You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [26]
“I can’t do this,” Ben had whispered as Owen rested his head against Ben’s chest.
“Smells wonderful, whatever it is you’re cooking,” Mrs. Giles said. Hillary nodded.
For that moment before Ben had spoken, as he lay in his arms, Owen had believed in the fantasy of love as the creator, your life clay in its hands.
“I should check the food. Owen, why don’t you show Mrs. Giles a bit of the garden. She hasn’t seen the delphiniums, I’m sure.”
“Of course,” he said, looking into his sister’s taut smile.
“I suspect I’ve mistreated my garden,” Mrs. Giles said as the two of them reached the bottom of the lawn. “John it was who had the green thumb. I’m just a bungler really.”
The skin of her hands was mottled and soft looking. The gold ring she still wore hung rather loosely on her finger.
“I think Ben and I might have a weekend away,” Hillary had said one evening in the front room as they watched the evening news. The two of them had only met a few weeks before. An accident really, Hillary in the city on an errand, coming to drop something by for Owen, deciding at the last minute to join them for dinner. When the office phoned the restaurant in the middle of the meal, Owen had to leave the two of them alone.
A weekend at the cottage on Lake Windermere is what they had.
Owen had always thought of himself as a rational person, capable of perspective. As a school boy, he’d read Othello. O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on. What paltry aid literature turned out to be when the feelings were yours and not others’.
“Funny, I miss him in the most peculiar ways,” Mrs. Giles said. “We’d always kept the chutney over the stove, and as we only ever had it in the evenings, he’d be there to fetch it. Ridiculous to use a stepladder for the chutney, if you think about it. Does just as well on the counter.”
“Yes,” Owen said.
They stared together into the blue flowers.
“I expect it won’t be long before I join him,” she said.
“No, you’re in fine shape, surely.”
“Doesn’t upset me—the idea. It used to, but not anymore. I’ve been very lucky. He was a good person.”
Owen could hear the telephone ringing in the house.
“Could you get that?” Hillary called from the kitchen.
“I apologize, I—”
“No, please, carry on,” Mrs. Giles said.
He left her there and passing through the dining room, crossed the hall to the phone.
“Owen, it’s Ben Hansen.”
“Ben.”
“Look, I feel terrible about this, but I’m not going to be able to make it out there tonight.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, the meetings are running late here and I’m supposed to give this talk, it’s all been pushed back. Horrible timing, I’m afraid.”
Owen could hear his sister closing the oven door, the water coming on in the sink.
“I’m sorry about that. It’s a great pity. I know Hillary was looking forward to seeing you. We both were.”
“I was looking forward to it myself, I really was,” he said. “Have you been well?”
Owen laughed. “Me? Yes. I’ve been fine. Everything’s very much the same on this end . . . It does seem awfully long ago you were here.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Standing there in the hall, Owen felt a sudden longing. He imagined Ben as he often saw him in his mind’s eye, tall and thin, half a step ahead on the Battersea Bridge, hands scrunched into his pockets. And he pictured the men he sometimes saw holding hands in Soho or Piccadilly. In June, perhaps on this very Sunday, thousands marched. He wanted to tell Ben what it felt like to pass two men on the street like that, how he had always in a sense been afraid.
“You’re still with the firm?”
“Yes,” Owen said. “That’s right.” And he wanted to say how frightened he’d been watching his friend Saul’s ravaged body die, how the specter of disease had made him timid. How he, Ben, had seemed a refuge.