“Is that what you wanted all along—a room of your own?”
“It’s a cliché, but why not?”
“Or just a place where no one can look up your lies?”
“They’re your lies too,” Naomi retorted. “They’re ours. Anyway, why shouldn’t I want a place where no one can look up my lies? It’s what all human beings want, in my opinion.”
“It’s the last thing I want.”
“Then you’re a very special person.”
“I’m not special. I’m just gullible, apparently.”
“You’re still a fantastic liar—a virtuoso, in fact. I think you enjoy it. So that makes two of us.”
The subtle malice made Sam recoil a little, but she calmed herself. She realized now that she knew nothing about Naomi or her past, let alone what tortuous road had brought her to this spot at this moment. It was all unknown, a shadowed story that was not her own and which she had probably misinterpreted. But she let Naomi embrace her and suddenly they were locked together in silence, baked by the sun, half blinded by the sea, and it was a long time before they disengaged and Sam laid her head on Naomi’s shoulder.
“You know what the Greeks used to say?” Naomi thought aloud. “Love makes the time pass and time makes the love pass.”
Turning her head, Sam could see the low-clinging pines on the rock shelves, moving slightly as the wind disturbed them. Their sound was familiar, but it was deeper than she remembered and more relentless. She could have changed all her plans in one instant, but the instant came and went and she did not.
TWENTY-FOUR
In New York, the last days of heat passed slowly for Sam as she caught up on her reading for the next semester. Her parents and her brother went up to Maine to stay with her grandparents, and she stayed in the city at the family apartment in Morningside Heights. After the jet lag had cleared she was able to assess everything and refind her bearings. Gone was the blinding Greek sky and the sun that pierced your mind to the core. Here it was deafening cicadas and a moist, cloying heat with no wind. She got up at first light and ran along the river, her mind cooled by the low forests on the far side and the mechanical motion of the other joggers.
She had the freedom to see Toby as much as she wanted. During the exhausted late-summer days, with the city emptied out, they laid the groundwork for a relationship that might last for a long time, longer in any case than she had expected on Hydra. In the cavernous apartment overlooking the river they made dinner together with their own groceries and watched movies or made sorties to bars that Toby had personally discovered and which he wanted to pass on to her. They went often to Sakagura on East 43rd Street in the basement below a garage and sat at the long counter with plum blossoms where Toby could practice his Japanese. It was not especially young or hip, but she liked the fact that he knew such places and knew how to handle himself inside them. In the second week of September, her parents still away, he asked her if she had heard from Naomi. His own parents were back in the States and they had finally heard something about the terrible events in Italy with the Codringtons. It defied explanation.
“I heard about it too,” she said. “It doesn’t seem possible. I can’t say they were nice people—but I only heard Naomi’s side of things.”
“My parents liked them well enough, though. You can never tell about families. They’re incomprehensible from the outside.”
“It’s true. Man, mine too—”
“But Naomi didn’t seem upset beforehand?”
“She thought they went away for a trip. There’s nothing suspicious about it.”
“Either way I’m glad we’re here now,” he said. “Away from her.”
“I know what you mean.”
He looked down and saw that her hand, as it tried to lift a masu brimming with sake, was causing the liquid to tremble. He reached out and lowered her hand for her.
“You’re upset,” he said. “Let it go.”
“Not really upset—”
Her lower lip went slack and he sensed a crisis suddenly developing.
“I don’t know what it is,” she went on.
“Let it go all the same.”
She picked the masu up again and it was steady. He did likewise and they touched boxes. There, there, his eyes said.
That night he slept over at her apartment. He thought back to the first night they had spent together on Hydra and the way her face had contorted in her sleep before waking with a scream. He had thought about it ever since. It was a clue to something that he knew he shouldn’t investigate. But press Sam a little and she withdrew. She could not be hustled into confessions, and it was clear by now that she didn’t believe in them.
When the semester began and her parents returned she began to spend her days and evenings in Bobst Library on Washington Square, sitting close to the glass walls at one of the desks at the end of the stacks and reading with hours-long concentration. It was her last year doing comparative literature and she was reading the French Romantics. The days grew darker, and when Toby was in town from Princeton they went to places in the East Village and then went to his parents’ pied à terre on East 63rd—the Carhargans spent most of their time in Maine now, and only occasionally visited the city. Slowly, she came to know them: they all had Hydra in common and it made it easy to bond. Over the winter she came three times a week and the hospitality was returned in the opposite direction. Toby soon appeared at her parents’ dinner parties when he was down from Princeton, where he was shown off like an adorable trophy who might, by the miraculous alchemy of time, turn into a son-in-law before a single gray hair had appeared on his head. This was, in fact, exactly what happened, and much more quickly than she had expected.
He proposed that first winter six months before her graduation. Dizzy and alarmed, she panicked, asked for more time, then accepted within a week. Her mother was ecstatic; her father demurred a little, then gave in with unconvincing jollity. The parents met together at a restaurant with the three children and the introductions were made. She was aware that as she and Toby sat together with their parents in the dining room of Ilili in the West Village they looked as perfect as a young couple could look in the first flush of an enviable marriage. She thought, Our future children are already visible like beautiful ghosts to the people around us.
It was too perfect—and yet didn’t people in perfect situations always think “It’s too perfect”?
“I must say,” Andrew Carhargan said as the waiter opened a bottle of Musar at the table, “I think it’s an extraordinary coincidence that we were all on Hydra at the same time. I’d say that was as good an omen as one could want. I hope you’ll consider getting a house there every summer from now on. What do you say, Jeffrey?”
“I’m in! I think Amy and Chris are too?”
“I think next time I’d rather be in the port,” Amy said.