“Oh, Dev, I’m sorry. You must be about to fall over. Come in and sit.” I pushed him in the direction of a chair and tugged his jacket off from behind as he walked away. “Do you want anything? Water? Coffee? Toast?”
“No thanks. I should probably just start talking.”
Then, Dev sat down in my dark blue velvet armchair, aimed his gray-blue eyes at me like two pretty headlights, and started to talk.
“So I had this brainstorm, and I figured I’d better just get in the car and start driving before I lost my nerve, but I only had to drive about ten miles before I realized that I’d never lose my nerve because if I’ve ever been sure of anything in my life, I’m sure of what I’m about to say to you.”
“And you’ve been sure of a lot things,” I said. “You’re an un-wishy-washy person by nature.”
“So you understand how sure I am about this.”
He did sound sure, but for a second, he looked downward, his lashes casting tiny twin shadows on his cheeks, and I recognized that this was the moment: the pivot point between the way things had been and the way things would be. And in that still, time-stopped moment, I knew what he was going to say to me.
When he looked up again, he was the usual Dev, flushed and vivid, and he smiled his sudden, direct, radiant, untired smile at me and said, “I love you and you love me, and out of all the things I know, what I know the most is that we should be together.”
For a full three seconds after he said it, I knew it, too, with all my heart.
“Oh, Dev,” I said.
“And trust me, I get exactly how big a jerk this makes me, since you’re with Zach now, but not saying it would be worse. I swear I’d be doing all this even if he were here.”
“I believe you.”
“Not to downplay my jerk status, but you don’t belong to Zach. You belong to yourself. I definitely didn’t come here thinking, ‘I’ll steal her away.’” He spoke those last four words as if they were something bitter he needed to spit out.
“Then what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking, ‘I’ll ask her to do this with me.’”
“Do what?”
Dev got up out of the chair and sat down next to me, not touching me, but so close that I could see the scar in his eyebrow and the thin tributary of vein running down the right side of his forehead, close enough that I could take in, all at once, the entire familiar terrain of his face.
“All of it,” he said. “Everything. Or separate things sometimes but together, next to each other, in the same place.”
“You want to live with me? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, yeah, for starters. Live and everything else. Live, et cetera.”
Dev made et cetera sound like the best adventure ever. How easy it would have been to reach out and grab his hand and set off on it with him. But I hesitated. I hesitated and he saw me do it and at least half the glow went right out of his face.
“Before you answer,” he said, quickly, “please understand that you’re not trapped. I would never corner you. If you say no, you won’t lose me. That’s not a thing that could happen. If you say no, I promise I’ll never bring it up again. I’ll stay your friend.”
He slid his hand under my hair and rested it against the side of my neck.
“I’d miss touching you, though,” he said. “I’ve pretty much lived in a constant state of missing touching you for the past four years. Please don’t say no. Let’s be together for the rest of our lives. Don’t you want to? It would be so fun. Let’s just do it, Clare.”
That was my Dev, eyes all lit up, talking about a lifetime commitment like a ten-year-old talks about climbing a tree or starting a secret club. Of course, I loved him. I had loved him since I was thirteen. But oh God, Zach. Zach with his head down, talking about his father in that broken voice, asking me to help him. The men in his family never asked for help, but Zach had asked me. “I can’t do this without you,” he’d said.
Dev’s hand was still on my neck, and I reached up and pressed my own hand against it.
“His father is dying,” I said.
In one swift motion, Dev drew in his breath hard, slid his hand away, and stood up, shock all over his face.
“You’re saying no,” he said, incredulously. “I never thought you would say no.”
I jumped up.
“No!” I said. “I mean, I don’t know. His father is dying at their lake house up north, and Zach needs me to go there with him. I promised I would. Dev, don’t look like that.”
I reached for him, but he leaned away.
“Maybe it’s good,” I said.
“It’s not good,” he said, drily. “For me, I mean. For Zach, it sounds pretty good. Definitely bodes well for Zach.”
“It will give me some time,” I said. “To think. To decide.”
“To decide between me and Zach?” said Dev, in the same repulsed tone of voice he’d used when he’d said he wasn’t trying to steal me away. “To choose? What, do a cost/benefit analysis? Is that what you’re saying?”
“To decide the best thing to do, for everyone.”
Dev shook his head like he was shaking off a sucker punch. “Forget about everyone, Clare. What do you want? Zach? Me? Neither of us? Forget about what we want. Throw that right out the window. Whatever happens, Zach and I will be okay. Just be honest. Say what would make you, Clare Hobbes, happy.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yes. It. Is.”
I sat back down, cradled my face in my hands, shut my eyes, tried to strip everything else away except what I wanted. Being with Dev was easy. Not because he never challenged me or disagreed with me, because he did. Maybe easeful is more what I meant. We fit. I never laughed more with anyone than I did with him. I never felt more myself. We could say anything to each other. But what about Zach? How many times had he told me I was his entire family, his one and only shot at joy, redemption, being good, his one and only shot at everything? Dev was wrong about him. If I left, Zach would not be okay.
