I WENT AWAY to college, stayed away for graduate school, and then returned to teach molluscan biology, local history, folk etymology, and recreational mathematics at Babbington High. When I returned, Ariane was still in town, at the same place, down by the docks, but I didn’t see much of her. I just never seemed to have the time. Then one night her house burned down and Ariane was killed.
Again, I blamed myself. If I had been there—who knows. Perhaps the fire never would have started. Perhaps I could have put it out. Or perhaps we would have died together. When I start a thought with if, I tend to get lost in a maze of possibilities, and soon I’m furious with headstrong fate for having, in haste to get from then to then, chosen a single route, and a wrong one at that, an unacceptable one, when so many others would have served, such as the one that I have described in the pages that follow, in which a fire extinguisher is provided at the critical moment, allowing her to telephone me one night, a few years after the fire extinguisher saved her.
I WAS READING when the phone rang, and I was reluctant to answer, but I’ve never been good at ignoring a ringing phone, so I picked it up after the third ring.
“Hello?” I said.
“Peter?” said the voice at the other end of the line.
“Yes,” I said.
“I bet you don’t know who this is.”
It sounded like Ariane, but I wasn’t sure, and when people ask you to guess they usually have some trick up their sleeve.
“It’s Ariane,” she said, without requiring me to guess.
All my boyish feelings for her came back to me, and for a moment I saw her in my mind’s eye just as she had been—back when I was eleven and she was seventeen, when she was somewhere between girl and woman—as if I had seen her earlier that day, but because the truth was that I hadn’t seen her for months, I immediately felt guilty about it.
“How are you?” I asked, and I heard in my voice a phoniness that embarrassed me.
“Fine,” she said.
“I haven’t been down there to see you in a while,” I said. “I—” I could taste the lame excuses in my mouth.
“Oh, never mind about that,” she said. “I called you to tell you something that—well—that I can hardly believe.” She paused. Apparently she was waiting for some response from me.
“Oh?” I said.
“I’m leaving Babbington.”
“Wow,” was all I could think of to say. I had regressed to early adolescence. I had begun to feel the same aching yearning for her I had felt so many years before. “I—I—really don’t know what to say,” I said. This happens to me, sometimes. It’s not really that I don’t know what to say, but that I can’t seem to get hold of it. Everything I might say seems to be on the other side of a fence, guarded by a drooling dog, inaccessible to me.
“It’s time for something else,” she said. “Time for me to do something else, maybe it’s even time for me to be someone else. Anyway, it’s time to go.”
“I—I’m—astonished. It’s hard to think of Babbington without you. You’re an institution.”
“I know,” she said. “Think of the broken hearts! But I’ve had enough of it. Anyway, before I go, I want to see you.”
“Oh, sure! I want to see you, too! I’m not letting you out of town without a good-bye—”
“I don’t mean just to say good-bye. I want—well—I have some stories that I want to tell you. Maybe I just want to get nostalgic. Maybe I miss your attention. I don’t know.”
“I’ll come over.”
“This will take a while,” she said. “It’s not a one-night stand.”
I’m sure I was blushing.
“Do you mind spending a few evenings with me?” she asked. I had the pleasant feeling that time had reversed our roles, that she was flirting with me. Perhaps I was flattering myself, but a guy needs some of that now and then.
“Not at all,” I said.
“Maybe we can curl up together on the sofa and watch television.” I could hear her smile.
“For old times’ sake,” I said.
“Tomorrow night? Seven?”
“I’ll be there,” I said. I hung up. My palm had left an interesting pattern of sweat on the handset.
[to be continued]
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