“I hope I wasn’t snoring,” I say.
“Nope. Nope. You’re a wife’s dream. You never snore. I hope you saw I put de Tocqueville out for you since you’re taking a trip and also reading history in the middle of the night. I always liked him.”
“Me too,” I lie.
She gives me the look then. Her features are narrow, her nose is sharp, her chin angular and freckled — a sleek package. She is wearing thin silver earrings and heavy turquoise bracelets. “You did say something about Ann — speaking of wives, or former wives.” This is the reason for the look, not my lying about de Tocqueville.
“I only remember dreaming about somebody not getting his insurance premiums paid on time, and then about if it was better to be killed or tortured and then killed.”
“I know what I’d choose.” She takes a sip of wine, holding the round glass in both palms and focusing into the dark that has taken over the beach. New York’s damp glow brightens the lusterless sky. Out on the main drag cars are racing; tires squeal, one siren goes woop.
Whenever Sally turns ruminant, I assume she’s brooding over Wally, her long-lost, now roaming the ozone, somewhere amongst these frigid stars, “dead” to the world but (more than likely) not to her. Her situation is much like mine — divorced in a generic sense — with all of divorce’s shaky unfinality, which, when all else fails, your mind chews on like a piece of sour meat you just won’t swallow.
I sometimes imagine that one night right at dusk she’ll be here on her porch, wondering away as now, and up’ll stride ole Wal, a big grin on his kisser, more slew-footed than she remembered, softer around center field, wide-eyed and more pudding-faced, but altogether himself, having suddenly, in the midst of a thriving florist’s career in Bellingham or his textile manufacturer’s life in downstate Pekin, just waked up in a movie, say, or on a ferry, or midway of the Sunshine Bridge, and immediately begun the journey back to where he’d veered off on that long-ago morning in Hoffman Estates. (I’d rather not be present for this reunion.) In my story they embrace, cry, eat dinner in the kitchen, drink too much vino, find it easier to talk than either of them would’ve thought, later head back to the porch, sit in the dark, hold hands (optional), start to get cozy, consider a trek up the flight of stairs to the bedroom, where another candle’s lit — thinking as they consider this what a strange but not altogether supportable thrill it would be. Then they just snap out of it, laugh a little, grow embarrassed at the mutually unacknowledged prospect, then grow less chummy, in fact cold and impatient, until it’s clear there’s not enough language to fill the space of years and absence, plus Wally (aka Bert, Ned, whatever) is needed back in Pekin or the Pacific Northwest by his new/old wife and semi-grown kids. So that shortly past midnight off he goes, down the walkway to oblivion with all the other court-appointed but not-quite dead (not that much different from what Sally and I do together, though I always show up again).
Anything more, of course, would be too complex and ruefuclass="underline" the whole bunch of them ending up on TV, dressed in suits, sitting painfully on couches — the kids, the wives, the boyfriend, a family priest, the psychiatrist, all there to explain what they’re feeling to bleachers full of cakey fat women eager to stand up and say they themselves “would prolly have to feel a lot of jealousy, you know?” if they were in either wife’s place, and really “no one could be sure if Wally was telling the truth about where …” True, true, true. And who cares?
Somewhere on the water a boat neither of us can see suddenly becomes a launch pad for a bright, fusey, sparkly projectile that arcs into the inky air and explodes into luminous pink and green effusions that brighten the whole sky like creation’s dawn, then pops and fizzles as other, minor detonations go off, before the whole gizmo weakens and dies out of view like an evanescing spirit of nighttime.
Invisible on the beach, people say Ooooo and Aaahhh in unison and applaud each pop. Their presence is a surprise. We wait for the next boomp, whoosh and burst, but none occurs. “Oh,” I hear someone say in a falling voice. “Shit.” “But one was nice,” someone says. “One ain’t enough a-nuthin,” is the answer.
“That was my first official ‘firework’ of the holiday,” Sally says cheerfully. “That’s always very exciting.” Where she’s looking the sky is smoky and bluish against the black. We are, the two of us, suspended here as though waiting on some other ignition.
“My mother used to buy little ones in Mississippi,” I offer, “and let them pop off in her fingers. ‘Teensies,’ she called them.” I’m still leaned amiably on the doorframe, glass dangling in my hand, like a movie star in a celebrity still. Two sips on a mostly empty stomach, and I’m mildly tipsy.
Sally looks at me doubtfully. “Was she very frustrated with life, your Mom?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well. Somebody might say she was trying to wake herself up.”
“Maybe,” I say, made uncomfortable by thinking of my guileless parents in some revisionist’s way, a way that were I only briefly to pursue it would no doubt explain my whole life to now. Better to write a story about it.
“When I was a little girl in Illinois, my parents always managed to have a big fight on New Year’s Eve,” Sally says. “There’d always be yelling and things being thrown and cars starting late at night. They drank too much, of course. But my sisters and I would get terribly excited because of the fireworks display at Pine Lake. And we’d always want to bundle up and drive out and watch from the car, except the car was always gone, and so we’d have to stand in the front yard in the snow or wind and see whatever we could, which wasn’t much. I’m sure we made up most of what we said we saw. So fireworks always make me feel like a girl, which is probably pretty silly. They should make me feel cheated, but they don’t. Did you sell a house to your Vermont people, by the way?”
“I’ve got them simmering.” (I hope.)
“You’re very skillful at your profession, aren’t you? You sell houses when no one else sells them.” She rocks forward then back, using just her shoulders, the big rocker grinding the porch boards.
“It’s not a very hard job. It’s just driving around in the car with strangers, then later talking to them on the phone.”
“That’s what my job’s like,” Sally says happily, still rocking. Sally’s job is more admirable but fuller of sorrows. I wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of it. Though suddenly and badly now I want to kiss her, touch her shoulder or her waist or somewhere, have a good whiff of her sweet, oiled skin on this warm evening. I therefore make my way clump-a-clump across the noisy boards, lean awkwardly down like an oversize doctor seeking a heartbeat with his naked ear, and give her cheek and also her neck a smooch I’d be happy to have lead to almost anything.
“Hey, hey, stop that,” she says only half-jokingly, as I breathe in the exotics of her neck, feel the dampness of her scapula. Along her cheek just below her ear is the faintest skim of blond down, a delicate, perhaps sensitive feature I’ve always found inflaming but have never been sure how I should attend to. My smooch, though, gives rise to little more than one well-meant, not overly tight wrist squeeze and a willing tilt of head in my general direction, following which I stand up with my empty glass, peer across the beach at nothing, then clump back to take my listening post holding up the doorframe, half aware of some infraction but uncertain what it is. Possibly even more restrictions are in effect.