X appears out of the agate cemetery light, loose-gaited and sleepy, wearing deck shoes, baggy corduroys and an old London Fog I gave her years ago. Her hair has been cut short in a new-style way I like. She is a tall girl, big and brown-haired and pretty, who looks younger than she is, which is only thirty-seven. When we re-met fifteen years ago in New York, at a dreary book signing, she was modeling at a Fifth Avenue clothing store, and sometimes even now she has a tendency to slouch and walk about long-strided in a loose-limbed, toes-out way, though when she takes a square stance up over a golf ball, she can smack it a mile. In some ways she has become as much of a genuine athlete as anyone I know. Needless to say, I have the greatest admiration for her, and love her in every way but the strictest one. Sometimes I see her on the street in town or in her car without expecting to and without her knowing it, and I am struck by wonder: what can she want from life now? How could I have ever loved her and let her go.
“It’s chilly, still,” she says, in a small, firm voice when she is close enough to be heard, her hands stuffed down deep inside her raincoat. It is a voice I love. In many ways it was her voice I loved first, the sharpened mid western vowels, the succinct glaciated syntax: Binton Herbor, himburg, Gren Repids. It is a voice that knows the minimum of what will suffice, and banks on it. In general I have always liked hearing women talk more than men.
I wonder, in fact, what my own voice will sound like. Will it be a convincing, truth-telling voice? Or a pseudo-sincere, phony, ex-husband one that will stir up trouble? I have a voice that is really mine, a frank, vaguely rural voice more or less like a used car salesman: a no-frills voice that hopes to uncover simple truth by a straight-on application of the facts. I used to practice it when I was in college. “Well, okay, look at it this way,” I’d say right out loud. “All right, all right.” “Yeah, but look here.” As much as any, this constitutes my sportswriter voice, though I have stopped practicing by now.
X leans herself against the curved marble monument of a man named Craig — at a safe distance from me — and presses her lips inward. Up to this moment I have not noticed the cold. But now that she said it, I feel it in my bones and wish I’d worn a sweater.
These pre-dawn meetings were my idea, and in the abstract they seem like a good way for two people like us to share a remaining intimacy. In practice they are as uncomfortable as a hanging, and it’s conceivable we will just forgo it next year, though we felt the same way last year. It is simply that I don’t know how to mourn and neither does X. Neither of us has the vocabulary or temperament for it, and so we are more prone to pass the time chatting, which isn’t always wise.
“Did Paul mention our rendezvous last night?” I say. Paul, my son, is ten. Last night I had an unexpected meeting with him standing in the dark street in front of his house, when his mother was inside and knew nothing of it, and I was lurking about outside. We had a talk about Ralph, and where he was and about how it might be possible to reach him — all of which caused me to go away feeling better. X and I agree in principle that I shouldn’t sneak my visits, but this was not that way.
“He told me Daddy was sitting in the car in the dark watching the house like the police.” She stares at me curiously.
“It was just an odd day. It ended up fine, though.” It was in fact much more than an odd day.
“You could’ve come in. You’re always welcome.”
I smile a winning smile at her. “Another time I will.” (Sometimes we do strange things and say they’re accidents and coincidences, though I want her to believe it was a coincidence.)
“I just wondered if something was wrong,” X says.
“No. I love him very much.”
“Good,” X says and sighs.
I have spoken in a voice that pleases me, a voice that is really mine.
X brings a sandwich bag out of her pocket, removes a hard-boiled egg and begins to peel it into the bag. We actually have little to say. We talk on the phone at least twice a week, mostly about the children, who visit me after school while X is still out on the teaching tee. Occasionally I bump into her in the grocery line, or take a table next to hers at the August Inn, and we will have a brief chairback chat. We have tried to stay a modern, divided family. Our meeting here is only by way of a memorial for an old life lost.
Still it is a good time to talk. Last year, for instance, X told me that if she had her life to live over again she would probably wait to get married and try to make a go of it on the LPGA tour. Her father had offered to sponsor her, she said, back in 1966—something she had never told me before. She did not say if she would marry me when the time came. But she did say she wished I had finished my novel, that it would have probably made things better, which surprised me. (She later took that back.) She also told me, without being particularly critical, that she considered me a loner, which surprised me too. She said that it was a mistake to have made as few superficial friends as I have done in my life, and to have concentrated only on the few things I have concentrated on — her, for one. My children, for another. Sportswriting and being an ordinary citizen. This did not leave me well enough armored for the unexpected, was her opinion. She said this was because I didn’t know my parents very well, had gone to a military school, and grown up in the south, which was full of betrayers and secret-keepers and untrustworthy people, which I agree is true, though I never knew any of them. All that originated, she said, with the outcome of the Civil War. It was much better to have grown up, she said, as she did, in a place with no apparent character, where there is nothing ambiguous around to confuse you or complicate things, where the only thing anybody ever thought seriously about was the weather.
“Do you think you laugh enough these days?” She finishes peeling her egg and puts the sack down deep in her coat pocket. She knows about Vicki, and I’ve had one or two other girlfriends since our divorce that I’m sure the children have told her about. But I do not think she thinks they have turned my basic situation around much. And maybe she’s right. In any case I am happy to have this apparently intimate, truth-telling conversation, something I do not have very often, and that a marriage can really be good for.
“You bet I do,” I say. “I think I’m doing all right, if that’s what you mean.”
“I suppose it is,” X says, looking at her boiled egg as if it posed a small but intriguing problem. “I’m not really worried about you.” She raises her eyes at me in an appraising way. It’s possible my talk with Paul last night has made her think I’ve gone off my bearings or started drinking.
“I watch Johnny. He’s good for a laugh,” I say. “I think he gets funnier as I get older. But thanks for asking.” All this makes me feel stupid. I smile at her.
X takes a tiny mouse bite out of her white egg. “I apologize for prying into your life.”
“It’s fine.”
X breathes out audibly and speaks softly. “I woke up this morning in the dark, and I suddenly got this idea in my head about Ralph laughing. It made me cry, in fact. But I thought to myself that you have to strive to live your life to the ultimate. Ralph lived his whole life in nine years, and I remember him laughing. I just wanted to be sure you did. You have a lot longer to live.”
“My birthday’s in two weeks.”
“Do you think you’ll get married again?” X says with extreme formality, looking up at me. And for a moment what I smell in the dense morning air is a swimming pool! Somewhere nearby. The cool, aqueous suburban chlorine bouquet that reminds me of the summer coming, and all the other better summers of memory. It is a token of the suburbs I love, that from time to time a swimming pool or a barbecue or a leaf fire you’ll never ever see will drift provocatively to your nose.