But who ever really knows the experience of another?
When William met me at LaGuardia Airport I saw him from afar and I saw that his khakis were too short. A little bit this broke my heart. He wore loafers, and his socks were blue, not a dark blue and not a light blue, and they showed a few inches until his khakis covered them. Oh William, I thought. Oh William!
He looked exhausted; there were darkish circles around his eyes. He said “Hi Button” and sat down next to me. He had with him a small suitcase with wheels, it was dark brown, two-toned. I understood that it was expensive. He looked at my wheelie suitcase, which was a blazing violet color, and he said, “Really?”
“Oh stop,” I said. “It never gets lost.”
“I should think it wouldn’t.”
Then he crossed his arms and looked around and said, “You ever been to Maine, Lucy?” A baby was crawling across the carpeted floor with its mother behind it; she was wearing a Snugli on her front and she smiled at us, and I saw William smile back at her.
“Once,” I said, and he said, “Yeah?”
“I was invited to that college in Shirley Falls to give a reading. I thought I told you about that.”
“Tell me again,” he said. His eyes were moving around the place.
“I don’t know which book it was, my third? Anyway, the chairman of the English Department invited me up—he was a short-story writer—and I spent the whole afternoon with him, listening about his mother, who was getting old, and all the trouble he was having about that— And as we walked around the campus, I kind of noticed that there were no ads for me that night at all that I could see. So he took me to dinner and then we went to this room with about a hundred chairs set up. And not one person showed up.”
William looked at me now. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, absolutely seriously. Only time that ever happened. So we waited about half an hour, then I went off to my room and he emailed me and said he was so sorry, he had no idea why that had happened. And it didn’t even occur to me until later that at least his students should have shown up. He must not even have told them, I think. I emailed him back not to worry about it.”
“Jesus,” William said, “what was his problem?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.” William looked at me with almost anger in his face. “He was jealous of you, Lucy.”
“Really?” I said. “I don’t know about that.”
William sighed and then shook his head slowly, looking again at the baby crawling across the floor. “No, you wouldn’t know, Lucy,” he said. He tugged on his mustache. “Did they pay you?”
“Oh, sure. I mean I can’t remember. You know, something small, I’m sure.”
“Jesus, Lucy,” William said.
* * *
We arrived in Bangor about fifteen minutes before ten o’clock at night; there had been only a handful of people on the small plane. Walking through the Bangor airport—it was not well lit, and it was kind of eerie—I noticed many signs welcoming veterans home, and William said he had researched this, it had been an old Air Force base, and the runway was very long. It was the place that many people in the armed services overseas first stopped when they came back from wherever they had been. Or left from: It was their final place to leave from in the United States. He said that during the Iraq War this had been the place that so many had come into on their way home, and that the people of Maine had made a point of greeting them. There was a hallway that we did not walk down, but it said in large letters GREETERS HALL. It was almost like a museum in some way. And it made me think of my father. My father had come back from Germany on a ship to New York, and he had taken the train all the way back to Illinois. But was it possible that William’s father had gotten to Maine this way; had he been flown in here as a POW?
“No,” William said, “he took a train from Boston, after a boat from Europe, I’ve been reading about this stuff.”
* * *
—
There was a strange sense of something surreal.
* * *
—
And then I saw a man who （I think） was going to spend the night at the airport; he was not old or young, and he had with him many large white plastic bags, not suitcases, and he was alone in a section of the airport where the lights were turned down very low. I thought he saw me looking at him; he stopped eating from a big bag of potato chips he had on his lap.
* * *
—
Our hotel was connected to the airport: You walked through a walkway, and the lobby of the hotel—which did not seem like a lobby although there were two chairs—was right there. William checked us in—separate rooms—and I turned and looked at a bar immediately behind us. Men and a few women were seated on tall wooden chairs, all watching the television that hung above them. I stepped away from William and I asked the woman behind the bar if I could please have a glass of chardonnay. “Bar’s closed,” she said without looking up. “Closes at ten.” She was holding glasses under a stream of water from a sink.