“Do you expect the fingerprints to go on forever?” she asked.
“Not forever,” he said. “If he wasn’t your high school sweetheart, who was the man in the bedroom with you in Seattle?”
She left the room abruptly, having no interest in the turn the conversation had taken, but then returned momentarily with an appropriate response. “Whoever he was, he didn’t leave fingerprints on clean towels,” she said.
“If he was such a paragon, why didn’t you run off with him when you had the chance?”
She was on to him now. “You brought him around, didn’t you, so you would have an excuse to get rid of me. That’s so like you.”
“It was your mother not me who bought him into the house.”
“So you say,” she said, “but it could have been you who told her to invite him over… This happened where?”
“It was in Seattle.”
“No way.”
“I know it was Seattle. That was where your mother was living at the time.”
“I’ll tell you why you’re wrong,” she said. My mother never would have allowed it, never in a million years. You know what I think. I think the person in the bedroom with me was you.”
He left an unfinished sentence on his computer to ask Genevieve if she would like to go for a walk.
“Do I like taking walks?” she asked.
He couldn’t remember the last time they had walked together, but he wouldn’t have asked if there was no chance that she would accept. Rejection had never been high on his list of priorities. “It’s your call,” he said.
“My call?” she mused. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk with you if you promise not to tell me your dream.” She took his arm, then gave it back to him. “Let’s not walk too far, all right?” Then she left him on a quest that lost itself somewhere along the way. Then she remembered that she was looking for her coat. Her searches always took longer than anticipated. She hated to feel cold when everyone else seemed not to mind.
When she returned she asked him if she knew why she had her coat on.
“We’re going for a walk if I make a certain promise,” he said.
“Did you really think I didn’t know we were going for a walk? What promise were you going to make?”
“I’m not making any promises,” he said.
“You make too many promises as it is,” she said, which offended him momentarily and then amused him no end. It seemed to him the wittiest thing she had said to him in ages.
His extended amusement, which bent him over, disconcerted her. She wondered if she had meant what she said, whatever it was, as a joke all along. She laughed in echo, not wanting to seem out of it.
He was still smiling at her remark as they started their walk hand in hand in the general direction of their local park.
They had barely stepped outside when she asked how much further they had to go.
“We haven’t gone anywhere, sweetheart,” he said. “Do you want to go back. We don’t have to take a walk.”
“I don’t want to do anything that makes you angry,” she said, “though I think everything I do makes you angry.”
“Then let’s go back,” he said in a tone so reasonable he could hardly recognize the voice as his own.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Do you even know the way back? You’re always getting us lost. You know that’s true.”
“Of course I know the way,” he said. “And when did I ever get you lost?”
A much younger couple with a baby in a stroller excused themselves to edge their way by. “Do you know where the park is?” Genevieve asked the woman.
“It’s where we’re going,” the woman said. “You can follow us.”
Genevieve admired the baby and thanked the couple.
“I know where the park is,” Josh said when they were alone. “You didn’t have to ask anyone.”
After awhile they came to the corner of their extended block and Josh saw or thought he saw the park in the distance, the couple with the stroller framed in the entrance, which confirmed him in his controversial view of himself as someone of more than ordinary competence. He had a reputation even in better days for having an unreliable sense of direction. It was strictly the judgment of others. In so far as he could remember, he had almost always, at least eventually, gotten where he was going.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Genevieve asked.
“We’re just taking a walk,” he said.
“I suppose that’s all right,” she said.
Eventually, the park moved toward them in its leisurely pace. It was late afternoon and the trees seemed backlit, suffused with light.
“Do I like the park?” she asked.
He didn’t want to lie to her, though God knows there had been lies between them before. “Almost everyone likes the park,” he said.
“I was here as a child,” she said. “Every afternoon, rain or shine, we used to go to the park.”
He was thinking that it was time to turn back, but he let the thought, with its disquieting urgencies, dissolve. They were getting along so well, he didn’t want to disturb the rhythm that had brought them to this place.
They took the center path, but after awhile it seemed more rewarding to take a right turn on a narrower path dotted at uncertain intervals with stone benches.
“Is this my warmest coat?” she asked him.
He took his coat off and put it around her shoulders. “Would you like to sit for a while?”
“If you do,” she said. “I always ruin things for you.”
“Isn’t that the nature of marriage,” he said.
They were between benches and he chose for their resting place the one they had already passed, shortening if not by much the distance necessary for return. As she eased herself on to the bench, Genevieve gave up a sigh, leaning into Josh to exclude the darkness.
“I know what you’re saying,” she said. “You think I’m getting like my mother. It so happens I remember that we met in a park very much like this one. I was with another boy at the time, someone from my school who was in the class ahead of me. He wanted me to go somewhere with him. He had something he wanted to show me.”
Josh was nagged by the furtive thought that they would not find their way back in the dark but her story, which he had never heard before, intrigued him. It was somehow important to know how it turned out and so he would sit there, he decided, sit alongside her on the hard bench, as the temperature fell and the last of the light went its vagrant way, to the bitter end.
LOST CAR
It starts with my coming out of a movie, sometimes with someone — my wife, one of my former wives — and not remembering where exactly I parked the car. I don’t panic, I never panic. What I do is try to visualize the various streets I traversed to get to the theater, some memorable landmarks which might help determine the way there and consequently the way back. As I tend to be destination oriented, this method of inquiry inevitably yields a faceless landscape. More potent is the memory of driving around looking for a place to park against the self-induced pressure of arriving at the movie on time. I can see the car now in my mind’s eye parked behind an exceptionally wide van or SUV, black or dark green, the space unlit.
And then, walking toward my idea of where the car is, I think I see it in the distance, not behind a van of uncertain color (that might have been another time altogether) but behind a car very much like it, which may indeed even be the car itself. Closer inspection yields disappointment. My “metallic mist” Honda Civic (perhaps a Corolla) has Massachusetts plates last I looked and both the cars I have focused on as potentially mine have New York plates. So much for expectation. The street I parked on is similar, indeed almost identical to the one I am on, but it is, so evidence or lack of suggests, a different street in the same general area. I can remember now finding no spaces on this street and turning right and then right again and finding a secreted space between two huge SUVs on this other parallel street. I hurry over to this other street while the sense memory of my parking there remains fresh. The second street is darker than the first. It is always that way.