Before, During, After Read online

  All Mrs. Ratzibungen’s employees—cooks, waitstaff, those who kept the rooms—were Jamaican, and they dressed according to the traditions of life in the tropics: colorful skirts, blouses, and headscarves made from calico for the women; light shirts full of designs with flowers, loud colors in patterns, or depictions of sailboats, rising fish in the surf, or palm trees in the sun for the men. The men all wore shorts, even in the evenings. Mrs. Ratzibungen’s sons had taken to the island way of dressing.

  Natasha got a tan and spent hours swimming. She called Faulk on the third day, and he told her that his father had decided not to attend the Ruhm wedding after all, because a mild case of gout had made it painful to walk. “So it’s only going to be me there, and it’s just as well, I guess. But, you know, I’m actually going to miss the old apostate.”

  “We’ll go see him. As soon as we’re settled. Let’s.”

  “You sound very happy.”

  “It’s beautiful here. I wish you could see it.”

  “Maybe I’ll take you back there one birthday.”

  “I mean it, you really will love it.”

  “And we will go visit the old man in Little Rock. Though he’ll be insufferable about my leaving the clergy, you can bet on that. Vindication. He’ll use the word.”

  “I’ll listen for it.”

  He laughed. “Think of it. We’ll go visit people, a married couple going around and shining for everybody.”

  “And we’ll spend weekends in Jamaica,” she said.

  “We’ll be island people half the year.”

  “We’ll smell like coconut oil all the time.”

  “You’re wonderful,” he said.

  They began a pattern where they talked every other morning. He would call her, and the sound of his voice on the other end of the line was a warm reminder of the new life.

  Her twelfth day there, she arose and looked out her window at the sea. The morning was gorgeous, white sand and emerald ocean stretching on into dark blue distance, the wide sky without a cloud, showing all the shades of the one color.

  Fire

  1

  Faulk woke before light on that morning with a headache from too much wine. The airlessness of the room wasn’t helping. With a familiar sense of taking his punishment, he got up and swallowed some aspirin and a lot of water, then took a cool shower, and, without feeling any relief, lay back down to try reading for a spell. The wedding wouldn’t take place until noon, more than seven hours away, at Trinity Church, but he would not go down to the towers for breakfast. In the first place, he lacked the appetite, and finally he was too hungover to do much of anything but lie there and suffer it. The Marriott Downtown, three blocks from the church, was where the rehearsal dinner had been and where the groom’s whole family was staying. Faulk had booked himself a room uptown, and before the rehearsal evening was over, he was glad of this.

  He had been unready for the well-meaning but essentially prying talk arising from the fact that he was not conducting the wedding ceremony. It placed him at a slight remove from everyone, as if they were all wondering about him.

  Theo Ruhm and Faulk’s father had gone to college together; they had been friends for fifty years. Theo considered Faulk another son, and, when they were all boys, his four sons were like brothers. The groom, Charlie, was the youngest and the last to be married. Faulk had performed the ceremony for the three older ones, each in turn.

  Everybody was solicitous of him—a couple of people called him Father Faulk and then blanched from embarrassment—and they all wanted to know how he was doing. He could not help hearing a note of concern in their voices, doubtless stemming from the belief that leaving the clergy involved something more complicated for him than the wish for a change. In any case, it seemed unpleasantly clear to him that to these kindly people the very idea was in need of some kind of explication: a man in his late forties leaving a twenty-year vocation for any reason, even if it was only to “seek happiness elsewhere.”

  Theo Ruhm was particularly interested and wanted details and wasn’t shy about asking. He cornered Faulk at the entrance to the large ballroom where the rehearsal dinner was to be held, handed him a glass of wine, and said, “So tell me.”

  “There’s really not much to tell.”

  “Hey—this is me you’re talking to.”

  “Well, but there really isn’t much to tell.”

  Ruhm merely gazed at him, smiling.

  “It stopped meaning anything to me, you know, Theo? I can’t explain it beyond that.”

  “You turning into an atheist, like your old man?”

  “Oh, no. Not at all.”

  “He’s the most religious atheist I ever saw. Been arguing with God his whole life. I still get pissed at him when he starts in about it. And I still love him like a brother.”

  “He’ll think he’s won something with my leaving the priesthood.”

  “So,” Theo Ruhm said. “How do you—quit, exactly, in your line of work.”

  “I went to see my superior. The—the senior warden of the vestry. Who’s a friend.”

  “And what did he say?”

  Faulk looked at him. “You don’t really want to hear all this do you? Today?”

  “You don’t think I’d be interested about what you go through?”

  “You’re a good man, Mr. Ruhm.”

  “Well,” Theo went on, raising his drink, “the prohibitionist aunt didn’t come, so we can have as much as we want of this. And it’s a happy time. I’m sorry Leander’s missing it. I was looking forward to meeting Trixie and having her meet my lady.”

  “I was looking forward to seeing them, too,” Faulk said. “I’ve only spoken to Trixie on the phone a couple times myself.”

