“So lovely,” she murmured.
“It’s been a long time,” he breathed. “Too long.” He was still out of breath.
“Let’s sleep now. Or do you want something else to drink? I have some wine in the refrigerator.”
“I don’t want to move.”
“Can I get it for you?”
“I don’t want you to move.”
She snuggled closer, put one leg over his middle, and felt him running warm out of her — how good to have this sensation without the attendant stab of guilt or aversion; how wonderful to feel so clean and clear.
“Where do we go tomorrow?” he said.
2
She chose the Corcoran Gallery. Though he had driven or walked by the building many times during visits to the city, he had never been in. They spent a pleasant couple of hours looking at an exhibit of Impressionist paintings on loan from the Louvre — and then they went across the river to Mount Vernon and Arlington Cemetery, those somber, gentle slopes, row upon row of white crosses and six-sided stars. At the Kennedy grave site, they stood quietly among other visitors and read the words of the speeches.
She said, “Doesn’t seem fair.”
“What.”
“Lincoln wrote the words on his memorial.”
He stared for a moment, unable to decide how serious she was. “You’ve been working in politics too long, I think.”
“It’s the truth. Right?”
“I think JFK wrote his inaugural himself.”
She shrugged. “He had help.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I don’t remember him,” she said.
“Well, I was ten when he died. I remember him. And I remember that. Everybody remembers where they were that day.”
She said, “For me it’s the Challenger disaster.”
They made their way down to the parking lot and drove back across the river, to Georgetown. He noted that she appeared almost passive about the evening, but then he realized that this came from a form of relaxation: her smile was both playful and compliant, the expression on her face giving forth a lovely intimation of gratitude, perhaps not for him, particularly, but for the fineness of the day. He kept the talk light, and the way her dark eyes seemed to narrow very slightly when she concentrated on something delighted him.
The next morning, they drove out to Middleburg for a long leisurely afternoon of thrift shopping. They stayed there that night. And the following morning they traveled down to the Old Town section of Fredericksburg to look at antiques. He watched her negotiate with a dealer about a set of old pewter cups for Iris, and together they rummaged through old postcards and photographs in a bin. She bought thirty of them in a packet. One family’s photos going back to 1913.
It was gratifying to discover that they had the same fascination with the individual details and concerns of past lives.
He wanted to look at Civil War battlefields in the area, and she agreed to this with an enthusiasm that warmed him; it was an interest of hers as well. They went to Marye’s Heights, and over to Chancellorsville, then on to Manassas and even out to little Ball’s Bluff, in Leesburg. This necessitated intervals of travel on the highways and the country roads, too, and they were quiet for long periods. When they spoke, it was mostly about the battles that had thundered back and forth in these peaceful hills and fields. He was impressed with her knowledge of all that, her comprehension of the politics of the time, and when they were standing at the little monument to the action at Ball’s Bluff, he told her so.
She bowed her head. “Thank you, Mr. Professor, sir.”
“Well, I am impressed.”
“You just can’t believe someone my age could be at all knowledgeable.”
“That’s not how I meant it.”
“Just teasing you,” she told him. “I did a lot of reading growing up because I was alone so much. I even knew about Thomas Aquinas.”
“Hey, I don’t feel there’s anything about you I have to compensate for.”
“I was being silly. Okay?”
“Okay.” He put his arm around her. “Let’s forget it.”
But that night, in her bed, lying awake in the dark with the sound of traffic out the window, he couldn’t sleep, and while she moved and murmured, dreaming, he kept thinking about the numbers: when she was five years old, he was already old enough to vote; when she was ten, he had been married for two years. He quietly got out of the bed and went into her little living room. It was chilly, and he pulled the afghan that covered the sofa around himself. Looking through more of the books, he found a volume of Shakespeare. He took it to the kitchenette and had a glass of water, then poured himself some of the sauvignon blanc that was in the refrigerator. Most of the flavor was gone from it, but he thought it might help him sleep. Finally he sat on the sofa with the afghan over his shoulders, looking through the Shakespeare. The line she had told him that Iris embroidered on a pillow rose to his mind. The phrase was vaguely familiar. He had seen two Shakespeare plays in the last three or four years. He looked through Hamlet, and then The Tempest.
And there it was, in the second scene. He closed the big book, satisfied, as if he had won some kind of contest, and abruptly felt foolish for it.
He crawled back into her bed and was very still when she turned and put her arm over his chest. The feeling of intimacy, the slight sourness of her breath in sleep, the warmth of her body, so close, caused something to collapse in his heart. He told himself that he’d had the wine, and therefore could sleep. But sleep did not come, and he lay there doing the math, worrying all the more about it because he knew now that he was in love.
3
Friday morning at Harpers Ferry they hiked up beyond the old ruin of Saint John’s Church and the grass-overgrown, tumbledown two-hundred-year-old graves adjacent to it, to the big flat boulder where Thomas Jefferson reportedly stood and declared that this view of the conjoining rivers and opposing bluffs was worth the grueling journey across the Atlantic. They stood together on that rock, a light breeze moving over them, and held hands, watching the waters course and mingle in currents and eddies far beneath them.
“I’m beginning to feel like this touring is a pretext,” he said.
“Explain.”
“I don’t really care so much about it now. I just — I want to be around you. We could’ve stayed in bed today, at your apartment.”
“The air-conditioning doesn’t work that well. We’d be miserable there in the heat all day.”
They watched the white folds of the water below and saw two people — a man and a woman — high on the cliff across the way. The two people were wearing backpacks, and it looked like they had dry-tooling axes and ropes. Apparently they were serious. There seemed something ostentatious about all that equipment. Except that now the man dropped something shiny, and it bounced terribly off an outcropping of rock far below. Natasha gave a little cry of alarm.
“A long fall,” her companion said.
She covered her eyes. “I can’t watch them.” A second later, she peeked through her fingers.
“I did a little climbing in Colorado when I was in my twenties,” he told her. “Well — once. I didn’t mean to make it sound like more. It was just once. Very supervised.”