Meg, can you fuck your way out of grief? She’ll say it suddenly in the kitchen, another day, weeks later. The same setup: having coffee in the kitchen while the kids play in the other room. Except it’s February. Almost two months have passed. For the first time in years the river is frozen. Hunks of ice clog the sides, pounded up into piles. Last night, on her fourth date with Hugh, she went to a movie at the new multiplex; a late dinner at a bad Italian restaurant; then upstairs to her bedroom where he made love to her for the first time from above and behind, nothing but air and his sliding; the simplicity of the position, the way he loomed over her but didn’t touch her except for the plunging, got her thinking about empty space. It was too easy. That position, her face in the pillow. How good it was. Meg pauses a moment, looks into her eyes, and then abruptly squeals and says her name — Grrraace Smith — elongating it like she’s announcing a talk show host, and then stands and moves over to her, giving her a girlish hug, small, quick clasps. What’s on your mind? Guiding Grace to the table and making her sit down. And right then she’ll tell her about doing it with Hugh, confess how good it was from the start that very first night when she just went ahead and slept with him, and how she feels guilty about it but knows that there isn’t anything wrong with getting pleasure out of her body. He has good hands, she’ll say. He goes just the right speed. I’m so ashamed. I mean it hasn’t been that long since Ron died and the truth is, I mean it’s so horrible to say but I feel like, well, I feel I have to say it. He’s better than Ron was, maybe, I mean maybe I’m fooling myself, maybe I don’t remember or it doesn’t matter — after all, he’s gone physically, at least, and all that, and I shouldn’t be comparing, right, shouldn’t even put them side by side, but that’s only natural, isn’t it? And, yeah, well I have to admit that even when Ron was fine, before he got sick, you know, things weren’t so great in that department even then, at least I didn’t know they weren’t great but now I do; I have to compare, can’t help it, and I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say that even though he’s kind of awkward at times, he’s a hundred times better than Ron ever was because, well, because of something, his rhythm, I guess — he’ very musical. He’s fantastic, a virtuoso performance every time.
She imagines he’ll take her farther away from the town on dates, their relationship burgeoning out in concentric circles, like the damage zones of a ground zero atomic blast. They’ll go for rides with Gary on weekends, and Rudy and Stan, his boys, will come over and play, Stan perhaps acting the part of big brother. They’ll drive up to West Point in the spring to watch the cadets parade. Then one night — almost a year later — early fall, they’ll go over the Bear Mountain bridge alone and take the winding road north along the river. She’ll kick off her pumps and wade her stocking toes through the hot wash of air from the heater — her hand resting plaintively on his knee, twitching along his wide-wale cords, zipping the fabric, brushing the knotty tightness of his crotch. A year has passed. The pain has faded. What she can recall of her life with Ron has become burnished, ideal, a beautiful relic (or the inverse; the whole marriage pure boredom, the man a dullard, the end inevitable one way or another). She’ll look out the window at the wintry dark — barely listening to Hugh as he talks about a castle up on the hillside, built by a robber baron, and how he had once hiked up along a path to see the ruins of house, the stone foundation loaded with charred timbers. They’ll get to the town, park along the streets. A light snow will be falling. The restaurant at the end of the street, along a pier, will have long, wide windows allowing a view of the river — and across it — past the narrow bend of wafer — the tall looming dark squat rock of Storm King Mountain; he’ll explain something about how these rocks were not carved out by glacial backwash. She only half listens. She has grown accustomed to his voice, the resonate tones, and his soliloquies about geological formation; his world is striated and broken and governed by forces webbing back into some primordial center; he has a firm grip on this world, on life, and he has lifted her up, has her in his arms, in the parking lot, after the meal, and she smells a faint hint of his spice cologne rising from damp wool. The engagement ring is a bit loose on her finger. She keeps it bent slightly during the ride home. Grief has lost a toehold. It has become only a faint residue.