You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [23]
“The wine, Owen? Aren’t you going to open it?”
But then he’d met Ben, and things had changed.
“Sorry?” he said.
“The wine. It’s on the sideboard.”
Hillary held a glass to the light, checking for smudges.
“We’re certainly pulling out all the stops,” he said. When she made no reply, he continued. “Believe it or not, I commented on your dress earlier but you didn’t hear me. I haven’t seen that one before. Have you been shopping?”
“You didn’t comment on my dress, Owen. You said I was awfully dressed up.”
She looked out the window over the kitchen sink. They both watched another sheet of the Sunday Times tumble gently into the flower beds.
“I thought we’d have our salad outside,” she said. “Ben might like to see the garden.”
STANDING IN STOCKINGED feet before the open door of his wardrobe, Owen pushed aside the row of gray pinstripe suits, looking for a green summer blazer he remembered wearing the year before to a garden party the firm had given out in Surrey. Brushing the dust off the shoulders, he put it on over his white shirt.
On the shelf above the suits was a boater hat—he couldn’t imagine what he’d worn that to—and just behind it, barely visible, the shoe box. He paused a moment, staring at the corner of it. Ben would be here in a few hours. His first visit since he’d gone back to the States, fifteen years ago. Why now? Owen had asked himself all weekend.
“I’ll be over for a conference,” he’d said when Owen took the call Thursday. And yet he could so easily have come and gone from London with no word to them.
As he had each of the last three nights, Owen reached behind the boater hat and took down the shoe box. Fourteen years it had sat there untouched. Now the dust on the lid showed his fingerprints again. He listened for the sound of Hillary downstairs, then crossed the room and closed the door. Perching on the edge of the side chair, he removed the lid of the box and unfolded the last of the four letters.
November 4, 1985
Boston
Dear Hillary,
It’s awkward writing when I haven’t heard back from my other letters. I suppose I’ll get the message soon enough. Right now I’m still bewildered. My only thought is you’ve decided my leaving was my own choice and not the Globe’s, that I have no intention of trying to get back there. I’m not sure what more I can say to convince you. I’ve told my editor I’ll give him six months to get me reassigned to London or I’m quitting. I’ve been talking to people there, trying to see what might be available. It would be a lot easier if I thought this all had some purpose.
I know things got started late, that we didn’t have much time before I had to leave. Owen kept you a secret for too long. But for me those were great months. I feel like a romantic clown to say I live on the memory of them, but it’s not altogether untrue. I can’t settle here again. I feel like I’m on a leash, everything so depressingly familiar. I’m tempted to write out all my recollections of our weekends, our evenings together, just so I can linger on them a bit more, but that would be maudlin, and you wouldn’t like that—which is, of course, why I love you.
If this is over, for heaven’s sake just let me know.
Yours,
Ben
Owen slid the paper back into its envelope and replaced it in the box on his lap. Dust floated in the light by the window. The rectangle of sun on the floor crept over the red pile carpet.
For most of his life he’d hated Sundays. Their gnawing stillness, the faint memories of religion. A day loneliness won. But in these last years that quiet little dread had faded. He and Hillary made a point of cooking a big breakfast and taking a walk on the common afterward. In winter they read the paper together by the fire in the front room and often walked into the town for a film in the evening. In spring and summer they spent hours in the garden. They weren’t unhappy people.
From the