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“Of all those places you’ve been,” he says, “which was your favorite?”
Bernadette sighs. She is tired of questions. Strangely, she cannot remember anyone having asked her this one before. Is that possible? she wonders. Surely someone asked, surely she had some answer. She tries again to move her hand. Jann holds it still.
“I liked them all,” she says.
“Bullshit.”
She feels a surge of regret at finding herself still here, at getting caught in this discussion. Jann moves her hand from his stomach to his chest. The skin is warmer there, close to the bone. She can feel the beating heart.
“There must be one that stands out,” he says.
Bernadette hesitates.
“New Orleans,” she says. “My honeymoon.”
It is the only place she can think of. She feels suddenly that she might begin to cry.
“It’s strange,” she says. “Going back.”
“To them?” Jann gestures at the group. “Or back?”
“Both,” she says.
Later today they will fly to Nairobi. Tomorrow morning, New York. Two weeks from now she leaves for Argentina.
“Everything fades the minute you’re somewhere else,” Bernadette says. It’s a mistake to say these things. “It fades.”
“More eyes,” he says. “Make them harder.”
The girl lifts her chin, sharpening the thin line of her jaw. Her eyes are bright and narrow. She looks at Jann and Bernadette with the sad, fierce look of someone who sees a thing she knows she cannot have.
Jann is excited. “Kiddo! You’ve got it,” he cries.
She does, Bernadette thinks. In three years she will probably be famous. She will hardly remember Lamu, and if she runs across pictures of herself on this beach, she’ll wonder who took them.
The Belsons are coming to our house for a barbecue, and I’m making a pie with Peggy, our stepmother since last year. Outside the kitchen window Bradley pushes my stepsisters, Sheila and Meg, on the tire swing. Peggy keeps looking out there like she’s nervous. Dad’s beside her, chopping onions for burgers.
“He’s pushing them awfully hard,” Peggy says.
Dad looks out and so do I. Sheila and Meg are six and seven years old, Peggy’s daughters from her first marriage. Dad smiles. “Brad’s good with kids,” he says, kneading the chopped meat.
“That’s not what I said.”
Dad is quiet. I stare at my blob of crust. “What do you want me to do?” he says.
Peggy laughs. “Nothing, I guess.” She dumps her flour and sugar mix over a pile of apple slices. “If I have to tell you, then nothing.”
the way the tension snaps to attention in the last section here
Then Bradley looks up. Maybe he felt me watching him. He doesn’t say a thing, we just look at each other a long time, neither one of us moving. Fire lights his face and makes his eyes look hollow. The only sound is wood cracking in the fire.
I rise halfway to my feet and jump. I stay calm until the second my shoes leave the branch and I see the bonfire coming at me like a giant orange mouth. People are screaming. I hear the crash I make, and there’s wild, rippling heat in my hair and clothes. Then I’m on the beach, rolled and pounded by a weight that is Bradley, pushing me into the cool sand, smothering flames with his body.
After a second round of drinks, Diana went down to the cabin. The sun hurt her eyes—it had been like that since she’d started researching her dissertation, “Crisis and Catharsis in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock.” She had promised James she would cut down the hours she spent viewing, but lately she found that everything in her life—the telephone calls, the endless, hopeful pounding of their son Daniel’s basketball against the garage door as he struggled to match his father, the bills and invitations—seemed like nothing but distractions from Hitchcock’s tense, dreamlike world, where even the clicking of heels was significant. Diana often felt weirdly nostalgic as she watched, as if her own life had been like that once—dreamy, Technicolor—but had lost these qualities through some misstep of her own.
He nodded, then shyly put his arms around her. As they hugged, Diana teased herself, imagining what it would be like to make love to Sonny. Then he drew back, took her face in his hands, and kissed her.
Diana was as stunned as if he had slapped her. Gently she tried to pull away, but Sonny was running his palms along her back and kissing her neck as if this were all something they had agreed on. She tried to take it as a joke. “I’ve heard of self-contradiction,” she said, “but this is outrageous.” Sonny didn’t pause, and as the moments passed, Diana felt drawn in by his fierce arousal, by the very fact that something so unthinkable was actually happening. The feeling was not quite desire, but something like it. It held her still while Sonny eased her onto the concrete floor, pushing a folded rag behind her head. She was crying by then, and tears ran from her eyes into both ears. She pulled Sonny to her, hooking her fingers over the thick ridges of muscle along his spine. He felt heavy and strange in her arms. His belt buckle struck the concrete—once, then again, over and over again with a thick, blunt sound. She closed her eyes at the end. When Sonny was done he stood up, slapped the dust from his hands, and picked up his paintbrush. Diana touched the floor beneath her, thinking she might have bled, though there was no reason. She ran through the rain back to the house, convinced her life would never be the same.
But nothing happened. No mention of the incident was ever made, and Sonny never again laid a hand on her except in the most benign affection. Only one thing changed: he liked her after that. It was as if she had passed some test or—and she tried not to think about this—as if she were partly his. What troubled her most was that she couldn’t forget it; not Sonny himself so much as the paintbrushes soaking in their jars of cloudy water, the rolls of unstretched canvas, each detail bringing with it an ache of longing that still haunted her sometimes.
Catherine wasn’t laughing anymore, but looked as if she might start again at any moment. “It’s funny,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “There are things you’re just positive will happen to you. Then there’s that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won’t.”
She was watching me closely. Her eyes, I noticed, were bloodshot. I shifted the ski pole under my leg.
“Have you ever had a feeling like that?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” I said, uneasy. “I guess I have most things I wanted.”
“You’re lucky.”
I felt her envy, sharp as the tang of her cigarette smoke on the cold air. We were far apart, I realized then, and this filled me with relief.
Catherine flicked her half-smoked cigarette into a snowbank. “Of course,” she said, “getting what you want is only the beginning. The hard part is holding on to it.”
I was annoyed. “How do you know?”
Catherine took a while to answer. She seemed deep in thought. “I just know,” she finally said.
(we later find out catherine is sleeping with her husband)
We hang up, and I go back to my closet to do another hour’s work. I’m looking forward to tonight—I always liked Bud Templeton, though I’ve hardly seen him in years. I still think of him as the tall, wry neurologist I loved to chat with over plastic cups of wine at school plays. We would congratulate each other on our daughters’ performances as orphans or lost boys, one eyebrow raised to show that, unlike some parents, we had this all in perspective. But perspective was what I lacked, it turns out, for my life had felt as permanent as childhood. I’ve even outgrown the clothes I wore as a young wife: summer suits, skirts below the knee, tall black boots—none of it fits; I’ve become a smaller version of myself, distilled from an earlier abundance I was not even aware of. I take unexpected pleasure now in packing these outfits away and stepping into a sleek, narrow dress I bought last week. I carry my wine to the window and wait, my face near the glass. The sky is clear and dark, the lights of the city trembling beneath it. As I watch them, I’m overwhelmed by a feeling I haven’t had in years: a sweet, giddy sense that anything might happen to me.
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“When I was eighteen,” her father said, “I bought a motorcycle and rode around Europe for months.”
Ellen had never heard this before. “Was it fun?” she asked.
“I lived like a maniac.”
She paused, unsure whether this was good or bad. “Was it fun?” she asked again.
“Fun. Was it fun.” He stared across the miles of dead grass and shook his head. “It was the best time of my life.”
Ellen felt suddenly shy. She followed her father’s gaze to the horizon, where faded earth nudged a faded sky. It looked like the edge of something hidden, a place he alone had explored.