She said nothing.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. But you’re the first one to know all of it.”
“Not Aunt Clara?”
“No — not yet. But I don’t think it’ll matter much to her.”
“Why me?”
Something changed in his eyes, a very slight narrowing; it could’ve been the light. “I don’t know,” he said.
He walked her to her car, and they exchanged a hug before she got in behind the wheel.
“Good night,” he said. Then: “Let’s go somewhere else tomorrow.”
“Call me,” she said.
He stood under the streetlamp and watched her go, and she saw him in the side-view mirror.
In her apartment she had a whiskey, trying to offset the coffee and the nervousness she felt. Marsha Trunan had called twice and left two messages. Natasha reflected that her last remaining friend in the city might soon go the way of the others. She made herself return the call.
“What,” Marsha said, her voice thick with sleep.
“I woke you. I’m sorry.”
“I knew it would be you. I wasn’t asleep.”
“You called me today?”
“Where are you?” Marsha wanted to know.
“Home.”
“Want a visitor?”
“Marsha, I’m really fried. It’s so late.”
“Busy, busy.”
Natasha said nothing.
“I’ve got tickets to something called Hamlet at the National Theatre way in June. Way, way off in June. And I hear it’s a pretty good play by this English dude named Shakespeare.”
Natasha sighed. “Sounds interesting.”
“But you can’t say that far ahead.”
“I’m sorry, Marsha. I’m just so—”
The other interrupted her. “Busy, right. I get it. I’ll stop calling.”
“Please don’t do that.”
“Well, anyway, I’ve got news,” Marsha went on. “Guess who’s divorcing his insane wife and marrying some Ph.D. sociology student at GW.”
Natasha waited. She could not remember when the other would have learned about it all, and then she felt she knew: Constance.
“You remember your photographer friend. Mackenzie.”
She expected to feel a sting, but it didn’t come. “Why would that mean anything to me?”
“Oh, come on. I know all about it. And I haven’t divulged it, either, like someone else we know. But a lot of people saw that you were pretty thick with him.”
“Well, anyway. Good for him. I’m sure it was love at first sighting.”
Marsha laughed, and coughed, and said through her sputtering that she was going to steal the line.
“You can have it,” Natasha told her.
“God! I miss you. You are amazing. If it was me, I’d be a hopeless mess. But you—”
“Marsha, he’s so gone from me.”
“You’re strong. I wish I was strong.”
“Tell me.”
“Oh, things’re cool with me, really. I wish I had your troubles sometimes.”
“I’m supposed to go to Jamaica with Constance in early September. Why don’t you come with us? We could split the cost of a room ourselves.”
“Constance wouldn’t speak to us for decades.”
Natasha heard her light a cigarette. “Listen, Marsha, I really should get to bed. I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise.”
“Bye,” Marsha said, and hung up. Something like a song note sounded in her voice: two syllables. “Bye-eye.”
Natasha listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, feeling the separation. She would call her back, say she loved her. She punched the number, then felt too tired for the talk that would follow. She pressed the disconnect and put the handset down.
Sitting at her small night table, she opened a book. Nearly midnight. She heard sirens out in the night, someone shouted in the street a block or two over. It was the sound of a Saturday night in this part of the city. Without even quite attending to it, she put the book down, undressed and got into bed, and lay there in the light from her reading lamp, gazing at the ceiling and going over the day, afraid to think forward.
So the photographer was breaking up his marriage after all.
Willing herself away from any thoughts of him, she conjured the picture of Michael Faulk as he appeared in her side-view mirror, standing under the streetlight. She went to sleep with this image in her mind like a ghost outline after looking into bright light.
Love Life
1
The weather had been breezy and a bit cooler than usual, and then it warmed up, and you knew real spring had arrived. She took the week off and saw him every day, making sure they went to places where it was unlikely they would encounter anyone from her office. He showed that he had divined this when they were on their way to dinner at his aunt Clara’s, explaining that long ago he’d extracted a promise from her not to talk about his comings and goings.
Her tall old house in Cleveland Park was reminiscent of the house in Collierville where Natasha had grown up, with its wide front porch and its Italianate windows. Going up the sidewalk in front felt like coming home. Here were the same worn steps, the same spindle-shaped wooden supports for the railing. Aunt Clara stood in the doorway with arms extended in greeting as they came up the walk. She was thin, sharp featured, with dark auburn hair and brilliant light blue eyes. Natasha thought briefly of the daughter, the senator’s wife, Greta. The eye color was the same, and you saw something very similar in the jawline.
“Can I call you Tasha?” Clara asked. “When I was a girl I had a friend Natasha and we all called her that. Do any of your friends call you Tasha?”
“Well, no — but I don’t mind at all. If you want to.”
“Sorry I’m so forward.”
“No,” Natasha hurried to say. “Really.”
Aunt Clara’s husband, Jack, was Italian, and he kept a wine cellar and was proud of it, happy to show it off. At dinner, he told about being a young man ignorant of anything but the taste of beer and pouring down the sink a gift bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1956 because it wasn’t sweet. “Well, I was only twenty-four. Grand cru, worth about two hundred seventy-five dollars back then. I lied to the nice guy who gave it to me in gratitude for helping him get his car out of a ditch. Said it was excellent, and of course he was stunned that I’d opened it.”
Aunt Clara said, “The deepest regret of the man’s life.”
“That makes him very lucky,” said Natasha.
After dinner, they all sat out on the porch, and Jack smoked a pipe. They remarked about the hot weather that would arrive soon, the town’s unbearable humidity. Clara said her daughter had recently decided to take up yoga in order to help her relax.
“She always seems so relaxed,” Natasha said.
Clara smiled. “She’s as nervous as the very idea of nervousness. And I think I did it to her, too. I was such an anxious mom. Saw threats everywhere. The poor thing was bearing up under a catastrophic imagination way before she became the senator’s wife, no kidding.”
“I think a person’s character is probably there at birth,” said Jack, blowing smoke.
Clara turned to Faulk and said, “Have you spoken with your father lately?”
“Not too long ago. Couple weeks.”
“I wonder how he’s doing.”
“He said something about stopping to see me on their way to visiting Trixie’s family in Tuscaloosa next month. I’m pretty sure it’s Trixie’s idea.”
“Don’t be so hard on him.”
“Well.”
They sat breathing the spring air, the fragrance of Jack’s tobacco. A bird sang in the nearest tree, and Clara whistled at it, making almost the same sound.