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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] grunts, strenuous and lengthy. The elderly couple were rigid with embarrassment. Linda felt for them and wished a clever remark would come to her to put the couple at ease, but instead, their embarrassment became infectious. Moving toward the stairs, she thought, What reservoir of guilt has Thomas tapped? 70 R incent s apartment in Boston was unlike anything she had ever seen before unadorned and architectural, like a Vschoolroom, its centerpiece a draftsman s table that cranked up to different angles with a winch. He had black-and-white pho- tographs on the walls, some of his prodigious family (it would be months before she learned all their names), others of windows that had captured his imagination: austere colonial twelve-over-twelves; vast, complex fanlights set deeply into brick; simple sidelights be- side a paneled door. His rooms were clean and masculine, curiously adult and oddly Calvinist in their sunny moral rectitude. Some- times, when he was gone for brief periods on weekends, she would sit at his draftsman s table with a pad of paper and a pen and write simple paragraphs that functioned as letters to herself, letters that Vincent would never see. He did not know her as troubled, for he had met her laughing; and she discovered that she had no desire to taint the happiness she d found with him with sordid stories of her recent past. And consequently and partly as a result of expectation she rose to his image of herself: sensible and practi- cal (which was largely true), drowsy and easy in bed, and prone to 71 Anita Shreve laugh at the foibles of others and of herself. The first night he took her back to his apartment, he made her a meal spaghetti with red gravy impressing upon her the fact that he was Italian to her Irish. The sauce was smooth and thick and seemed to have little to do with any tomatoes she had ever seen or eaten. Yet, she, who had been carelessly starving herself, ate ravenously, furthering the impression that she was a woman of appetite, an impression that was not altered in bed when she (who had been starved there as well) responded to her new lover with an almost animal greed. (Was it Vincent s sleek pelt that made her think of seals?) And it was not a lie, this presentation of herself as healthy, for with Vincent she wanted to be and therefore was. And she thought it was probably not so unusual to be a different person with a different man, for all parts were authentically within, waiting to be coaxed out by one person or another, by one set of circumstances or another, and it pleased her to make this discovery. So much so that when, at the end of that first glorious weekend together, she returned to her rooms on Fairfield, she recoiled from the sight of the bathtub on its plat- form, the single Melamine plate on the dish rack. And immediately she went out and bought more dishes to put in the drainer and a Marimekko spread for her bed, so as not to frighten Vincent away, nor allow herself to be sucked back in. When Vincent first came and stood in the doorway of her apartment and looked around, he fit the surroundings to suit the person he knew (like designing a house, she later thought, only in reverse). And she, too, began to see them dif- ferently as well as unadorned rather than bereft. Maria had come easily, but Marcus (prophetically) with painful difficulty. By then they were living in a house in Belmont that chal- lenged Vincent at every corner with its banal design and shoddy workmanship. (Vincent, the son of a contractor, was a man who knew improperly mitered trim when he saw it.) Linda wasn t teach- ing, and Vincent had started an architectural practice of his own, 72 The Last Time They Met sinking whatever money he made back into the business (as was right, she thought), leaving them little at home; and if they had any stressful times together, it was then, when babies and unpaid bills stole their good tempers. But mostly, she remembered those early years as good ones. Sitting in their small backyard in Belmont (the grill, the swing set, the plastic turtle pool), and watching Vincent plant tomatoes with the children, she would be filled with amaze- ment that, against all the odds, this had been given to her, that she and Vincent had made this family. She could not imagine what would have become of her had she not, for she saw the alternative as only a long, throbbing headache from which there would have been little relief. One morning, when Marcus was sleeping and Maria was at Montessori, Linda sat down at the kitchen table and wrote not a let- ter to herself, but a poem, another kind of letter. The poem was about windows and children and panes of glass and small muffled voices, and she found over the next few days that when she wrote and reworked the images and phrases, time passed differently, lurching ahead, so that she was often startled to look up at the clock and realize she was late to pick up Maria or that Marcus had slept too long. Her imagination began to hum, and even when she was not writing, she found herself jotting down metered lines and strange word pairings; and in general she was preoccupied. So much so that Vincent noticed and said so, and she, who for months had written in secret, got out her sheaf of papers and showed them to him. She was shredded with worry while he read them, for they revealed a side of Linda that Vincent was not familiar with and might not want to know (worse still, he might be curious about who had known this Linda, for some of the poems were about Thomas, even when they seemingly weren t). But Vincent didn t ask, and instead said he thought they were very fine; and he seemed genuinely impressed that his wife had secretly harbored this talent he d known nothing 73 Anita Shreve about. All of which was a gift to her, for she wrote with redoubled energy, and not just when the children were away or asleep, but late into the night, pouring words onto paper and reshaping them into small objects one could hold in the mind. And Vincent never said, Don t write these words about another man (or even later, about him- self ), thus freeing her from the most potent censorship there is, the fear of hurting others. She joined a poetry workshop at night and was stupefied (and secretly heartened) by the dull and overly confessional work of those around her. Emboldened by this, she sent out her first contri- butions to small literary journals, all of which, in the early months, rejected her work (once misdirecting another s letter to her, so that she was able to quip that they d started rejecting poems she hadn t even written). To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose to see not as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game. Until one afternoon she received a letter from an editor who liked a poem and said he would publish it. He couldn t pay her anything, he added, but he hoped she would give him the honor of being the first to put that particular verse into print. Far from minding the lack of payment, Linda was too thrilled to speak; and when Vincent came home that night, she was still clutching the letter to her breast. Months later, when a poem was accepted by a magazine that did pay, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |