I arrived home shortly past noon.
For me, "home" is now Charlottesville, Virginia, a small Piedmont town about a hundred miles southwest of Washington: birthplace of Lewis and Clark, seat of the University of Virginia, discreetly Southern. As always, when I arrived, I couldn't quite believe that I'd actually settled there. Its population is only thirty-five thousand (swelled a trifle by the students), whereas I was brought up in a succession of world capitals, went to school in New York (Columbia), and spent most of my journalistic career in Berlin, Warsaw, and Moscow?all large cities, whatever your ideological persuasion. Nonetheless, when I tired of the Betacam rat race and came home again, I found New York and L.A. unendurable in turn and decided to try someplace smaller. Charlottesville won out for two reasons: the University, with its excellent research facilities, and the town's proximity to Washington, where I have most of my contacts. Now, after three years, I fitted right in dreary proof that I was growing middle-aged, I suppose. But it's a town that lets you alone, and I was able to live the kind of life I wanted: work, small pleasures, quiet routines. Up at dawn, I usually wrote till noon, then strolled along to Mur-chie's a local landmark for the papers and cigarettes. For lunch, I normally indulged myself at the Mousetrap or one of the other student hangouts beer, sandwiches, an eyeful of coeds and finally, protected by an alcoholic haze, I'd dutifully continue on to the Alderman Library for last week's Izvestia and the penance of some academic prose. That afternoon, turning off Emmet Street, I picked all this up in the middle and dropped in at the Mousetrap, but then decided to skip the University there was no sense pretending I was going to get any work done today. Instead, I bought some food at the supermarket and headed straight home.
I live on Walsh Street, near the old black section of town, in a white frame house decorated with Victorian gingerbread. I left the Volvo in the lane, then staggered up the walk with the groceries, maneuvered through the front door, and went straight through to the kitchen. The house felt cold, so I laid a fire in the old wood stove (the size of a locomotive and almost as complicated), then made coffee and carried it into the living room.
Usually, the visit to my father's grave was just a day's excursion, but this time I'd worked it in as the last leg of a two-week trip to New York and Boston, so the room had a forlorn, abandoned air. Taking possession of the place again, I went around plumping cushions and opening curtains, put some Haydn on the stereo, and then slumped down on the sofa. Now the coffee table was directly in front of me, a large pile of mail strewn across it. And perhaps I was simply tired, or perhaps it was the peculiar quality of this day, but I saw nothing unusual in this and, almost absently, began sorting through the envelopes. Texaco wanted $58.93? Jimmy Swaggart devoutly prayed that I'd purchase a Bible, bound in Genuine Olive Wood, for a minimum donation of $25? There was a letter from my agent about the French rights to my second book, but we'd already covered that in New York, and then junk, oddments, more bills, and a whole slew of magazines: The Economist, The Spectator, Foreign Affairs, Slavic Review, The Journal of Soviet Studies, BBC Monitors Soviet Broadcasts, The Red Army Journaclass="underline" Extracts and Commentaries? I finished my coffee and carried the whole mess into my workroom.
Like the workrooms of most men, I suppose, mine gives a fair portrait of its owner all the more so in my case, since I designed and built it myself. It's converted from an old screened porch running the full length of the house. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves cover the inside wall (two thousand volumes, mostly about the Soviet Union), and on the outside, under the windows, there's a maple counter that constitutes my principal workspace. The tools of my trade were scattered there in their usual disarray papers, drafts, offprints from journals, notes to myself (illegible), a couple of Uher tape recorders (one of which worked), an IBM Selectric, an old Underwood I'd been dragging around for years as a sort of lucky charm, and my latest toy, an IBM PC: 640K, Corona hard disk, C–Itoh printer? but perhaps you don't share the new electronic enthusiasms. In any case, as I say, these bits and pieces provide the surest clues to my character. They should tell you I'm something of a solitary: growing up as an "embassy brat," I learned to get by on my own, and then my father's death seemed to set me apart from everyone else. But I also like my comfort in my workroom, I'm never far from a comfortable chair and one of the reasons I left journalism was the sheer misery of it, the borrowed apartments, pool offices, endless fast food. And lastly, you should be able to guess that I love my work. In a sense, that's also connected to my father. He died in 1956, a year before Sputnik, and in the great panic that followed, my high school in Washington began offering courses in Russian. It was just what I needed something to lose myself in and soon I was totally enthralled by the language, the country, the people. It's a fascination I've never lost, and for most of my adult life I've earned my living, in one way or another, as a "Russian expert": as a journalist in Eastern Europe and Moscow, briefly (miserably) as a teacher, and now as a freelance writer. Even on that afternoon I couldn't resist, and flipped on my machine. It greeted me with the IBM beep, and then a page from my third book flickered into green, ghostly life. I read it through, even felt my brain stir a little, but I knew I was too tired to do anything useful, so I went back to the living room and read myself to sleep. When I awoke, it was after three and the phone was ringing.
Groggily, I staggered into my workroom to answer it and felt the usual chest-tightening sensation when the girl said, "Western Union."
"Yes?"
"We have a telegram for you, Mr. Thorne. The text reads:
DEAR ROBERT. TRIED TO REACH YOU ALL WEEK. URGENT. PLEASE CALL 416 922-0250. LOVE. MAY."
May. May Brightman? even after all these years, hearing her name was like a blow to the pit of my stomach.
"Mr. Thorne, sir?"
It took me a moment to recover. I cleared my throat. "I'm here, operator. Could you tell me where that was sent from?"
"Yes, sir. The point of origin is Toronto, Canada."
She was Canadian, though I'd never known her to live there.
"And could you read back that number again?"
She did so, and I hung up.
May Brightman. I stood there, my hand on the phone. May? It had been a long time since I'd heard from her. Three years? Five? But of course she always did keep in touch? maybe a woman who rejects you can never quite leave you alone? Except that sounds bitter and that's not what I felt. Enough time had passed, God knows I was over her now? so there wasn't that pain. But there was still something else? a species of regret, a strange lack of completion. What had happened between us? Standing there, almost twenty years after the fact, I still didn't know. She'd loved me, she'd never denied it. But when I'd asked her to marry me (I was very young and sufficiently romantic to do the deed on a bench in Central Park, a cinematic mist in the air), she'd said yes right away, only to change her mind the next week with no clue as to why. Did she know herself? Maybe not. Maybe no woman, in her place, ever does. In any event, May Brightman had become another question I couldn't answer. Indeed, as I pulled myself together and went back into the living room, I thought how uncanny it was that she had called today, for there was another link to my father. I'd lived my life within the shadow cast by his death, and May had been my great attempt to step outside it. When she'd turned me down, I'd retreated again. If, to admit the truth, I was a lonely man today? albeit as comfortable with my loneliness as a fish is with the sea she was part of the reason. Not the first cause, but the second?