They’ve eaten dinner. (Scratch that.) She asks if she has time for a shower before dinner. She feels so slimy after twelve hours on the road and then running around the house doing things. She tends to sweat a lot, she’s said, and when she told him that, he said, “Nobody would ever know it. My schnoz is still pretty keen and, hackneyed as this remark might be, you always smell sweet to me.” That was about three weeks after they met. It’s still true: she’s never smelled bad or of a deep sweat anywhere on her body except a few times her hair. Water for the pasta’s about to boil and he turns it off, finds the flashlight he brought, and heads to the shore about two hundred feet from the cottage. Hears some funny bird sounds as he walks down the path, and then they stop as he gets near the shore and he hears the flapping of wings or feet or both against the water as the bird or birds take off. Over dinner she’ll tell him those were loons. Sea sounds: soft crashing of tiny breakers and a buoy from somewhere in the bay. So, he thinks, this is it; nice. Gets bitten by insects on the path and beach. (“Mosquitoes” for “insects”: he knows their buzzing and bite.) Walks along the shore to the closest point. (Is there another way — well, there are always other ways — but a better one to say all this so it doesn’t sound so perfunctory and drab? Later.) Lots of moon, also mirrored in its squiggly way in the water. “Loons and moons, that’s about all I found down there bigger than a mosquito,” he would have said to her soon as he got back, if he’d known what those birds were called. Enough light to walk by, so he turns off the flashlight. Then thinks, Don’t go falling over a boulder or into a hole. Just what he needs: to break something first hour he’s there and have to crawl to the cottage, be driven to a hospital, ruin what he hopes will be as near-perfect a night as he’s ever had: sounds, smells, light, breezes, freshly made bed with what she said were the cottage’s very fine old cotton sheets, and of course her. No other houses around, it seems. Lighthouse way out in the water. Stars, more than … but not more than he can ever remember seeing, maybe because the moon’s so full and bright. His mother, he forgot to call her; do it when he gets back, though check the time first. Sits on a rock shaped like a chair with arms. Gets buzzed and bitten but tries to think. Let things run through your head, he thinks. Nothing much does. Shuts his eyes. Woman he was in love with two years ago. Wanted to spend the summer with her; instead she went to Europe alone. They’d planned to go together, even bought the plane tickets. Were going to buy fold-up bikes and ride them through Holland and France, take trains or buses when they wanted a rest. Travel light except for the bikes. One big paperback apiece: War and Peace for him, a new difficult modern novel for her. They’d already bought the books and an anthology of Romantic verse between them. Then she said she needed to be completely free for two months. He knew she’d meet guys. In Turkey she let a man penetrate her behind, a first for her. She said she didn’t like it and would never try it again. “How come you let him?” he said. “Not that I’d ever want to do it. Though if you had asked, and you knew me for six months, I would have done it once.” “He wanted to very much, was very sweet and pretty and claimed to be an expert at it, and I’d always been curious about it.” She fell in love with a Frenchman and they traveled through Greece for two weeks. She didn’t think she’d ever return home; then he told her he was married. “Boy, for a smart city gal, you really fell for a couple of drips.” “Neither were,” she said; “both were extremely sophisticated and intelligent.” She discovered in Europe what she wanted to do the next ten years: films. Write and direct, though of course she’ll have to go to school for it first. “Always so full of new projects and beginnings,” he said. “I guess that’s supposed to be good.” “This is why I didn’t want you in Europe with me. You’re so cynical and critical and don’t like to do anything unusual or new. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to try a plate of sea urchins at a Greek seaside stand without you fretting over the cost and the possibility of dangerous bacteria, killing the experience for me. You knew what you wanted to do with your life when you were two and stuck to it, the same way you stick to me, and it makes me claustrophobic.” (Pare all that down, maybe paraphrase what’s left of it. But the woman he least wanted to spend a summer with.) More bites, making it impossible to sit here, and he breathes in deeply — he loves the ocean at night, he thinks, and at dusk, minus the mosquitoes, though to him, unless the sky’s overcast, it gets too bright and hot during the day and he ends up hating it — and goes back to the house. She’s upstairs, probably getting dressed after the shower, and he yells up—
