“Like her,” he says. “Look at her. It’s never occurred to her to question that her story is the center of the narrative. But only this fragment of her life will survive.”
“If you call it survival,” she says, chin cupped on hand, contemplating her gin and tonic, which Philip has always called the blood of dead empire. “It’s more like imprisonment, under glass, forever. Like Nimue and Merlin. Waters may rise, and cities crumble, but I’ll always have this light on your face and the water running down the windows.”
“I’m happy here,” he says. “Let’s never leave.”
“Done,” she says. “I’ll always be here with you.”
“Strange to think of the boy I was, still with you. I suppose you’re there too, at least since you were twelve. How strange it must be for you, how your personal history is a crystalline museum, until the point where, I suppose, it must darken.”
She imagines the severe boy he’d been standing behind her in his second-hand pea coat torn at the shoulder, how he’d be moved by the light, disdainful of their consumption, how he’d stare in bemused dismay at the elegant man across from her. She takes a sip of wine.
“Yes?” he says.
She says, “You’re standing right behind me, in judgment, and you have no mercy.”
“I’d expect no less,” he says, seeming pleased. “Tell him not to work so hard. Or maybe harder. Another drink?”
“It’s different with me,” she says. “I don’t really have past selves. It’s all one big present. There is nothing of me that fades.”
“Nor suffers a sea change,” he says. “But isn’t that awful? Every little wound open forever?”
She smiles, makes a vague, expansive gesture, her hands tracing circles in the air.
He says, “I’d forgotten how rewarding it can be to get you drunk.”
“I wish I could remember the future,” she says, resting her forehead briefly on her palm, and if the other patrons see, well, let them, they’ll barely remember it. “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. I wish I could just slip up and down the timeline as I pleased. It’s almost what I do anyway.”
A pause in which they listen to the rain and then he says, “I have news. Something I have to tell you. Of the most improbable kind.”
“You’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior?”
“No. Worse. I met a girl. She used to be a model but she didn’t mean it. Now she’s a biologist. Lepidoptery. Butterflies and moths, you know,” he says airily.
She waits for the punch line. “And…?”
“And we’re giving it, as they say, a whirl. She’s moving in. Nuptials would appear to be imminent.”
“You’re marrying a model with a butterfly net.”
“With anyone else I’d deny it. What am I supposed to say? ‘Yes, but she’s hot’? ‘With the approach of middle age I’ve learned to compromise my once noble principles’? ‘Nabokov liked it so it’s probably okay’?”
“Something like that.”
“You’d like her. She’s hot and stacked. Kidding. Well, in spirit. Seriously, though. She keeps me calm. She says that’s her job.”
“It’s a big one.”
He smiles at her.
“I have more to tell you,” he says. “Though I hardly know how. Simply, I suppose.”
She reaches across the table and covers his mouth with her hand because she knows what he’s going to say, and it’s like she’s turning her will against the ironclad decree of inexorable fate but what else is there to do, and he takes her wrist gently and removes her hand but her resources are not exhausted and she sings a single long, clear note to drown him out (remembering lessons in a dusty room that was a ballet studio most of the time, mirrors everywhere, the piano, the barre), and she does it well, even beautifully, so he has to stop to listen, and all the other diners are looking. She sustains it for as long as she can, thinks she might sustain it forever, even as her wind fades and her vision starts to go. Scattered applause from the other tables and someone shouts “Encore!” and “Bravissima!” as Philip kisses her palm, puts her hand to his cheek, and says, “No more trips to the Mayo.”
She starts to argue, starts to cry, but he says, “I’m spending my entire life driving my company hard enough so it grows fast enough that I can pay for the fucking Mayo. I hardly see Ann-Elise. If I have just one bad year it’s all for nothing anyway. I’m going to try to live my life instead of tending it like a bonsai.”
She had always supposed they would attend each other’s funerals, would welcome the next century together, and perhaps the next, and if there were long stretches of silence between them there would still always be a return and within moments of his walking in the door it would be like they’d never parted, and sometimes they’d be lovers and sometimes not but there would always be a next thing. Holding his gaze, she snuffs the candle with her palm.
“You look like I announced end-stage cancer.”
“In a way you did.”
“Well, I guess this is goodbye, give or take fifty years.”
“You’re being stupid. There’s no going back. Is life worth so little that you’re in a hurry to leave it?”
“Life is worth so much that I’m in a hurry to live it.”
“So you can have your little model,” she says, distressed by the sneer in her voice but unable to suppress it. “And maybe a family and a handful of decades in which you do nothing important and then you’ll die and be forgotten. That’s your plan.”
“As opposed to what, my dear. I tried. I have one hundred and thirteen scars on my palm to prove it. I had to have surgery to get feeling in my thumb back. I took my shot, but I’m not Newton, and wasting the years in vain has ceased to appeal.”
“You had intuitions. I remember.”
“And if I had a dozen lifetimes I might pursue them, but not even the Mayo can get me that. Though, who knows, technology evolves, by the time I’m old there might be a solution.”
“There won’t be.”
“I know,” he says gently, and then, “But you’ll never lose me. I’ll always be right here.”
A black wind rises and sweeps through the room, extinguishing the candles and swallowing the voices and the echoes and every particle of light and carrying them back down into her other memory’s stillness, leaving her in silence and solitude and the blood-red dark behind her eyelids, and she’s tempted to remain here in this peace, but then, with just the slightest exertion of her will, the candles are flickering again, and once again the restaurant is full, and there’s Philip sitting across from her.