Part 18 (1/2)

”He 's pretty clean,” she said. ”And after all, he 's an old friend.”

Lying in those same sheets did not make for a peaceful night.

In my dreams, though not in reality, they smelled of water-weeds, river mud, and reeds in the hot sun.

I knew that he wouldn't come to me no matter how small the risk was. It would be a sleazy thing to do, in the house of his friends, who would be-if they were not already-the friends of his wife as well. And how could he be sure that it was what I wanted? Or that it was what he really wanted? Even I was not sure of it. Up till now, I had always been able to think of myself as a woman who was faithful to the person she was sleeping with at any given time.

My sleep was shallow, my dreams monotonously l.u.s.tful, with irritating and unpleasant subplots. Sometimes Mike was ready to cooperate, but we met with obstacles. Sometimes he got sidetracked, as when he said that he had brought me a present, but he had mislaid it, and it was of great importance to him to find it. I told him not to mind, that I was not interested in the - 175*

present, for he himself was my present, the person I loved and always had loved, I said that. But he was preoccupied. And sometimes he reproached me.

All night-or at least whenever I woke up, and I woke often-the crickets were singing outside my window. At first I thought it was birds, a chorus of indefatigable night-birds. I had lived in cities long enough to have forgotten how crickets can make a perfect waterfall of noise.

It has to be said, too, that sometimes when I woke I found myself stranded on a dry patch. Unwelcome lucidity. What do you really know of this man? Or he of you? What music does he like, what are his politics? What are his expectations of women?

”Did you two sleep well?” Sunny said.

Mike said, ”Out like a light.”

I said, ”Okay. Fine.”

Everybody was invited to brunch that morning at the house of some neighbors who had a swimming pool. Mike said that he thought he would rather just go round the golf course, if that would be okay.

Sunny said, ”Sure,” and looked at me. I said, ”Well, I don't know if I-” and Mike said, ”You don't play golf, do you?” No.

”Still. You could come and caddy for me.”

”I'll come and caddy,” Gregory said. He was ready to attach himself to any expedition of ours, sure that we would be more liberal and entertaining than his parents.

Sunny said no. ”You're coming with us. Don't you want to go in the pool?”

”All the kids pee in that pool. I hope you know that.”

Johnston had warned us before we left that there was a prediction of rain. Mike had said that we 'd take our chances. I liked his saying ”we” and I liked riding beside him, in the wife 's - 176*

seat. I felt a pleasure in the idea of us as a couple-a pleasure that I knew was lightheaded as an adolescent girl's. The notion of being a wife beguiled me, just as if I had never been one. This had never happened with the man who was now my actual lover.

Could I really have settled in, with a true love, and somehow just got rid of the parts of me that did not fit, and been happy?

But now that we were alone, there was some constraint.

”Isn't the country here beautiful?” I said. And today I meant it. The hills looked softer, under this cloudy white sky, than they had looked yesterday in the brazen sunlight. The trees, at the end of summer, had a raggedy foliage, many of their leaves beginning to rust around the edges, and some had actually turned brown or red. I recognized different leaves now. I said, ”Oak trees.”

”This is sandy soil,” Mike said. ”All through here-they call it Oak Ridges.”

I said I supposed that Ireland was beautiful.

”Parts of it are really bare. Bare rock.”

”Did your wife grow up there? Does she have that lovely accent?”

”You'd think she did, if you heard her. But when she goes back there, they tell her she 's lost it. They tell her she sounds just like an American. American's what they always say-they don't bother with Canadian.”

”And your kids-I guess they don't sound Irish at all?”

”Nope.”

”What are they anyway-boys or girls?”

”Two boys and a girl.”

I had an urge now to tell him about the contradictions, the griefs and necessities of my life. I said, ”I miss my kids.”

But he said nothing. No sympathetic word, no encouragement. It might be that he thought it unseemly to talk of our partners or our children, under the circ.u.mstances.

Soon after that we pulled into the parking lot beside the clubhouse, and he said, rather boisterously, as if to make up for - 177*

his stiffness, ”Looks like the rain scare 's kept the Sunday golfers home.” There was only one car in the lot.

He got out and went into the office to pay the visitor's fee.

I had never been on a golf course. I had seen the game being played on television, once or twice and never by choice, and I had an idea that some of the clubs were called irons, or some of the irons clubs, and that there was one of them called a niblick, and that the course itself was called the links. When I told him this Mike said, ”Maybe you're going to be awfully bored.”

”If I am I'll go for a walk.”

That seemed to please him. He laid the weight of his warm hand on my shoulder and said, ”You would, too.”

My ignorance did not matter-of course I did not really have to caddy-and I was not bored. All there was for me to do was to follow him around, and watch him. I didn't even have to watch him. I could have watched the trees at the edges of the course-they were tall trees with feathery tops and slender trunks, whose name I was not sure of-acacia?-and they were ruffled by occasional winds that we could not feel at all, here below. Also there were flocks of birds, blackbirds or starlings, flying about with a communal sense of urgency, but only from one treetop to another. I remembered now that birds did that; in August or even late July they began to have noisy ma.s.s meetings, preparing for the trip south.

Mike talked now and then, but it was hardly to me. There was no need for me to reply, and in fact I couldn't have done so. I thought he talked more, though, than a man would have done if he 'd been playing here by himself. His disconnected words were reproaches or cautious congratulations or warnings to himself, or they were hardly words at all-just the kind of noises that are meant to convey meaning, and that do convey meaning, in the long intimacy of lives lived in willing proximity.

This was what I was supposed to do, then-to give him an amplified, an extended notion of himself. A more comfortable notion, you might say, a rea.s.suring sense of human padding - 178*

around his solitude. He wouldn't have expected this in quite the same way, or asked it quite so naturally and easily, if I had been another man. Or if I had been a woman with whom he did not feel some established connection.

I didn't think this out. It was all there in the pleasure I felt come over me as we made our way around the links. l.u.s.t that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back now into a tidy pilot flame, attentive, wifely. I followed his setting up and choosing and pondering and squinting and swinging, and watched the course of the ball, which always seemed to me triumphant but to him usually problematic, to the site of our next challenge, our immediate future.

Walking there, we hardly talked at all. Will it rain? we said.

Did you feel a drop? I thought I felt a drop. Maybe not. This was not dutiful weather talk-it was all in the context of the game.

Would we finish the round or not?

As it turned out, we would not. There was a drop of rain, definitely a drop of rain, then another, then a splatter. Mike looked along the length of the course, to where the clouds had changed color, becoming dark blue instead of white, and he said without particular alarm or disappointment, ”Here comes our weather.” He began methodically to pack up and fasten his bag.

We were then about as far away as we could be from the clubhouse. The birds had increased their commotion, and were wheeling about overhead in an agitated, indecisive way. The tops of the trees were swaying, and there was a sound-it seemed to be above us-like the sound of a wave full of stones cras.h.i.+ng on the beach. Mike said, ”Okay, then. We better get in here,” and he took my hand and hurried us across the mown gra.s.s into bushes and the tall weeds that grew between the course and the river.

The bushes right at the edge of the gra.s.s had dark leaves and an almost formal look, as if they had been a hedge, set out there.

But they were in a clump, growing wild. They also looked impenetrable, but close up there were little openings, the narrow - 179*