Safely married, Alex keeps a formal distance from Rebecca in public, never taking her
hand, kissing her politely on the cheek when she arrives on the early morning Metroliner,
guiding gently her down the steps, until they reach his long blue car. "I thought we'd have
lunch at the hotel Du Pont. Is that all right with you?"
Rebecca, safely remarried, is amused. It is as if Alex has forgotten all those years as her
lover, but she knows down deep, he hasn't. It is simply a matter of courtesy, mutual
respect. "I think we're safe there," she teases him as they drive away, "Besides," she
adds, "we're getting past the age where people think of us as intimate beings. Let's see,
you're 68, and God, I'm 60. It's hard to believe," she protests, "part of me is still 16,
inside."
He keeps his eyes fixed on the asphalt ahead, trying to determine the right road so he
won't overshoot the bridge. "I know." His words hang in the simple silence of the winter
afternoon. Impulsively, Rebecca reaches over and traces her gloved hand down his
sleeve. He neither withdraws his hand, nor reaches for hers, as he once would have. He
is busy driving. Rebecca leans back into the buttery leather seat; Alexander is a good
driver, even when he drives well over the speed limit. But she says nothing. There is
never a sense of real danger. Alexander is in complete control of the car. Just as she feels
she has always been in control of their relationship, setting the limits, the boundaries.
At lunch, Rebecca looks closely at Alexander. She sees, for the first time, the wrinkles
that limn his eyes, the way his skin, which used to fit so tightly to his face, has begun to
loosen from his chin. Still, she feels what she has always felt with him, a precious,
intimacy that has grown over the years so that now they can talk about their lives freely
and without complication, knowing that neither of them has any interest in using this
information, except as a means of letting the other know what is happening, now.
Now, dressed in a dark turquoise wool suit and black sweater, Rebecca appears almost as
formally dressed as Alexander, in his navy sport coat, grey flannel slacks, pale blue shirt
with a traditional rep tie of navy and red. Rebecca can never remember seeing him in
anything but a suit or a tailored jacket and trousers. Most of the time she is in jeans and
sweatshirts, but today, because she is going to Washington for the opening show of her
new paintings, and because she is having lunch with him, she has taken a bit more care
with her clothes.
"It's just good seeing you again. Tell me all about what's happening,"she begins, and
before he can answer, she adds, "I can't believe we're eating here. Whatever made you
pick out the great city of Wilmington? Instead of Philadelphia?" She is interrupted by the
arrival of the waitress, bearing menus.
Alexander pauses, as if trying to think of a reply. " I come here often. The board I sit on
meets here. It's the same distance from my house as Philadelphia, and less traffic at this
hour." His reply is careful, considered. Alexander has a quietness about him that seems
to consider everything; a quality that Rebecca admires and one she lacks. She pictures
him standing in front of his double closet, looking back and forth, finally selecting the
appropriate attire for the effect he wishes to create. Only when they are completely alone
does he drop his guarded appraisals, becomes almost spontaneous.
After placing their orders, they sit quietly for a few minutes. She knows his house is
filled with family that has arrived for Christmas and New Years. It is difficult to break
away from family. He surprised her with a phone call the week before asking if she had
time for lunch. She hadn't expected to see him at all this trip. But she does not bring any
of this up. Shaking her head, she laughs, "I can't believe I'm taking the train, instead of
flying, like always. Sort of like going backwards in time." As she says this, she realizes
they are always going backwards in time. Saying "remember when" and reminiscing about
past events. How long as it been? Twenty, twenty-five years? We were so young then,
she thinks. The years telescope into hours spent together in various cities, small bits of
days and nights stolen from their real lives. But she says none of this. Allows the
conversation to flow light and easily over the table.
The sandwiches arrive. They stop talking to consider what has been brought to them.
Rebecca thinks it is almost like one of their phone conversations, which are always short
and interrupted, as if he has to steal time away to talk with her. For 25 years, she has
been his secret: from his wife, his family.
Rebecca, on the other hand, talks freely about Alexander to her husband, Theo. Theo
knows of her relationship with Alexander. Even though the sexual relationship is long
over, the friendship remains, somehow even more important to her. And it does not
threaten Theo in any way.
After all these years, Rebecca still categorizes Alexander more as a doer than a thinker.
although this is not true. He has, in his working career, built enormous structures:
runways, bridges, highways, buildings, and his knowledge of engineering is both concept
and conclusion. He makes real what was imaginary. When she can get him to talk bout
engineering or fishing, he is a energetic world of facts and information, small insights she
has never even considered. He amazes her, at times, with what he knows about countries
she has only heard about.
