They watched the couple move across the face of the cliff.
Suddenly he said, “It’s from Shakespeare. The line embroidered on the pillow.”
She looked at him.
He shrugged. “It sounded familiar when you told me about it. I was up last night, looking through your books. It’s from The Tempest. I saw it done last year in the park.”
“ ‘The dark backward and abysm of time.’ ”
“It’s part of something Prospero asks Miranda. ‘What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?’ He’s asking her what she remembers.”
“I should know the play, but I don’t.”
“I’m in love with you,” he said evenly, straightly, as if answering a question.
She pressed herself against him, looked up, touched his cheek, and kissed him. It was a long, exquisite kiss. Then she gazed into his eyes and murmured, “ ‘What seest thou …?’ ”
“I want to marry you and have a family and raise a bunch of kids,” he said.
“Yes. The answer’s yes.”
“But I’m a little worried.”
“People will find things to say anyway.”
“Then it doesn’t bother you,” he said. “Sixteen years.”
She kissed him. “Does that answer your question?”
“It answers everything in my life. When do you want to?”
“In Memphis — in September. After I get back from Jamaica. Something small. Very few people. I don’t want a big deal.”
“Can I say the words?”
She smiled.
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes.”
They stood close, gazing at the country below and around them, and then others came rushing up the hill out of the cut path, children with older boys and girls, teenagers showing off for one another. Natasha looked at them with that sense of pity a lover feels for the less fortunate of her kind.
4
In mid-August, she gave notice that she would leave her job with Senator Norland and return to Memphis. Iris had suffered a fall and hurt her knee and had required surgery. She was healing slowly. Natasha was needed at home. This was the truth but, of course, not the whole truth.
She and Faulk had not announced their plans to marry yet; she was keeping to her determination not to divulge anything at work about her personal life. Since the first days of the affair with Mackenzie, she had maintained a strict rule about it.
She had kept the present news even from Iris until the second week of May.
Faulk came to Washington every other weekend through the summer months, and they traveled to the Maryland and Virginia beaches or visited with Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack and sometimes Marsha Trunan, too. It was a splendid summer, full of laughter and wide-ranging talk and long walks on the shady streets of the city. They went sailing off Annapolis and picnicking at Great Falls, and they visited the galleries and saw concerts and went to restaurants, and it was as though she were recovering something lost, that adventurous young someone she remembered.
On the muggy, oven-hot afternoon of her last day at work, Senator Norland tried to talk her into remaining in Washington. She could consider this a long vacation. She listened politely to him, sure now that Faulk had done as she asked and kept it to himself: the senator would not be talking to her about staying if he knew why she had resigned. She was going home and taking her private life with her.
Anyhow, that was how it felt.
The air conditioner whirred in one window, and the other was foggy with inside moisture. She experienced a moment of disorientation, pretending to consider his words. He emphasized that she could come back anytime. He stood over her with arms folded. On his desk were photographs of him with Greta, and Clara and Jack, too, and his own parents — two very jolly-looking people standing on a porch. The wall was festooned with framed photographs of him with presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton, and there was a letter wishing him well on his reelection signed by the current president. But no picture of the senator with him. Tom Norland had fought hard to keep George W. from being given the office by the Supreme Court, and he had been outspoken in his criticism of the whole affair. Natasha had typed some of the letters and had contributed wording for them, too.
But she had never wanted to be the person people saw her as being, in that office. The work interested her, but she had no enthusiasm for wearing the smart little business outfits and the jewelry; never wanted to be the type — with no strand of hair out of place, the senator’s administrative person, the one everyone depended on for practical matters, and about whom they all made easy assumptions, without any inkling of the nights she had spent in other parts of the city. Even before the affair, their picture of her was far from who she really was, sitting in that fluorescent light behind the desk while her thoughts turned on places she had wandered before she was twenty-five years old: Paris and the Loire Valley; Nice and Florence and Rome; Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, and Africa. From her earliest conscious life she had experienced the sense of being held back by her own skin and bones, confined in space. This feeling had carried her across the world.
Now, with Michael Faulk, she was full of the old thrilling sense of freshness, on the verge of a new life, and in this last week of work the days crawled, reminding her of the tremendous unhappiness she had endured here. She and her new husband would spend next spring in the south of France. It would indeed be like getting her twenties back.
When she lived in Provence, she went on day trips, biking the roads lined with plane trees and walking the paths above the sea at Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Her thoughts about it were delectable. She could be in those places again, and with the time to take it all in, and to paint. She was beginning to believe she might manage to do something consequential, something people might remember. The idea delighted her, though she recognized that just now, since she had not painted anything in many months, it was a form of daydreaming. But she would work to realize it. She felt the resolve like a rush of adrenaline. Life was gorgeous; she would make it so.
Working for the senator, with the daily requirements and the little satisfactions of being on the inside, all that was over now, and she felt detached from it and from the thin, stooped, gaunt man who stood before her, talking. His face was blue veined from the years of alcoholism. He wore a lapel pin with the word HOPE on it. He was a humorous, decent, quiet man whose voice, when he was serious, had a way of making her feel drowsy. “None of this is getting through to you, is it.” He grinned. It was not a question.
“I’m flattered that you’ve taken the time,” she said. “I really am — and I’m grateful. It’s been a wonderful adventure, Washington.” Though in some important ways this was true, she still felt as if she had said something deceitful.
“Well, I couldn’t let you go without at least expressing what I hope you’ll take as my friendly concern.”
“I do. I have.”
“And you’re sure I can’t give you some money to tide you over until you find something out there.”
“No, really. I’m fine. I’ve actually saved some. You’ve already done more than you should.”
“Ah. It doesn’t amount to much.” He had made the arrangements with the storage company and the movers, thinking they were for Natasha alone. All her belongings, which as of that morning were in a storage bin on Georgia Avenue, would, the week of September 10, be headed by truck back to Tennessee.
She rose from her chair and offered a handshake. “Thank you so much for everything. And thank Greta for always being so kind.” They embraced, and that was that.
She would spend the time with Constance Waverly in Jamaica, then join Faulk in Memphis on the twelfth (they had joked about how it would be their own Twelfth Night).