The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [105]
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Linda leaves Thomas at the bottom of her street.
“I’m all right now,” she says and detaches herself from his arm.
“Can I call you tomorrow?” he asks.
She thinks a moment. No one has yet called her at the apartment.
“It would be better if I met you,” she says.
“Here?” he asks. “At noon?”
“I’ll try.”
She runs up the street, though her limbs are shivering and stiff, and she knows she looks ungainly. As she turns the corner, she cannot resist glancing back. He is standing where she left him. He raises a hand and waves.
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Her aunt is in the hallway when she enters the apartment. The aunt’s hair is rolled in pin curls and is secured with a hairnet: little coils of gold on silver stems behind a wire fence. Normally, her hair is frizzy, and sometimes Linda can see her scalp. The aunt has a pronounced widow’s peak that she tries to hide with bangs.
The aunt has on a pink seersucker bathrobe and flannel pajamas with teapots on them. The slippers, once pink, are worn beige. The aunt’s eyebrows are unkempt, but she has traces of maroon lipstick on her mouth, as though she were ambivalent about her vanity.
They stand on separate sides of a fault, each wanting something from the other.
“Where have you been?” the aunt asks.
“I fell in,” Linda says, walking past her.
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Thomas picks Linda up the next day in a white Buick Skylark convertible with leather trim the color of her aunt’s lipstick. Linda is wearing dungarees in defiance of the Sunday, even though she has dutifully gone to church with the cousins. Thomas has on the same jacket he wore the night before, but good trousers, like a boy would wear to school.
“I didn’t bring a scarf,” she says. “I didn’t know it would be a convertible.”
“Do you want to go back and get one?”
“No,” she says.
They sit in the car for a moment before he starts the engine. There seems to be something each wants to say, though for a time neither of them speaks.
“Did you get yelled at?” Thomas asks finally.
“I got looked askance at,” she says, and he smiles.
“Do you want to go for a drive?”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Just a drive.”
“Sure,” she says.
In the car, there is an ocean of space between Thomas and Linda. She studies the chrome dashboard, the plugs that say Light and Wiper and Lighter and Accessory. What exactly will the Accessory be? she wonders. Thomas turns on the radio, and an energetic patter issues forth. It is all wrong for them, as though Ricky Nelson had wandered into a chamber orchestra. Thomas switches it off at once.
“Sometimes when I drive,” he says, “I don’t play the radio. I need time to think.”
“So do I,” she says. “Need time to think, I mean.”
She sits with her hands in the pockets of her peacoat. If she hadn’t worn a coat, she would sit on her hands.
She likes the open air of the convertible, even though her hair whips into her eyes, and she knows it will be snarled and stringy when he stops the car. When the aunt’s boyfriend was around and there was actually a car, she and her cousins were routinely packed into a backseat meant for three. On rainy days, the windows were shut tight, and her aunt smoked. Just thinking about it now gives Linda a headache.
Linda notes, as Thomas is driving, that the color of the water and the sky have intensified since the day before; the sun glints painfully from the sea. It is a fabulous piece of jewelry with a million diamonds.
Diplomatically, Thomas moves away from the neighborhood where Linda lives. Diplomatically, he does not point out his own house on Allerton Hill.
“Did you go away?” he asks as they make a turn onto Samoset.
“Yes.”
“Did you have a baby?”
She is stunned by the boy’s boldness, but exhilarated nonetheless. She might have spent the entire year without a single direct question, learned to live with sniggered looks and aspersions.
“No,” she says.
“I don’t care about that,” he says. He amends himself. “Well, I care, because it happened to you, but it wouldn’t have made me like you any less. I don’t care about reputation.”
“Why do you like me?” she asks.
“I liked