Before, During, After Page 3

  “Did you study painting?”

  “Studied art.”

  “What would you say is your best trait?”

  She had the feeling that he was talking now just to talk. “Doing the watercolors.”

  “That’s your best trait?”

  She decided to change the subject. “Is Clara your mother’s sister or your father’s?”

  “My mother’s half sister.”

  They were quiet for a few paces. The Tidal Basin was awash in blue shade with patches of sun, and on the fresh-cut grass shirtless young men threw a Frisbee back and forth. Only yesterday she would have seen them as cruelly separate from her, spending a carefree morning.

  The day was growing lovelier by the minute. The white linen slacks she wore were comfortable and cool. She had tied her hair back in a chignon, and the breezes pleasantly brushed her neck. Butterflies flew around her.

  “I think they’re drawn to your pink top,” he said.

  At the water’s edge they stood, watching the ducks glide by and several geese that kept honking. He reached over and, in a way that seemed natural and uninvasive—like the gesture of an older sibling—undid her hair. “I didn’t know I was going to do that,” he said. “I was appreciating the shine of it in this light, and I wanted to see more of it. Sorry. I don’t usually do that kind of thing.”

  “It’s fine.” She was a little surprised at how much his worry about it pleased her.

  They walked along the bank of the river. Sailboats glided past out in the brightness, and one motorboat sped by heading the opposite way, creating a white wake that churned at the banks. He placed his hand gently at the small of her back as they moved to the lane, into the cooler shade. A woman came by, pulled along by two large black dogs whose panting and striving—long nails clicking on the pavement—were the only sounds in the stillness. At a stone bench near the memorial, with its classic circle of columns and the tall shadow of the statue inside, they sat together and talked idly about the dinner party the evening before and about Senator Norland.

  “Ten years dry now,” he said about the senator’s famous alcohol troubles. “But when they handed the presidency to Bush, that was tough for him.”

  “We’re not allowed to mention that.”

  “I remember John Mitchell saying the country was going to go so far right it would hardly be recognizable. And here we are, not even three months out of the Clinton administration, and Mitchell, that crusty old bastard, looks like a prophet. It’s so strange that the very people who are hurt most by them are their most vociferous supporters. An unforeseen flaw. The Founding Fathers couldn’t have imagined television. What to do about a duped population.”

  “Do you talk about any of this from the pulpit?”

  “Actually, I’m leaving the, um, pulpit.”

  She turned and waited for him to explain. But he sat back and sighed.

  “You can’t just say that and leave it there.”

  “Well, I’m not a very good priest. I feel like I’m lying.”

  “You no longer believe in God.”

  “No, I do. Very much. You don’t have to leave the religion, you know, if you renounce your vocation.”

  They walked over to the memorial. Staring at the sculpted face, he murmured, as if out of respect for it, “This is one of my favorite places in the city. He’s actually an ancestor on my mother’s side, I’m told.”

  “Tell me about your aunt Clara.”

  Thinking about the woman gave him obvious pleasure. “She’s lived here all her life. My mother’s younger sister by twelve years. Got a big old pretty house in Cleveland Park, and it’s constantly filled with people. She’s not slightly involved in politics, either.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m fairly insulated in Memphis. My coming into town to see her and her husband is usually as close as I get.”

  “I’ve lived here for years,” said Natasha, “and I’ve never come to this memorial. A lot of this town I’ve never seen. And these are places people travel thousands of miles to see.”

  “What did you paint when you did the watercolors?”

  “Not this.”

  He was still gazing at Jefferson. “There’s a lot of places here I’ve never been in, too.”

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “I won’t make you guess. I’ll be forty-eight in June. And you?”

  “Thirty-two in July.”

  They went back toward the Ellipse and on to the Lincoln Memorial. School buses were lined up, emptying out, children gathering to go in. The air was full of diesel exhaust.

  “Tell me the happiest you’ve been,” he said.

  She didn’t have to think. “When I was in France. Aix-en-Provence. One day I was standing in a little café waiting to order a baguette. I’d come on my bicycle down a long mountain road overlooking the Mediterranean, and it was cool and sunny and I realized I’d never felt so much at home, and I was happy. Really happy. And I’d been happy for weeks.”

  “Ever been back?”

  “Not to live. Had a few days there a couple of times, taking pictures.”

  “Not painting them.”

  “Working for a travel magazine. And now how about you? What’s the happiest you’ve been?”

  “Actually, I’m pretty happy right now.”

  “Not fair. Come on.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve never been really happy. Maybe that’s why I asked the question. I’m still trying to figure out if it’s possible.”

  “You’re a little old for that kind of questioning, don’t you think?”

  “I know.” He laughed. “Even at my age, I’m incomplete.”

