Lost and Wanted(100)
“George, off!” She moved one of the dogs out of my way with her boot. “We’ll be informal and have coffee in the kitchen.”
I followed her down the hall, past two valuable pieces of art. One was a Kara Walker silhouette of a woman in a highly ornamented costume, beautiful and technically virtuosic. Charlie had once told me that her mother bought it while Walker was still studying at RISD. I knew without being told that Addie wouldn’t have hung any of Walker’s more violent images in her home, even if she was likely to admire them. The other was a triptych of tall, rectangular photographs meant to recall Chinese scroll paintings: one fresh peony, one fading, and one covered with frost. They looked real until you got up close and saw that the blooms themselves were actually made of raw meat. I had a residual feeling of excitement, entering Charlie’s house, as if I were still a student, eager to prove to her parents that I was worldly enough to have a place at their table.
The hallway opened up into the kitchen, a long, rectangular room with a bow window opening to the backyard. Somewhere was the faint but steady drone of television news. The kitchen I remembered had white cabinets with blue-and-white china knobs, a tiled countertop, and the same mottled white appliances my parents had owned. At some point in the last twenty-three years, the Boyces had replaced those with stainless steel, the counters with granite. The cabinets had glass fronts and you could see the orderly towers of china inside, the wineglasses hanging upside down from their stems. I complimented Addie.
“I’ve always liked glass,” she said. “When the children were young, I needed to hide the mess, but now it’s much easier to stay organized.” She offered me coffee and I accepted. The television in the other room switched off, and Carl emerged from his office. There was a dark V on the front of his T-shirt, and he was wiping his face with a towel.
“Helen!” he said. “It’s wonderful to see you. I won’t hug you.”
“I bought him a Peloton bike,” Addie said. “He pretends not to like it.”
“I don’t pretend,” Carl said. He turned to his wife. “You look beautiful—are you two going out?”
It had been many years since Carl’s infidelity, and the year Addie had spent in Paris with the children, but there was still a note of deference in the way Carl spoke to his wife. He sounded more like a newlywed than a husband of nearly half a century. Addie didn’t dismiss this attention; nor did she really seem to notice it. Charlie once said that what her mother had gotten in exchange for taking him back was absolute confidence in his loyalty, not only sexual but in every other matter as well. That might have been true, but there was nothing pragmatic or dutiful about the way he looked at her. I wondered if a betrayal would be so much to pay, if you could have someone who loved you like that.
“Later,” Addie said. “Helen and I are going to chat first.”
Carl turned to me. “I saw the news last week. Are you involved with LIGO?”
“Not directly, but I have some good friends there.”
“What is LIGO?” Addie asked.
Carl explained about the detection. He described the black hole inspiral and merger, the rippling effect of the waves, and the basic mechanism of the interferometers. He even knew where they were located. Then he turned to me. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure I have all that wrong.”
“No,” I said. “That’s exactly right.”
“Ripples in spacetime,” Addie said. “I’m afraid that’s beyond me.”
“It’s beyond pretty much everyone,” I said. “Most people don’t understand as well as Carl does.”
“She’s being kind to an old man,” Carl said, patting my arm. He wasn’t handsome, or even especially distinguished-looking, but I could understand why women might have responded to him. He had a way of really looking at you while he was talking, as if he were choosing each word based on subtle shifts in your expression. I was sorry when he declined coffee and said he was going upstairs to shower. It might have been a trick of his profession, but it seemed more difficult to talk as soon as he left the room.
Addie put some cookies on a flowered plate. We sat on stools on either side of the marble-topped island.
“I have to apologize for not having you here sooner,” Addie said matter-of-factly. “Things have been very hard.”
“No, of course.”
“But it sounds like you’re doing well,” Addie said.
“Well—”
“I hear from Terrence that Jack and Simmi are becoming close.”
“They are,” I said. “It’s wonderful.” But this conversational line seemed unlikely to lead to where I wanted it to go. I needed to ask whether Addie had been receiving the same kinds of messages I had. Did she know their source?
I turned on my stool, and noticed an elaborate wooden treehouse, prefabricated and almost certainly new, in an old elm near the fence.
“Carl ordered that for Simmi,” Addie said. “He thought he could put it together himself—happily there are people you can hire through Amazon to redo it.”
I laughed. “I would’ve loved that as a kid.” Actually, I thought that I would love it now: the rope ladder, the walkway around the perimeter, between the leaves, the enclosed cabin into which no one on the ground would be able to see.