Before, During, After Page 2

  “Please don’t tell her I’m as stupid as I must have seemed just now.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  The man on his left began talking to him loudly about the unseasonably hot weather in the south. And then the waiters were circling the table, pouring wine in everyone’s glass. Each held a bottle of white and a bottle of red.

  Father Faulk asked for water. Natasha held her glass out and indicated that she wanted the red.

  “When do you go back to Memphis?” she asked him.

  “Probably tomorrow. I’ve been visiting my aunt Clara. She’s the senator’s mother-in-law.”

  “Then maybe you’ll see Iris before I do,” Natasha said.

  “Oh, well, in that case, I’ll remember you to her.”

  The food was arriving. She felt a pull of nausea at the pit of her stomach. For months she had been miserable; and here, completely unforeseen, was something like light pouring in. And he would be gone tomorrow, and she would never see him again. She drank half her glass of wine, nearly gulping it. He was listening to the man go on about humidity. The man owned a bookshop in Leesburg, and business was slow. Finally he grew quiet; Faulk turned to her and asked how she liked the wine.

  She held up the nearly empty glass. “Evidently too much.”

  She was not thinking of him in a boy-girl way but simply as a possible friend. And she did not want him to go back to Tennessee. “You should have a glass,” she said.

  “I think I will at that.” He signaled one of the servers.

  “Is your aunt Clara here?”

  “She was supposed to be—she knows this crowd pretty well, of course. But she developed a migraine this afternoon. She doesn’t get them often, but when she does they’re fairly incapacitating.”

  The waiters were bringing the food. Two choices: a vegetable medley, with butternut squash and kale, or medallions of beef, with arugula salad, red potatoes soaked in olive oil and sprinkled with candied garlic. She asked for the beef, and he followed suit. Her glass had been refilled. He had a little wine, too, now.

  “This is very jammy,” he said, with a slight smile.

  She said, “Maybe too much so.”

  2

  Her parents were lost in the Meteor cruise ship fire near Vancouver in 1971, their remains sepulchered somewhere in the waters off that coast. The recitation of this history never failed to make her wish herself far away, and her grandmother still occasionally mentioned it as a reason that Natasha possessed such an old soul.

  Natasha, in her early twenties, took to thinking of her own beginnings ironically. After all, it was just who she was. There seemed something faintly snobbish or even smug reporting the calamity to people like some sort of pedigree. But the accident was the dividing line of Iris’s life, so the fact of it would be mentioned in talk with new acquaintances, and often enough this would lead to Iris using the phrase “old soul,” meaning it in the best way, about her granddaughter. At times she would elaborate a little more, pointing to the watercolors Natasha did—depictions of faces from piles of photographs found in bins at antiques stores, families long gone, staring out in the light of those rainy-looking scenes.

  Natasha felt like an old soul, all right, but not in the way Iris meant it. Through the past winter all the shifts of her mind and heart seemed frail and elderly to her, and she endured the purgatorial hours of each day, walking around in a haze of penitential worry about minutia, experiencing an immense lethargy and a recurring fearfulness. Fear of others, the sounds outside her apartment at night, the shadows in the cold streets when she walked home, all the possible harms of the world, and, most terrible, the fear that this darkness might last all her life. Night panics, dread wakefulness, fierce dreams when she could manage any sleep. During the days, nothing had any taste. Everything seemed dismally the same, the same. Her own thoughts oppressed her. The voices of others were demoralizing and dull. Friendships lapsed. The young women she had studied with in France and the group of friends and acquaintances she had made in Washington drifted to their own concerns, stopped calling or writing, acceding one by one to the silence. All but two: Marsha Trunan, a Paris friend with whom she had traveled in Italy and who was also from Memphis, and Constance Waverly, who lived in Maine now and was twenty years older than Natasha and sometimes treated her like a daughter. Marsha continued to call and leave messages, apparently having decided to ignore the difference between Natasha before and Natasha now. Marsha wanted to know what was wrong. Natasha kept insisting that nothing was wrong. She was overwhelmed with work. Just awfully busy. And this was partly true when you added to the daily responsibilities in the senator’s office the necessity of keeping up appearances.

  Perhaps the thing that tormented her most was the banality of it all: a squalid little cliché of betrayal and being the other woman. Surely regret was supposed to be reserved for mistakes on some grander scale than this—yet regret was what she felt, so deep that it sat under her heart, a physical ache.

  She had thought he was the love of her life.

  His name was Larry Mackenzie, a photographer she met through her job arranging appointments with journalists and news services for the senator.

  She had spent almost a year sneaking in and out of hotels with him, and taking trips to other cities for false reasons, lying to everyone, including herself, holding on to the hope that he would leave his wife for her, end an unhappy marriage, a loveless disaster. He had described the misery in his house: a wife sinking into fanatical pursuit of the supernatural, believing in her ability to read minds and predict the future. Natasha had felt sorrow for his pain, mingled with desire that he stop talking about it and do what he kept saying he would do: find a way to make the civil arrangements. No one had to remain in a marriage he no longer wanted.

  The day after Thanksgiving, she got a phone call from the wife.

