Summer is beginning its long atrophy into barrenness.
A woman is sitting for lunch with a man. Very old
friends in a mid-sized middle western city, ravaged
by industrial outsourcing. Good night, steel. Good
night, auto. A city foreign to him, familiar in an elegiac
way to her. Whatever compelled her here has languished.
Much as the warmth, the robust green, the diffuse sun
spray. But she has not left, for reasons she cannot explicate.
Maybe she is tired. Maybe she has stopped searching,
or at the very least stopped chasing. Maybe things are
not as bad as they seem. She struggles to corral her
opinions of things anymore. / He is passing through,
having delivered his youngest son to college. His wife
is dead. Her two marriages have failed. The minor
entropies of existence. For many years, this man thought
that he would marry this woman. Thought, no matter
what he said, that fate, a thing he believed in only in
extreme cases, would bring them together. Then, one
summer she met a marine biologist while studying in
San Diego. Well, he thought, fate doesn’t exist. Nor God.
That desire, that longing, has transfigured into something
neither of them can place: a gentle, knowing affection,
melancholy but often gracious. Closeness, they have
learned, only tarnishes things. And sitting here - her
eating a chicken Caesar salad, him eating a turkey
burger with crumbled blue cheese - they are still lustrous.
Or, they manage moments where a passerby might see
them and think, that’s sweet, after all these years,
before being enveloped back into the folds of their day.
They move quickly through the practical matters: her
daughter at school studying poetry (so impractical! she
bemoans; yes, but dignified, he comforts); her son living
with his father and not terribly happy; his oldest son,
playing bass in a band touring college campuses and
making little money; his youngest off on his own with
what seems like his entire life ahead of him (it will escape
him before he can understand a thing, he smiles wryly;
it hasn’t yet escaped us, has it? she says, while he thinks,
perhaps fate works in protracted, strange ways); her
regrets; his grief. They delve into more important things.
/ God, of course. Her faith was present, has wavered. His
faith never existed, has not materialized. The scale of the
world, which seems larger and more terrifying by the day.
Love, how it muddles beyond the irresponsibilities of
adolescence, knows nothing of clarity, and, is best avoided
beyond a certain age. Or, at least avoided in the precipitous,
indulgent sense. They do not say that they are beyond that
threshold. Both holding out hope. / Tell me about your
writing, she says. He will always be perspicacious to her,
slightly bedraggled, the world always wheeling from his
control. His eyes, their insouciant indigo sheen, remind
her that he is still the same man, still the familiar,
precocious body of her memory. The eyes of a flawed but
decent man, well acquainted with failure. I’ll never
understand why you couldn’t find someone to publish
you, she says. Well, he says, I was just never quite good
enough. Though, he tells her, I’ve written a marvelous
novel in my head, and she smiles, her body humming an elegy
for these nostalgic peculiarities. And why won’t you write it?
Well, he says, then it wouldn’t be perfect, and I don’t think my
heart could handle that failure. / They moved on to the
subjective perfections of art. He preferred his art expansive,
messy, sprawled with the unruly mastery of death. She,
scientific minded, enjoyed linearity, circularity, strictness. /
Have you spoken at all with James? he asks. James the
marine biologist. Faceless, bodiless nemesis, foil to eternal
happiness. Enlarged, in his internal narrative, to obscene
proportions. No doubt a total bastard. No, she says. Not in
years. I know nothing of his life anymore, the quotidian
details that fill his time. Which, she says, is always so strange,
to spend years loving someone and then to realize you no
longer know what books they read or what people they miss.
We become such strangers. Do you miss him? he asks. Of course.
Time doesn’t change that. Although I don’t miss him in an active
way. But there are moments when a scent, or a sound, or
some other numinous thing springs from nowhere and
I am reminded of a time in my life when he was present.
And I miss him then, she continues, looking just over his
right shoulder. But I think mostly I am missing that irretrievable
point in my life, some breath of the past when certain threads
were full of possibility and had not yet unraveled. (he marvels
at the elegant, swift, and formal intonations of her hands, very
much like leaves following an incommensurable current) I
miss that he knew me as a young woman, loved my ambitions
and dreams, and those very dreams, long since dead in my own
soul, will always have a home inside him. But that’s why our
marriage failed. What he loved and adored ceased to be true,
and he couldn’t adapt. He loved a phantom, an apparition. We
all love ghosts, don’t you think? Ghosts of ourselves, ghosts of
others. At our age, I sometimes fear that they’re the only thing left.
/ Suddenly, they were outside themselves, into an exquisite
lull, as if they were exiting an unexpected meadow, the
lingering goldenrod and unencumbered wind. Newly
conscious of their corporeal remove, the rest of the
circumnavigating world. I am too old for anything but
pleasure, he thinks. She thinks, yes, this could not have
been anything else. I’ll be back in a minute, he says, I
need to find the bathroom. She watches him through the
crowd and feels the unassailable melancholy of so many
frail bodies engulfed in the ocher hue of coming autumn.
Not a thing any of them can do. / All this dying, she says
as he returns, effects me in ways it didn’t as a girl. Abscission,
the falling off of things. You know, he says, somewhere
the world is blooming. Yes, but it is such a brief flowering.
He sits and they talk until sundown. Standing at curbside,
they part with a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.