Lucy by the Sea (51)



I thought of how my life had become so different from what I had ever imagined for myself during these—my last—years. I thought of how I had pictured Christmases with Chrissy and Becka and eventually their children—and David!—in one of their apartments in Brooklyn. But now neither child lived there, and neither would probably ever return.

I thought of how I would live out my days in this house on a small cliff on the coast of Maine with William, how Bridget would come to us in the summers; perhaps she would even come for a Christmas, how did I know?





I wondered if I had become too frightened to return to New York again. It was funny, but I felt that in my enclosed world I had somehow become worse about that—about my fears, I mean.

I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone.

Because it was.

I knew this was true.





I told Bob about that as we walked one day in late February by the river. The day was not terribly cold, and the river was not frozen as it had been. Bob walked with his hands in his pockets and looked at me sideways, his mask covering most of his face. “What do you mean?” he asked, and I tried to explain how I had always been a frightened person, and how I was afraid now that when and if I ever got back to New York, how would I do it? I said I was no longer young, and Bob said, “I know.” But then he said, “It’s funny that you call yourself a frightened person. I think of you as brave.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. I stopped walking to look at him.

“Not a bit,” he said. “Think about your life. You came from really hard circumstances, you left a marriage that was not working, you wrote books that have really reached people. You married another guy who was wonderful to you. Sorry, Lucy, but that’s not what frightened people do.” He started to walk again. “But I know what you mean about New York. Margaret hates the place, so she no longer makes the trip with me, but I’ve been thinking how when I finally get my shot, what will it be like?”





It was quite a walk that day.





Bob spoke of his brother, Jim, who lived in Brooklyn with his wife, Helen. Bob had not seen them in over a year, though Jim had just gotten his first shot. Bob said to me, “Honestly, Lucy?” He sat down on a granite seat so he could have his cigarette. He pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit it, then put the pack back into his pocket. He exhaled and said, “Jim has kind of been the love of my life. How strange is that?” He looked at me. “I mean, I have just loved that guy so much, and he did break my heart, but I have just always—I don’t know—he’s like the furnace that has kept me going.”

“Oh Bob,” I said. “Oh God, I get it.”

“I mean, when Pam left I was a mess.” He told me how he had moved to a fourth-floor walkup in Brooklyn to be near his brother, and how Jim had made fun of the place, calling it a “graduate dorm.” Bob said he drank too much during those days, he didn’t like to think about them now, and then he had finally moved to a doorman building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “And to really tell you the truth?” He shook his head as he took another drag on his cigarette. “To tell you the absolute truth, I wish Pam had never left. Oh Lucy, I wish she could have had her kids with me. I miss her, and I think she still misses me.”

“She does,” I said. “I saw her at William’s seventieth birthday party and she told me that she still thinks of you.”

Bob kept shaking his head. “Boy. It makes me sad. I think she’s okay, she’s got her kids and everything, and we talk once in a while. But it’s a sad story, Lucy. Both Pam and Jim are in New York and they always will be, and I will always be here in Maine.”

We sat in silence while I absorbed this. Oh, he broke my heart!





After a while we began to talk again. I told him that I suspected that William and I were together now until the very end, and that I was glad—but that somehow there was an uncertainty for me.

Bob squinted at me. “What’s the uncertainty, Lucy?”

“I don’t really know.” I shifted my legs and said, “But he loves it up here now. He’s got his ‘sister’?”—I put my fingers up in quotes as I said that—“and he loves her, which is good. But he’s really excited about what he’s doing at the University of Maine now, and they seem excited about him there, so I don’t know—I mean I don’t know what will happen when this is all over.

“He mentioned his apartment in New York to me the other day, as though I would go there with him whenever we went to New York. But I told him no, that had been his apartment with Estelle, I was not going to stay there—which makes sense to me—but he seemed slightly surprised by that.”

Bob said, “Well, Lucy.” And he looked me straight in the eye. “Speaking for myself, I would love it more than anything if you stayed here in this town.”

He said that to me.

He made me feel that I mattered. Bob Burgess was the only person who seemed able to do that for me right now.

ii

By early March a number of things had happened:





I had finished my Arms Emory story. The story has Arms finding out that Jimmie Wagg is selling Legs his drugs, and all Arms wants to do is go find Jimmie Wagg.

Elizabeth Strout's Books