He had been a fourth-year medical student when they met and Pamela had intrigued him, British and bosomy, full of sexual and intellectual confidence. They had taken Urogynecology together and she had challenged a famously irascible surgeon day after day, asking questions that infuriated him, immune to his loathing while better-liked students were regularly reduced to tears. James had found himself in her busy and unmade bed, where he stayed for the rest of medical school. They had been, in that way at least, a good match.
In adulthood they were not well suited. He had felt perpetually unsettled; she, increasingly defensive and competitive as he relied less and less on bolstering infusions of her own self-belief. She had exhausted him, and they had irritated one another. The divorce, they agreed—sometimes amicably, at other times in the throes of an accidental, old, appalling fight—had been the best choice they’d made together.
Now he was fifty-five and truly in love, deeply in love, for the first time in his life. Tonight, above all, he was grateful Julia had trusted him and come to Boston. She had the generosity to see that to keep his family on civil terms was so very important to him. He pulled her closer to him as they walked. He felt expansive with love for her.
“She’s very attractive. I was a bit intimidated.”
“You’re so beautiful, Julia; that’s crazy. Please don’t be intimidated by anything at all; she’s a friend now but we got divorced for a reason.” He tried not to speak ill of his children’s mother but this statement was not disloyal to anyone, and was true.
“Why did you get married?”
He considered. He had told Julia a great deal about the separation, but had talked little about what had come before. In general he did not spend a great deal of time in retrospection. “I was . . .” he considered “overpowered” and then said, “overwhelmed by her. She was—is—brimming with confidence and social ease, and I wanted both of those things. She sort of . . . kicked me up the ass, I think. I wasn’t superyoung but I was still pretty immature. I’d never really known anyone like that before. She was kind of the British equivalent of the Waspy girls who would never look at me. Except she looked at me.”
“And then?”
“And then I grew up, a little slowly I guess, and once I was more mature or self-assured, we began to fight. We outgrew each other.” He had talked enough, and so returned to the far happier present. “And now I’m with you, which is exactly where I should be.”
They had turned into the pedestrian mall at the heart of Commonwealth Avenue and walked in silence for a while beneath the canopy of yellow elms looming black in the darkness. Before them drifts of fallen leaves lifted and skittered in the sharp wind.
“What did Philip say about the dog?”
“It’s so hard to tell; he wouldn’t want to worry me but it didn’t sound good. I feel so awful he has to deal with it.”
James stopped and faced her, and took both her hands. He had been thinking for some time about how he could help. He watched her struggle with her guilt for distressing him, and for introducing a note of sadness into this first, small vacation. He could see she was anxious.
“Listen to me,” he said, gently. “When we get back to the hotel I’ll look online for the best vet in London. I’ll find the guy who looks after the corgis, just tell me how to help. Your people will be my people. And your dog, my dog.”
6.
The night before they had not seen Boston at her best, but early the next day she welcomed them, awash with pale yellow sunshine beneath a blue sky, the air crisp, the light dazzling. On the broad black silence of the Charles the rowers rowed; along the esplanade the runners ran, in hats and earmuffs, in fleece and gloves and clouds of their own quick breath. The greedy stasis of Thanksgiving was behind them; busy Bostonians had returned to river life.
“Oh em gee”—Gwen bounded off the bus, scarf flying, and calling backward to Saskia—“this is unbelievable.” James had taken Julia and the girls to Cambridge to lead them through the leaf-strewn paths beneath the ivy-clad red brick of his glorious alma mater, but Gwen’s praise was in fact for a fire hydrant. She fell upon it with a cry of joy, a delightful reunion with this old friend known only from the quaint, unreal America she inhabited on television. She photographed it, and then crouched down beside it for Saskia to capture her looking at it. She measured its solid contours with her gloved hands. She would make one for the blog, she told them all. She giggled at the sign that offered instruction in case of SNOW EMERGENCY and asked her mother to take another picture of her with Saskia beneath it.
“Nathan’s just getting off the T, he’ll be here shortly. I’m not sure the Widener can compete after a hydrant and a sign. But there may be other signs in Harvard Yard. ‘No Smoking. Fire Exit.’ That sort of thing.”
Julia watched Gwen with anxious interest but Gwen merely grinned. “Fire hydrants are cool. I like Americana.”
Not rude, Julia noted, just conversational. Progress.
James led them toward a small ice cream shop. In the doorway Saskia paused, and she now gently poked her father’s shoulder.
“I’m leaving, Dad. I’m meeting people for lunch.”
“We’re people. We’re people right here. Three people, who all live in England and who pine for you across the ocean . . .”
She patted his head mildly. “Bye, Dad.”
“Have you got cash? Scarf? Batphone? Call me if you need a ride from anywhere.”
“You don’t have a car in this country, but thanks.” Saskia turned to Gwen. “When you go into Harvard Yard, don’t let him or Nathan tell you to rub John Harvard’s toe; the students pee on it. Kay, bye. Get the black raspberry.”
? ? ?
NATHAN WAS LATE, and they ordered without him. Gwen held out her cone of black raspberry to James, tentative, casual. James took it, tasted, considered with head cocked to one side, reviewed it favorably, returned it. He offered Gwen his own malted white chocolate. They agreed to swap and Julia watched in a state of rigid disbelief and fascination, breath held, as if willing a paused and watchful wild animal to approach a tidbit held on offered palm. This would have been unthinkable in London. It was Nathan’s absence, surely, or it was Boston, or it was the alignment of the planets. In her pocket her phone vibrated, and she excused herself from the table, handing Gwen her untouched frozen yogurt and stepping out into the noise and chill of Massachusetts Avenue.