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Then he told the boys to pack up the Scrabble game and they obeyed. But Gregory thought of asking to see the stars. “This is the only place we can ever see them,” he said. “At home it’s all the lights and crap.”
“Watch it,” his father said. But he said, Okay then, five minutes, and we all went outside and looked at the sky. We looked for the Pilot Star, close beside the second star in the handle of the Big Dipper. If you could see that one, Johnston said, then your eyesight was good enough to get you into the Air Force, at least that was the way it was during the Second World War.
Su
Mike said, the same with him.
“I could see it,” said Gregory scornfully. “I could see it whether I knew it was there or not.”
“I could see it too,” Mark said.
Mike was standing a little ahead of me and to one side. He was actually closer to Su
I had the feeling, however, that he was a scrupulous man, he would refrain.
And for that reason, certainly, he would not come to my bed that night. It was so risky as to be impossible, in any case. There were three bedrooms upstairs-the guest room and the parents’ room both opening off the larger room where the children slept. Anybody approaching either of the smaller bedrooms had to do so through the children’s room. Mike, who had slept in the guest room last night, had been moved downstairs, to the foldout sofa in the front room. Su
“He’s pretty clean,” she said. “And after all, he’s an old friend.”
Lying in those same sheets did not make for a peaceful night. In my dreams, though not in reality, they smelled of water-weeds, river mud, and reeds in the hot sun.
I knew that he wouldn’t come to me no matter how small the risk was. It would be a sleazy thing to do, in the house of his friends, who would be-if they were not already-the friends of his wife as well. And how could he be sure that it was what I wanted? Or that it was what he really wanted? Even I was not sure of it. Up till now, I had always been able to think of myself as a woman who was faithful to the person she was sleeping with at any given time.
My sleep was shallow, my dreams monotonously lustful, with irritating and unpleasant subplots. Sometimes Mike was ready to cooperate, but we met with obstacles. Sometimes he got sidetracked, as when he said that he had brought me a present, but he had mislaid it, and it was of great importance to him to find it. I told him not to mind, that I was not interested in the present, for he himself was my present, the person I loved and always had loved, I said that. But he was preoccupied. And sometimes he reproached me.
All night-or at least whenever I woke up, and I woke often-the crickets were singing outside my window. At first I thought it was birds, a chorus of indefatigable night-birds. I had lived in cities long enough to have forgotten how crickets can make a perfect waterfall of noise.
It has to be said, too, that sometimes when I woke I found myself stranded on a dry patch. Unwelcome lucidity. What do you really know of this man? Or he of you? What music does he like, what are his politics? What are his expectations of women?
“Did you two sleep well?” Su
Mike said, “Out like a light.”
I said, “Okay. Fine.”
Everybody was invited to brunch that morning at the house of some neighbors who had a swimming pool. Mike said that he thought he would rather just go round the golf course, if that would be okay.
Su
“Still. You could come and caddy for me.”
“I’ll come and caddy,” Gregory said. He was ready to attach himself to any expedition of ours, sure that we would be more liberal and entertaining than his parents.
Su
“All the kids pee in that pool. I hope you know that.”
Johnston had warned us before we left that there was a prediction of rain. Mike had said that we’d take our chances. I liked his saying “we” and I liked riding beside him, in the wife’s seat. I felt a pleasure in the idea of us as a couple-a pleasure that I knew was lightheaded as an adolescent girl’s. The notion of being a wife beguiled me, just as if I had never been one. This had never happened with the man who was now my actual lover. Could I really have settled in, with a true love, and somehow just got rid of the parts of me that did not fit, and been happy?
But now that we were alone, there was some constraint.
“Isn’t the country here beautiful?” I said. And today I meant it. The hills looked softer, under this cloudy white sky, than they had looked yesterday in the brazen sunlight. The trees, at the end of summer, had a raggedy foliage, many of their leaves begi
“This is sandy soil,” Mike said. “All through here-they call it Oak Ridges.”
I said I supposed that Ireland was beautiful.
“Parts of it are really bare. Bare rock.”
“Did your wife grow up there? Does she have that lovely accent?”
“You’d think she did, if you heard her. But when she goes back there, they tell her she’s lost it. They tell her she sounds just like an American. American’s what they always say-they don’t bother with Canadian.”
“And your kids-I guess they don’t sound Irish at all?”
“Nope.”
“What are they anyway-boys or girls?”
“Two boys and a girl.”
I had an urge now to tell him about the contradictions, the griefs and necessities of my life. I said, “I miss my kids.”
But he said nothing. No sympathetic word, no encouragement. It might be that he thought it unseemly to talk of our partners or our children, under the circumstances.
Soon after that we pulled into the parking lot beside the clubhouse, and he said, rather boisterously, as if to make up for his stiffness, “Looks like the rain scare’s kept the Sunday golfers home.” There was only one car in the lot.
He got out and went into the office to pay the visitor’s fee.
I had never been on a golf course. I had seen the game being played on television, once or twice and never by choice, and I had an idea that some of the clubs were called irons, or some of the irons clubs, and that there was one of them called a niblick, and that the course itself was called the links. When I told him this Mike said, “Maybe you’re going to be awfully bored.”
“If I am I’ll go for a walk.”
That seemed to please him. He laid the weight of his warm hand on my shoulder and said, “You would, too.”
My ignorance did not matter-of course I did not really have to caddy-and I was not bored. All there was for me to do was to follow him around, and watch him. I didn’t even have to watch him. I could have watched the trees at the edges of the course-they were tall trees with feathery tops and slender trunks, whose name I was not sure of-acacia?-and they were ruffled by occasional winds that we could not feel at all, here below. Also there were flocks of birds, blackbirds or starlings, flying about with a communal sense of urgency, but only from one treetop to another. I remembered now that birds did that; in August or even late July they began to have noisy mass meetings, preparing for the trip south.