The Clairvoyants(33)

“I’m sorry if I was rude,” I said, once we reached the road.

The streetlights overhead, the passing cars, distanced the encampment, as if it hadn’t existed.

“She seemed mostly concerned,” Del said.

“I thought she was going to read our palms,” William said.

I slipped my hand into his. “Why don’t those people go to shelters or get help?”

“They want to be there,” Del said.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Who are they?”

“They’re people,” Del said. She stopped in the street. She didn’t say “like me,” but I understood it anyway.

“I don’t want you going there anymore,” I said.

We walked the rest of the way home in silence. I held William’s hand. Del went into the house in a huff and slammed her apartment door. Upstairs we met Geoff in his plaid robe and slippers. His ankles were bare and white. He seemed dazed, standing on the landing. The cold followed us in on our coats.

“Good morning,” he mumbled, standing as if he’d been chased from his room by something to which he did not wish to return. I put my key in the lock and regretted seeing him like that.

Inside my apartment it was still cold, still gray, still dark.

William sat on the end of the bed. I sat down beside him. The evening felt strange now—almost unreal. He seemed to have distanced himself, and I didn’t know how to reclaim him. I kept seeing Mary Rae’s figure approaching him. “Oh, Billy, don’t,” she’d said, as if he were a bad child. All night the snow had been like powdered sugar falling through a sieve, like stage snow, pretty and harmless, but as we sat side by side at the end of my bed it turned to ice and slanted against the window.

“It seemed as if you saw something there,” William said. “I can’t explain it. Something happened.”

I lay back on the bed. I was tired. My life before William seemed now like loneliness. Everything had changed. I might even confess the truth. William lay alongside me. His closeness, his curiosity, suffused me. But I confessed nothing.

“My sister makes odd friends,” I said.

“I wanted to photograph those people, but I didn’t want to ask,” he said. “They might let you. You should think about it.”

After a short time he rolled from the bed and stood and went to the door. He was leaving, and I was afraid I would never see him again. I felt tied to the slope of his broad shoulders, his soft hair curling over his collar, the fingers of his hand on the knob.

“Don’t go,” I said.

He faced me, and his expression was hard to describe—satisfied, almost canny, a look that I should have paid attention to.

I went to him and put my arms around him. I kissed his warm mouth. He sighed in relief. His hands fell back into place on my body. Had he wanted to discover me, unknowing, in my bed? And had I wanted to be discovered, awoken and vulnerable, aroused from sleep? We held each other, believing we knew what the other thought. We could imagine anything about each other, even a past we might never confess. And maybe this was what love was—what I’d wanted all along.





13




The summer David Pinney died Del was fourteen and I was fifteen. His family owned a cottage in the Spiritualists by the Sea community, and he ended up that summer with a group of us who would meet to swim in the old house’s pool—me and Del and Jane Roberts and a handful of others we’d known since we were small—local kids who would show up each summer. When we were younger they’d arrive at the privet hedge gate, and my grandmother would wave an arm to welcome them. Leanne and Sarah were part of the group then, and my mother, who would sit with my grandmother at the iron table in the shade, the two of them with iced coffees, their voices low, in earnest discussion of my father—my mother claiming she was at the end of her rope, my grandmother telling her to divorce him already. There’d be orange life preservers tossed in the grass, a blue plastic boat the little kids floated in, a set of croquet mallets in a stand, and towels, flapping on the backs of chairs, on the hammock.

If a boy did a back flip, my mother would inhale, sharply, and bolt upright in her chair, waving her hand.

“Oh, you there! Someone, one of you, tell him not to do that.”

She’d have on her usual large-framed Giorgio Armani sunglasses. Her hair was dyed a reddish shade of auburn then, short and soft around her face.

My grandfather complained, saying we trampled his lawn, saying it wasn’t a public pool, saying we had the Sound to swim in with our friends. But after he died, and we’d grown older, there was no one to monitor our comings and goings. Leanne and Sarah had stopped swimming, choosing to spend time with boys home on vacation from Loomis Chaffee or The Gunnery. My mother thought we were old enough to monitor ourselves. Younger children weren’t allowed to freely roam, as we had been. The group of kids at the pool was always only our group.

The pool was one of the first installed in the area in the 1950s, oval-shaped, inground, placed at the base of the sloping backyard that joined the woods on one side and the tamed and rounded holes of the golf course on the other. From the pool a path of flat stones led through the privet hedge and up to the house, where large horse chestnuts and maples threw their shade, and my grandfather’s delphiniums waved on tall stalks. He’d never been a real farmer. He was an entrepreneur who sold lightning rods, traversing the New England countryside in a shiny Cadillac, quoting installation prices for barns stacked with freshly mown hay, for clapboard houses with mourning doors. When my mother met my father he was my grandfather’s employee—a young man who climbed the old slanted roofs, nailed the copper wiring and the bracketed rods to sides of silos, to widow’s watches, his boot heels slipping on slate and loose asbestos shingles.