Her forehead creased with consternation. “Being bound to people is the heart of life. My children have lit me up, lit up the whole world. It’s love like you can’t imagine.”
He smiled ruefully. “Be that as it may, I don’t know if they’re in the cards for me, either.”
She slumped back into the love seat, exhaling. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what good there is in my saying something like that. But you’ll have them. I’m sure you will.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I think I’d like them. But I also think Marian would say she knows her own mind. She wants a different kind of life.”
“I shouldn’t have judged. It’s no business of mine how your sister lives. Or how you live.”
This last remark stung. He said, “Do you know what this reminds me of?”
“No, what?”
“When we walked around the lake together, when we first met, and you extracted my whole life from me, and I didn’t realize until later that I hadn’t asked you anything about yours.”
“I’d forgotten all about that.” He must have looked crestfallen because she added hastily, “Not about that day or the walk. I’d forgotten you were so worried about having talked too much. But it was the same then as now—your life is more interesting than mine.”
“No—”
“Oh—there’s a bulletin. Will you turn it up?”
Jamie reached for the volume knob. Japan had declared war on the United States and Great Britain.
After a minute, she said, “That’s enough.”
He turned down the volume again. Tentatively, he said, “I wish there was a way I could just convey everything to you in a flash, have you know it all without having to tell you.”
“I don’t. I like the way you have to find out about someone little by little.”
“But we don’t have time. And I don’t trust myself to explain things right.”
She was looking at him keenly. “I’ve always liked how honest you are. That’s all you have to be, to explain things.”
“I struggle with the same thing in my paintings. Everything I want to paint is too big, and so I’ve started to think what I really want to paint is the too-bigness. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, I think so. It’s there in the beach painting.”
“I think I’m drawn to impossibility.” Cautiously, slowly, he reached out and took her left hand in both of his. She let him.
“Yes,” she said quietly after a pause. “Impossible.”
“Your life went on as though I were never in it.”
“Only outwardly.”
“Isn’t that what matters?”
“I don’t think so. But I’m just— I have an ordinary life, Jamie. You wanted me to rebel, and I couldn’t. It’s not my way. Sometimes I wish I were less conventional, but the simplest explanation is I don’t have the guts.” She gripped his hand more tightly. “I’ve always only wished you the best. I want you to be happy.”
“I don’t like that, how you say that.”
“You don’t want me to wish you happiness?”
“No, it’s that there’s something final about it.” He released her hand, hunched forward. “Was our summer just a sweet little rite of passage for you?”
A soprano’s aria warbled quietly from the radio while Sarah thought for a long time, staring out at the lawn. “No,” she said finally, decisively. “But, Jamie, shouldn’t it have been? Wouldn’t it be better if we decided now, together, that it was? I honestly don’t know why it wasn’t, why I haven’t completely let go of it. But I have a life. I have children. Even if my feelings about you are complicated, what possible difference could it make?” Her gaze blazed on him like a searchlight, and he felt exposed, as though she could see his most pathetic, persistent hopes and desires. She said firmly, “No good can come from us going to bed.”
The mention of sex, discouraging though she meant it to be, aroused him. Trying to sound jokey but fooling neither of them, he said, “You don’t think it could be worthwhile in itself?”
She remained outwardly composed, but he had the sense she was struggling. There was so much he didn’t know about her; he couldn’t guess what all she was weighing in the balance. Finally, with resolve, she said, “I won’t ever leave Lewis. I love him—it’s important you understand that. So I don’t see the point. It would just bring us both pain.”