No thank you, really. Hara would do without if it came to that. She was proud enough to prefer suffering to fooling herself, which was only a less dignified form of suffering in the end. The phone in the house, on some perverse cue, rose shrilly above the quiet, startling her. Zeke, no doubt. Well, she needed to excuse herself.
“All right, you’ve got me. What is it you want?”
There was a pause. “Is Boris, I call from Russia.”
“Zeke.”
“Boris,” Zeke said. “Anyway, there you are. I left you a thousand messages.”
“The thousandth must have done the trick.” She picked up a framed picture from the desk. She and Zeke at a wedding on Skiathos. They looked, well — formidable.
“You’re not back in New York.”
“Oh my God, what a master sleuth you’ve become!”
“Hara.”
“Are you having me followed? Is there a man with binoculars in the hedges?”
“I wanted to see how you were, make sure you weren’t hacked to bits by your houseguest or whatever.” Hara was silent. “Okay, it was stupid prank, I know. You don’t have to say it. But she’s gone now anyway.”
“Actually, no.”
“Really.”
Oh, how she hated that crystallizing attention in Zeke’s voice, the typical distraction it laid bare.
“It’s been more than a week,” he said.
“Oh, has it been? Oops, silly me. I’ll go kick Lyric out right now.” She glanced at herself in the glass of a framed movie poster. It acted as a mirror in the dim light.
“Lyric?”
“You were right,” she said. She felt she were speaking in a dream. “I made a new friend. She’s fun.”
“You sound odd, Hara.”
“Well, I’m drunk. And stoned. And I’m hosting two young people tonight, if you must know, and I need to hang up in a minute so we can all go make love in front of the fire.”
“Hara.”
“Hmm? Or does that sound like you, Zeke? Now really, don’t you have some cardboard Tanya to escort around Bel Air or what are we talking about?”
She felt her mood strobe gently within her, but with the act of speaking, stringing these words together and feeling them hum in her chest, she found herself brought into momentary focus. How strange it was to be talking just like this, the two of them, alive in each other’s ears, invisible pinpoints in the black immensity of night. Zeke was here in the phone. But he was also out there somewhere, in some city, in some unknowable room. It was absurd. It was a cruel joke.
“I don’t know when you’re being serious anymore,” he said.
“That’s funny,” Hara said, “because now I’m racking my brain for when you were ever serious.”
“I’m worried about you. Should I be worried?”
“The thing is”—her voice had fallen, the spite deserting her that quickly—“you don’t have to be worried about me anymore. More to the point, I’m not sure you get to be.” How tired she was. “Don’t call unless it’s important, ’kay? I’m hanging up now.”
She lay on the window seat and closed her eyes, careering for a minute on the tide of intoxication that bore her. She was further gone than she’d realized, good and stewed, but what use was that when no one would rise to her bait? Why were people so horribly decent only just after they had knifed you in the Theatre of Pompey? I come to praise Hara, not to marry her! And what had she been thinking, really, when Zeke had come to marry her? Well, it wasn’t hard to remember, just hard now to account for the feeling of possibility that crept in to scatter her prudent doubts. She would blame it on the beauty of that wind-bitten day, the fragrant hills above Sorrento, the high clouds trailing out to sea. The sort of day that for its very clarity startled you into an unarmored sense of your own vital heart. She had known so clearly in that moment that life gave its fruit to the bold, the unhesitant. And beneath her apprehension, her judicious dread, her understanding that toughness was no more than the scarring on sites of a more vulnerable and immediate contact, beneath it all her heart beat its silly hollow yeses. It made her want to throw up, it did now, for if the reasonableness of her objections would be borne out — that Zeke was not a person who came to rest and perhaps neither was she — all she could think just then was that it was happening to her, the thing you wait for, telling yourself you aren’t waiting, sure someday it will come, and sure just the same it won’t, that you will be the one passed over while all the repellent millions walk hand in hand into the insipid lava of a setting sun. But she would be one of them, she saw. She felt the dull embrace of that contentment tumble about her like curtains from the wings. And as she adjusted to the weight of the ring on her finger over the next few days, she marveled that without this anchor, for so many years, she hadn’t floated up, up, and out of sight, to that point far above where the things you could once see right in front of you disappear.
* * *
When Hara woke it was morning. Out the windows in the study a gray sky lingered at the treetops. She had a blanket around her she didn’t recall getting.
Lyric was in the living room reading when she emerged. “Morning,” the girl said, her voice as sweet and languorous as honey. “We thought we’d let you sleep.”
“Oh. Is Robert—”
“No, but he says thanks.”
Hara doubted that very much, but the room was neat, the trace remains of a fire in the fireplace.
“He seems nice,” Hara said, lying on the sofa, watching as Lyric rose to fetch her water. “A little surly, maybe, the strong, silent type, but to each her own.”
They worked diligently on the puzzle that week. The evidence of their progress, so slow in the moment, was undeniable in sum. The field had begun to form in emerald swatches floating within the forest. The wolves galloped at the center, shabby specters unmoored. What heart Hara once had taken in the irremediable mess began to desert her as order emerged.
“What if you stayed on?” she asked Lyric. “When I go back, I mean. You could look after the house. You’d be near Robert.” Lyric had taken to visiting Robert in the evenings, asking whether Hara minded if she used the car — as though Hara might suddenly have made plans and neglected to tell her! “I’d see you when I came up,” she said. “I’d pay you, of course.”