“Could you really do that?” I asked Dev. “Just go back to the way we’ve been for the past four years? Be friends with me?”
Dev stared down at me, and, just like that, I could tell he was angry. The shift was almost imperceptible, but I saw it and I knew how it would go: no wildfire flaring, no raised voice, no bruising silences, no meanness for the sake of meanness. Just a deliberate, resolute, ruthless pulling away.
“So that’s the trouble with me,” said Dev. “That’s my mistake.”
“I didn’t say that. ”
“I should lie and tell you no, right? That would help my case. But I don’t lie to you ever, so yes, sure, I’d stay your friend. What else would I do? Not talk to you? Not see you anymore?”
“Please don’t be mad.”
“I won’t die. I won’t live the rest of my life in dire misery, either. But that doesn’t mean we don’t belong together.”
“I can’t leave him right now,” I said. “He’s lost his mother and his sister. His father is dying. I couldn’t live with myself if I left him now.”
“When, then?”
I threw up my hands. “I don’t know! How could I know?”
“So this is how it goes. We miss out on being together because I’m not broken enough.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” he said. “Not fair at all.”
Dev turned and walked away from me, lifted his coat from the back of the kitchen chair where I’d left it, and put it on. I knew the way his hair grew; I knew how he shrugged on a coat, with that quick flip right at the end; I knew exactly how wide his shoulders were. All the tiny, precious details, the variations that separated Dev from every other person on the planet, the universe had entrusted these to me, and here I was, letting them all go.
Just before he walked out my door, he said, “I meant what I said. I’ll go on being your friend, and I’ll never bring up any of this again. Neither will you. It’s gone. E
rased. It never happened.”
By the time I was ready to start back to Edith’s house, the sunrise had unleashed its colors on the world, sent them shooting across the sky and sliding across the water, and the low sun was turning the grass-spiked dunes gold. The gulls were wheeling in from wherever they’d been to perch on the empty lifeguard stand, gray-winged and noble as eagles, while under my feet, the sand was already relinquishing its coolness. Now was the moment for regret, for cursing myself for being a fool, the moment for guilt and self-disgust and shame. That’s what I’d expected when I set out this morning to take the past head-on. But now, to my surprise, mostly what I felt for the girl I’d been then was tenderness. She’d been confused, but she hadn’t been careless. She had done her best. And on her wedding day, when she had finally seen the light, she had walked straight into it, which was surely worth something. Even if no one else in the world ever forgave her, not Zach or his family or even Dev, I could.
I did.
Then I asked the girl I was right at that second, “So what’s next?” and the words were as sweet as spun sugar on my tongue.
Gold-leaf sand stretched out before me; the green waves unfurled themselves over and over under the lucent sky. For the second time in twenty-four hours I laughed simply because being this particular person in this particular world at this particular moment was cause for joy, and then I put on my shoes and went home.
Chapter Nineteen
Edith
Winter 1955–Spring 1956
The first time coincided with the first snowstorm of the season, a few days before Christmas, flakes pouring dense as flour, and, when Edith stood alone afterward at the back window and watched her yard become mute and smothered and finally lose itself under the anonymous weight, she found there was no piecing the events together, no first this, then this, then this. She had neither decided nor been persuaded. George had merely shown up at her door, breathless, red-cheeked, snow on his shoulders and inside the brim of his hat, and said, uncertainly, “I walked from the hotel,” and her desire had bolted out of hiding, huge and fleet and hurtling forward, forward, carrying Edith in its slipstream.
During future encounters, she would be deliberate. She would relish undressing him, this man whose clothes seemed so intrinsically part of who he was, her fingers easing buttons from their holes, unknotting his tie, negotiating his belt buckle and slithering his belt free a loop at a time, sliding off his layers of wool and silk and fine cotton, feeling her way like a blind woman, her eyes locked on his, refusing to rest so much as a fingertip against his skin even as he strained his body toward her hands. When she got to the last layer, she would close her eyes and rest her cheek on his chest, feeling his heat through the thin, ribbed cotton of his undershirt. Only when he was naked would she touch his bare skin or allow him to touch her. Naked, George was transfigured, was someone else, was anyone, no one.
Edith, who had not so much as held hands with a man before Joseph, learned the acute, concentrated pleasure of sex with a man she did not love. George’s body was a means to an end and an instrument to play. They met several times a month, always in the downstairs bedroom, George knowing better than anyone when that room would be empty. She didn’t ask about his wife, although she knew he had one. She didn’t ask how he managed to get away so often. She didn’t ask him anything or ask anything of him, except to instruct him, occasionally, as to what part of her to handle or enter or take into his mouth, exactly how, and for how long, words he liked to hear and, after listening, to obey.
The second time he came, he brought a bag with him and spent the night; propped up on an elbow, watching him sleep, she marveled at her own abstraction. For a day or two, after he left her house, he came back to her in flashes, pure sense memory; her nerve endings resurrecting him in precise and aching detail. But that was all. When he arrived, always without warning, she burned her desire out against him over and over; when he left, she never asked when he’d be back.