They have dinner. Bottle of port he opened and poured for her the next night. She puts candles into the bronze candlesticks on the table and lights them. She’d hid the candlesticks when she closed up the cottage last year. “There are antiques thieves,” she told him, when she got the candles and some fine china out. “After the summer people leave, they can clean out a house if everything’s top-notch, or only take the choice items like silver, and antique furniture you didn’t know was antique, and old clocks.” “Who would have thought it, up here. But otherwise, in summers you’re safe? You can leave the doors unlocked and your typewriter out?” She even thinks the caretaker’s in cahoots with them. “They’re rough people, the locals, and very proud and wily. They won’t accept the welfare they’re entitled to, when they’re destitute, but for a few dollars they’ll let thieves from away break into the houses they caretake. They can be pitiless, too. One time there was a bat upstairs.” (Really thinks he needs all this? See where it goes.) “He caught it in a special bat catcher the house has, which is like a butterfly net but stronger, and I said, ‘Let it loose outside.’ He said, ‘Why, what good is it alive?’ I said, ‘It kills mosquitoes’—they do, don’t they? — and he said, ‘Who cares about them?’ and it’s true; you should have seen him. There was one on his cheek and I pointed it out and he said, ‘Everyone’s got to eat,’ and let it bite him. ‘Now it’s dead,’ he said. ‘They can only get you once and then they die, and I saved my strength swatting it.’ Anyway, he put the bat in the net on the floor and stomped on it.” Tomorrow he’ll meet the caretaker. He’ll rap on the door very hard a little after dawn, be holding a bag of Swiss chard for her, and a scythe, and yell, “Hello, I see you got in; anyone home?” A big burly guy with a weak meaty handshake, smelling of soiled clothes and B.O. (If he just plays a small part in this, does he rate a descript?) The only light they eat by is from the candles and fire in the fireplace. Another thing she did: collecting the wood outside for it and getting it lit. They toast to the summer and then kiss. She’s a real beauty, but in the candle and fireplace light she looks ghoulish, just as he must to her since their angles to the lights are about the same, though she probably doesn’t think it about him. The phone rings. It’s her father, wanting to know how the trip went and how his cats survived it and did all the cats like the chicken livers he’d cooked for them? When she gets off the phone he excuses himself a minute and calls his mother. He says to her—
He still can’t believe his luck. She brought up dessert from a New York patisserie. There’s some brandy from last summer she gets out. She wonders if it’s still good and does he think it could have frozen over the winter and if it did would that spoil it? She takes his hand while he drinks; she doesn’t: brandy and any after-dinner liqueur give her a stomachache in the morning. They continue to hold hands and look at each other while he sips. This is an unbeatable night, he thinks. He can’t think of any other like it in his life. The air, food, fire, quiet, smells, drinks, all-wooden room with the tall cathedral ceiling, he thinks, and of course her and what’s going to be their lovemaking later. This summer’s the beginning of something, he’s almost sure of it. She loves him, he really believes that. She said so but you never know, people say that when they don’t mean it or aren’t sure or just think the other person wants to hear it, which is the same thing as “they don’t mean it,” but mainly to get certain things; with him it was mostly sex. But she doesn’t say anything she doesn’t mean. He’s never known a woman who’s leveled with him more. No, the one from two years ago leveled with him plenty, maybe too much: telling him things he didn’t want to hear. So he means “been on the level with him,” which Sally has from the day they met and never, far as he can tell, was tricky or dishonest to him, which the other one was lots of times. She wants to make this work. She’s thirty-one, been married once, wants to have children and get married again — reverse those. They’re going to get married one day, maybe by the end of next year; he’s almost sure of that too. Something tells him. They’ve spoken about it — he brought it up a month ago — and she said it’s too early to talk about yet but she certainly doesn’t preclude the possibility of it someday. (Preclude was the word she used, but it’s okay here?) By the end of the summer, if it continues to go like this — not that he doesn’t expect some bumps — he’ll bring it up again. That they’ve been practically living together almost a year now. (Would nine and a half months be considered almost a year?) Or maybe he won’t bring it up till the year they’ve been together is up. Then he can say, “Listen, we’ve been together for more than a year now — granted, only a few days more” (since he’d never say this on the one-year anniversary of the day they met; that’d be too … he can’t find the word for it: hokey, cornball, commonplace? something like that, and planned)—“and we seem to have worked out well as a couple, so what do you say?” “Look, we’re deeply in love with each other — can I say that? I know I am with you, and that’s the straight-on truth, and you seem to have comparable feelings for me; you’ve at least said it — so what do you say?” “We’re in love with each other, that’s obvious, and are obviously compatible in just about every way and seem to want the same things from life, or the ones important, so what would you say to my idea now about our getting married?” But he has to make it go well as he can till then. Doesn’t want her thinking, This is never going to work out. He’s a lively bright guy, for the most part good-natured and often very funny, and there are things between us that are near to being perfect — sex, for instance; our love for music and books, and that we both want to have kids. But he’s too unpredictable and impatient and recurringly hot-tempered and even mean-spirited and vulgar, which is not the kind of man I want to be tied to for the rest of my life, so best to give up on it now before it becomes impossibly complex, and for him destructive, and while I’ve still time to find someone else. Lose her and he’s lost, no two ways about it. Or not as bad as that but close. He’d feel hopeless and bereft, as if he’d blown his last chance at getting married and having kids, and he simply doesn’t want to lose her, period, because never in his life has he been with anyone like her, and so on. He sips, kisses her hand, and says—