Sometimes he asks about her work, but it is always in terms of what she has finished, sold,
not what she is doing at the moment. Early in their relationship she tried to explain to him
that she had little idea of how something would turn out until it was actually completed.
"I go from one side of the canvas to the other, trying to find an answer, and since I work
directly from nature, I have to really look to see what nature is saying to me." She sees
Alexander's puzzled look. "If there is an answer, I mean. Sometimes I just throw it away
after working on it for weeks. It just is there or it isn't." Her mind scampers for words to
try and link the quick thoughts. "I don't just paint what I see, Alex; I paint the distance
between me and what it is I think I see."
He lapses into silence, as if trying to take apart the abstraction out of which she lives into
the life that exerts itself on the canvases. He will only comment on the reviews she
sometimes sends after a show, asking what this critic meant or why that critic had chosen
only a part of the show to write about, but never about her work in progress. He has even
been to one of her openings, where he walked around stiffly trying to blend in. But
Rebecca knows that he prefers the geometric carefulness of Klee, the light over Delft of
Vermeer, the intricate details of the masters, to what appears to him chaotic and random
in her work: those explosions of color and form leaping into one another, cascading,
linking, undoing, always in a state of becoming, even when finished.
"We're like two aliens who have landed on the same planet," Rebecca tells him. "We're
doomed," and her voice drops a theatrical octave on the word doomed, " to tell our story
in our own awkward ways." Rebecca admires the long sweep of his bridges, the fact he
has explained to her how a building she loves in New York that ends in a giant sweep of
glass is really a bridge on its side, anchored, as a bridge is, to the ground below. Alexander
admires the fact that she allows her joys and depressions to invade her own work, and in
fact, seems to revel in them when they are finished. But neither is able to completely
understand the other's way of seeing. Doing. Each is delineated by a structure that both
reveals and conceals its creator.
Even their tastes in music are dissimilar; the tapes in his car are standards: Frank Sinatra,
Nat "King" Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr. Her tastes are violently baroque; from Albinioni to
the Kronos Quartet. With lots of hot rock and roll in between. It depends on what she is
painting. The last series, "Winter in Virginia" was a melange of the Rolling Stones, Frank
Zappa, early Guess Who, and Yo Yo Ma. The paintings swirled up and out of the snow,
the mountains beyond in their stark and angular intrusions, and the trees, which were
sticks and lines and geometries of their own, impositions on a grey landscape. Now they
are being shown in a noted gallery in Washington in a joint show, and the opening is
tonight. Rebecca is headed, dutifully and excitedly, to Washington where Theo will meet
her.
"I wish you could come to the gallery tonight," she offers, as she finishes the remnants of
her sandwich. " I can promise bad wine and rubbery cheese, something that's really hard
to come by. Or maybe even good wine and good cheese. Depends on whose buying."
"Not with a house full of guests." He glances over at her, a rueful smile on his face.
"I'd so like Theo to meet you. I mean, you've talked on the phone and he probably knows
more about you then he does about my family. Well, in a way, you are family, you've been
around longer than my first marriage lasted." She laughs, softly and pushes her plate
aside, reaches for the coffee which has just arrived.
"Wasn't too happy a one, as I remember," he replies quickly, reaching for another piece of
bread. No butter.
" Towards the end it wasn't. But there were early parts that were good," Rebecca's
memory smooths its way toward the more pleasant parts of episodes. The rest can be
turned into art, or completely discarded, if it is too insubstantial to create the energy she
needs. "And I had loads of time to paint. Reuben was out of the house almost every
day."
She thinks back, about Alexander's own marriage. When she had met him, they both
were separated. They danced out of that emptiness into each other's lives, and within a
month, a chemistry had happened. She had not intended to fall in love with him,
regarding it at first as a transient affair, a lark. But he persisted, sending flowers, cajoling,
even surprising her once with an opal ring. Astounded, she had asked, "Why? His answer
amazed her, as he quoted something back she had once told him, "You said you like opals
because no two were alike and they give back the colors of the sun."
When Rueben and Rebecca divorced, Alexander would call, at least once a week, offering
his emotional support. By then, he had gone back to his wife. When she finally got
around to asking him why, he simply said, "It was too much trouble to divide everything
up. And the lawyers would have been the only ones who made out. Besides, it wouldn't
be much better if I lived alone." Since they slept separately, according to Alexander, and
he was never home, "In a sense I do live alone," he concluded.