Sometimes, after they were finished and he’d gotten dressed again, she would photograph him, the real George, a distant, elegant, dark-haired man.
After the first few times, he began to talk to her, the two of them lying together in bed, his voice threading faintly through the dark as if from far away. He told her about the places he’d traveled, about the restaurants and the hotels, the museums and boats and women. Once, he told her, with no emotion at all, that he and his wife were unable to have children. Another time, he described his first love; he was sixteen, she was twenty-one, his cousin’s friend from college visiting for the summer. “She went back to school and never even wrote. Dashed my heart to pieces,” he said, laughing.
And then, one night, four months in, he told her the story of his parents.
His father beat his mother, regularly, brutally. George’s first memory was of hearing his father shouting during the night and then, afterward, his mother crying in the bathroom, something she would do again and again, her throat-wrenching sobs nearly masked by the thunder of water into the tub. For years, with almost clinical accuracy, his father was careful to leave bruises only in places her clothing would cover, but when George was eight, for reasons unknown to him, his father’s rages became less frequent, but wilder. He would hit his wife in front of the maid, in front of George, with his fists, yes, but also, sometimes, with whatever was closest: a frying pan, a shoe, a candlestick, his briefcase. On one occasion, he threw a five-pound bag of flour at her head. On another, he beat her with the heavy, black telephone until the phone cord snapped from the wall. Whenever George witnessed this, he would be sick afterward, his stomach yanked into knots, but he never tried to stop it from happening.
“Maybe I wasn’t brave enough,” said George to Edith. “But what I remember is feeling that it was just the way things were in my house, and nothing in the world could ever make it stop.”
A handful of times, a neighbor or a passerby called the police. The uniformed men would come to the family’s grand house purchased with his mother’s money, tuck their hats under their arms, and stand in the marble foyer, speaking to George’s father, who could turn on charm like throwing a switch, his laugh big and rollicking. If George’s mother were presentable enough, she would appear, would stretch her mouth into a smile, offer the officers tea, say she was fine, fine, fine, even if her hands were shaking, her eyes red from weeping. And the police officers would nod and tell them all to please be quieter and to have a good night. On occasion, the officers would apologize to his parents for disturbing them.
When George was ten, a night came that was worse than the others. George’s father arrived home crazy with rage over something that had happened at work. He slammed George’s mother against the wall, her head jerking backward hard. George remembered the sound of it, bone on plaster. He remembered the streak of red on the wall as she slid to the ground, unconscious, looking dead, her head lolled to one side. He remembered blood on her mouth; she must have bitten her tongue. George’s father nudged her with his foot, shouted at her to wake the hell up, and finally, she opened her eyes, blinked, and looked straight at George who was across the room, watching from his hiding place between the closed velvet drapes; she smiled at him to reassure him, her little boy, that despite the blood and her oatmeal-colored face and the way her head wobbled on her neck, she was fine.
The next morning, his father left for a business trip, and once he was gone, George’s mother washed her hair, pinning it so the lump on the back of her head didn’t show, and packed two suitcases, one for her and one for George. They rode a bus—his first time ever on a bus; he could still remember the smell of the seats—to a church on the other side of town. Although she and George’s father had been married at a different church, one up north where they had met, she had grown up going to this one, had always taken George on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. It was a place his father never went.
There was an elderly rector and another, younger priest. Neither had been there when George’s mother
was growing up, but the rector remembered meeting her father. “A humane man,” he said. “A philanthropist. A rich man who felt a true responsibility to the poor.”
Dry-eyed, George’s mother told them about her marriage; she included terrible details without flinching; she called her life “hell,” a bad word, one George had never heard her say. She told the priests that she couldn’t bear for her son to spend another minute in that house for fear it would scar him or, worse, turn him into the kind of man his father was. The old rector held her hands between his large, wrinkled ones, prayed with her, said that she and George could stay two nights, or maybe three, however long it took to catch their breaths, regain their balance.
“But after that respite, I must ask you to go back,” he said. “Marriage is a sacred bond and a deeply private one. Use the time here to think of ways to talk with your husband and also to avoid angering him. He’s gone astray, lost his moral compass, but the fact that he never hits your boy is a sign that he has a good heart. A man like that can be reasoned with.”
George remembered that the old rector’s voice and eyes were sorrowful and kind. But the young priest got angry with him.
“We cannot, in good conscience, send them back!” he said, through gritted teeth.
“But they can’t stay here forever,” said the old man, sadly. “She will have to go home eventually, and the longer she stays away, the worse it will be, the wider the rift. He is her husband.”
In a flat voice, George’s mother thanked them. She said they would just go home that day. “Three nights will make no difference,” she said.
“Try to persuade your husband to come to church with you next Sunday,” said the old man, as George and his mother were leaving. “Help him to heal. Help him find his way back to God.”
The young priest walked them to the door of the church. He was red-faced and his mouth was trembling; George thought he might burst into tears. He braced himself for seeing a man cry, but it never happened.