The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [21]
She touched him then, on the arm. It would have been inhuman not to. There are just no words, Thomas.
—No, there aren’t, and isn’t that ironic? We who thought we had all the words. Jean, with her camera, has made us irrelevant.
A motorboat with a young blond woman at the helm sped around the corner. The girl seemed exuberant with her own beauty and the first warm day of the season.
Thomas bent his head slightly forward. Scratch up near my shoulders, he said.
* * *
On the way to the ferry, Thomas, who was either exceptionally hot or desiring to be cleansed, went into the water. Linda sat on a hillock and watched the way he dove in and stood, staggering with the shock of the cold, shaking his head like a dog, hiking his boxers up to his waist. They hung low on his thighs when he came out and molded his genitals, which had grown longer in the intervening years.
—It’s like electric shock therapy, Thomas reported as he used his shirt to dry himself.
He shivered on the ferry, despite his jacket. Later they would learn that the lake was polluted. He held his shirt in a ball. She stood near to him to warm him, but the shiver came from deep within and would not be appeased. He seemed oblivious to curious stares, in the boat and at the entrance to the hotel, his hair dried into a comical sculpture by the water and the ferry breezes. He got out at her floor and accompanied her to her room, looking for all the world like a refugee from a disaster (and of course he was, she thought). He stood at the door and finger-combed his hair.
—I won’t ask you in. She meant it, actually, as a kind of joke, as if they had been on a date. But Thomas, as ever, took her seriously.
—What’s the harm?
—What’s the harm? Linda asked, incredulous.
—Antecedents, he said. Does this exist on its own, or because of what went before?
—Because of what went before, I should think.
He studied her. What large drama, do you suppose, will part us this time?
—There doesn’t have to be any drama, Thomas. We’re too old for drama.
He turned to leave, then stopped. Magdalene, he said.
The name, the old name. Nearly an endearment.
Against her better judgment, she looked for evidence of others before her and found it in a single hair, disturbingly pubic, on the white tile beneath the sink. She was farsighted now and could blur her reflection in the mirror, and sometimes she did that if she was in a hurry. But today, she wanted sight: dispassionate and objective.
She unbuttoned her blouse in the way that a woman who is not being watched will do, unzipped her jeans, and kicked them from her feet. The underwear, unmatched, could stay. She put her hands on her hips and looked into the mirror. She did not like what she saw.
She was what was never possible: a fifty-two-year-old woman with thinning blond hair; no, not even that, not blond, but rather no color, a gray if you will, closer to invisible. Invisible at the roots and spreading out to a dirty gold that did not exist in nature. She examined squarish hips and a thickening waist that just a year ago she’d been convinced was only temporary. She’d read about girls who thought they were too fat when in fact they were frighteningly thin (well, Maria’s friend Charlotte had been one); whereas she, Linda, thought she was in general a thin woman when in reality she was overweight. And of course there were her hands, the skin long roughened, announcing her age and then some.
She turned abruptly away from the mirror, a peevish physician annoyed by his patient. She took the terrycloth hotel robe from its hook and meant to put it on, but instead she froze with it in her arms.
Was she mad? What had she been thinking? No one would see her body. So why the lover’s examination?
She tried her daughter again, this time on Maria’s cell phone. Though Linda had offered to pay for the calls, Maria had refused, her independence, even in the face of impressive student loans, no surprise. Whereas Marcus. Marcus needed to be taken care of, had developed