Surprised by the intensity of her feeling for this man who was as unlike her as possible,
Rebecca found herself part of a passionate, if erratic joining of needs. Since they lived
hundreds of miles apart, it was never too often. Never too long. And there had never
been any thought of the two of them as long term partners. Lovers, yes. Friends, yes.
Years ago, Rebecca told Alexander, "If we lived together we'd kill each other."
"The question would be who'd attack first?" He had tried to make it a joke. He was lying
in bed, naked, next to her. His body, a deep tan, from the hours in the sun was a contrast
to her pale, translucent body. The sun was not to be trusted: she would do preliminary
sketches outside, but a huge brimmed hat always shaded her face and upper shoulders.
She took great care keeping her skin away from the treacherous rays that had burned her
once, unbearably, as a child. Nights of blistered agony. Only her hands showed her age:
they were becoming her mother's hands, small and lined. Her tiny, quick movements
were also her mother's, although her mother had been proper, like Alexander. She didn't
seem to have the terrible hungers that hunted Rebecca, even at night, when she would
wake up from tossing and turning in the teeth of a nightmare, then wander the dark house
for hours. Her mother slept soundly, unmindful of the child that wandered up and down
the hall. Rebecca, older, would come to think of her mother as if she were in a static,
ornate frame, enclosing a woman all in tones of pale aqua or sage green, edged with ecru,
like stiffened lace that has been exposed to the air.
Rebecca's fingers traced the area around his nipple, then slid along his chest, smooth and
hairless. His body was a memory her fingers could almost capture. She had never painted
him, although she was quite capable of doing realistic paintings. Instead, she would paint
what surrounded and held them: the long wooden bed with its spindled footboard; the
carelessly thrown comforter in its pale yellow and white pattern, and outside, the far blue
ridged mountains clustered on the horizon, the thin sticks of the winter trees as they
shaped the near landscape.
Already these images were coalescing in small colors and clumps. It was as if emptiness
were the truest landscape: the incidental people would be absent, but the emotion they
felt and left would permeate the colors and density of the images. Pale ivory moving to
darker tan, the linking of arms and legs, body moving with body until there was only a blur
of sensation, rawness, completion.
Sometimes I think I love you," she said to him, "Because I know it will keep you away.
You do hate that word." Then laughed delightedly, knowing it would upset him. "Stop
worrying," she said to his frowning face. "I fall in and out of love the way some people
get in and out of Fords."
"Jesus. " He shook his head from side to side. Then began laughing with her.
Rebecca was aware of the power of the word love. It kept him at an agreeable distance
that allowed her life to be her own. She didn't have to share it with him unless she
wanted to. She had made the mistake, once, less that a year after the affair began, of
telling him she loved him, and felt him actively recoil. "I can't" was all he could say.
"Can't what?" She asked.
"Just can't. I can't fall in love."
"Oh, good," her voice lilted up. "I suppose you can't catch a cold, either."
"I can catch a cold. But I get over it."
There was a long silence that filled, extended out beyond the room. The day was
dwindling. Already the horizon was tinted the palest shade of salmon, and the mountains
stood out in relief. The nearer trees were growing darker, holding the shadows of night.
Soon the only landscape outside would be totally dark; the room began to settle into the
glow of the bedside lamp.
"Come here," he lifted her head to his and kissed her. His hands, blunt and long, reached
for he and she responded, fully and without hesitation. He was a good lover, slow and
careful, and when he reached his climax she watched his face. He went immobile, then
feature by feature, his lips and eyes relaxed. "You've just killed me," he smiled up at her.
"Oh, you look pretty alive to me," and she nestled into the hollow of his arm, her hands,
at last still, small white birds coming to rest on a branch.
They fell asleep that way, curved into one another. When she woke in the morning, he
was up and getting dressed. He had an early morning plane to catch. As he moved about
the room, quickly and efficiently, she saw that he had already left her, moved into his
other life, the one in which she was a small compartment, set off, separate.
"Would you remove this plate?" He is asking the waitress. Snapped back into the present
time, Rebecca feels a tiny shudder run along her body. "Something wrong?" Alexander
has been watching her.
"Oh, a rat ran over my grave," she says offhandedly. "An old southern saying."
But she knows what has made her uneasy. She can feel, between them, the long threads
of the relationship, whatever it has been, whatever it is, like a cat's cradle, woven and
intricate, held by sheer will. Her own thin fingers are attempting to weave a pattern into
the future. One in which she will take the colors, all of the ivories and greys, singly, and
let them out, one at a time, to become string and cord and spider webs. As if she can
paint the future. Keep them both safe inside the intricate knots their lives have
interwoven.
