2
“PETER...” HE HEARD his name again, just the faintest murmur. It wasn’t Beth. It wasn’t coming from the bedroom.
Shadows moved across the carpet at his feet—the dark shapes of slender tree branches waving in a soft wind, like a willow tree hung with green leaves.
“Peter...”
He stepped into the faint light, the shadows seeming to entwine him.
There was suddenly the heavy smell of orange blossoms on the air. Then, as distinct and clear as a memory, there arose the smell of new-mown grass and of hamburgers sizzling on a barbecue, and, drifting lazily over all of it, the warm, hazy smell of a summer evening.
His breath came in gasps, and he felt suddenly numb and dislocated. Like a sleepwalker, he stepped slowly across to look into the parlor, full of nostalgic longing as if he were stepping through a doorway into a fragment of some past time carefully manufactured from his memory.
His tools lay scattered on the floor, the rug turned back, shadowy furniture piled in the corner beyond the stone fireplace. The light that suffused the room seemed to be drifting like smoke from out of the littered hearth. A ghostly willow tree stood rooted in the middle of the floor, its tangle of branches drooping at shoulder height and obscuring the ceiling overhead. Peter anchored himself against the doorjamb, holding on with both hands, watching the room shimmer like a desert mirage. A summery breeze ruffled the leaves of the willow, and pale sunlight shone through the branches, turning the leaves nearly gold. The dilapidated furniture beyond the tree was merely a lumber of dark shapes.
As if from far away he could hear the hissing of lawn sprinklers and what sounded like laughter. There was the clanking of pots and pans in a kitchen. From somewhere beneath these sounds came the whisper of his name again, “Peter...” like the sound of a letter slid under a door.
He stepped in among the lacy, glowing branches of the tree. “Yes,” he said, and instantly, as if in answer, the wind rose outside with a howling that shook the house. The ghostly light in the hearth vanished as abruptly as a blown-out candle flame. The old furniture rematerialized in the darkness, and the willow tree, the summer smells, all of it was gone like an interrupted dream.
PETER HELD HIS hands in front of him, closing his fists to try to stop their shaking. He was aware suddenly that the air was full of the acrid smell of overcooked coffee. Mechanically, he went into the kitchen, moved the coffeepot to a cold burner, and turned off the stove, then slumped back heavily against the counter. He pressed his eyes shut, trying to recall the details of the dream. That’s what it must have been, some kind of waking dream, a hallucination.
He picked the mug up off the counter and tried to pour himself a cup of coffee. His hand still shook, and he slopped the coffee across the stove top. Suddenly lightheaded, he clanked the pot back down onto the burner and forced himself to breathe evenly, holding on to the edge of the stove. The wind, the moonlight, the weird crying outside—all of it must have been rocking like a pry bar in some mental crack....
He managed to pour the oily coffee into the cup now, along with plenty of grounds. Out the window the moon was just going down beyond the ridge, and the sky was gray in the east. A flurry of dry leaves blew past. Shivering suddenly, he went into the living room, opened a drawer in the hutch, and pulled out an envelope of photographs, then sat down at the kitchen table and sorted through them—pictures of David on a skateboard, and playing baseball, another of Amanda and David and himself in front of the Christmas tree.
He searched through them for his most recent photo of Amanda, taken last Christmas, not a particularly happy time of the year for her. They had been dressed to go out, and she had looked like a model in her black evening dress. He had looked at the photo just last week and had thought without any hesitation, “Of course you married her.”
Surprisingly, that Christmas had been a good one, maybe because neither one of them had expected it to be. There was no hurry, no fighting, no forced holiday cheer. He and Amanda had even taken turns reading out loud in the evenings from Jack London’s South Sea Tales. Even then they were planning the trip to Hawaii—the trip that eventually hadn’t included him.
He shuffled through the photos again.
“Are we drinking coffee or turpentine?”
At the sound of Beth’s voice, Peter jerked in surprise, his hand knocking his coffee cup, the coffee spilling out across the photographs and off the edge of the table.
Beth grabbed the towel off the hook, snatched the photographs up, and dried them off one by one. She was dressed, as if ready to leave.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping the table clean. She looked at the photos then, laying them out on the table to dry more thoroughly. “I didn’t mean to set you off.”
“It’s nothing,” Peter said. “I’m a little gun shy. I’ve been...” He took the towel from her and sopped up the coffee on the floor.
