The Last Book Party(40)

“Ooh, I like him already!”

I called Jeremy back and told him the guest room was his for the weekend.

Sifting through a pile of mail after I hung up the phone, I discovered that I’d received a message from Franny too. A postcard from Maine, and the first I had heard from him since our night together. The card had a photograph of a big, shiny red lobster superimposed over a map of Maine with the words YOU CAN’T BE SAD WHEN YOU HAVE LOBSTER! below. On the back was a short message in blue crayon: “So Maine is supposed to be the best place for lobster, but we know better! Heading back to the Cape for Labor Day—see you there?” He had signed not with a love, or a from or an xoxo or even the breezy publishing favorite all best! but with a drawing of a lobster pot and the letter F written with a looped flourish.

I didn’t know what to make of this. Did he know I was working for Henry? Was he giving me a heads-up, relieving his guilt at not being in touch? Or did he want to see me? Worse, would he figure out what was going on between me and his father? I was relieved that he hadn’t included a return address because I had no idea how I would have responded.

Dear Franny:

So nice to hear from you! Funny me, I had thought that after our night together, we might have continued our path toward getting to know each other by perhaps exchanging a SINGLE WORD. Like maybe this one: Lil.

Dear Franny:

Sorry I haven’t been in touch. Have been totally wrapped up in a new job, the description of which suddenly changed in ways I can’t even begin to tell you!

Dear Franny:

Roses are red

Violets are blue,

You’re very sexy,

But your father is too.

Dear Franny:

What you may have heard is true. I can’t quite explain it myself.

Forgive me.





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After dinner I took the rare step of calling Henry at home. As the phone rang, I prayed that Tillie wouldn’t answer. When Henry answered, I said, “Thank God, it’s you.”

“Now, that’s what I call a delightful greeting,” he said.

He seemed back to himself, and agreed to slip out in the morning and meet me for a swim at one of my favorite places while Tillie was taking an early morning walk with a friend in Provincetown.

Hidden in the woods of South Truro, at the end of a rutted dirt road that twists through a forest of pitch pine, is a string of freshwater kettle ponds. Slough, Spectacle, Herring, Horse Leech. The ancient ponds are not magnificent like the ocean, but beautiful in their quiet stillness, with water so deep that when you dive down and open your eyes, it looks like nothing at all.

It was just after 8:00 a.m. when we met at Horse Leech, and we had the place to ourselves. We decided to swim across the pond and back. The water was cool. We slid along the surface beside each other, matching stroke for stroke in a way that surprised me as I had assumed that I would be the faster, stronger swimmer. When we reached a grove of lily pads near the other side of the pond, we stopped and treaded water, catching our breath. Henry floated on his back for a while, staring up at the sky. A few minutes passed and, without exchanging a word, we started back. I felt buoyed by relief to be with Henry again, back in our easy and natural rhythm together.

Dappled sunlight warmed the towels we had left on a patch of dry ground close to the water. I stretched out on my back. A bright blue dragonfly landed on the sand beside my fingers and, after a moment, lifted up like a helicopter and flew off. I closed my eyes and said, “I think I have never been so content.” Henry didn’t answer. When I opened my eyes, he was sitting beside me, tossing sticks into the water.

“I’m aware what a cliché this all is,” he said. “Me. You. Mostly me.”

My heart sank. Henry rested his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands, combed his fingers through his hair, which was longer when wet, nearly long enough for a pony tail. I waited for him to continue. He turned toward me and lay on his side. He reached out and put a hand on my stomach.

“Can we not analyze it?” he said, as if I was part of the conversation going on in his head. “Not diminish this interlude by noting the obvious—you get to feel older and recognized, I get to feel young and admired?”

I wasn’t sure what to say, how to handle this introduction to his angst. He was half right. I no longer considered him old, and I did admire him. But being with Henry hadn’t made me feel older. It had made me feel, for once, my age, myself.

His use of the word interlude, while not a surprise, stung. I wished, again, I hadn’t brought up Franny and Jeremy, hadn’t reminded Henry of his age, and of mine. Or of how happy I was.

I wasn’t na?ve enough to think that ours would be a long-term affair, but nor was I ready to be pushed away so soon. Looking at his worried face, I knew that to stretch this out a little longer, I had to play the part, to be his fun-loving cliché, and not let on how much I liked being with him, in all ways. I rested my hand on his shoulder and ran it slowly down his arm.

“I’ve found, these last few weeks, that not thinking too much really is the ticket,” I said.

Henry’s face relaxed.

“That’s my girl,” he said, throwing his leg over mine.





part four



September 1987





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