The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [14]
The applause was that of an audience made good-humored by promise of release to beds and dinners. There were questions then, one oddly similar to the dyspeptic complaint of the woman who thought it opportunistic to use another’s life for purposes of art (why this should so rankle, Linda couldn’t imagine, since it was not her life in question). The line in the lobby to buy Linda’s books was no deeper than twenty, and she was, actually, grateful for the twenty. She contrived to linger longer than she might have, wondering if Thomas would appear after all for the dinner they’d felt was owed to them; but she did not stay long enough to feel foolish if he did eventually arrive. When she left the theater, she walked out into the night and was stopped by a streak of white along the roof of the sky, the low clouds having caught the light of the city.
Water’s silk, she thought. Trampled stem.
There was comfort in thinking the worst had happened. She was twenty-seven, washed high upon a tide line and left to wither in the sun or be swept away by another wave. She had been beached in Cambridge, where she walked the streets incessantly, her body all legs and arms inside her skirts and blouses, a miniskirt no more remarkable in that season and in that year than a dashiki or a pair of bell-bottoms. What was remarkable was her hair: wild and unruly and unstylish, though no particular style was called for then. It had taken on, in Africa, more color than before, so that it now ran a spectrum from mahogany to whitened pine. From the walking, or from lack of ceremony with food, she had grown lean and wiry as well. Life now was walking in the rain or in the sunshine with a freedom she had never known and did not want. Each morning, she slipped on her sandals and fingered her gold cross, preparing for days filled with guilt and recrimination, and having no wish to erase the event that had bequeathed this legacy. Sometimes, hollowed out, she leaned against a wall and put her head to the cool stones and gasped for breath, struck anew by the magnitude of the loss, the pain as sharp as if it had happened just the day before.
She did not know the city as it was supposed to be known. She did not live as expected. What was expected were lengthy walks among the sycamores, not forgetting that this was hallowed ground. What was expected were conversations that lasted long into the night, watched over by the ghosts of pale scholars and exasperating pedants. In flagrant violation of entitlement, she returned to cheerless rooms in which there was a bed she could scarcely bear to look at. For her, Cambridge was remembering that sordid kissing behind an office door had once been elevated to the status of a sacrament (she who had now been excommunicated); or it was the bitter thrill of a sunset that turned the bricks and stones of the city, and even the faces on the streets (those entitled scholars), a rosy-salmon color that seemed the very hue of love itself. Cambridge was sitting in a bathtub in a rented apartment and making experimental slits along the wrists, slits immediately regretted for the fuss they caused in Emergency. (And mortifying that she should be just one of so many who’d had to resort.) Her skirts hung from her hipbones like wash on the line, and in September, when the weather turned colder, she wore