The weight of water - Anita Shreve [12]
“I love you,” he said, getting up from the desk.
“You couldn’t possibly,” I said, alarmed. I looked over to the desk. I saw white-lined papers covered with black ink. Thomas’s fingers were stained, and there was ink on his shirt.
“Oh but I do,” he said.
“You’ve been working,” I said, going to him. He embraced me, and I inhaled in his shirt what had become, in twenty-four hours, a familiar scent.
“It’s the beginning of something,” he said into my hair.
In the restaurant in Portsmouth, Thomas turns slightly and sees that I am watching him.
He reaches across the table. “Jean, do you want a walk?” he asks. “We’ll go up to the bookstore. Maybe we’ll find some old photographs of Smuttynose.”
“Yes, that’s right,” says Adaline. “You and Thomas go off for a bit on your own. Rich and I will take care of Billie.”
Rich stands. My daughter’s face is serious, as if she were trying to look older than she is — perhaps eight or nine. I watch her smooth her T-shirt over her shorts.
“Fat repose” Thomas says. He speaks distinctly, but there is, in his voice, which is somewhat louder than it was, the barest suggestion of excitement.
At the next table, a couple turns to look at us.
Adaline reaches around for a sweater she has left on the back of the chair. “Spaded breasts” she says.
She stands up, but Thomas cannot leave it there.
“Twice-bloated oaths on lovers’breath”
Adaline looks at Thomas, then at me. “The hour confesses” she says quietly. “And leaves him spinning.”
Thomas and I walk up Ceres Street to the center of the town. Thomas seems anxious and distracted. We pass boutiques, a microbrewery, a home-furnishings store. In a storefront window, I see my reflection, and it occurs to me there are no mirrors on the boat. I am surprised to see a woman who looks older than I think she ought to. Her mouth is pressed into a narrow line, as if she were trying to remember something important. Her shoulders are hunched, or perhaps that is simply the way she is standing, with her hands in the pockets of her jeans. She has on a faded navy sweatshirt, and she has a camera bag on her arm. She might be a tourist. She wears her hair short, hastily pushed back behind her ears. On the top of her hair, which is an indeterminate and faded chestnut, there is a thin weave of dew. She wears dark glasses, and I cannot see her eyes.
I am not, on the afternoon we walk up Ceres Street, or even on the evening I first meet Thomas, a beautiful woman. I was never a pretty girl. As my mother once said, in a moment of honesty that I used to resent but now appreciate, my individual features were each lovely or passable in themselves, but somehow the parts had never formed an absolutely coherent whole. There is something mildly disturbing, I know, in the length of my face, the width of my brow. It is not an unpleasant face, but it is not a face that strangers turn to, have to see. As Thomas’s is, for instance. Or Adaline’s.
Thomas and I do not touch as we walk up Ceres Street. “She seems a pleasant person,” I say.
“Yes, she does.”
“Billie likes her.”
“And Rich.”
“He’s good with kids.”
“Excellent.”
“She has a beautiful voice. It’s interesting that she wears a cross.”
“Her daughter gave it to her.”
At the top of the street, Thomas pauses for a moment and says, “We could go back.” I misunderstand him and say, looking at my watch, “We’ve only been gone ten minutes.”
But he means, We could go home.
There are tourists on the street, people peering into shop windows. We reach the center of town, the market square, a church, a tiny mall with benches. We round the corner and come upon the facade of a tall, brick building. The windows are long and arched, multipaned. There is a discreet card in the