Harper something-told her where you lived.”
“Come in, come in,” I said, stepping aside.
“How did you get through the gate?” I asked as she looked around the living room.
“It was wide open.”
Then I remembered. “I forgot to lock it last night when I got home.”
It was a lie. I had not forgotten. I did not lock it because, afraid of what might be lurking in the shadows, I did not want to get out of the car. I had not seen her in years and I still did not want her to know that I was capable of courage only if I thought someone was watching.
She walked around the living room as if she had been there before and was making certain that everything was still the way she remembered it. With her hand trailing behind her, barely touching the spines of the books that lined the shelves, she moved the length of the bookcase that covered one wall. When she reached the end, she looked back.
“Remember I told you that you were too serious for me? You always knew exactly what you wanted to do. You always had such great plans. I didn’t think much beyond the next weekend.” She laughed, softly, and her mouth twisted down at the corners, tender and sad. “Maybe if I had been more like you, things would have been different.”
As soon as she said it, she shook her head, embarrassed, and laughed again. “I didn’t come here to complain about my life.
Honest. I came to ask if you’d like to go for a ride. Like old times,” she added.
It would not have occurred to me to say no, but I felt somehow awkward and stupid, like someone who does not know quite how they are supposed to act. I could not know how much she had changed, and I could only wonder how different I was from the way she must have remembered me.
“Where would you like to go?” I asked, sounding stiff and formal and every bit the pompous fool.
She looked at me again with that same half-mocking smile, that look that had always told me that she knew more about me than I ever would myself.
“Does it matter?”
“No,” I admitted with a laugh. “Doesn’t matter at all.”
I changed as quickly as I could into a pair of slacks and an ox-ford shirt. When I came back downstairs she had left the living room and found her way into the library. She was standing on her tiptoes, gazing up at a row of books on the top shelf bound in green and gold leather.
“The collected works of Francis Bacon,” she said when she became aware of my presence. “Have you really read all of this?”
I leaned against the door, my arms folded across my chest, and shook my head. “Not only have I not read them, they don’t really even belong to me. They were given to me, along with the house.
A judge, the kindest, most intelligent man I ever knew, left it to me when he died. I think he thought I might be able to learn something.”
She smiled at me from across the room. “And have you-
learned anything?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Marry the first girl you fall in love with. Nothing is ever as good as that.”
Outside, on the front steps of the porch, she let her eye wander across the green grass lawn and the flower gardens filled with azaleas and beyond that to a stand of fir trees at the fence.
“Reminds me of that song,” she said, as she stood next to her car, her hand on the door. She wrinkled her nose and tossed her head. “The fool who lives on the hill.”
“The old fool who lives on the hill,” I said as I climbed into her shiny black Porsche convertible.
“Nice car,” I remarked with deliberate understatement.
She reached into the console between the red leather seats and pulled out a pair of dark glasses. “Married badly, divorced well,”
she remarked as she put them on.
She started the engine, then turned to me, an innocent mischievous smile on her face, as she unfastened the ribbon with which she had tied her hair. “Ready?”
Leaning against the passenger door, my arms folded loosely, I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
As soon as I said it, she ducked her head, jammed her foot down on the accelerator, and threw it into gear. I grabbed the side of the seat with one hand and braced myself against the dashboard with the other. The car hurtled down the drive and onto the street. Her long black hair was flying back around her face and over her shoulders, the wind whipping it into long twisted tangles. Her eyes were fastened on the road in front of her. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gearshift knob. Darting in and out of traffic without bothering to signal or even to look, she left it to everyone else to get out of the way.
Leaning toward her, I shouted above the whining roar of the engine, “You’re still the worst driver I’ve ever seen!”
She slid the dark glasses down to the tip of her nose and glanced across at me. “You forget,” she yelled back, “I used to drive like this!” Clutching the wheel with both hands, she closed her eyes and laughed as if it was the most fun she had had in years.
I grabbed the wheel away from her and held it steady. The speedometer was edging past ninety. “I was only kidding. You were always a great driver.”
“Remember the MG? British racing green? You didn’t mind the way I drove then.”
“When I was eighteen I thought I’d live forever.” I started to laugh. “Of course in those days I thought forever meant forty-five at the outside.”
“I liked that MG,” she said, looking straight ahead, her head held high. “It was safe.” She darted her eyes at me and then looked back at the road. “It didn’t have a back seat.”
We drove to the coast and followed the highway south as it curved through dark forested headlands and high rocky cliffs beaten smooth by the sea. We crawled through oceanside towns, waiting at crosswalks for the tourists and day-trippers eager to see the huckster shops filled with candy and myrtlewood carvings or to visit the coffee shops and ice cream parlors on the other side of the street. The April sun beat down through the cloudless sky, drying against our skin the cool salt air. As we drove on, I closed my eyes and slouched down until my head was resting against the top of the seat. The breeze that blew by us had a chill to it, but the sun was warm on my face and I felt as drowsy as the boy I had once been, when I slept with a blanket pulled up under my chin while my feet stuck out the other end.
We barely spoke. We had not even talked about where we were going. I could not count the number of times we had come here, to the coast, on a weekend day, stopping wherever we felt like it, and seldom the same place twice. We had always come in her car, and Jennifer always drove. She loved it and never got tired of it, the sheer, hypnotic thrill of taking a car high around a corner and then flat out through a straight stretch of road. I used to watch her, the constant, fluid motion of her hands and arms and wrists, the fixed determined look in her eyes, the way she laughed when she had taken the machine right to the edge of what it could do. In the shared silence of those day-long drives, I had felt closer to her than I had ever felt to anyone before, or ever felt again.
Jennifer pulled off the road onto a promontory high above the sea, and parked the car in front of a restaurant that had been there as long as I could remember. It was a long, lowlying wooden frame building that looked like a roadhouse, the kind you once saw in movies where long-legged women sat at the corner of the bar, staring through languid, half-closed eyes into the cigarette smoke that danced slowly into the air with every provocative breath they took.
We found a booth next to a window that overlooked a small cove. Down below, on the rock-covered inlet, waving their arms in the air, children ran into the water and then, when it was up to their knees, tumbled back to shore.
“Do you remember this place?” Jennifer asked as she studied the menu. “We stopped here the first time we came to the coast together.” She glanced at me over the top of the menu. Her dark glasses were on the table. The lines at the edges of her eyes, barely noticeable before, spread out and deepened as she smiled.