of Victorian novel. She’d gone to Radcliffe back when it was still called Radcliffe. She’d had a brief career in magazine journalism in New York. She met a doctoral candidate at Columbia. They’d had a fling. She got pregnant. She convinced herself it was love, whereas she privately knew there were manifold problems, the most prominent of which being that she suspected Calvin – his name – of being a rather closeted gay man. Still, the upright Boston WASP in her decided she had to do the right thing when she found herself “with child” – and Calvin was hugely bright and intellectually agile. So when he got an assistant professorship at Bowdoin she married him and off they went to Brunswick. This was the mid-1970s – a time when Maine was still rather isolated and less than metropolitan. But Sarah liked the college, liked the smart people she met on the faculty, and got a job in the cataloging division of the library. She also gave birth to a little boy, Chester – yes, she and her husband went for truly nineteenth-century WASP names. Seven months after he was born she came into the nursery one morning to find her son lying in his crib, lifeless. One of those crib deaths you sometimes read about, and which are so devastating because they are so out of nowhere, so random, so profoundly cruel.

  ‘Sarah, however, surprised everyone in Brunswick with her fortitude, her need to keep the immense grief she was feeling so clearly out of sight, to propel herself forward with what can only be described as a steely dignity. When I first met her – she needed to get her house reinsured and someone had recommended our company to her – it was eight months after her son’s
death. Though I’d heard about it all before she came into my office, what surprised me most was how she didn’t betray the horror of what she had been living with. You know, from your own work, that there are many people among us who, at the drop of a dime, unload their entire life story onto you. Just as there are others who, with a little coaxing, also begin to recount the heartbreak that has been their life. When Sarah came into my office she was business itself. At some point, when we were filling out the policy forms, she said that, though married, there were no dependants, then added: “But you must know that already.” I was just a little thrown and impressed by her directness. Just as I was also immediately taken with her elegance and intelligence. Sarah wasn’t a beautiful woman like you. In fact, there was something rather plain about her. But the plainness had the sort of formal poise that you see in those sharp-featured, but still curiously sensual wives of Dutch burghers that kept Vermeer’s bank account topped up over the years. From the outset it was also clear that hers was a mind of great agility. She also happened to be – until I bumped into you – the best-read person I’d ever met. When I found out she worked in the Bowdoin library I asked her if she could, perhaps, locate a book for me.’

  ‘What was the book?’

  ‘I was looking for Pepys’s Diaries – which I could have probably ordered at the time from one of the antiquarian booksellers around the state, but which I really didn’t have the money to afford. The Bath Public Library’s only copy had recently fallen apart. No matter how often I asked the librarian to order it for me, she seemed resistant to the idea of dropping forty dollars of taxpayers’ money – a lot of money back then – on a volume that nobody, except for me, was ever going to borrow. So I asked Sarah if she might be able to loan me a copy. This large smile crossed her face as she said: “You are the first man I’ve ever met who has shown the remotest interest in one of my benchmark writers.” Her exact words. Benchmark writers. I think I was in love with her as soon as she uttered that phrase. And I think she saw that immediately as well.

  ‘She invited me to lunch. No woman had ever invited me to lunch before. Though she was only seven years older than me – she was thirty when we met – she immediately struck me as so worldly, so cosmopolitan. She brought me to a really nice place in Brunswick and insisted we share a bottle of wine – it was a Saint-Emilion, I always remember that – over lunch. My dad was still very much running the agency – and monitored all my working-hour moves like the Marine drill sergeant he once was. I was also still living at home, as Dad saw no reason for me to be wasting money on an apartment, though he did buy me a secondhand Chevy Impala as a gift when I left college and “joined the firm”, as he called our two-person business. So I was still living at home – albeit in a basement apartment that gave me a certain amount of autonomy in the evenings, though Dad would often chide me if he discovered I was up late reading. Dad was something of an insomniac – and even though he was in bed most nights by nine-thirty, he’d always be up around midnight, stepping outside for a few minutes for a walk, but really checking on whether I had the lights on in my place. Why I didn’t move out, why I was so cowed by him into joining the firm, instead of forging my own life . . . it remains perhaps the biggest regret of my life to date.

  ‘Anyway, some of this came out at that first lunch with Sarah. She was quite the polite interrogator. She got out of me the fact that I wanted to be a writer, that I had published a story, and that I had an impossibly dictatorial father. She also had me talking about my literary tastes, and ascertained that, outside of a brief, inconsequential four-month thing with a graduate student named Florence during my U Maine years, I was largely inexperienced when it came to the world of women. Sarah, in turn, volunteered several things about herself.

