His eyes looked past me into the distance. Then he got to his feet, tied the belt around his waist, and opened the closet door.
“I’ve got some clothes you can wear. Why don’t you take a shower, get cleaned up, and I’ll drive you home. You don’t want to show up looking like that,” he said with a gentle laugh.
Halfway up the drive the porch light came on and Jennifer, wearing a knee-length cotton nightgown, dashed out and began to wave. The headlights swept past her as Flynn pulled up in front. Darting barefoot down the darkened steps, she threw herself into my arms as I got out of the car.
“I didn’t think you’d be home for days.” Standing on her tiptoes, her arms around my neck, she ran her hand over the side of my face. “You shaved.”
“Say hello to Howard Flynn,” I said, as I opened the back door of the car.
Her arms behind her back, Jennifer looked across the passenger seat. “Hello, Howard Flynn. Thank you for bringing my derelict home.”
Reaching inside, I gathered up the thick bundle of clothing I had worn during my brief sojourn as one of the homeless. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Flynn’s face color slightly as he became formal and awkward, trying to be polite.
Dragging the bundle behind me, my arm around her waist, we walked up the steps to the porch and watched the lights of the car recede into the distance as Flynn drove down the drive and out the gate. Inside, Jennifer took the bundle from my hand, dropped it to the floor, and kissed me on the mouth. I gathered her up in my arms and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. She slid under the sheets and started teasing me about my borrowed oversize clothes, and then, after I had taken them off, she turned off the lamp.
We made love with a new intensity, and when it was over, and we lay together in the moonlight that splashed through the bedroom window, she put her hand in mine and touched my soul.
“The only thing I want is to live with you and to die with you, live together, die together, just us, the way we said it would be.
Remember?”
I remembered when we first said it, and I said it again, the same words, the same promises, but it was not the same. We had lived separate lives, and we knew that what we had promised before-that we could never survive apart-had been, not a lie, but something that had not been true. In the innocence of our youth we had believed love and death the only real alternatives, and had come to learn that life was neither so simple nor so kind.
Curling her arm around my neck, she held me as tight as she could. “Just love me, love me forever… please.”
I put my arm around her and spread my fingers on the small of her back, and tried to relieve the tension that was running rigid through her. Her hard, sobbing breath began to slow down, and after a while I could barely feel her heart beating against me; and then, a little later, her hand let go of my neck and her arm slid down onto my shoulder. For a long time I watched her sleep, wondering about the way the most important things seem to come about by chance, and whether chance might be nothing more than a word we hide behind when we don’t want to believe that everything has been decided by fate.
The next morning I found Jennifer dancing around the kitchen, humming to herself as she put dishes away with one hand and rinsed off a pot with the other. Both hands moving at once, she kissed me lightly on the cheek and ordered me to sit down at the table. I squinted at her through eyes still filled with sleep, staggered to the coffeemaker, and poured myself a cup. She watched with amused indulgence as I dragged myself over to the table and collapsed into a chair. Jennifer slid into the chair opposite, and with a pensive expression drank coffee from her cup.
“Tell me about Howard Flynn,” she said presently.
“Flynn? He’s a private investigator. A long time ago he was a lawyer,” I said, my gaze drifting across the kitchen to the windows that let in the yellow morning light.
“You told me once that he was disbarred because he came to court drunk and said some things he shouldn’t have.”
My eyes came back to her. She never seemed to forget anything, no matter what it was and no matter how long ago it might have been said.
“What happened to him?” she asked.
My gaze went back to the window, and I shook my head. “It’s a terrible story,” I said, reluctant to say more.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“It isn’t that,” I said, as I began to stir the cup with a spoon.
“It really is a terrible story, the kind that doesn’t have an end.”
“Does any story have an end?” Her voice was like a long slow breath that made you want to stay right where you were, listening to her talk. “Our story didn’t.”
I thought about what she said. “No,” I remarked presently, “our story didn’t end-it got better-but what happened to Flynn…
“Howard Flynn was a great athlete, one of the best high school football players anyone had ever seen. He was six foot three, two hundred sixty-five pounds, with a thick neck and a head like a barrel keg, and quick as a cat. Every college wanted him; everyone told him he’d be an all-American. He was, too, third-string all-American his sophomore year. But Flynn didn’t play football because he loved it; he played it because he was good at it and because it paid his way through college. If he had come from a wealthy family, I don’t think he would have played at all. Flynn wanted to be a lawyer-from the time he was a kid, that’s what he wanted to do.
“He studied all the time, and almost never went out. Howard was a one-man wrecking crew on a football field, but around other people he was quiet, shy, always a gentleman. I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if he’d ever had a date in high school. But now he was an all-American, and girls who would not have looked at him twice wanted to be with someone famous. There was one in particular: tiny, not more than five foot two, with flashing black eyes and a cute little smile. Her name was Yvonne Montero and they started going out. Everyone liked Flynn, and everyone thought it was great that he finally had a girl. It didn’t matter that she had made it with half the guys in school. Flynn didn’t know anything about that, and besides, they were just going out.
No one thought it was serious, but of course it was serious. For the first and only time in his life, Howard was in love-the way I was in love with you.
“They got married the day after he graduated, and she probably started fooling around the day after that.” I caught myself getting angry and took a deep breath. “To be fair, she worked while he went through law school. Three years later, he passed the bar and got a good job with a pretty good firm. A few months later, she had their baby, a boy, Howard Flynn, Jr. That was the hap-piest day of Howard Flynn’s life-maybe the last really happy day he ever had-the day he first saw his son.”
Locking my fingers together on top of my head, I stared out the window, rocking back and forth on the chair.
“What happened?” Jennifer asked, breaking my reverie.
“One day, about two years later, while Flynn was in court arguing a case, his wife was home in bed with another man, someone she had been sleeping with for more than a year. The boy, Howard’s son, was asleep in his own room. He woke up and wandered into the living room, looking for his mother. The sliding glass door to the backyard had been left open. She was in the bedroom, making love, when it happened. She never heard her son fall into the pool, never heard him cry for help, never heard anything except the sounds she was making while she cheated on her husband.
“The boy drowned, and Howard died that day as well. He blamed himself. Odd, isn’t it, that after what his wife had been doing, Howard would think it was his fault? He thought he should have known that it was too good to last. His wife was having sex with another man in their bed; their son drowns because of it; and Howard thinks that he should have known what she was going to do, and that he could have saved his only child if he had!”