He asked me how I was and I said fine, last I checked.
There was a moment of silence while the lanterns rocked and the laughter and music came from below. The wind was just about freezing. He kept looking at me from the darkness. Finally he said, “I was wondering when I’d see you. Five years back in Newport now, and I haven’t gone to the Whale’s Tale once.”
I asked him where he’d been, even though I already knew. It’s demeaning to tell someone you’ve followed him in the newspapers and magazines, especially someone with whom you have... well, I’ll come to that, Dear One.
He said Montana, where he owned a ranch.
I said he owned half the state, from what I heard.
“People say I own half of Orange County, too, but that’s not even close to true.”
“I think it’s good you’re back,” I said. After everything we went through, I couldn’t believe, standing there looking at him, how good it was to see him again. David Cantrell has an unhappy face, though he’s quick enough with that smile to look boyish in the papers. He has the look of a future sour old man. He did even in college. I don’t think he’s ever been surprised by the darkness of human nature — maybe that’s why he does so well. But you could see it in his face.
He told me I looked wonderful.
I told him he looked all right himself. “But you’re pale. Don’t you Power Crowders ever get outside?”
Not enough, I guess, he said apologetically.
I’ve often wondered why the same men who will kill each other over the silliest things stand there dumb and oaf-like when a woman gives them a little needle.
What he said to me next hit me hard, much harder than any gust of wind.
He said that he still thought about me. He said it like he was surprised, like he’d thought of me in spite of himself. Know what I think? I think that women deceive men, but men deceive themselves.
“Well, I’ve thought about you, too,” I said. How can you have been pregnant by a man, for chrissakes, and not think of him? Think about him a lot--the same way you think about something that’s gone forever and not coming back, like your father maybe, or your first dog.
He said it was nice to get my letter.
“When was that?” I asked him. “Eight years ago?”
We were out past the jetties now, rocking steadily on that wild sea. I thought of the Titanic.
“Nine,” said David, then asked me if I still ran the preschool.
I said yes and asked if he was going to be sending us a toddler soon. I will admit to knowing the answer ahead of time.
He said his wife, Christine, could not conceive. “I won’t adopt,” he said, in much the same tone of voice that Raymond used when he pronounced his feelings on adoption.
I told him I was sorry.
“How about you?”
David knew about my trip to New York that summer long ago, because he was the reason for it. But I had never told him all the details of the aftermath, the terrible hemorrhage and the infection that set in later. Between the two, I was made infertile.
I told him New York had taken care of that.
God, Ann, he said, I had no idea.
“It’s all over and done with. You just move on to what you have left, that’s all. I’ve never been one to dwell.”
Ho-ho.
He nodded. Nothing makes a man strong like a woman who is, some genetic obligation to outdo you. But I could tell he was very shaken, and his next questions came out in a disturbed jumble — are you healthy... are you happy... do you have a good life...
I told him I had a great life and wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
I don’t know why I lied.
But I do, thought Joseph Goins. He stared for a long moment at a knothole in the pine paneling of his kitchen. He could smell the oven gas, faintly. The rock and roll next door was over, and the sounds of the cars on the boulevard rushed in to claim the silence. Reading Ann’s journal always made him think how wise a woman can think she is, how... in control. They just keep insisting there’s something good in the world, bubbling happily about this and that, right up to the time it ends for them. That’s why you love them so much, he thought, because they won’t give in to the dark currents, even when the water rises up to their lovely smooth throats. Look what happened to Cricket at the hospital, that nervous, beautiful, chubby girl who came to the fifth floor — the infamous fifth floor — and bestowed upon all of us her presence. What a mouth, what a smile — I could see the glow around her as she walked by, past the bars and the double-paned reinforced steel-meshed safety glass and the nets and the fabric of drugs that was always pulled across my eyes like a curtain across a window. One week was all she lasted before Papini handled her in her own office — Papini, a trusty, medicated into oblivion, but he cut through it all for a few prodding moments up against her — and she fled. For those few days, though, the confidence she had, the grace. The knowledge that Lima State Hospital was a better place because she believed it could be a better place. Look what happened when your world ran into Papini’s. And look what happened to you, sweet Ann, when your world took you to the Back Bay.
You lied, Ann, thought Joseph Goins, so that you could hope.
It was enough to make him sick. He turned back to the journal.
And how about your life, I asked him.
The same, he said, wouldn’t trade it. He smiled. David always knew when I was lying, but he was generous enough to play along. “What I think is, we work like slaves to keep from admitting that we really are.”
I said amen to that.
He asked about Ray.
“He’s fine. He’s a wonderful husband.” It made him sound icky, not what I’d intended at all.
David said that Brian Dennison thought a lot of Ray.
“Made lieutenant at thirty-five,” I said proudly.
The difference between Raymond making lieutenant young and David Cantrell owning half of the universe was never a difference that meant much to me. It still doesn’t. But somehow, the sheer size of it loomed there a moment around us. It was kind of an acknowledgment that the two of them — the two of us — were simply components of two different worlds. I was never able to understand how David could maintain all this humility and ambition at the same time. There may be some arrogance roosting inside his seeming good nature, but I didn’t see it that night, and I’ve never seen it since. As a college boy, he was actually shy — even with me — seven years younger, just a high school sophomore. Still, I believe that there are borders to defend in life, so I defended away.
“Don’t be so humble,” I said. “You’re not that great.” I stole the line from Indira Gandhi, I think, always a favorite.
He laughed and said it was nice to see me.
I said it was nice to see him.
He turned and walked past me with a nod, the kind of nod I imagined him giving some corporate doofus in a hallway of the PacifiCo Tower. That nod was an insult. What I yapped at him next was supposed to be a rebuttal, the kind of glib remark that tells someone you could care less about them. But the second I said it, I realized it was really a much more simple message. And I can say now, Dear One, that it contained your very beginnings. “Well, be sure and write,” I said.
He stopped and looked at me with what I can only call flattered surprise. And I heard then what he had heard, and suddenly it didn’t sound like such a bad idea at all. It sounded like a wonderful thing. It sounded like opening a small window to the sun on a hot and stifling day.