Sometimes on weekends when Meret wasn’t working, Mara would come over and spend the day, browsing in Harry’s library or playing CDs from his collection while he worked at his desk. She would bring her sketchbooks and curl up in a chair somewhere and work quietly. They would have drinks in the garden and talk, a pastime of which neither of them seemed to tire, every conversation bringing to each of them an accumulative knowledge of the other that continued to stabilize their friendship.
And it remained a friendship, a close friendship, but nothing more than that. Mara always went home in the evenings, or Strand did when he was at her place. Increasingly, though, Strand’s house became the place where they were most comfortable.
Strand thought a lot about what would happen if the relationship turned more intimate. In a way he yearned for it, but in another way he very much wanted to keep it just the way it was. He tried to make peace with his ambivalence, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to remove the boundary line that protected him from a level of complication that he still wanted to avoid.
For her part, Mara seemed at ease with this, and their friendship settled into a routine in which they desired and sought nothing more than simply to be in each other’s company. But it quickly moved beyond that to the point where they very much desired each other’s presence, and the alacrity with which this happened surprised both of them.
May and June passed from the calendar in this manner, and the first anniversary of Romy’s death slipped quietly past in a single summer night, its hurt and heartache softened, at least to the point of being bearable, by Mara’s reassuring presence. July was almost gone when Strand told Mara that he was going to have to start traveling.
“Really? For how long?” She was curled up in an armchair in his office, near the windows and his desk, sketching by the oblique light that came in from the courtyard. She had gathered her hair in a loose pile on her head to keep it out of her face while she sketched, securing it in place with a couple of pencils. She was barefoot, and she was eating a frozen lime bar, a napkin in her lap.
“A few weeks.” Strand put down his pen and pushed away from his desk. He had kicked off his shoes under the desk and propped his feet on an ottoman.
“Where are you going?”
“San Francisco, then Rome. I’ve got a collection of Eakins portrait studies that I’ve been putting together for a client in San Francisco, and a man in Rome has got a little bunch of Fuseli drawings that I’d be a fool to pass up.”
Mara finished her lime bar and wiped her mouth with the napkin and then carefully wrapped the stick in the napkin.
“You’ve been working on these a long time?”
“Most of the year.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said, but she wasn’t successful at hiding her disappointment at the prospect of his leaving. Strand was a little surprised, and gratified, at her reaction. “When are you leaving?”
“In a couple of days.”
“Oh, that soon?”
She was pursing her lips slightly, her eyes diverted to her pencil as she doodled distractedly in the bottom corner of her sketchpad.
“I was wondering,” he said, “when I get back from San Francisco if you’d like to go on to Rome with me.”
Her pencil stopped. She didn’t look up. She said, “Oh… well…”
He could see her mind working in her face, something he was beginning to appreciate about her. It was an unusually transparent behavior, a lack of calculation that he found refreshing. His entire professional life had been spent dealing with people under control. Spontaneity, apparent spontaneity, was rare.
“In a few days?” she asked, still not looking up.
“Right.”
She nodded slightly, as if having confirmed something to herself, and then she looked up at him.
“I want to say something, Harry.” Her face reflected just a hint of acknowledgment that she thought she was stepping into risky water. “I’m forty-two. I don’t want to pretend that I’m in my twenties, and that I’m engaged in some sort of game here. One, I don’t have the patience for it anymore. Two, I don’t have the time for it anymore. I’ve wasted too much of it already. I must have thrown away five years in the last twelve months. Three, I want you to know, without having to be coy about it, that I like you very much, and, frankly, I don’t want you to wander away before we get to know each other better. Really get to know each other.”
She stopped, but not long enough for him to say anything before she went on.
“If you don’t have the same… interest… in continuing this in a serious way, just tell me. I’ve been through quite a lot in the past couple of years, and I think I can handle honest answers if they’ve got honest feelings behind them. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who’d be cruel about it if you didn’t want this to go on.”
She paused again, but again she didn’t let him interrupt her train of thought.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is, well, I think I’m a romantic woman, but at this point in my life it seems to me that good common sense is just as important.
“I’ve been burned pretty badly with this marriage, Harry, despite my bravado about it. I just can’t make that kind of mistake again.” She stopped and looked down. “But we seem to have so much to offer each other. If this is a… possibility for us, well, I’d hate for us to miss an opportunity simply because we didn’t know how to talk to each other about what we’re really feeling.” Again she confronted him with her eyes. “I don’t want the rituals of… getting to know each other to confuse what we might be genuinely feeling. We can’t mistake, or misrepresent, our feelings for each other, Harry. Either way.” She paused. “I think… that would be a shame.”
He couldn’t answer her immediately. Though she had spoken haltingly, there was no misunderstanding the depth of her feelings, and Strand wanted to accord her the same considerate deliberation.
“I can’t think of anything I’d like better than to continue this… as long as we can.” He thought a moment, his arms crossed. “I don’t know how far down the road I’m thinking. I don’t know that I have ‘plans.’…”
“No”-Mara sat up in her chair, putting the sketchpad down on the floor-“I didn’t mean that you had to spell it out for me. I, it’s just that, a trip like that, it could change things.” She stopped, seemingly frustrated at her own inability to express precisely what she was thinking. “Harry, you know what I mean here. I’m so very grateful to you for our friendship… for you sharing your home, for Meret’s friendship… for you including me in your life.” She took a deep breath. “For me, it could easily go farther than this. It seems like we’re at that point where this could become something else, something more.”
“But you don’t want to do that yet. Or maybe ever.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I’m afraid to if… Look, I don’t want sex to complicate a friendship. If it’s only going to be a friendship.”
Strand stood, put his hands in his pockets, and leaned his shoulder against the window frame. He looked outside a moment and tried to straighten out his thoughts. When he turned back to her she was reaching up and taking the two pencils out of her hair. She tossed them onto the floor by her sketchpad, shook out her hair, and leaned back in the corner of the chair and looked at him.
“Do you think it’s possible that you could be expecting too much from this?” Strand asked.
“Expecting too much? What do you think is out of proportion in what I’ve just said?”
“It sounds to me like you’re wanting guarantees.”
She frowned at him, waiting for him to go on.
“Guarantees,” Strand said, “that you won’t get hurt. Guarantees that I’m going to be the kind of person you want me to be. Guarantees that I’m not going to disappoint you.”
For a moment neither of them said anything, and this time he had no perception whatsoever of what was going on in her mind. The silence went on longer than he imagined it would. She broke her gaze and looked away. She nodded slightly, as if to herself, her eyes finding and settling on a drawing on the wall near her chair.