He was staring at her, his smile almost goofy. In her evident fascination to him, she felt a stirring of the role she’d once played, the role of dangerous-crazy, the role of bluntly saying whatever came to mind.
“Did you live here with your second wife?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “I cannot believe I’m seeing you. How many years has it been?”
“More than thirty.”
“God!”
He came at her again, and she slipped away to the rear windows. He hastened to open a French door. “I’ll show you the garden. I love the privacy of it.”
In other words, he didn’t have an ocean view.
“I’ve got the gardening bug,” he said, following her outside. “It comes on like clockwork when you’re sixty. I always hated yard work, and now I can’t get enough of it.”
There was a large bed of roses. The sky was gray-blue in the haze, the shadows of the patio furniture indistinct. A bird was buzzing in the hedge, perhaps a wren. She could hear it very clearly.
“Your second wife,” she said. “Did she live here with you?”
He laughed. “I’d forgotten how direct you are.”
“Really? You forgot?”
It was an unfair thing to say. She’d forgotten, too, for many years.
“I want to hear about everything,” he said. “I want to hear about your kids, I want to hear about—your husband. Your life in Chicago. I want to hear about everything.”
“I’m just curious about your second wife. What was she like?”
His face soured. “It was painful. A mistake.”
“She left you?”
“Marion, it’s been thirty years. Can’t we just…” He gestured limply.
“All right. Show me your garden.”
The wren buzzed again in the bushes, as uninterested as she in Bradley’s gardening. While he held forth about aphids and pruning cycles, morning sun versus afternoon sun, the mysterious death of a lemon tree, her idealization of him entirely disintegrated. The stiffness of his joints, when he crouched to show her a virginal hydrangea blossom, foretokened a near future in which, unlike Jimmy, he wouldn’t have a loyal mate devoted to his care—not unless he married a third time. And why should she, who already had a husband, even younger than herself, do a blowsy old man such a favor? Why, indeed, if she wasn’t going to marry him, had she come to his house at all?
It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her through his plants, she guessed that he’d imagined the same thing. But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.
The wren in the bushes erupted in full song, liquid, melodious, achingly clear. It seemed to her that God, in His mercy, was speaking through His birds. Her eyes filled.
“Oh, Bradley,” she said. “Do you have any idea how much you meant to me?”
She meant something definitively past. In the present, he was holding some weeds that he’d pulled, perhaps unconsciously.
“You were good to me,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I put you through.”
He looked at the weeds in his hand, let them fall to the gravel path, and took her in his arms. The two of them fit together as they once had. His chest, against her cheek, exposed by his half-open blouse, was still nearly hairless. Her eyes moist with pity for him, pity that he’d gotten older, she held him tight. When he tried to raise her chin, she averted her face. “Just hold me.”
“You’re every bit as beautiful to me.”
“I haven’t eaten in three months.”
“Marion—Marion—”
He tried to kiss her.
“What I’m saying,” she said, extricating herself, “is I’m extremely hungry.”
“You want lunch.”
“Yes, please.”
The tacky Oriental screen in his dining room saddened her. The disclosure that he’d become a vegetarian and a teetotaler saddened her. The vitamin pills he swallowed with his iced tea saddened her. The hemisphere of egg salad, on a bed of lettuce, saddened her so much she couldn’t touch it. Her chest was obstructed with the wrongness of her being there at all. That she’d imagined fucking—because this was what it was, this was the truth, this was why she’d starved herself and invented a pretext for going to Los Angeles—seemed so senseless to her, she wished she’d never done it with Bradley. She wished she’d never done it with anyone. To be fifty years old in a convent, to rise every morning and hear the sweet birds, to devote herself to loving God, to have that have been her life, instead of this one …