The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [107]
In a booth across the room, Linda recognizes Donny T. from the night before. Sipping a Coke, eyeing her carefully. Will he hate her for having proven him wrong? Yes, she thinks, he will.
A table of girls, in the center of the room, also watch her. Then they turn and make comments to their companions that are clearly about Linda. She notes their perfect curls, their skirts, the nylons running into the loafers.
When they leave the diner, Donny T. is sitting in the back of a powder-blue Bonneville counting money.
“That’s your friend,” Linda says to Thomas.
“Yeah,” Thomas says. “I guess.”
“Why is he counting money?”
“You don’t want to know.”
______
Thomas drives to the beach and parks behind a deserted cottage. He reaches into the backseat for a book that says, simply, Keats. Linda decides she won’t pretend to like the specific poems if in fact she doesn’t. Thomas reads to her in a voice oddly rich and gravelly.
“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain . . .”
As he reads, she gazes at the dirt drive that leads through the dune grass to the back of a shingled gray-blue cottage. It is small, two stories tall, and has a wraparound porch of white trim. There is a hammock and a screen door, and all the shades are drawn. The cottage has a kind of poverty-stricken charm and makes her think of the Great Depression, about which they are reading in history. Clay pots with withered geraniums stand by the back door, and roses have turned to beach plums beneath a window.
She can see, if she tries, a dark-haired woman in a dress and an apron. A small girl with blond hair playing on the porch. A man in a white shirt with suspenders. A boater on his head. Is she confusing her father with Eugene O’Neill?
“Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time . . .”
To one side of the house, two posts have been hammered into the ground. Between the posts runs a length of clothesline with wooden pins on it that someone has forgotten to put away.
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die
To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .”
“She was a whore, a prostitute,” Linda is saying.
“She repented her past,” Thomas argues. “She’s Christ’s symbol of penance.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’ve been reading.”
“I hardly know anything about her,” Linda says, which isn’t strictly true.
“She was present at the Crucifixion,” he says. “She was the first to bring word of the Resurrection to the Disciples.”
Linda shrugs. “If you say so.”
______
The papers about Keats and Wordsworth have been written. The amusement park has closed. A hurricane has blown in and out, washing cottages on the beach into the sea. Thomas has read Prufrock and passages from Death of a Salesman to Linda in the Skylark. The aunt has relented and bought Linda an outfit on discount at the store where she works. Linda, in response to a vague reference to someone else’s hair by Thomas, has stopped teasing her own. They are sitting on a hill overlooking the Atlantic.
“We’ve known each other exactly a month,” Thomas says.
“Really?” she asks, though she has had precisely the same thought earlier in the day.
“I feel like I’ve known you all my life,” he says.
She is silent. The light on the water is extraordinary — as good as any of the poets Thomas often reads to her: Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell.
“Do you sometimes think that, too?” he asks.
The straining toward the light on the water feels instinctive. It encompasses the specific moving of the waves, the boy beside her in his parka and loafers, the steep slope of mown grass down to the rocks, and the expanse, the endless view, Boston crisply to the north, a lone fisherman, late to his pots, to the east.
“Yes,” she says.
She wants to be able to paint the light on the water, or to put it into words at the very least. Capture it, hold it in her hands. Bottle it.
“You’re crying,” Thomas says.
She wants to deny that she is crying, but cannot. She