  “I hope you’re happy, Michael,” said Ruhm, patting his upper arm.

  “I am. And I’m happy for you, too, Theo.”

  The Ruhms had been together only a couple of years, the boys’ mother having left Theo a decade ago to pursue happiness elsewhere. The phrase went through Faulk’s mind, an evil little turn, and he grasped the other’s hand and congratulated him on the marriage of his youngest son. The boys’ mother, Cheryl, was on the other side of the room celebrating with her side of the family and her new husband, who was a football coach. The new husband’s capacity for this kind of cheerfulness was a cause for worry, and even now he lifted a cocktail and drained it. Faulk saw this, wondering at the failure of kindness in everything he felt, standing there with his glass of wine in his hand and his changed life showing in his face. He wished Natasha could be with him, and the thought of her soothed him.

  “You’ll like Natasha,” he said to Ruhm, but the older man was already distracted, greeting a business associate whose bushy red mustache looked as though it had been glued on, completely covering his mouth.

  Faulk moved to another part of the room. A band was setting up, five young men with the apathetic look of being hired for the purpose of background music.

  Faulk watched them, wishing he was in Tennessee. Or Jamaica. He had a glass of bourbon at the cash bar, then switched back to wine.

  And he faltered through the afternoon, repressing the bad temper that troubled him when his new circumstance surfaced in the talk, striving for patience with his own wearisome explanations, the same anemic phrases others used over and over, phrases he hated—self-fulfillment, new challenges, time to move on—phrases that, discouragingly enough, contained an element of truth. He drank several more glasses of Burgundy before the sit-down for the rehearsal dinner. It was not noticed, particularly, because there was plenty to drink and no one was holding back. But when, at dinner, he realized that the alcohol was having an effect on him, he removed himself quietly and took a cab back to the hotel, where he had another whiskey and went to bed with the room spinning.

  There, sleepless, he thought of his last meeting with Father Clenon, where he actually said the words “I want to renounce my vows.” He had come back from Washington, and Natasha. He went over the fail
ures of his priesthood, and talking about it was like getting out of jail. Father Clenon stared at him for a long time. Finally he said, “Take a month? For me?”

  “Let me do it now,” said Faulk. “For me.”

  The other continued to stare, and there was something bitterly forbearing in his gaze. “Write the letter when you’re sure,” he said. “Let’s just put it that way.”

  And so Faulk had waited through that following week.

  Now, in the dark of predawn, he tried to read and couldn’t. His mind kept wandering to the strangeness of being outside the fold—someone had used the term—and to random images from the evening before. He had seen so many wedding gatherings. The blur of them made his mind ache.

  How tired he was of being the one to whom others felt free to unpack their sorrows. Recognizing the self-centeredness of the feeling, he tried to think of something else. But it was true that while his own marriage was deteriorating he had listened to the marriage troubles of countless others, had endured his own suffering all alone, going through each day with the weight of it on his heart. And Joan was discreet. No one had the slightest inkling. Life went on that way for the more than two years it took her to decide.

  He turned the television on and flicked through the channels. Old shows, news, commercial broadcasts, movies. Everything in progress, nothing beginning. He felt locked away from the world where all this was happening. It was unnerving, and yet vaguely agreeable, like being proved right about something.

  Ten minutes after 5:00 a.m.

  He turned the television off, took a Xanax, and lay down to try going back to sleep. And sleep came, with stealth. He saw Natasha standing by the window, going on about the pretty water of the river. She said “river” and he corrected her. It’s not a river, darling.

  Yes, it is, she said with unfamiliar insistence.

  No, it’s the Mediterranean Sea, he told her, aware now that this was a dream, and yet feeling quite certain that what he had said made perfect sense. In the next instant, he experienced the suspicion that he was wrong and felt an unreasonable terror of the possibility. It was the Life or Death of dreams, and he was casting about in his mind for the answer, which kept eluding him. Finally he could only repeat helplessly “The Mediterranean Sea,” like a prayer, the one explicable thing in the dream, and then that was obliterated, too, and he was not even dreaming anymore. Mysteriously, he was also aware of the blankness.

  He woke shortly after nine with a sense of having worked his way up from an awful depth to consciousness. But the headache was gone. Rising, a bit groggy from the drug, he stumbled to the window and looked out. It was a perfect day for a wedding. “There it is,” he said aloud, smiling at the infinite rinsed sky stretching away over the tall roofs of the city with the small cylindrical water tanks and thickets of antennas and wires. “The Mediterranean Sea.”

  It came to him that he did not feel like attending a wedding, even this one, with its happy couple and proud father. Just now, the thought oppressed him.

  He made his way to the bathroom and cleaned his teeth, then moved to the closet and started to dress, thinking of calling Natasha, though it was well past the time. She would already have left for the beach. He decided to try anyway, wanting to tell her about the dream. A recorded voice said that the volume of calls was too much and to try the number later. He pushed the button for the front desk and waited. No answer. Finally he lay back down, hands behind his head, and drifted a little, intending to sit up and try again in a moment. He looked at his watch and remembered that she was an hour behind him.

