735: Ariane lay across . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 44
44
ARIANE LAY ACROSS MY LAP, with her head on the arm of the sofa. She didn’t bother wiping her tears away.
“I had anticipated that night,” she said.
“Of course.”
“But I had anticipated it—with a guilty pleasure.”
I gave her a squeeze that was meant to be compassionate, but I was excited by her, holding her this way, so there was something of a caress in it. She looked up at me, and I wished that she were not in a position that gave her a view up my nostrils.
She said, “I had imagined—oh—something like this: he would come down the stairs, slowly—”
“—moving through an atmosphere dense with the dignity of death—”
“—tired, tired—”
“—and on the stairs he would see you, in a beautiful swoon—”
“Something like that.”
“—so gentle, so lovely, so like the night—”
“Enough.”
“You would raise your head, your teardrops would sparkle in the softening light falling through the front windows—”
“Peter—”
“—falling through the curtains that you hadn’t gotten around to washing.”
“Hey.”
She sat up. She looked hard into my eyes.
“Don’t be angry with me,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said, and I may have been telling the truth.
She touched my cheek.
“And don’t punish me,” she said. “I’ve done a pretty good job of that on my own.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.” She stretched out again. “I didn’t stay. I walked out of the house, down the street, along the river, feeling a sorrow I hadn’t anticipated. I felt the loss much more than I had ever thought I would.”
“Which loss?”
“All of them. Eleanor, and John, and the trip—”
“—the loss that a traveler feels when the trip is over—”
“Yeah.”
“—and the remorse that the fictionist feels when the story’s over.”
“It hadn’t ended as I hoped it would.”
“Sometimes there are winds and currents that you can’t resist.”
“You’re right. Sad but true. Walking along the river, knowing that Eleanor was dead, I realized that I had hoped for something that now seemed entirely and eternally impossible: I had hoped that John would feel for me what he had felt for her, and I was suddenly tremendously afraid that no one would ever feel that for me. It was as if a storm had kicked up and the river was just raging the way it did sometimes in thunderstorms when all the water would come rushing past our house and I could feel the house tremble on the stilts. Terrifying.”
“You should have come to me.”
“You were far, far away.”
“I was back for the funeral. I stayed at my parents’ house, slept in my old bedroom. You could have come to me.”
I didn’t say everything that I was thinking. If she felt so much for my grandfather she might have felt as much for me, and she could have come to me, she could even have come to me that night. I wasn’t so very far away, and there were trains, or she could have borrowed a car—Tina’s old Commander. I would have listened to her, and I would have comforted her, and she could have given to me everything she had thought of giving to him. I would have consoled her, and she could have consoled me. I wasn’t a little boy any longer. I was taller than she. I could have taken her in my arms and she could have given me what, with hardly a thought for its worth, she had given so many others. Oh, preposterous, preposterous notion.
She looked at me. My expression must have given me away. She showed me that knowing look.
She sat up and said, “I heard it again, the same old warning: you must change your life.”
She turned impish, and she gave me a gift I didn’t deserve.
“Years before,” she said, “I had had a strange crush on a little boy, too many years younger, and now I had let myself fall in love with an old man, too many years older. Two impossible loves. What the hell was I up to? ‘Tootsie,’ I said, ‘you need a change—and a drink.’ ”
[to be continued]
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