“It hasn’t changed, has it?”
I followed her gaze around the busy dining room. A man in his early thirties was sitting at a table with his blond wife and their three blond children, talking to someone on his cell phone.
One of his children was playing with a handheld video game. At the far end of the restaurant, next to the steps that led up to the bar, a bearded, heavyset man was sitting alone, drinking coffee, his plump fingers tapping slowly on the keyboard of a slim lap-top computer.
“The restaurant hasn’t changed,” I replied.
“Neither has the menu,” she said, inspecting the cracked plastic surface of the art deco cover.
The waitress, a woman in her late forties with a cupid mouth and a quick smile, took a short yellow pencil out of her graying blond hair and jotted down our order on a green paper notebook, the kind that wind up stuck on a spindle next to the cash register. I watched her walk away. “I think she waited on us last time. I remember her. A cute blond high school kid.”
My eyes came back to Jennifer. “Your sister said you moved back a few months ago. She’s really the society editor? It’s hard to believe. I don’t think I ever saw her in a dress.” I was going off in all directions at once. I stopped and shrugged helplessly.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked quietly.
“Do you know how long it’s been? I couldn’t even be sure you still remembered me. If Lisa hadn’t called last night and told me that she had seen you, and told me that you lived alone, I don’t know if I ever would have…”
“You don’t believe for a minute that I could have forgotten you. I was in love with you. I was always in love with you.”
The waitress brought our food, and for a while we talked about nothing but the mundane details of everyday life, like two old friends who had never been more than a few months apart.
“Why didn’t you ever get married?” she asked, pushing her dish aside. She had barely touched her food.
I tried to make a joke out of it. “You ruined me for other women.”
“No, really,” she said, searching my eyes.
“In a way, it’s true. I never had that same feeling again. Not for a long time. Just a few years ago,” I said, gazing out the window. The sea stretched out in the distance and then, at the far horizon, dropped off into the sky. “There was someone I wanted to marry.”
“What happened?” she asked sympathetically.
“Nothing,” I said, turning back to her. “She wasn’t in love with me. We lived together for a while, and then she left.”
I did not want to talk about it, not even with her. “What about you?”
This time, she looked away and watched the children play on the beach.
“Remember the summer after your first year in college, the summer after I graduated from high school? Remember that August, the night before I was leaving for Europe, when we stayed up until three o’clock in the morning, talking about what we wanted to do?”
She was still watching out the window, a distant look in her eyes. “Remember when you asked me to marry you? Remember what I said?”
“That you weren’t ready for that yet, but that maybe someday, when you were older…”
“Yes, but then you remember the letter I wrote you the next day, just before I left, the letter-”
“What letter? I never got a letter.”
Her eyes seemed to freeze, and then, slowly, she turned away from the window. “The letter I left at your house. The letter I gave to your mother to give to you.”
“She never- What did it say? What did you write to me?”
“That you were right, that there was no reason to wait, that I was in love with you, that we should get married just like you said.”
“I never got it,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “She never gave it to me. Why would she have done that?”
We both knew the answer. My mother had tried to control everything I ever did. It was one of the reasons I had decided to go so far away to school.
“She thought I’d ruin your life. She expected you to do great things.”
“That was her all right. She was always trying to run my life, but I still can’t believe that she-!” I stopped myself and laughed derisively. I knew it was true, and despite that I had still felt this strange irrational compulsion to say something in my mother’s defense. “I believe it. It’s exactly what she would have done. And it worked, didn’t it? I never got the letter. All I knew when I left you that night was that you said you would think about what we talked about. I never heard from you again. I went back to school and I didn’t come home again until the summer after my senior year, the summer before I started law school. You know why I didn’t come home? Because I knew if I did, I’d try to see you again, and I knew-I thought I knew-that would just make things worse.”
We were looking at each other and thinking of ourselves, all the ephemeral events of our lives, wondering how much different things might have been, astonished to discover that everything that had happened had been a kind of fiction that began with a lie.
“Maybe your mother was right,” Jennifer said. “I might have ruined your life. I was selfish, self-absorbed, and sometimes even cruel. And we were so young! If we’d gotten married, how long do you think it would have lasted? And then what would have happened?”
I felt again inside me the vast emptiness of that next year away at school, the awful sense that nothing mattered anymore and that I had become the unwilling spectator of my own meaning-less life.
“It would have lasted,” I said, certain it was true because everything else had been so false.
She smiled and touched my hand. “It’s nice that you still think that.”
The waitress cleared away the dishes and brought coffee. It was after two and only a few people were left in the restaurant. The sunlight slanted through the window and I twisted around against the corner of the booth to avoid the glare.
“That’s the way you always used to sit. You never sat up straight.
You always slouched like that, and you’d look at me with those big brown eyes of yours, always sulking about something.” She hesitated, as if there was something she wanted to tell me, but was not sure she should. “I fell in love with someone once because he had eyes like yours, brown eyes that seemed to look right through me.”
“Is he the one you married?”
It took a moment for her to remember that we knew next to nothing about the way we had lived our lives. “No. I was married at the time, but not to him. I met him at a country club dinner. Some friends of ours from college had invited us. They brought along a friend of theirs who was visiting from Chicago.
He had your eyes. I think I fell in love with him before they finished introducing us…” Her voice trailed off, and she gazed out the window at the ocean lying motionless under the sun.
“We danced together,” she said, still staring out the window.
“We were in the middle of the dance floor.” She took one last look and then turned back to me. “One moment we were dancing, and the next moment, while everyone was dancing all around us, we stopped, stopped still, right in the middle of the dance, and he said, ‘Leave with me, now, right now. Let’s just walk off the dance floor and never come back.’ “
She looked at me as if she had just made a confession and was waiting for me to pass judgment.
“Did you want to? Leave with him, and never come back?”
“More than anything.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I felt sorry for my husband, because I’d never loved him.”
“Never loved him?” I asked, confused. “Then why did you marry him in the first place?”
“Because he raped me,” she said simply. “You know how it used to be in those days. Everyone used to drink too much and then use it as an excuse for things they wanted to do anyway. It wasn’t really rape, not in the way we usually mean it. We’d been to a fraternity party and we had both had a lot to drink. We were parked in his car, necking, that’s all. Then he tried to do more than that, and I told him not to, and when he wouldn’t quit, I shoved him away from me and told him to take me back.”