  Mrs. Mackenzie was confident and strong and spoke from a great height of scorn and moral superiority. She had confronted her delinquent husband with what she had known “for some time,” and he’d told her the whole story, had answered all her questions, being courageously forthright, explaining everything to her satisfaction. “I’ve already forgiven him,” she said. “As my faith dictates I should.”

  What Mackenzie had done, it turned out, was convince the poor woman that Natasha was the instigator of the affair and was now stalking him.

  Ugliness all around.

  Natasha confided this to Constance Waverly, and Constance responded in a tone that expressed how sordid she thought it was.

  Well, Constance was right—no use denying the fact.

  There had followed a series of blurry evenings, of being out by herself in Adams Morgan and Georgetown—boozy hours and instances of dalliance with unknown men. She had stopped painting altogether, and she began to drink alone, in the predawn, in her apartment, often going to sleep drunk, half clothed, on top of the blankets of her bed. This desperation had slowly turned into the interior gloom and ache that had brought her to a doctor and a prescription for bupropion.

  She confided in no one else. When she spoke to Iris on the telephone, it was their usual pleasant back and forth. When Iris asked about her plan of saving money to go back to France and spend a year putting together enough work for a show, she pretended that things were still on track. Senator Norland, who kept a proprietary interest in her and saw her nearly every day, was nevertheless too absorbed to notice that anything was wrong, and somehow she continued to keep up with her work. She had in fact gotten better at it, had buried herself in it.

  But the days were long, and filled with dejection.

  Now, in the soft evening in the senator’s house in Virginia, she was surprised by her own lifted spirits. She finished the medallions of beef, sipped the last of the wine in her glass, and went with Father Faulk to look at the new flowers clinging to the trestle bordering the patio. Blessedly, she felt no pressure to speak. The two of them were quiet. They strolled contentedly together along the gravel path
above the river.

  3

  Father Faulk had seen an intimation of gloom in the young woman’s eyes—not quite definable, yet there, like a shadow on water. Well, she was lovely, bracing up against something, and evidently not particularly eager to be introduced. Senator Norland, with characteristic, ham-handed, well-intentioned gregariousness, had barged through the moment like someone hoping to get them together as a couple. It was nothing of the kind, of course: Norland had merely realized the Memphis connection and, as was his nature, acted upon it, wanting everybody to be comfortable. Anyway, Faulk was grateful for having been pulled away in the middle of small talk. It was clear that this young, darkly beautiful woman had scarcely noticed him.

  He was struggling with his own shadows.

  The fact that his former wife, Joan, was getting remarried and was also expecting hurt him in a surprising, steady, aching way. He could not plumb the reason for it. The marriage ended three years ago. Joan had wanted a child and they had not conceived, but this was secondary: what bothered her most was what she called his moodiness; she believed that he had no sense of joy. Whereas she saw joy as an emotional goal and resting place, he had always looked upon it as something lovely that nevertheless contained awareness of the possible darkness all around—the rush of delight gazing at a sleeping baby, for instance, while also noting the little blue veins in the cheek, those minute tokens of mortality.

  Moreover, the progress of her leaving had to do with her admission to herself that she found little rest in the daily rounds of work, of supporting the life, his ministry. Eleven years of the troubles of others, including his own peculiar form of darkness. She said everything drained her, his needs, his inability or refusal to see her, her, as someone separate from him. “First thing in the morning the calls and the needs and your needs and the work and more calls and I just can’t breathe. It’s driving me crazy.” The accusation surprised and weakened him. He did not know how to change things. It was like trying to change one’s skin and bones. And so she went to visit her mother, who lived in an old house in Portland. It was supposed to be a break, time and space to gather herself. But then the stay lengthened, and when she finally came home, it was to pack and leave for good.

  In the end it wasn’t quite clear how much of her discontent came from his work and how much of it came from himself. She wanted to leave. She claimed she felt no anger. And since, now, he was indeed considering leaving the priesthood, he had come to imagine that her restlessness and her wish to depart were early reflections of his own trajectory.

  In his vocation, he had lost something unnameable but necessary.

  This came to him one afternoon not long after she left. He was visiting a man in the hospital who had fallen in his own kitchen and hit his head. Sitting at the foot of the man’s bed watching him go in and out of sleep, he had the unpleasant thought that this visit was his job. Across from where he sat with his half-conscious parishioner was a woman with a man whose demeanor showed that he hadn’t gone mentally past the age of three. Father Faulk saw the shape of her face in shadow, the devotion in her light blue eyes, her loveliness as a woman. He looked back to the sleeping patient, but the image of this woman played across the surface of his thoughts. He would speak to her, get to know her, offering solace, at which of course he was practiced enough. She turned into the light from the window, and the light showed the lines of her face. For some reason he hadn’t seen those lines before. She held the man’s hand—this man, her son, with some injury to his leg, and all the cost of her reality was in her features. Suddenly Father Faulk knew he had nothing to tell her that she would want to hear, and he experienced the strongest sense of having awakened from some dream of life.