“Thinking about your family,” Beth said, finishing his sentence. She picked up a picture of Amanda and him, looked at it for a moment, then laid the photograph back down. “I’ve always thought she was pretty.”
Peter waited.
“Walter and I ended up hating each other. You and Amanda didn’t?”
“Not really. Not like you two.”
“You don’t hate her?”
“No,” Peter said. “I guess I don’t.” He sipped gritty coffee from the half-full cup and then set it aside on the table.
“You know,” Beth said after a moment, “Bobby’s coming home this afternoon. It’s a week early. His father’s too … busy to keep him the full month.”
“Walter’s a jerk,” Peter said. “I knew he was a jerk when you married him.” He felt suddenly bitter, as if in some vague way he shared Walter’s weaknesses. Maybe all men did.
“Yeah,” Beth said. “I’ve always known how you felt about him. You were right. If I had known more about the way things worked, about how men are, I might have protected Bobby from some of it. I didn’t know enough.”
“I don’t buy that part about ‘how men are.’ Some of us just aren’t like that.” For a minute they listened to the sound of the wind.
“Yeah,” she said finally, “that wasn’t fair.” She thought for a moment, as if choosing her words. “Let’s just say I know more now. I won’t let it happen to Bobby a second time.” She looked away, studying the photograph of Amanda again. “Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead,” Peter said.
“When you found out about Amanda, about what had been going on between her and the other guy, was it already over by then?”
“What do you mean ‘over’? For who? Between us, you mean?”
“No, I mean her affair. Was it still going on?”
Peter shook his head. “Dead and buried.”
“But you chose not to live with it? Not to let bygones be bygones?”
“Chose?” Peter said. “I guess it was a choice. Some things, though... I worked at it, but—what? It spoiled things. Maybe if I hadn’t known him...”
“And you weren’t ever guilty of the same thing?”
“Not once,” Peter said. “I’m a confirmed monogamist.”
“Like foxes,” Beth said. “I guess if you’re a confirmed monogamist you won’t stand for anything less in a mate.”
Peter shrugged. “Since we’re telling the truth,” he said, “tell me what you meant about Bobby, about how you wouldn’t let that happen to him a second time.”
“I don’t know,” Beth said. “What did I mean? I guess it’s just that in the last three months he’s become pretty attached to you.”
“I guess he has,” Peter said.
“His life is all full of Peter this and Peter that. I bet his father is sick of hearing your name. I hope he is.”
“Remember that we’re not all alike,” Peter said.
“I know you’re not. Why do you think I’m here? If you were like that you wouldn’t be sitting in an empty room at dawn staring at photographs of the woman you broke up with after fifteen years of marriage. I guess what I wish is that you’d... figure out what you want right now, and settle down to it. Find a way to let the rest of it go.”
She stepped across and picked up the coffeepot, wrinkling up her face, trying to act cheerful. “And you complain about my coffee.” She set the pot down.
“You going?” Peter asked. “Stay for breakfast.”
“Can’t. I’ve got lots to do today before Bobby’s plane lands. He’s flying into John Wayne at noon.”
She put her arms around him and kissed him, long enough to take some of the fear out of him. “Cheer the hell up,” she said. “This isn’t the end of life as we know it. It’s just time that we got to know it a little better, that’s all. It’s time we got serious.”
After she left, Peter sat in the kitchen chair staring into his empty cup. He could still feel the pressure of her lips against his. His hands remembered the shape of her body from last night, and he recalled the lilac smell of the scented powder she put in her bathwater and how, with her skin still damp from the bath, she had slipped into bed.... Each part of him seemed to have its own singular memory of their lovemaking.
THE WOODS OUTSIDE were gray-green now in the dawn light. He got up and made a fresh pot of coffee, thinking now about the ghosts of summer afternoons. He went out into the living room and rummaged through the hutch again, pulling out more envelopes of photographs, sorting through them as he stood there, barely conscious of the wind sighing in the trees.
There was something in the photographs, in their captured memories, that reminded him again of what he had seen before dawn that morning. He set them back into the drawer, then walked to the parlor door and looked in. Early-morning sunlight slanted through the shutters, dimly illuminating the room.
On the carpet directly in front of the cold hearth lay a small flute, delicately carved out of wood, lying in plain sight like another hallucination. It was tipped across the edge of the tiles as if it had just that morning rolled out of the open fireplace.