To years gone by, he said.
And years to come, I said, and we drank. For a minute, I looked through the dark windows at the rain coming down again, the slick blackness of Coast Highway, the wet faces of the buildings shining in sign light. I felt like every inch of road we covered was an inch I’d never cross again, that I was moving on into unmapped territory, unsettled frontier. For a moment, I let myself believe it was true. And in that moment, I let myself admit how deeply I was rutted in my life, how numbingly familiar things had become, how astonishingly easy it all was, and, of course, how hard I’d worked to make it that way! David was looking at me when I turned to him.
I do this a lot at night, he said. I like to sit back and watch things go by. If you don’t think about anything while you see it, it seems new.
I said it must be nice to cruise Orange County, when you own half of it. A flicker of disappointment crossed his eyes.
Forget what I own for a while, he said. I’d like to. No one owns things, anyway — we’re renters. We all just rent, until the landlord comes.
We went out the boulevard to Coast Highway, south past the restaurants, through Corona del Mar, down into Laguna. I opened the window to get some storm. The waves were big at Main Beach, I could see the white foaming walls towering into shore; I could feel the power surge through the air when they broke, a sound you get in your chest, not through your ears.
You’re getting wet, he said.
I let the rain hit my face.
Same flake you were in high school, he said, and down went his window, too, and we sat there for the next five minutes riding through town while the wind charged in and the rain slanted through. He filled our glasses again and I could see the raindrops hitting the pool of champagne and bouncing off the rose. Neither of us said anything for a long time. It was just him and me and a couple of feet of leather between us, and a storm the shape of a window swirling into me.
I don’t know why I’m doing this, I said. But that was only partly true. Parts of us remain unrevealed to ourselves, but we catch glimpses of these missing pieces sometimes if we are awake and looking for them. So I had a notion of why I was doing this. I was surprised by the smallness of it. I was doing this as a simple way of not caring for a few minutes, a way not to have an experience but to let the experience have me.
“I never thought that Little Warm would be the last chance I’d get to have a child,” I said suddenly, and the words shocked me as I heard them.
He was brooding and quiet a long while, then finally said that when he learned that Christy, his wife, couldn’t have children, he wondered if it was some vengeful, poetic consequence of what had happened to me.
Then I caught myself saying things to him that I’d never said to anyone but myself, about the hugeness of what happened that fall in New York, and how long it took me to realize what my ruined womb would come to mean, how I’d look in the mirror or at one of the kids at school or see an expression in Ray’s eyes and realize again that I’d never pass myself on in that way, never have the chance to offer my best to a little being who needs me, never give Ray that gift, never, well... have one.
David’s window followed mine up. Getting pelted in the face by rain didn’t seem much fun anymore.
“There was one thing I wanted to say tonight,” he said. “It was the only thing I wanted to say. I’m sorry, Ann. I’m sorry for how it worked out.”
I shrugged. There have been times in my life when those words would have brought tears to my eyes and I’d have started blubbering, but after a while you just accept what is and don’t beat yourself up anymore about what isn’t. I mean, how much can a girl take?
“Me, too,” I said. “But it wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t mine, so what can you say?”
David was quiet for a long time. “Just that if I had the chance to do it again, do it right, do it now — I would.”
I looked at him for a moment. Always beneath the rational good sense in David’s eyes, I’ve seen the gambler that he is, the willingness to take a chance. He meant it.
“Well, that’s a fat, bitter pill, at this point,” I said.
“Remember our plan to run away and have it? Think of how different things would have been if we’d have had the guts to carry it out.”
I told him I’d thought of that every day for twenty-five years. And suddenly, I was aware of myself, unexpectedly, acutely aware of myself: the makeup running from the rain, my hair all a mess, my dress soaked, my husband almost off shift, my almost-forty body trying its best to stay young, my barren womb waiting there like some cute little house that nobody’s ever going to live in, and I thought, What in the fuck am I doing here?
“I turn into a pumpkin in about half an hour,” I said.
David tapped on the privacy glass and the driver headed for the left lane.
He said he wanted to ask me something.
Ask away, I said, though I knew what it would be.
Why did you marry Raymond so soon after... us? You were hardly out of high school.
Dear One, though I’ll probably never give this book to you, I must say that there are certain decisions made in life that are best left unexamined once you make them. Some things we must have the luxury of taking for granted, because if we entertained doubts about them, we simply wouldn’t be able to move ahead with life. I admit that I had asked that same question over the years, but never deeply, never with a passion to really know. I’ve always let the answer sit just out of reach, an unexamined mystery that requires no attention.
So I told myself then what I’d always known: that Raymond Cruz has a heart the size of California, and I was content to be a villager in it. I came to know Raymond as a girl of fifteen, secretly attached to a college senior of twenty-one I simply fell for in one lightning instant at a party, and was later made pregnant by. I came to know Raymond as a girl who’d just been through a secret death about which she could speak to no one but her parents and this college senior now exiled to Stanford University. I know now that I easily became lost in Raymond Cruz’s dimensions.
I told myself this, too, and I will tell you, Dear One, though I’ll never have the nerve to give this book to you: Besides the breadth of Raymond’s decency, I was seduced by his patient, tender, unwavering devotion to me. It would be a lie to deny that. I’m not sure when I first became aware of this devotion, but it was long before I turned into a woman, long
before we went as a couple to our first dance, when he was sixteen. I think it started when we were children in the neighborhood. I came to bask in that devotion like someone in the sun. It surrounded me; it waited for me; it was a dependable constant in a world of motion. And it would be a lie, too, to deny that I reserved the right to ignore it, to control my intake, to simply free myself of it when I wanted to be in a world that lacked the burden of someone else. That was often, in those first years, reeling as I was from what had happened in New York.
So why, as we walked the bayfront that fine spring afternoon, my eighteenth, Raymond holding my hand and respecting my distance with the silence I desired, did I ask him to marry me? Why? More than anything, as I ponder the question in the silence of this house I now share with him, I believe it was because I had seen the quickness with which life can take things away: my brother Jake just killed in Vietnam, David banished to the north, Little Warm to some medical-waste-disposal unit — I didn’t know what they did with her and I still don’t. No one can tell me that a girl of fifteen doesn’t feel genuinely. I felt with a depth of heartache that I still won’t let myself remember in any but my worst moments. And as I walked along the bay that day, I was aware, Dear One, excruciatingly aware that there was no God watching each footstep, no parent or friend powerful enough to guide my unsteady feet, no one devoted to my protection. There was nothing but him, Ray, walking beside me without words, holding my hand with just the right amount of possessiveness and tentativeness. He was my companion. He was my friend. He was soon — that night, in fact — my lover. Why did I marry him so soon after David?