The door swept open and a man called “Hello?”
“I have to go, Grace, someone’s here.”
“Who’s there? Who was that?”
“It’s no one.”
Hard-sole footsteps on the oak floor at the bottom of the stairs. “Angela?”
“I mean it’s only Robert from across the street. He must have seen the light on downstairs.” She stepped out of her daughter’s room and closed the door.
“Angela—”
“I have to go, Grace. I’ll call you back.”
HE HAD SEEN THE light and no car in the drive and had come over to make sure it was her. Or one of them. A good neighbor. Watching her come down the stairs—“Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course. Just checking on things.”
“Is everything all right?”
“It seems to be.”
“Good. Good.” He stood there nodding, looking about in the light from the kitchen. His shirttails out, cuffs turned back. Blue jeans and black loafers. Smiling at her uncertainly. “You look nice,” he said. “Did you teach?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Nodding. Checking his watch. “Have you eaten?”
She locked up and they crossed the darkened street, their footsteps lost in the scuffling sounds of two boys playing basketball in the spilled light of a garage. April cool but a feeling of the coming summer too, the hardest months. He followed her in and shut the door and offered to take her jacket but she kept it despite the warmth of the room. The air was densely spiced with the roast he’d been cooking for much of the day. He did something with computers and could work from home.
He turned down the music, an opera, and stepped into the large open kitchen and picked up the bottle. “Italian,” he said. “Insanely good.” He poured her a glass and she came to the bright plum color of it and sat in one of the high bar chairs and watched him lifting lids, stirring the steam, giving names to the smells. One thing he’d learned was food. Another was wine, though he wasn’t a bore about it. His hair was gray but had not thinned and there was the cowlick at the front, a springy disobeying forelock he wore long, like something from his youth he couldn’t give up, like something which served him still.
He stirred and spiced and tasted, talking all the while. It might’ve been a summer night with the children chasing fireflies over the back lawn, the dog, a little terrier, yapping in dismay.
Both boys in college now and the terrier, like Pepé, buried under a tree.
“Don’t you like it?”
“Hmm?”
He indicated her glass.
“Oh. No, it’s lovely.” She raised it for a sip.
He had good manners and would not ask after her family nor talk about his boys. He talked about his house and the improvements he would like to make this summer and the Chinese elms he was thinking about planting.
“Do you know a good realtor?” Angela said.
He stopped stirring to look at her. “A realtor?”
“Yes.”
He stood there. The thick, wet blurpings of the sauce. He turned back and began stirring again, but absently.
“I’ve done some work for a couple of them,” he said. “People speak very highly of Leslie Brown. I’ll give you her info.”
“Thank you.”
He checked the roast and lowered the flames under the pots and they took their glasses to the living room. She had always admired Caroline’s taste, and she let herself sink into the deep sofa, fabric the color and fineness of a wheat field in a painting. There had been a time, a very long time, when she could not admire, could not even notice; pleasure lay at the bottom of the sea. She toed the sneakers from her feet and put her head back. Robert joined her on the sofa, crossing an ankle over his knee. On the mantel were the same pictures in their silver frames: Peter and James growing up and grown. He and Caroline much younger. The dog alive. Everybody happy.
The male tenor began to sing, the notes rich and pure.
Robert sipped his wine and held the glass to the light.
“I saw him today,” he said.
“Saw who?” She rolled her head on the sofa back. She was tired. It took her a minute.
“Oh,” she said, and sat up a little. “Where?”
“At the gym. My gym. He has joined, apparently.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say.
“I was just coming out of the steam room and he was just coming in. Five minutes earlier and there we would have been. Like Romans.”
“I’m so sorry, Robert.” She touched his forearm.
“Ah, shit—that’s life, right? You run into the man your wife prefers to sleep with. One day we’ll go for a beer, he and I. Watch a bit of the game. He’ll turn out to be a pretty good egg. Life goes on. Isn’t that the idea?”
“No,” she said. “That’s not the idea.”
He looked at her and his face changed. He uncrossed his leg and turned to her. “I’m sorry, Angela. I’m an idiot. I—”
She shook her head, “No, I didn’t mean that. I was only saying . . . I was only saying I’m sorry, that you had to go through that today.”
“It’s nothing. Christ. It’s so trivial.”
“It’s not nothing,” she said.
He glanced at the mantel and then looked down. He seemed to be studying the sofa, the square of cushion plumped and risen between them like bread.
Outside, in the window, trees reared in a wave of sweeping light, appeared to pirouette, lapsed again into darkness. A man said gently: “Come on, we haven’t got all night.” There was the jingle of shaken tags.
She reached to touch the fallen forelock. Training it back, hopelessly. He looked up. His entire story in those eyes. Story of the world.
“Can we just be quiet for a while?” she said. “Can we just sit here and listen to the music?”