The Last September: A Novel

I GOT LADD’S LETTER in early September. Dear Brett. Standing on the front stoop in Amherst, our mailbox still open with the keys hanging from it, I read the whole rambling thing. He told me that he and Sheila, the girl he’d been with the day I’d seen him at his uncle’s house, had broken up. I should be mourning the loss of Sheila. But I keep thinking of you.

It was a sort of love letter, not a full-fledged one. There was no praise in it, and no proclamation. Just a kind of intimate urgency. How can I leave the country without telling you? By the time I’d closed and locked the mailbox, I decided not to show it to Charlie. But I didn’t keep it, either. Good wife, good girl, I ripped it into pieces and threw it away downstairs, not even bringing it up to our apartment.

“I could help you start a restaurant,” I said to Charlie, a few hours later. We sat at the kitchen table, eating braised Brussels sprouts and sole meunière. Charlie smiled as if I’d made a joke.

“No, really,” I said, taking a bite of the rich fish, meltingly delicious and nourishing. Charlie refilled my wineglass, even though I’d only taken a few sips. I didn’t want him to act this way, reluctant. I wanted him to be excited, grateful, at this gift I was offering.

“But won’t we be leaving here,” Charlie said. “Eventually. For you to teach somewhere?”

Something fluttered in my chest, irritation that he would resist, when here I was handing over my inheritance. Offering him something so huge. I wanted to ask him if he had any particular life’s plans. If Charlie’s mother’s voice found its way into his head after she died, inspiring him to marry me, maybe this was how my mother’s voice made its way into mine. I was suddenly frustrated by Charlie’s lack of direction. A person didn’t use talent like his just cooking for his wife. A person parlayed it into a career. The way I was parlaying my interests into a career.

“I won’t be on the market for a few years, at least,” I said. “And who knows, maybe we’ll end up staying here. It’s where my research is. There’s plenty of time to work all that out.”

Charlie hedged. He said that he’d never finished culinary school. He didn’t know anything about business. Since we’d been together, he’d worked odd jobs, mostly painting, occasional handy work, his culinary abilities displayed only in our apartment. Like now, the only light the tapered candles he’d lit. A white tablecloth over the folding card table that composed its own tiny little dining room between the kitchen and living room.

“Well,” he said, swirling the wine in his glass, the first sign of capitulation. “It would be fun to check out the competition. Go on dates.”

So that’s how we spent the money at first. We had to buy clothes, so we could arrive suitably dressed at all the best restaurants in Amherst. Trips to Boston and New York, too. On an October trip to New York, at La Grenouille, the waitress came to our table. Older than both of us, she was lean and almost professionally fit—I could see fine cords in her arm as she turned over our water glasses. She barely looked at me, but when Charlie ordered a bottle of wine, she complimented his choice, then reached over and righted his suit coat collar, which I hadn’t even noticed was slightly turned up.

Charlie didn’t act surprised at all. He leaned back a little in his chair and looked down toward the fixed collar, then back at her. “Well, thank you,” he said.

“Helpful when I can be,” she told him. Her face was still turned away from me, so I couldn’t see her expression, but her white blouse was open at the collar and a blush sprouted, splotchy, at the base of her neck.

“Look at you,” I said to Charlie when she walked away. “My Last Duchess.”

“What’s that?” Charlie, innocent, took a sip of water.

“ ‘A heart too soon made glad,’ ” I said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Browning.” Though it was the waitress, and not Charlie, who had blushed, I added, “ ‘ ’Twas not his wife’s presence only, called that spot of joy into his cheek.’ ”