He made his way to the bathroom and cleaned his teeth, then moved to the closet and started to dress, thinking of calling Natasha, though it was well past the time. She would already have left for the beach. He decided to try anyway, wanting to tell her about the dream. A recorded voice said that the volume of calls was too much and to try the number later. He pushed the button for the front desk and waited. No answer. Finally he lay back down, hands behind his head, and drifted a little, intending to sit up and try again in a moment. He looked at his watch and remembered that she was an hour behind him.
2
Because it was the day of the wedding in New York, Natasha did not expect to hear from him. This was her last day in Jamaica. She and Constance went out to the beach and had an hour sunning themselves and reading. Natasha stepped into the clear shallows and looked down at her feet in the sand. The water was cold, clean, and lucid, with its lime green color as you looked across it, and you could almost see the place in the distance where it began turning to the deepest blue. The sand was smooth and perfectly consistent, as though it had been designed and produced for human feet to track in it. She turned and looked back at Constance, who lay on her multicolored blanket, one arm across her face, one leg bent at the knee. The picture of relaxation. Natasha wondered why people weren’t strolling down to the beach, as on all the other mornings. “You suppose this is some kind of holy day?” she called to her friend. Constance raised her head and looked at her, then held both hands up, a shrugging motion, and went back to her sunbathing.
Natasha turned to look out at the waves coming toward her, and thought of Faulk. There was so much happiness to come, and now she made an effort not to allow it into her thoughts — as if to anticipate the fond future might render it precarious: her new life in Tennessee and her journey back to Europe in the spring. She saw herself painting in a sunlit room with the lovely countryside of Provence out the window and Michael Faulk somewhere close by, writing perhaps. Imagining this scene, she experienced suddenly a dark shift inside. She dipped her hands in the water and moved them back and forth, watching the swirls, concentrating on the traces running from the ends of her fingers. She saw the gulls gliding low across the iridescent surface and inwardly searched for the contentment she had just been feeling so strongly. Of course this propensity for the flow of her thoughts to shade into darkness was not new, and she had learned to accept it. But with Faulk she had come to believe she could grow out of it at last — that it would fade, becoming only an aspect of past life.
She had never known anything like this passion, and today’s crossing shadow was only that he was so far away. With the thousands of miles between them, it was natural to fear that the world might take him from her.
Though the unease she felt, missing him, brought on other worries.
His experience of the world was indeed unlike her own, and occasionally his seriousness about religion concerned her. The way his eyes glittered as he uttered the phrases of his faith. His fervor sometimes produced in her an irksome displeasure, which she had labored to stifle. Occasionally, she had made light of it, teasing him with the intent of bringing him back to earth about sounding too priestly.
At times her teasing was received in a less-than-lighthearted manner. “There’s stuff I’d rather not ponder,” he said. “Or be too conscious of. Thoughts that lead nowhere and only end in pain.”
“So you don’t question?” she asked him.
“I don’t expect an answer to the questions. So I try not to ask them.”
“And you’ve succeeded in that?”
“Failure,” he said with that sidelong smile, “is rampant where I live.”
How he fascinated her! She was sure now that she had never been in love before, had never even gotten near it. And there was something else, too: in the last few days, watching Constance conduct business over the phone with contractors about the design of the Maine house, she had begun to receive intimations about how much she, Natasha, had let the job in Washington take over her life. She had accepted the position merely to make enough money to spend a year in France painting, and the very effort to make possible the hoped-for journey had somehow diluted the hope itself. Constance’s focus was that house. She was continually rethinking everything about it, wanting the design to be in keeping with new ideas she had about the efficient use of energy and the least possible impact on the wildlife in the vicinity. It was her passion; it gave her definition and purpose.
Natasha stood in the cold water of the beach and thought about her own lack of some central resolve. She had dreamed of putting together a real body of work, a portfolio of paintings and drawings, too, and when actually painting she had always felt so fresh and glad. Yet she had let anything and everything, including her own wandering in the world, take precedence. And perhaps this had to do with her particular beginnings. After all, her earliest memories were of crisis, near and loving presences inexplicably taken away, first into distance and then into the limitless far quiet of the sky — something gravely wrong and her grandmother crying in the nights. Teachers had told her she was talented. Friends had marveled at what she could bring about with the stroke of a brush, and she had wasted so much time, so much of her young life chasing after some nameless inkling of happiness, as if she might come to a place, a physical somewhere else, where she would find whatever it was she had always missed, the right combination of nourishment for her soul, a sense of completion, and, at long last — she could admit it to herself now — relief. Solace.
Here, on this beach in Jamaica, remembering her plans with Faulk, she felt that very thing, that sighing release of the long pressure, and she murmured “My darling,” as though he were standing at her side. She looked at the shimmering horizon with its small white triangle of a single sailboat crossing.
Constance called to her from the beach. “Let’s go eat.”
Walking up to the resort, they saw Ratzi standing in the entrance. Natasha greeted him with a little wave and then, seeing the strange look on his face, paused and waited for him to speak.
He walked up to her and took her by the arms. She thought something had happened to Iris. But then he turned to Constance, and now she thought of Constance’s daughter. Ratzi stood back, almost bowing, wringing his small white hands. “Awful.” His voice was shaky. “I’m so sorry. It’s terrible. Terrible. You must come.” He went along the walk, and they followed, hurrying. Now Natasha thought that something must have happened to Maria Ratzibungen.
They entered the lobby, with its slowly turning ceiling fan and its plush chairs and benches and all the shapes of civilized enjoyment and recreation, the paintings and the statuary and the lush green plants, leaves the size of capes, several of which now screened some of the people — an alarming number of people — gathered there. The television was on. Natasha heard the voice of a newswoman say the phrase “minutes past the hour.” On the screen was a wide panorama of New York with smoke rising from it, a video taken from a distance, probably from a traffic helicopter. It did not quite register in her consciousness. It was something bad in the city. News. In the twelve days she had been here, she had not seen anyone watching this TV, which was hung from black wires on the side wall; only a few of the rooms had TVs in them. Now everyone crowded nearer the screen, and through the gathered others, Natasha saw the Twin Towers capped by the churning clouds of smoke. A little frame inside the larger picture showed the second plane cruising into its own shocking ball of flame.
“My God,” Constance said.