Sarah asks for a Dylan record when the Telemann finishes playing. White wax drips onto the wood table. George waits for it to solidify slightly, then scrapes up the little circles and with thumb and index finger flicks them gently toward Sarah. He explains (although she asked for no particular Dylan record) that he has only Dylan before he went electric. And
“It’s just terrible about Anna,” George says, finishing his wine, his ice cream melting, looking at no one in particular, although Sarah was the one who brought up Anna the night before, when they had been in the house only a short time—Anna dead, hit by a car, hardly an accident at all. Anna was also a student of his. The driver of the car was drunk, but for some reason charges were not pressed. (Sarah and George have talked about this before, but Lenore blocks it out. What can she do about it? She met Anna once: a beautiful girl, with tiny, childlike hands, her hair thin and curly—wary, as beautiful people are wary.) Now the driver has been flipping out, Julie says, and calling Anna’s parents, wanting to talk to them to find out why it has happened.
The baby begins to cry. Lenore goes upstairs, pulls up more covers, talks to him for a minute. He settles for this. She goes downstairs. The wine must have affected her more than she realizes; otherwise, why is she counting the number of steps?
In the candlelit dining room, Julie sits alone at the table. The girl has been left alone again; George and Sarah took the umbrellas, decided to go for a walk in the rain.
It is eight o’clock. Since helping Lenore load the dishes into the dishwasher, when she said what a beautiful house Lenore had, Julie has said very little. Lenore is tired, and does not want to make conversation. They sit in the living room and drink wine.
“Sarah is my best friend,” Julie says. She seems apologetic about it. “I was so out of it when I came back to college. I was in Italy, with my husband, and suddenly I was back in the States. I couldn’t make friends. But Sarah wasn’t like the other people. She cared enough to be nice to me.”
“How long have you been friends?”
“For two years. She’s really the best friend I’ve ever had. We understand things—we don’t always have to talk about them.”
“Like her relationship with George,” Lenore says.
Too direct. Too unexpected. Julie has no answer.
“You act as if you’re to blame,” Lenore says.
“I feel strange because you’re such a nice lady.”
A nice lady! What an odd way to speak. Has she been reading Henry James? Lenore has never known what to think of herself, but she certainly thinks of herself as being more complicated than a “lady.”
“Why do you look that way?” Julie asks. “You
“I always give up my weekends. Weekends are the only time we socialize, really. In a way, it’s good to have something to do.”
“But to have it turn out like this . . .” Julie says. “I think I feel so strange because when my own marriage broke up I didn’t even suspect. I mean, I couldn’t act the way you do, anyway, but I—”
“For all I know, nothing’s going on,” Lenore says. “For all I know, your friend is flattering herself, and George is trying to make me jealous.” She puts two more logs on the fire. When these are gone, she will either have to walk to the woodshed or give up and go to bed. “Is there something . . .
Julie is sitting on the rug, by the fire, twirling her hair with her finger. “I didn’t know it when I came out here,” she says. “Sarah’s put me in a very awkward position.”
“But do you know how far it has gone?” Lenore asks, genuinely curious now.
“No,” Julie says.
No way to know if she’s telling the truth. Would Julie speak the truth to a lady? Probably not.
“Anyway,” Lenore says with a shrug, “I don’t want to think about it all the time.”
