The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [15]
She was living then on Fairfield Street, in a set of rooms that had a bathtub on a platform in the kitchen (majestic locus for sacrificial rites). She had matching china and expensive crystal from another lethal ritual and the subsequent marriage that had corroded from the inside out, like a shiny car with rust beneath the paint job. (Though she had, in the end, crashed that car head-on.) These she had placed on a shelf in a cupboard in the kitchen, where they gathered dust, mute testament to expectation. She ate, when she ate at all, on a Melamine plate she’d bought at Lechmere’s, a plate that held no associations, a dish no lover or husband had ever touched. In the mornings, when school started up again, Linda stood by the door and drank an Instant Breakfast, pleased that so much could be taken care of in so little time. She went out in her miniskirts and boots (staggering now to think of wearing such clothing in front of seventeen-year-old boys), and got into her car and merged into traffic going north to a high school in a suburban town. Within the privacy that only the interior of a car can provide, she cried over her persistent and seemingly inexhaustible loss and often had to fix her face in the rearview mirror before she went into the classroom.
On the holidays, she went to Hull as if threading a minefield — fearful at the entry, mute with gratitude when the fraught journey had been negotiated. And occasionally she was not successful. Against all better judgment, she would sometimes drive by Thomas’s family home, trying to imagine which car was his (the VW? the Fiat? the Volvo?); for he, like her, was necessarily drawn back for the holidays. But as much as she feared or hoped for it, they never met by accident, not even at the diner or the gas station. (To think of how she would tremble just to turn the corner into the parking lot of the diner, hardly able to breathe for wondering.)
To ward off men, who seemed ever-present, even on that mostly female faculty, she created the fiction that she was married (and for the convenience of the lie, to a law student who was hardly ever home). This was a life she could well imagine and could recreate in detail at a moment’s notice: the phantom (once real enough) husband returning home after a grueling stint in moot court; a blow-out party at the weekend, during which her husband had become deathly ill from bourbon and cider; a gift needed for a professor’s wedding. Cambridge was leaving these lies behind and arriving home to quiet rooms, where there was time and space to remember, the space and time seemingly as necessary as the Valium she kept on hand in the medicine cabinet (the Valium an unexpected boon in the aftermath of Emergency).
She was a decent teacher, and sometimes others said so (I’m told your classes are; You are my favorite), but it seemed a shriveled life all the same. She supposed there were events that impinged upon her consciousness. Later she would recall that she had been a Marxist for a month and that there had been a man, political and insistent, to whom she had made love in a basement room and with whom she’d developed a taste for marijuana that hadn’t gone away until Maria. And for a time she would own a remarkable set of oil paints in a wooden box, a reminder of an attempt to lose herself on canvas. Oddly, she did not put pen to paper, afraid of conflagration, as if the paper itself were flinty.
But mostly she walked alone, down Massachusetts Avenue and onto Irving Street. Along the Charles and to Porter Square. On Saturdays, she walked to Somerville or to the Fenway. She had no destination, the walking destination itself, and sometimes, when it was very bad, she counted rhythmically, the closest she ever came to chanting a mantra. What impressed her most was the endurance of the suffering: it seemed unlikely that one should mind another’s loss so much. It was shameful to go on at length, she knew, even in the privacy of one’s mind, about personal disasters when