The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [16]
On a day in September — there had been months of walking — Linda entered a café in which wooden tables had been set perpendicular to a counter with a glass encasement of sweets. She ordered coffee and a peanut-butter cookie, lunch having along the way been missed, and brought them to her table, where she had laid out grids for lesson plans. It eased the tedium of the job to work in a café, and for a time she lost herself in the explicated themes of Ethan Frome and The Glass Menagerie. Outside, the sun had warmed the brick but not the people who practiced hunching into their jackets in anticipation of winter. A commotion in a corner claimed her attention, willing to be claimed. A woman with two poodles had set them improbably in booster seats on chairs and was feeding them bits of expensive macaroons from the glass case. She spoke to them as a mother might to toddlers, wiping snouts with a lacy handkerchief and gently scolding one for being greedy.
Linda watched the scene, incredulous.
—She’ll keep their ashes in the cookie jar, a voice behind her said.
Linda turned to see a man with vivid features and eyebrows as thick as pelts. A wry expression lay easily on his face. A cosmic laugh — unfettered, releasing months of grim remorse — bubbled up inside her and broke the surface. A sheaf of papers fell off the table, and she tried to catch them. She put a hand to her chest, helpless.
There were introductions, the cosmic laugh petering out in small bursts she could not control. The laughing itself was contagious, and the man chuckled from time to time. She put a hand to her mouth, and the girl behind the counter said, What’s so funny? One of them moved to the other’s table (later they would argue who), and Vincent said, apropos the cosmic laugh, You needed that.
He had wide brown eyes and smooth skin tanned from some exercise or trip away. His hair was glossy, like that of an animal with a healthy coat.
Turning, her foot bumped the table pedestal, causing coffee to spill onto his polished shoe. She bent to wipe it off with a paper napkin.
—Careful, he said to her. I’m easily aroused.
She looked up and smiled. As easily as that. And felt another tide come for her at last.
* * *
—He was good to you?
—Very. I can’t imagine what would have happened, what I’d have become.
—Because of me.
—Well. Yes. And me as well.
—I used to live in Cambridge, Thomas said. On Irving Street. Years later, though.
—I didn’t know that.
She wondered how often she had walked along that street, which large house he’d lived in. She was leaning against the ferry’s bulkhead, watching the northern city slip away. Wind whipped her hair, which stung her face, and she turned her head to free it. She wore, as she did almost every day that didn’t require something more inspired, a white shirt and a pair of jeans. And today the raincoat, buttoned against the breezes. Thomas still had on his navy blazer, as if he’d slept in it. He had called before she was even awake, afraid, he’d said, that she’d go off for the day and he wouldn’t be able to find her. Would she like to take a ferry ride to an island in the lake? Yes, she said, she thought she would. She boldly asked him why he hadn’t come to her reading.
—It was unnerving seeing you sitting there at mine. It’s always harder when someone you know is in the audience. I thought to spare you that.
And in this, he was, of course, correct.
—Your work, she said on the ferry. I don’t know when I’ve ever heard . . .
Thomas wore an expression she herself had sometimes felt: pleasure imperfectly masked by modesty.
—Your work will be taught in classrooms in a decade, she added. Maybe less. I’m sure of it.
She turned away, letting him have the pleasure without