Letters полностью

Good as her word, she came in on the Monday. Bon voyage gifts were laid on, jokes made about Florida, about septuagenarian lovers. Embraces, tears, laughter. Polly looked fine. Her friend was in good health, a gentleman, well enough off; they would be all right. How I envied them! She wished me the best; half her life was in that office; we’d done remarkable things together. She paused. She didn’t believe history really repeated itself. There were echoes, of course, if you listened for them, but the future — what there was of it for people our age — was new, and lay ahead, not behind us. All very well, I thought; yet what about…

But as if by tacit agreement, no allusion whatever was made to…

And so Tuesday the 17th came and went in thunderous silence, as if Polly’s flight laid an antisonic boom along the Eastern Shore. From 9 to 5, whenever Ms. Pond was in the office, I managed to drop things: my pen, my iced-coffee spoon; she must think me senile. But they were gracefully and soundlessly retrieved, a young woman picking up after an old codger with a sudden unquenchable thirst for iced coffee and a queer predilection for staring out the window at a certain oyster-shell pile.

Nothing — unless indeed opposites, negatives, count, in which case perhaps the entire absence of Polly Lake, and a fortiori of her etc., might betoken at the least my loss of the pending contest over Harrison’s will, and at the worst… Nonsense: 11 R didn’t happen, not on PLF Day or the next, or the next, by when in my frustration I was not fit society. For if time is not circling ’round, then 8 and 10 R, Jane’s return to me in the evening of our lives, that wondrous O out by Red Nun 20… portend nothing. My inchoate vision on the New Bridge was a delusion, and Now will be Tomorrow and Tomorrow: empty.

I missed Polly. There was no Jane. I was a fool.

At half past three yesterday I left the office, saying truly I felt ill and meant to rest up in the country till Monday. The afternoon was airless; I’d left my car back at the cottage: I motored O.J. out from Slip #2 and downriver to its Todds Point dock. As I left the Howell Point day beacon to starboard, I saw the Original Floating Theatre II chugging out of the Tred Avon into the Choptank, en route from Oxford to Cambridge for the weekend (unlike the original Original, the replica is self-propelled). I kept my eyes on it, not to glimpse a certain red buoy to port, the sight of which just then would have undone me. Docked, I took a swim (no sea nettles yet) and lingered on deck for cocktails; even made dinner aboard, to put off entering this cottage too crowded with ghosts. Over the last of the wine, by the light of citronella candles in the cockpit (but there are no mosquitoes yet either, to speak of), I read the Evening Sun and wondered how the prospecting was in Florida.

The phone fetched me in just after dusk, when the swifts had given way to the swallows and the swallows to the bats. It’s me, she said: Jane.

I replied: I resist the obvious reply.

What? O.

Say that again, please.

What? She was in Dorset Heights. Might she stop by at the office tomorrow?

She didn’t sound entirely official. I took a breath, and a chance. Here I am at the cottage, I said: why not make Tomorrow Now?

She couldn’t, possibly, much as she’d like to see the place again. She had a dozen things to do before bedtime. Didn’t I have a minute tomorrow?

Another chance: I’m in Baltimore tomorrow till three, I lied; then I plan to drive straight back here for the weekend. Will you meet me here at six for dinner, or shall I pick you up and fetch you out? Grilled rockfish with fennel and rémoulade, a house specialty.

She hesitated; my heart and history likewise.

Well… okay. She’d drive out. Make it six-thirty? Bye.

No matter that her hesitation, I was quite confident, had to do with the logistics of her business day and not the implications of revisiting me in situ where the world began. She was coming!