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.