  For a time he resisted negative considerations like these. He put them away like temptations—that was what he thought they were—and went on. And on. There wasn’t anything else for it. You did your job and you accepted the bouts of despair as part of the normal run of experience in the life of a priest. Since the divorce he had settled into a zone of gray calm, performing the tasks of his calling—an efficient, uninspired servant of his vocation. Now and then he saw one woman or another and felt lonely even when he was with them. He was no longer fit for the work. Or so he expressed it recently to a friend, Father Andrew Clenon, the warden of the vestry for his parish. Father Clenon wasn’t yet aware that Faulk wanted to leave. The talk had been confined to the dissatisfactions of the life. Clenon thought the trouble was spiritual dryness and told him to pray about it and went on to speak about the perils to the spirit when one was suffering through some change, as Father Faulk was with the news of Joan’s pregnancy.

  “It’s been three years, Andrew.”

  “You’re going to sit there and tell me that her getting remarried—the baby—none of that’s bothering you at all?”

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with Joan. Except that I think maybe she knew I wasn’t up to it before I admitted it to myself.”

  “You’ve dealt with it, though. Haven’t you. You’re a fine priest.”

  “I’m telling you it has nothing to do with Joan.”

  But of course it did have to do with Joan. And it had also to do with that life he once thought he was building, the changed life he was leading now, a chain of barren habit and avoidance and all the complications of being only marginally present in situations that deserved more from him. Through the winter, he had been carrying around the conviction that he must leave, must break free. The journey to Washington and a visit with what was left of his family, the senator’s mother-in-law, had been something Father Clenon suggested.

  It hadn’t helped, hadn’t changed anything. In fact it had strengthened the feeling that his priesthood was a failure.

  But strolling along the gravel path above the river on that spring evening with Iris Mara’s granddaughter, Natasha, he saw the unselfconscious pleasure she took in the new flowers, tulips and daffodils and wisteria, and he sought to break out of his own self-absorption. The flowers were indeed lovely and sweet scented, and when she looked at him, her dark sad eyes took him in, and for the first time he thought of leaving the clergy not as a capitulation but as a chance at some kind of happiness.

  He did not return to Tennessee the next morning. He got his aunt Clara to ask for Natasha’s number from the senator and called her to ask if she would accompany him for a stroll along the Tidal Basin, to the Jefferson Memorial.

  4

  She was curious, exhilarated, and even so she declined.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s just coffee and a stroll on a fine Saturday morning. What’s preventing you from that? I’m just going to call you tomorrow and ask you the same thing.”

  “I thought you were going home.”

  “I’m staying on for another week. Come on. A little walk.”

  They met at a coffee bar on Wisconsin Avenue. He wore a white shirt rolled above the elbows and tan slacks, and she thought the civilian clothes made him look younger. She wondered if you called them civilian clothes and almost asked him, holding herself in check and smiling under her hands as they walked into the little café. They each had an Americano and pastry. His talk was gratifyingly fanciful. He wondered where she would live if she had unlimited funds, and what climate would be best for her, what countries—advantages and shortcomings of the several candidates for home, as he called it.

  “France,” she said. “I’ve been trying to save money to go there for a year and live.”

  They talked about Iris a little. He paid for the coffee, and they took their walk. An image came to her mind of clouds lifting. She paused to appreciate the quality of light through the cherry trees. He bent down to pick up a blossom and then tossed it.

  “You didn’t name any of the states as a possible place to live,” she said.

  His smile was slightly sardonic. “Somewhere far away. California? Alaska? Hawaii?”

  “Not Alaska.”

  “Too cold,” he said. “Right? I wasn’t
serious.”

  “My mother was a bit, well, crazy. I mean that’s the only way to describe it. She had an idea that my father and she should find some way for us to live in Alaska. Anchorage. Think of it.”

  “A lot of nice happy people live there,” he said.

  “I wonder if she would’ve been happy. I don’t know that I would’ve.”

  They went on a little.

  “So she got my father to get a job on this Norwegian cruise ship to Alaska. My father was a trained chef. They were going to make the money to move. But there was an explosion, and the ship caught fire, and they jumped into the ocean. Several people did that to get away from the flames.”

  “Iris didn’t tell me any of this, of course.”

  “She didn’t tell me the real specifics of it until I was out of her house a couple of years. All I knew was that they were gone, lost at sea off Vancouver. I never knew them. Iris is—well. I used to wonder sometimes what she was thinking. And she never complains. It could be pretty quiet in the house, and anybody might think we were angry, or sad, but it was both of us sitting within four feet of each other reading. Perfectly glad of the quiet. I used to imagine her raising my mother alone. What that was like. And I guess it must’ve been like it was with me.”

  “And your mother wanted to live in Alaska.”

  “She actually wanted the cold. Loved snow, Iris says. I don’t think much of her survives in me.”

  “Do you think Iris would say that?”

  “Probably not.”

  Presently, she said, “But really, I’d like to go back to France. The southern coast. I went to school there. Let’s say I like to imagine living in France and—painting.”

  “Making enough money to live on it?”

  “Sure, why not?” She smiled.

  “You paint every day?”

  “I don’t paint at all just now. But I have done some watercolors. But this was about fantasy, right?”