Is he going to grow old with her? Or, rather, is he going to let her grow old with him? She doubts it. A lot. (“Practice on older men,” her grandmother used to say, “but marry a young one.” Oh, Granny!)
He doesn’t ask how her paper’s coming along.
They’re supposed to be going to her study partner’s birthday party. It’s not that far from her flat, but he’s insisted on going the long way round by the river, where it curves and they’ll have to cross the bridges twice. She knows he doesn’t really want to go at all. He hates parties; he hates her friends. She knows he thinks they’re stupid, even though they’re not. Really not: They were all the smartest kids in their graduating classes. He just doesn’t like listening to them talk about their lives. He doesn’t say so, but it depresses him. Her friends are mostly history and literature. He can barely sit still around them. He wants to be mean to them, to skewer them with his scorn for their youth and inexperience and dreams — but if he does, she’ll dump him. She’s made that clear.
He has to come with her, now, because she’s already been to too many parties without him, and missed too many others because of him. At first it was okay to say her busy older boyfriend was working all the time, but they’ve been together too long; it looks like there’s something funny if he never turns up, and the last thing she wants is people worrying about her. She got him to come along tonight by telling him that Theo will be there. Theo is Anna’s boyfriend, and he’s in physics. He adores talking physics with Theo.
Swallows have begun darting over the river, looking for the bugs that swarm there at twilight. The air is getting blue-gray, but he’s still wearing his heavy, trendy sunglasses. Light really does hurt his eyes. That much is true.
“Flower for the lady?”
It’s one of those beggar kids, trying to sell long-stemmed red roses, each one wrapped in cellophane, tied with a ribbon. The kid probably thinks he’s a tourist, because of the glasses.
To her surprise, he stops. He never stops for anyone. He’s looking at the kid. He never does that, either.
“Hey,” he says.
The kid stares back. “Flower?”
Her arm linked in his, she can feel the twitch of him starting to reach for his wallet, then pulling back and letting go. “No, thanks.”
He pulls her along with him, not looking back.
Was it someone he knew before he met her? Too young. His child by his last lover? But he can’t have kids himself; he says he’s sterile. (Good thing!) Suddenly she remembers when she first came here to university, feeling lonely and raw, then one morning on her way to class spotting Sophie from their soccer club back home ahead of her, on the square, waiting for the light to change. And then realizing it couldn’t be, because Sophie had been hit by a car last year. It was just someone with the same shoulders, the same hair, same height. It would be like that for him all the time, the people he’d known, when he remembered. He’d see them everywhere. But it would never really be them.
“No flower for me?” she says, to recapture his attention. Maybe she’ll even learn something this time. He’s shaken. She knows the signs.
“When I buy you flowers, they won’t look like that.” He loosens his grip on her arm. “Have I ever bought you flowers?”
“Sure,” she says airily. “Don’t you remember that huge basket of lilies and white roses?” He looks at her sideways. He doesn’t quite believe her, but he’s trying to remember, just in case. “And the big bunch of hydrangeas you brought when I got the honors in folklore? I had to borrow a vase from Anna downstairs to hold them all. But my favorite was the rosebuds and freesias you gave me on my birthday.”
He is still walking. But slowly. She feels the tension in his arm. “Did I?”
“No.” She walks past him, now, her heels clicking on the pavement. “Of course not.”
He lets her get a little ahead of him, but only a little. By the time he’s caught up with her, she’s a little sorry. But only a little.
“Hey,” he says. He takes off his sunglasses. Hair falls into his eyes. He pushes it back with one hand. “Not everyone gets honors in folklore.”
“You didn’t even know me then.”
“I didn’t know you liked getting flowers,” he says innocently.
“All women like flowers. You’ve had how many centuries of us, and you can’t even remember that one stupid thing?”
He slings a pebble from the embankment into the water. Then he steps back, to watch it fall. The river is running strong. She can’t see it hit the water, but maybe he can.
“In foreign lands,” he announces, “ancient heroes sleep in caves, waiting for a horn to be blown or a bell to be rung, whereupon they spring into action in their country’s hour of greatest need.” Moodily, he slings another pebble. “Lucky bastards. Nothing to do but dream of ancient glory till it’s time for a remix. Our motherland discourages such sloth.”
“Really?”
“Really. No lying around when the land is in peril. Not here. Oh, no. We’ve got a better system in place.”
Finally! She can’t believe he’s telling her this. “And you’re it?”
“I’m it.”
She keeps her voice level, nonchalant. “I’ve always wondered how anyone could decide when the hour of greatest need was, anyway.”
“Me, too. Every year’s got plenty of hours, believe me.”
“That must be a lot of work.”
“All the work, and none of the glory.” Another pebble. “How do you think we kept our borders intact until ’41? When the Russians were boiling shoe leather?”
She shudders with delight. “You ate Nazis?”
“Ate?” He looks down his nose at her. “What do I look like, an ambulating garbage disposal? I just scared the crap out of them.” His head, lifted against the horizon, is too perfect, like a profile on a coin, a medal of heroism. “Well, certainly I drew a little sustenance first. Waste Not in Wartime and all that.” (She remembers her grandmother telling her that slogan.) “But foreign blood does not nourish like the blood of the land.”
“Is that why you hate to travel?”
“One reason.”
“The blood of the land?”
He draws a little closer to her. And he was close before. He puts one hand on the back of her head and bends down to smell her hair.
Her heart starts slamming like it’s working for him already. She lifts her chin and reaches up to draw his head down to her. Someone passing would think they were just any couple, nuzzling on a picturesque riverbank. They might even wind up in some tactless tourist’s photos. He pulls her tighter, getting her neck right up against his mouth.
“I used to be tall,” he mutters. “I mean really, really tall. People would stare at me on the street. That tall. Now I’m, what, just normal?”
“You’re hardly normal.” She always feels a giddy, reckless joy with his mouth near her veins.
“After the war,” he growls. “All that nutrition. Milk. Marshall Plan. A race of giants. And now it’s vitamins. I’ll end up having to date midgets my own size.”
He might have said more, but she doesn’t hear it because the blood is pounding in her ears. Sweet, it’s so sweet letting him take her into himself. If they were home, she’d take him into her, too. She takes a deep breath of air, the best air she’s ever breathed. She doesn’t want him to stop, but he does.
She’s lost track of time, but the birds are still swirling; it hasn’t been long. She clutches at the wool of his jacket, because otherwise she knows she’s going to fall. He’s so tender with her, now, as he pulls away. He wipes his mouth quickly with a white cotton handkerchief. He’ll never use a paper tissue, and there’s never much to wipe, but he always does it anyway.