The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [23]
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She went out into the sunshine only to retreat from it. In this city, she had been told, there were shops that she should visit (the exchange rate was very good), but when she entered a famous department store, she was saddened by the sight of people buying things to make them happier, or thinner, or impervious to death. She fingered a silk scarf and ran her hand along the shoulder pads of suits, neatly aligned with spaces in between to indicate best quality. She admired a negligee and remembered nights with other negligees, and still the sadness, that cloud, was not swept away. She went up the escalator, up and up, preferring the concrete evidence of floors to the free flight of elevators. She saw a lemon sweater with delicate edging in Children’s and tried to think of anyone she knew with a baby, and then reflected that it would have to be a grandchild now. She stood at an entrance to a café, ravenous and impatient to be seated, but when she had been shown to her table, she felt the store to be suddenly airless. She could smell the chemicals in the clothes as she fled, wafting off Men’s Shirts in fumes. What had she done? She had raised a family. She would not be remembered. She was deteriorating daily. She could not let her body be seen. She would never sit unclothed upon a beach. Some things could not be gotten back. Most things could not be gotten back. Even her images of Vincent were fading: he was more substantial now in photographs than he was in her memories, like children are after they have grown.
She went outside, supremely conscious of herself as a middle-aged woman in a sensible raincoat despite the heat. Men, as if they had been programmed, did not turn their heads. Whereas Vincent, her admirer, her lover, had pronounced her beautiful even on the morning he had died.
—You’re beautiful, he’d said.
—I’m fifty. No one is beautiful at fifty.
—You surprise me. Of course you’re wrong.
Amazing how one yearned to be called beautiful, how much the single word could please. She saw a couple, in expensive clothing, arguing as they walked. He had blond hair and a beard and moved inches ahead of his wife, while she gestured angrily and said, I can’t believe you said that. He kept his hands in his pockets and didn’t answer her. He would win the argument, Linda thought, with silence.
She stood before a building of Gothic spires and darkened stones, though she supposed she would never truly be able to regard a Catholic church as just a building. Its authenticity beckoned between the excess of the smart boutiques on either side. (Yet weren’t the spires evidence of excess in themselves?) She entered a musty narthex and remembered that as a child she had refused to believe the scent a product simply of mold and dust; instead, she’d been convinced that it was the holy water in the font that had produced that somewhat frightening smell. She was momentarily embarrassed to interrupt a Mass in progress (she who had known Saturday church only for Confession), and she moved quietly to the pews, not genuflecting, not crossing herself, though her body wanted to from habit.
The interior cooled the perspiration at the back of her neck. She let her coat slide from her shoulders and was glad she did not have crinkly and noisy packages. It had not been so long that the words were unfamiliar to her, but still it had been years, and so she listened to the liturgy with small mental exclamations of surprise. And as she did, she had a startling thought: her own poetry mimicked those cadences! How had she not noticed this before? How had someone else, a critic perhaps, not have noticed this as well? The similar rhythms could not be missed. It felt a stunning discovery, like unearthing a letter that explained one’s childhood after all.
An older woman in front of her was crying copiously (what grief or sin had caused such tears?), but Linda could not see