  ‘You know I lost a child,’ she told me. ‘I doubt I’ll ever get over that – though to the outside world I will always maintain a certain decorum. And you possibly know that my husband, of whom I am inordinately fond, has fallen in love with a professor at Harvard named Elliot . . . but for the sake of “decorum” we are maintaining a proper public front for the time being. We live together during the week as he teaches at the college. Calvin goes to see Elliot at the weekends. My husband remains my great friend. We will never have children again – which is my choice, because were I to become a mother again the specter of possible tragedy and appalling loss would always be there, and I know I could never support the fear that would haunt me every day. I am very accepting of that decision, as painful as it is. Just as I am very accepting of Calvin’s new life – as I knew, more or less, all this about him from the moment we met in New York eight years ago. As far as Calvin is concerned I have carte blanche when it comes to my own personal life and how I choose to conduct it. Which is why, when we finish lunch, I suggest we return to my house – Calvin is away today – and go to bed.”

  ‘She said it just like that. No hemming or hawing. No “Let’s get to know each other”. No apprehension or fear. She chose me. I certainly wanted to be chosen. And in the seven months that I was Sarah’s lover she taught me so much. Both in and out of the bedroom. And God, that must be the second manhattan talking.’

  ‘You’re telling me this because you want to tell me this,’ I said. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Was it love? I certainly think so. We saw each other three times a week. We managed to sneak off for a weekend to Boston, and to Quebec City . . .’

  Quebec City. The adjacent Paris for entrapped Mainers.

  ‘. . . and Sarah told me, around four months into our relationship, that what I needed to do, as a matter of urgency, was walk out of my father’s “firm” and apply for a top MFA program in writing at Iowa or Michigan or Brown. She was sure I would get in somewhere good. And she would come with me – because she could always find interesting work in a college town. And because she knew I had talent.

  ‘“I may have a talent for life,” she told me. “I may know how to make a wonderful coq au vin –” that was no lie – “and what wine to pair with it, and which new emerging Polish surrealist poet I should be reading –” she was always glued to literary magazines – “but I don’t have any real creative spark in me when it comes to words or music or paints. You, on the other hand, have the possibility of a proper literary career, if you can only shake off your King Lear father. He has been determined to break you of your talent from the moment he read that short story of yours in print.”

  ‘Of course she had hit the bull’s-eye – as unsettling as it was to hear such truths being articulated. We were sprawled across her bed at the time. And that was the afternoon she told me that she loved me, that we were kindred spirits, that together everything was possible . . . and Sarah was never the most emotionally effusive of people. I told her that I too loved her, that she had changed my life, that, yes, I would start to apply for MFA programs and quit my job at the end of the summer and . . .

  ‘All these amazing plans. All within the realm of possibility. Because love – at its truest – allows all the impediments to fall away. You see a vision of the life you want to lead. A happy life. A fulfilled life. With someone who wants to share everything with you, who so completely gets you, as you get her. A love also based on deep mutual desire. And passion. And a shared curiosity about everything in life. That was my life with Sarah – the whole fairy tale we tell ourselves we so want, and then do everything in our power to subvert.’

  He fell silent. I reached out and took his hand.

  ‘Did your father find out?’ I finally asked.

  ‘Your interpretative powers are impressive. I applied to about a half-dozen MFA programs. Though I didn’t get into Iowa – which is the most prestigious and competitive – I did get accepted to Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, Berkeley. An amazing choice of schools. Sarah and I agreed that Michigan was the best option. It was ranked second in the country as an MFA writing program, and Ann Arbor is a great college town. Sarah even had a friend who was a senior librarian there, and who told her there was an
opening in the cataloging department. It was all so serendipitous. Here was our immediate future. Here was the life ahead together. I’d even started writing again. A new short story about a man who cannot force himself to leave a bad marriage – even though he knows that the marriage is killing him. It was, at heart, the story of my dad and my mother, but also about my father’s anger at me, at the world in general, all fueled by the fact that my mother was such a dry, cold woman. The only good thing I can say about her is that, as she knew my dad was doing the heavy guilt reinforcement on me, she didn’t criticize me the way that Dad did. She was just cold and distant.

  ‘Anyway, Sarah and I used her address in Brunswick for all the MFA applications. After I accepted Michigan – which came with a partial scholarship, by the way – they needed my official mailing address. So I put on the form my address in Bath, but also enclosed a note stating that all correspondence should continue to be sent to the Brunswick address I’d been using. Of course, my father discovered it. But being the truly manipulative man he was he kept this knowledge from me for weeks. Then, one evening, as I was about to head down to Brunswick and a weekend with Sarah, he asked if I could step into his office for a moment. Once seated in the chair opposite his desk, he began to talk in this ultra-low voice that he switched into whenever he was angry, whenever he wanted to be ruthless and menacing.

  ‘“I know everything,” he told me. “I know about your plans to go to Michigan and pursue a useless degree in writing. I know about your relationship with that married harpy down in Brunswick. I know all about the fact that she is planning to move to Ann Arbor with you. I know all about her pederast husband. I know the name of his boyfriend at Harvard. And I know if word of all this got around the community it would profoundly harm our family name and that of our family firm.”