"Do you want to take a room for a couple of hours and rest?" He asks her, looking
around the grand hotel's dining room, which holds only three couples beside them.
"I don't think so. Why? Are we going to have a quickie?" she teases him.
"No. I'd
rather sit here and play catch up." Then she looks at his face again. The line of hurt that
forms on his mouth before he obliterates it. She is sorry she has said anything. "Oh, Alex,
I was just teasing." What was he asking in his coded language? It isn't sex, she knows
that, for that decision has been determined years ago. She tries to gloss over the incident,
"Do I look that tired?"
"You look fine. I just know you were up early this morning and it's a long trip down." He
is fingering, straightening his tie, a small, nervous gesture. The occasion of meeting her.
He looks away.
For an hour or so, they continue to sit by the window as the sun tries to make its way
through the grey thickening clouds. They weave their own stories into each other's lives.
His wife is giving up smoking, and they are all staying out of her way; her husband is off
on yet another business trip, but will meet her this evening, and she is worried about his
health. So it begins with husbands and wives, children and work, and eventually makes
its way to the crucial question: health. Alexander has had his share of illness: a heart
attack, a prostatectomy, and a mini-stroke, all within the last four years.
Rebecca did not know about these at the time. Only later, when he was recovering did he
call and make light of each episode. Just as she has not told him of her own health
problems. The machinery of life is beginning to break down. They are both on
Coumadin; "Rat poison," Alexander complains. "I have to take the damned stuff every
night."
"So do I," she acknowledges. "But the alternative's worse. Hearing my heart go
thumpety-thump, thumpety-thump-thump." She is making light of the erratic heartbeat
she inherited from her mother. The fact the doctor, while saying that strokes are not
hereditary, is still taking no chances. She will be on this medication for the rest of her life.
"Probably," he frowns. "But hell, I take so damned many pills, we can't figure out how to
regulate them all."
She thinks of how he was in his prime: health conscious, never having salad dressing, little
meat, never a dessert, and running five miles each day. Has it all been for nothing?
"You're hardly an advertisement for good living," she jokes. "But then again, I did
everything wrong and I'm on as many pills as you. This is boring. Let's talk about books,
or sex, or anything we both know something about."
The topic changes, and they are back, safely, in the present. Enjoying each other. Now is
what matters; the closing of distance. Eventually, they both know, even these meetings
will come to an end. But not yet.
As he drives her back to the train station, she wonders, silently, if the offer of the room
had really been for him. Perhaps he is more tired than she cares to believe. Yes. That is
it. And she didn't see it or want to see it. But she says nothing. The illusion needs to be
maintained. They arrive at the station an hour early. Rebecca notices that the earlier
Metroliner has not come in, is running late. Perhaps she can catch the earlier one. She
makes a hasty decision. "Dear," she says, "I think I might catch this earlier one. Do you
mind? It will get me in before the afternoon rush."
"I don't mind staying here with you," he looks at her quizzically.
"I know. But you've got company. And I've taken up enough of your time. We'll see
each other in a couple of months. I'll be back here. Or you'll come see us. You know
you have a standing invitation from Theo and from me."
She changes her ticket and he walks her to the platform. Slowly and with infinite care,
she takes his face in her gloved hands, then kisses him deeply and long, closing the
agreeable distance. His hand closes about her waist, the other slides up under her coat,
cupping her breast. For a minute the two are locked inside a world they had once known,
a world where hands and lips form a language of familiar longing. Their bodies respond,
as they always have, one to the other.
As the train pulls up, she moves away.
"You're still a sexy lady," he says, softly.
"And you've always been a hell of a lover," she replies.
True or not, Rebecca feels young again, and Alexander has that familiar half-smile on his
face. He looks, to her, as he once did: strong and energetic, the lines erased in the cold
December afternoon. She gets on the train, puts her bags down and sees he is still looking
for her. She walks back to the vestibule, leans out, and kisses him again. "Take care of
yourself," she whispers.
"My best to Theo. He's a lucky man," Alexander replies.
"We're all lucky," she responds. "Dinner in April?"
"You pick the restaurant," he says.
"I will," she promises.
The train begins to slip out of the station: she watches him as long as she can, his grey
coat and hat, his face bundled against the cold wind. He stands, unmoving, as the distance
between them grows, until he is featureless, a thin stick of grey against the receding
station. For a moment, she wishes she could stop time, get off, run to him, but she is
moving, inevitably, toward another future. Then the train slides into a curve and he is
gone.