  5

  They spent the rest of the day together, looking at the famous sights of the city that neither of them had ever gotten around to—the Washington Monument, the National Archives, and some of the Smithsonian. It was a lark, a sweet game. For her it seemed a charm against having to part ways. In the evening they had dinner at a small French place she knew in Georgetown. The day’s experience had made clear to her—it was a disconcerting little revelation—how rarely she had been herself with any of the men she had known. It was as if she’d always had to labor through some unspoken contest of wit. The insight made her hesitate. Perhaps it was the age difference. She got quiet while they ate and thought about finding an excuse to go on her way. Suddenly the whole gloomy history of the past two years blew through her. She sat straighter, attempting to fight it off. She had taken to calling this feeling the white sustenance, except that now she felt anxiety, too. She took a long sip of her wine and finished it, keeping her eyes on him.

  He ordered two more glasses, then said, “Be right back.” He rose and went toward the restrooms. The server, a long-faced, grouchy-seeming old man, set the glasses of wine down, and she took a small drink from hers and breathed deeply, wanting to calm down. It had been such a good day. She possessed the necessary detachment to admit that her emotions about it might be sentimental, that she could be producing them in some way, a self-deception born out of where she had been and what she had been through. She looked across the room at the bar, where a man and woman sat close, murmuring.

  People got along in the world. People provided comfort for one another.

  She took the rest of the wine and signaled the server for another. He brought the bottle over and poured more for her, without saying a word. She saw the wrinkles across the back of his neck as he moved away. Faulk came back to the table and sat down. He was an interesting man, and she could just enjoy him. He was not that much older: sixteen years. But they could simply be friends. She could leave it there.

  He sipped his wine and looked at her, and she looked away.

  “Something hurt you a minute ago. Did I say something wrong?”

  She touched the back of his hand. “No.”

  “This is fun,” he said.

  She found herself talking more about Iris, how it had been growing up orphaned in that old house. �
�Of course I never thought about it then, but I was being raised by a woman who had lost everything except me. Her husband had gone off, and she never heard another thing from him or about him until news came from a cousin that he’d passed away on a street in San Antonio. I still don’t know what made him leave, except that she was pregnant with my mother. But, you know, I don’t feel deprived. Life was—well, itself. And then I went off to France. And of course we don’t—she doesn’t live in Collierville anymore. Not since my last year of high school. But I always had a sense of this—this sad past I couldn’t know about, and Iris has a thing about time. There’s a pillow she embroidered that she keeps on the piano bench. It says, The dark backward and abysm of time. I don’t have any idea where it comes from.”

  “ ‘The dark backward and abysm of time.’ ”

  “I was fourteen when she did it.”

  “Strange thing to embroider on a pillow.”

  “So tell me about you,” Natasha said. “Your parents.”

  “My father’s Leander. Lee. From Gulfport, Mississippi. He used to practice what he calls small-town law. His joke is that all he’s ever missed in life is the n-e-r at the end of his name. Then we’d be Faulkners. We have what you might call a complex relationship, since he thinks the religion, um, makes me a fool. He and my mother argued about it and about me all the time, and finally they broke apart when I was in divinity school. Basically she believed and he didn’t. And in his mind she coddled me. And I guess she did. In his mind, anyway, that explains my being a priest. Her obsessive piety.”

  Natasha took a little more of the wine. “Still?”

  “I guess. He’s retired and he has a new wife I haven’t seen.”

  “He doesn’t visit you in Memphis.”

  Faulk shrugged. “Something about his peripheral vision makes it so he can’t drive anymore, but he talks of getting the new wife to drive him over one day. They were married this past fall, and of course he was glad to have me know it was a civil ceremony. Her name’s Trixie. I’ve talked to her on the phone. Soft, sweet voice. And I’ve seen her picture with him on the Christmas card.” Sitting back, folding his arms across his chest, he sighed. “I’d like one more glass of wine, I think.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”

  As he signaled the server, he said, “By the terms of my mother’s last will and testament, I have a trust fund, really enough to live on if I don’t go crazy with it. So if I leave the priesthood I won’t—”

  The server came and poured, still without saying anything, and they sipped the wine.

  A little while later she said, “I think I’m getting blotto.”

  So they ordered coffee and stayed until all the other patrons were gone from the place—the old grouchy server and the bartender talking quietly at the bar.

  She was telling him about being eighteen years old and arriving in France with only the vaguest ideas of what she might do with her life. The world was wide and welcoming. As she talked she was suddenly aware of the coarseness of her hands, the bitten fingernails. She folded them under her chin and looked out at the street. Then, slowly, with a small soundless breath, set them down on the table between them, fingers spread, in plain sight. “Anyway, it was a good time. I felt like I’d found the place on earth where I belonged. I took a job as an au pair for a Dutch liquor wholesaler and his wife and two children after I graduated, because I didn’t want to come back to the States. I met my friend Constance Waverly working for them. My rich lady friend. She’s older. So you see, I have experience, I guess because of Iris, really, being friends with—” She stopped.

  “You were going to say ‘with people who are so much older’?”

  “With people who are a good deal older, sure.”

  “That’s—reassuring.”

  She sipped her coffee and sought something else to talk about.

  “And how old is Constance?”

  “Fifties. I’m supposed to spend some time with her in Jamaica in September. A little vacation she’s offered me. All I have to do is pay my way down.”

  “Ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “Nice place.” He stared. “I hear.”