  2

  Because it was the day of the wedding in New York, Natasha did not expect to hear from him. This was her last day in Jamaica. She and Constance went out to the beach and had an hour sunning themselves and reading. Natasha stepped into the clear shallows and looked down at her feet in the sand. The water was cold, clean, and lucid, with its lime green color as you looked across it, and you could almost see the place in the distance where it began turning to the deepest blue. The sand was smooth and perfectly consistent, as though it had been designed and produced for human feet to track in it. She turned and looked back at Constance, who lay on her multicolored blanket, one arm across her face, one leg bent at the knee. The picture of relaxation. Natasha wondered why people weren’t strolling down to the beach, as on all the other mornings. “You suppose this is some kind of holy day?” she called to her friend. Constance raised her head and looked at her, then held both hands up, a shrugging motion, and went back to her sunbathing.

  Natasha turned to look out at the waves coming toward her, and thought of Faulk. There was so much happiness to come, and now she made an effort not to allow it into her thoughts—as if to anticipate the fond future might render it precarious: her new life in Tennessee and her journey back to Europe in the spring. She saw herself painting in a sunlit room with the lovely countryside of Provence out the window and Michael Faulk somewhere close by, writing perhaps. Imagining this scene, she experienced suddenly a dark shift inside. She dipped her hands in the water and moved them back and forth, watching the swirls, concentrating on the traces running from the ends of her fingers. She saw the gulls gliding low across the iridescent surface and inwardly searched for the contentment she had just been feeling so strongly. Of course this propensity for the flow of her thoughts to shade into darkness was not new, and she had learned to accept it. But with Faulk she had come to believe she could grow out of it at last—that it would fade, becoming only an aspect of past life.

  She had never known anything like this passion, and today’s crossing shadow was only that he was so far away. With the thousands of miles between them, it was natural to fear that the world might take him from her.

  Though the unease she felt, missing him, brought on other worries.

  His experience of the world was indeed unlike her own, and occasionally his seriousness about religion concerned her. The way his eyes glittered as he uttered the phrases of his faith. His fervor sometimes produced in her an irksome displeasure, which she had labored to stifle. Occasionally, she had made light of it, teasing him with the intent of bringing him back to earth about sounding too priestly.

  At times her teasing was received in a less-than-lighthearted manner. “There’s stuff I’d rather not ponder,” he said. “Or be too conscious of. Thoughts that lead nowhere and only end in pain.”

  “So you don’t question?” she asked him.

  “I don’t expect an answer to the questions. So I try not to ask them.”

  “And you’ve succeeded in that?”

  “Failure,” he said with that sidelong smile, “is rampant where I live.”

  How he fascinated her! She was sure now that she had never been in love before, had never even gotten near it. And there was something else, too: in the last few days, watching Constance conduct business over the phone with contractors about the design of the Maine house, she had begun to receive intimations about how much she, Natasha, had let the job in Washington take over her life. She had accepted the position merely to make enough money to spend a year in France painting, and the very effort to make possible the hoped-for journey had somehow diluted the hope itself. Constance’s focus was that house. She was continually rethinking everything about it, wanting the design to be in keeping with new ideas she had about the efficient use of energy and the least possible impact on the wildlife in the vicinity. It was her passion; it gave her definition and purpose.

  Natasha stood in the cold water of the beach and thought about her own lack of some central resolve. She had dreamed of putting together a real body of work, a portfolio of paintings and drawings, too, and when actually painting she had always felt so fresh and glad. Yet she had let anything and everything, including her own wandering in the world, take precedence. And perhaps this had to do with her particular beginnings. After all, her earliest memories were of crisis, near and loving presences inexplicably taken away, first into distance and then into the limitless far q
uiet of the sky—something gravely wrong and her grandmother crying in the nights. Teachers had told her she was talented. Friends had marveled at what she could bring about with the stroke of a brush, and she had wasted so much time, so much of her young life chasing after some nameless inkling of happiness, as if she might come to a place, a physical somewhere else, where she would find whatever it was she had always missed, the right combination of nourishment for her soul, a sense of completion, and, at long last—she could admit it to herself now—relief. Solace.

  Here, on this beach in Jamaica, remembering her plans with Faulk, she felt that very thing, that sighing release of the long pressure, and she murmured “My darling,” as though he were standing at her side. She looked at the shimmering horizon with its small white triangle of a single sailboat crossing.

  Constance called to her from the beach. “Let’s go eat.”

  Walking up to the resort, they saw Ratzi standing in the entrance. Natasha greeted him with a little wave and then, seeing the strange look on his face, paused and waited for him to speak.

  He walked up to her and took her by the arms. She thought something had happened to Iris. But then he turned to Constance, and now she thought of Constance’s daughter. Ratzi stood back, almost bowing, wringing his small white hands. “Awful.” His voice was shaky. “I’m so sorry. It’s terrible. Terrible. You must come.” He went along the walk, and they followed, hurrying. Now Natasha thought that something must have happened to Maria Ratzibungen.