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She sat at the kitchen table while he brewed a pot of coffee. “This doesn’t look like bachelor housekeeping.”
His smile was secretive. “Guess I’ve learned a few things since the college dorm.”
“Tony said you’re working down at his lot.”
“Yup.”
“How’s it going?”
He brought two cups of coffee to the table and passed one to her. “Lousy. Maybe Tony mentioned that, too. I don’t have a knack for taking people’s money.”
“You were always a rotten card player, too. Are you going to quit?”
He said, “I’m thinking of leaving.”
This distinction—not “quitting” but “leaving”—struck an odd chord. “So you don’t answer the phone, the job’s no good … Are you moving?”
“I don’t have any firm plans.”
“You mean you don’t want to talk about it.”
He shrugged.
She said, “Well, I can’t blame Tony and Loreen for worrying. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this.”
His mood, she meant, but it was the way he looked, too. All his flabbiness had been stripped away. He moved as if he’d tapped some secret well of energy. She considered checking his medicine cabinet for stimulants—but this wasn’t a chemical nerviness. Something deeper, she thought: a purposeful energy.
“I’m not sick,” he said. “And I’m not crazy.”
“Can you tell me what’s going on?”
He hesitated a long time. Finally he said, “I chose not to talk about this with Tony or Loreen or anyone else. I think I have that right.”
“And you don’t want to talk about it with me.”
A longer pause. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“I waited a long time to see you,” he said. “I wanted you to come back. I wanted to see you come through that door. To come and to stay. But that’s not why you’re here.”
“No,” she said.
“We don’t share secrets anymore. I think that’s a fact of life.”
“I suppose so. But you understand why I came?”
“Yes.”
“You would have done the same—right?”
“Yes. I would.”
They sipped coffee in the silence of the kitchen. A breeze lifted the curtains over the sink.
By noon, Barbara understood that, yes, he was preparing to go away for a long time; that he was secretive but probably not suicidal; that she might not see him again.
Adjusting to this last nugget of information was harder than she’d anticipated. She had left him months ago, and the break had been final; she had never made plans to meet him again. The separation had been difficult but not traumatic. But maybe that was because, at the back of her mind, he was still there, as solid and invulnerable as a monument, a part of her life cast in stone.
His bout with alcoholism had disturbed that complacency and now it had been shaken to the roots. This wasn’t Tom as she’d left him. This was some new Tom. A wilder Tom, deep in some enterprise he wouldn’t explain.
Selfish, of course, to want him never to change. But she was afraid for him, too.
He fixed a little lunch, omelettes, ham and onion—“I don’t live entirely on TV di
“Whatever it is you’re doing,” she said, “I hope it’s good for you. I mean that.”
He thanked her; then he put down his fork. His face was solemn. “Barbara,” he said, “how much do you love the year 1989?”
It was a weird question. “I think it sucks,” she said. “Why?”
“It’s bad because—well, why?”
“I don’t know. Where do you start? It’s a bad time for the world because people are starving, because the climate is tough, because we’ve stripped away the ozone layer—all kinds of reasons. And it’s a bad time in America because everybody is very, very nervous and very, very careful. Except the bad guys. Remember Yeats? ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Why do you ask?”
“What if you had a choice?”
“What?”
“I’m serious. What if you could step out of the world? What if you knew a place—not a perfect place, but a place where you could live without some of the uncertainties? A place where you knew for sure there wouldn’t be a nuclear exchange in the next thirty years. Where there was disease, but not AIDS. All the human agony—repression, pain, ugliness—but on a slightly less massive scale. And suppose you could predict some of it. Maybe not stop it, but at least stay away from it—floods, plane crashes, terrorist raids. What do you think, Barb, is that a good offer?”
She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a hypothetical question.”
“Even hypothetically, it doesn’t make sense.”
“But if there were such a place. If you could go there.”
She thought about it. She meant to answer carefully: the question might be hypothetical but it certainly wasn’t casual. She read the intensity in Tom’s face. “I might be tempted,” she said. “Well, hell. I would be tempted. Who wouldn’t? But in the end—no, I don’t think I’d go.”
He seemed disappointed. “Why not?”
“Lots of reasons. I have business here.”
“Saving the world?”
A small vein of sarcasm. She ignored it. “Maybe doing my share. And there are people—”
“Rafe, for instance?”
“Rafe. Among others, yes. I have a lot to live for, Tom.”
“I wasn’t talking about dying.” I hope not, she thought. But then, what?
Had somebody made him such an offer?
Too weird, she thought. Absolutely too weird. “I would stay here,” she said firmly.
Tom looked at her a long time. She guessed he was weighing the claim, turning it over, judging it. Finally he nodded. “Maybe you would.”
“Is that the wrong answer?”
“No … not really.”
“But it’s not your answer.”
He smiled. “No.”
She stood up. “Tell me again. Before I leave. Tell me you’re all right.”
He walked her to the door. “I’m fine. Just going away for a while.”
“You mean that?”
“I mean that.”
She inspected his face. He was holding something back; but he meant what he said. Her fear had retreated a little— he wasn’t suicidal—but a small nugget of anxiety remained firmly lodged, because something had got hold of him, obviously—some strange tide carrying him beyond her reach.
Maybe forever beyond her reach.
He touched her arm, tentatively. She accepted the gesture and they hugged. The hard part was remembering how much she had loved being held by him. How much she missed it.
She said, “Don’t forget to feed the cat.”
“I don’t have a cat.”
“Dog, then? When I looked in the window—I thought I saw—”
“You must have been mistaken.”
His first real he, Barbara thought. He’d always been a truly lousy liar.
In the corner of the room his TV set flickered into life—by itself, apparently. She guessed he had a timer on it. He said, “You’d better go.”
“Well, what can I say?”
He held her just a little tighter. “I think all we can say is goodbye.”
Six
Tom Winter woke refreshed and ready for the last day he meant to endure in the decade of the 1980s.
It occurred to him that he was checking out only a little ahead of schedule. A few more months, January 1, the ball would drop, the crowds would cheer in the nineties. It was a kind of mass exodus, rats deserting the sinking ship of this decade for the shark-infested waters of the next. He was no different. Only more prudent.
Assuming, of course, the machine bugs would allow him to go.
But he wasn’t afraid of the machine bugs anymore.
He showered, dressed, and fixed himself a hearty meal in the kitchen. It was a fine early-summer day. The breeze through the screen door was just cool enough to refresh, the sky blue enough to promise a lazy afternoon. When he switched off the coffee machine he heard a woodpecker tocking on one of the tall trees out back. Sweet smell of pine and cedar and fresh grass. He’d mown the lawn yesterday.