“Yes,” Robert says. “At Florida State University. History.”
“Sounds like where you’d go from Tulane.”
Robert hears, as welclass="underline" Not to Vietnam.
Though Jimmy did not intend this.
Robert says, “American history. Usually Southern. Early-twentieth-century particularly.”
“I saw your bio at the school site.”
“And you make leather goods,” Robert says.
“I do.”
“Bags.”
“And other things. But bags are our specialty.”
If Robert knows about this, so does their mother, and Jimmy almost adds: So does she own one? But there is no way to ask that and make it simultaneously clear that he doesn’t give a damn.
Robert almost says something about the glowing reviews and press coverage at Jimmy’s website, about the special things Jimmy does to the leather, but Robert can’t immediately shape those words concisely or clearly and maintain the appropriate tone of benignly tepid small talk.
And so they fall silent one last time.
Both men turn from the windows they are facing.
Then Jimmy says, “You understand?”
“That you won’t come to see him.”
“Yes.”
“Of course.”
“Tell her to let go of this.”
“I’ll try.”
Both houses tick with morning silence. The brothers feel the vague impulse to say a little something more before they end the conversation, but neither can possibly imagine what it might be.
“Good-bye then,” Jimmy says.
“Good-bye,” Robert says.
They disconnect.
Each takes the cordless phone away from his ear and looks at it for a moment as if it were a faded Polaroid found in a shoe box.
Jimmy’s four women workers have gone off together for their monthly lunch at Mavis’s house and he is glad now to be able to sit at his worktable and have the barn to himself. Linda has not yet checked in with him. It must be going badly at their friends’ house.
He has taken up his deer tine and his softest square of camel hide and has hunched into the furious burnishing of the edges of half a dozen messenger bags, filling himself with the smell of warming beeswax and edge paint, emptying himself of Robert’s voice and the family he has left behind.
But shortly he hears the middle bay door creak open and closed. He looks across the floor.
It’s Linda, and he thinks: Good. The antidote. Whatever of Robert and Peggy and William he has not been able to burnish away will vanish in five minutes with Linda.
She is flushed from the sun and the cold and sheds her quilted coat as she approaches. Beneath, she is turtlenecked to her chin and is long-legged and slim-hipped in black dress-up jeans.
She stops before him.
She strips off her knit hat and shakes her hair down. “Your women are gone,” she says.
“This is their day for Mavis’s wife to make them venison stew.”
She obviously hasn’t noticed the phenomenon.
“A start-ups tradition,” he says.
“Ah,” she says.
She grows still, her coat over her arm, her hat in her hand. She is staring at him but he has no sense that she’s seeing him. She’s considering something, he senses.
Becca no doubt has confided in her. Linda wants to speak of it but has probably made a vow not to. Linda takes that sort of pact seriously.
“You’ve got a tale to tell,” he says.
She makes a small sound, deep in her throat. Not quite a sound of assent. More meditative.
Jimmy waits for Linda to figure out what she’s free to reveal.
Then she says, “When will they be back?”
He’s thinking of their friends splitting up and hears this wrong. His puzzlement must be showing. Linda clarifies. “Your women.”
“My women …” he says, drawing out the phrase to add an unspoken as you oddly insist on calling them, “… usually take an hour and a half or a little longer on stew day. They make it up at the end of the afternoon.”
“And they left recently?”
“Twenty minutes perhaps.”
Linda nods and lays her coat and hat on the near edge of Jimmy’s worktable, and she says, “Then let’s go sit on the couch together for a few minutes.”
“All right,” Jimmy says.
He follows her to the south end of the barn and into the break room next to their office.
“The coffee’s fresh,” he says.
“I’m good,” she says, and she heads for the flannel chesterfield. He follows her.
She arranges herself sideways at one end, her legs drawn up beneath her. A long story to come.
Jimmy sits in the middle of the couch, within reaching distance, holding distance if need be. He turns toward her and waits.
She is still working something out in her mind. Then she says, “They’re finished, Becca and Paul. Forever and for the best.”
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy says.
“No,” Linda says. “It is for the best. For everyone concerned.”
A recent image of the couple flickers into Jimmy’s head: a restaurant in Toronto, the two of them side by side on the bench seats, Paul’s pugilist jaw and horn-rimmed reader’s eyes, Becca’s ballerina bun and Bardot pout. They are nearly two decades younger than Jimmy and Linda but the four of them are joined together by New Democratic Party politics, halibut fishing on Hudson Bay, and a couples’ chemistry that synthesizes compassion and snark.
Before Jimmy can consider this image, it flickers out again with Linda reaching into his lap and lifting his hand toward her. She leans to it and kisses him on the very spot where a wedding ring would be if they were to wear them.
“My darling,” she says as she replaces the hand in his lap.
But he instantly senses what is happening.
“I need to go away for a week or two,” she says.
If he objectively considers this, there is the possibility that she will, as Becca’s best friend, simply stay with her or go away with her to help her through the first wave of trauma over the dissolution of her marriage. Paul is once divorced; Becca has never been.
But Jimmy understands. Linda is invoking the agreement that allowed the two of them to officially wed. A quarter of a century ago it was what they both wanted, equally, philosophically. It was how they’d sorted out the world together — before marriage and after — with regard to equality and rights and interpersonal power and the nature of love. All these things freely given and received and shared.
Jimmy has always been content with this.
He has wanted it.
But now in the center of his head he feels a hot dilation, like the frame of a Saturday movie serial sticking in the projector and its image splitting and searing and burning through.
“I’ll be back soon, my sweet Jimmy,” she says.
He does not say anything.
This declaration is clearer than is their custom.
She keeps her eyes on his. Nothing intense in her gaze. This is how it has always been for them. They have always treated each other’s lacunae with loving tact. It is what they want.
The conversation is meant to stop here.
They will hold hands. They might kiss. They might even make love now, here on the chesterfield, to assert their abiding connection.
But the burning is done in Jimmy’s head and there is only a blank screen. A tabula rasa. And from it he asks, “Were you the reason for the breakup?”
Minutely — but minutely is significant for Linda, Jimmy knows — minutely she flinches. Then she composes herself once more.
She takes his hand again. “They’ve never meant as much to you as to me,” she says. “You’re not worried about the breakup.”
She’s right about that. Nor is it the issue. But he does not say so.