Liz left Ev in a living room furnished with what looked like period reproduction furniture and went out to the kitchen to get the makings for the Rusty Nails they had talked about over coffee. He first sat down in a lovely Sheraton-period wing chair, which was downright uncomfortable, then moved over to the sofa. He felt apprehensive about being here, in this woman’s house. They had enjoyed themselves once he’d overcome his own awkwardness. This was the first time he’d been out with anyone since Joanne had died, and he hadn’t been sure what to think of it. Liz had put him at his ease with a steady flow of bright conversation, quick-witted jokes, and stories about clients. Once he’d relaxed a bit, he joined in with equally funny stories about midshipmen and their antics. He’d ended up talking about his own life toward the end of dinner-growing up in Annapolis, the pervasive influence of the Academy on life in the state capital, and the satisfaction of finally returning home after his time in the Navy.
He’d done twelve years in naval aviation before getting out, and then he’d gone to grad school out on the West Coast to get a Ph. D. A week after he’d successfully defended his dissertation, and while he was still shopping around for a faculty appointment, his father had had a heart attack and died. He and Joanne had come back to the East Coast with their eleven-year-old daughter to stay with his mother for a while, and then the appointment in the Academy’s Political Science Department had opened up and they’d never left. Once he’d taken the Academy position, his mother, to his surprise, went into what seemed like a deliberate decline, becoming a semi-invalid. One night five years later, she turned her face to the wall and died.
He had explained to Liz that leaving the Navy after almost thirteen years had been Joanne’s idea, although he knew the truth to be somewhat more complex. His father had been a strong and domineering man, and Ev’s passage into the academy and naval service had been something of a foreordained matter, not really open for discussion. Not that Ev had objected, at least not until he had become a plebe and had all those romantic notions about midshipman life yelled out of him in the first twenty-four hours of plebe summer. He’d met and married Joanne, a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, while doing an instructor tour in Pensacola, and then watched with chagrin as she underwent a similar experience once he had to return to the real Navy world of sea duty, with a lot of the romance being flattened by the stark fact that naval aviators mostly flew in the away direction. The truth was, he’d been as lonely as she had been when he was cooped up in the hot, crowded, constantly noisy steel catacombs underneath the flight deck. Life as a carrier aviator alternated between two extremes. There was the huge adrenaline rush of being flung off the end of the flight deck while strapped inside a cramped Plexiglas cocoon mounted over a pair of unruly rockets built by the lowest bidder. And then there was the seemingly endless, six-month blear of briefs, debriefs, alerts, training sessions, transits, crowded port visits, duty days, safety stand-downs, no-fly Sundays, punctuated occasionally by the jolt of seeing a squadron mate misjudge a landing and go over the angle in a rending screech of flaming metal into the always-waiting sea. Doing this while missing his new wife, their daughter’s early years, and the luxury of life in America made it hard to ignore the fact that the next promotion would mean more deployments and more separation. Even when he had been on shore duty, he had detected a gradual hollowing out of their marriage, as each next deployment loomed ever closer and Joanne began to erect those walls that would support her once he left. Give her credit: She’d never issued any ultimatums, but he had been able to see the choice he would ultimately have to make.
It hadn’t hurt that Joanne had some money. She’d stayed with Merrill Lynch during his active-duty career, and her money had paid off his parents’ remaining mortgage when his father died and they’d moved into the house. They’d had eight years of a wonderfully normal life in Annapolis as he moved from probationary to tenured status on the faculty. Eight years of coming home every night, waking up in the same place every morning without the crash and bang of jets landing on the roof, or the rattling, scraping sounds of the arresting wires reeling into their greasy lairs to await the next trap, sharing the travails of bringing up just one teenager, actual family vacations over on the Atlantic beaches, the short, sharp spats they both recognized as episodes of cabin fever, the sad subsidence of his mother as she pined away for his father, the care of a home and yard and gardens, secure in the knowledge that he’d probably be around to see the results of his labors. In short, normal American life. He explained to Liz that if he’d never been in the Navy, he would never have appreciated the relative tranquility and productive purpose of his civilian existence.
On the other hand, he’d done nothing to stop his daughter, Julie, from falling under the same romantic delusions about the Academy. Absent his father’s political connections, Julie had made it through the grueling admissions process pretty much on her own merits, although it didn’t hurt her admissions package that Ev was an alumnus and faculty member. He remembered vividly her comment during parents’ weekend, four years ago now, when she had described the downer from the huge victory of getting an appointment to spending the entire first night in Bancroft Hall learning how to stencil her plebe summer whites. He had experienced the very same feelings, and could still smell the stencil ink and hear the upperclassman screaming at him to wash his ink-stained hands, something he’d been trying to do for an hour.
And then Joanne died, he thought, pressing a hand on the smooth fabric of the sofa. Just like that, he realized, his eyes blinking. His whole life here, his normal, post-Navy, happy, real life, had begun with his father’s sudden death. And then his mother’s. And then Joanne’s. Viewed one way, his ultimate homecoming to Annapolis had been a veritable chronology of death. This thought had been at the back of his mind during their entire dinner, and at times, Liz’s bright conversation and upbeat attitude had cast a surreal haze around his own thoughts. Liz had skillfully urged him to open up, he realized now, offering small tidbits about her own past, her two ex-husbands, and the challenges of being single at her age. He could not help but notice how other men in the crowded restaurant watched her smile and play with her hair and envied him sitting there, getting her full attention. Despite his emotional fragility, Liz had grown on him, filling his senses and attention. Even so, he’d felt like he was walking through a waking dream, not knowing quite what was coming next but increasingly willing to go forward and see.
Liz came back into the living room. She’d brought a tray with scotch, Drambuie, two snifters, a small sharp knife, a heavy spoon, an ice bucket, and a lemon. She put the tray on the coffee table, tapped a remote to ignite the gas fire in the fireplace, turned on one more table lamp, and sat down at the other end of the sofa. She was wearing a silk pantsuit, and she’d done something to her hair while out in the kitchen. Adjectives tumbled through his thoughts: lovely, warm, smart, sexy, sweet. He felt his cheeks warming just a little when he realized he was staring.
“We’re in luck,” she announced, arranging the things on the tray. “I even had the lemon.”
He smiled but didn’t say anything, suddenly not willing to trust his voice. A familiar feeling was gathering in his chest.
“So, a Rusty Nail,” she said. “One half scotch, one half Drambuie, which I think is scotch-based, and a twist of lemon peel, all over cracked ice. That how you remember it?”