  “I’m sorry if I said something wrong,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “It’s all right, really.”

  Deciding to pretend that she’d already forgotten about it, she said, “What’re people saying about you leaving the priesthood?”

  “Well, you’re the first person I’ve told other than the warden of the vestry about my—difficulty. And he doesn’t really know I want to leave.”

  She said nothing.

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a while. But you’re the first one to know all of it.”

  “Not Aunt Clara?”

  “No—not yet. But I don’t think it’ll matter much to her.”

  “Why me?”

  Something changed in his eyes, a very slight narrowing; it could’ve been the light. “I don’t know,” he said.

  He walked her to her car, and they exchanged a hug before she got in behind the wheel.

  “Good night,” he said. Then: “Let’s go somewhere else tomorrow.”

  “Call me,” she said.

  He stood under the streetlamp and watched her go, and she saw him in the side-view mirror.

  In her apartment she had a whiskey, trying to offset the coffee and the nervousness she felt. Marsha Trunan had called twice and left two messages. Natasha reflected that her last remaining friend in the city might soon go the way of the others. She made herself return the call.

  “What,” Marsha said, her voice thick with sleep.

  “I woke you. I’m sorry.”

  “I knew it would be you. I wasn’t asleep.”

  “You called me today?”

  “Where are you?” Marsha wanted to know.

  “Home.”

  “Want a visitor?”

  “Marsha, I’m really fried. It’s so late.”

  “Busy, busy.”

  Natasha said nothing.

  “I’ve got tickets to something called Hamlet at the National Theatre way in June. Way, way off in June. And I hear it’s a pretty good play by this English dude named Shakespeare.”

  Natasha sighed. “Sounds interesting.”

  “But you can’t say that far ahead.”

  “I’m sorry, Marsha. I’m just so—”

  The other interrupted her. “Busy, right. I get it. I’ll stop calling.”

  “Please don’t do that.”

  “Well, anyway, I’ve got news,” Marsha went on. “Guess who’s divorcing his insane wife and marrying some Ph.D. sociology student at GW.”

  Natasha waited. She could not remember when the other would have learned about it all, and then she felt she knew: Constance.

  “You remember your photographer friend. Mackenzie.”

  She expected to feel a sting, but it didn’t come. “Why would that mean anything to me?”

  “Oh, come on. I know all about it. And I haven’t divulged it, either, like someone else we know. But a lot of people saw that you were pretty thick with him.”

  “Well, anyway. Good for him. I’m sure it was love at first sighting.”

  Marsha laughed, and coughed, and said through her sputtering that she was going to steal the line.

  “You can have it,” Natasha told her.

  “God! I miss you. You are amazing. If it was me, I’d be a hopeless mess. But you—”

  “Marsha, he’s so gone from me.”

  “You’re strong. I wish I was strong.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Oh, things’re cool with me, really. I wish I had your troubles sometimes.”

  “I’m supposed to go to Jamaica with Constance in early September. Why don’t you come with us? We could split the cost of a room ourselves.”

  “Constance wouldn’t speak to us for decades.”

  Natasha heard her light a cigarette. “Listen, Marsha, I really should
get to bed. I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise.”

  “Bye,” Marsha said, and hung up. Something like a song note sounded in her voice: two syllables. “Bye-eye.”

  Natasha listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, feeling the separation. She would call her back, say she loved her. She punched the number, then felt too tired for the talk that would follow. She pressed the disconnect and put the handset down.

  Sitting at her small night table, she opened a book. Nearly midnight. She heard sirens out in the night, someone shouted in the street a block or two over. It was the sound of a Saturday night in this part of the city. Without even quite attending to it, she put the book down, undressed and got into bed, and lay there in the light from her reading lamp, gazing at the ceiling and going over the day, afraid to think forward.

  So the photographer was breaking up his marriage after all.

  Willing herself away from any thoughts of him, she conjured the picture of Michael Faulk as he appeared in her side-view mirror, standing under the streetlight. She went to sleep with this image in her mind like a ghost outline after looking into bright light.

  Love Life

  1

  The weather had been breezy and a bit cooler than usual, and then it warmed up, and you knew real spring had arrived. She took the week off and saw him every day, making sure they went to places where it was unlikely they would encounter anyone from her office. He showed that he had divined this when they were on their way to dinner at his aunt Clara’s, explaining that long ago he’d extracted a promise from her not to talk about his comings and goings.

  Her tall old house in Cleveland Park was reminiscent of the house in Collierville where Natasha had grown up, with its wide front porch and its Italianate windows. Going up the sidewalk in front felt like coming home. Here were the same worn steps, the same spindle-shaped wooden supports for the railing. Aunt Clara stood in the doorway with arms extended in greeting as they came up the walk. She was thin, sharp featured, with dark auburn hair and brilliant light blue eyes. Natasha thought briefly of the daughter, the senator’s wife, Greta. The eye color was the same, and you saw something very similar in the jawline.

  “Can I call you Tasha?” Clara asked. “When I was a girl I had a friend Natasha and we all called her that. Do any of your friends call you Tasha?”