George Higgins - A change of gravity

By then eleven years had passed since Walter's death, so there had been no question that Diane had recovered from the loss. The shattering decline into silence that would necessitate Polly's admission to St.

Mary's on the Hilltop had set in, rendering progressively more irrelevant his extreme reluctance 'to put her in the home'; he had reached a sort of marker in his life. But depressing as it was, the event had nonetheless been predictable for a long time; he had seen it coming much as Dan and Mercy Hilliard had known despairingly long before the day arrived that sooner or later they would have to put their daughter Donna in an institution providing long-term care. So he did not have the excuse that he had been dazed in shock that evening when he said what he should not have, asking Diane what he should do.

"You should move right back into it," Diane said immediately. "That's a good house, just like my house is a good house. That place you're living in right now," a large garden court apartment in the Old Wisdom House overlooking Hampton Pond, 'may be where the swells all want to go when they retire, half the year playing golf and shuffleboard in Florida, the other half back here playing golf and lying about their grandchildren. But you'll never be one of those silly men in colored pants with white belts and shoes. Besides, you're not old enough."

"Well," he said, 'the golf I could handle with pleasure, but it looks like I probably wont have the grandchildren."

"Looking for sympathy?" she said. "Won't get it from me. Rachel's always apologizing for not bringing her two back here more often, "so they can get to know you." Uh huh. "Perfectly all right," I always say. "Time enough for us to become dear friends when they go to Harvard. Then they can drive out and see me."

"Nothing wrong with where you live now, it's a very stylish place. But no matter what you have somebody do to it, it'll never be a good house, the kind of place you hang onto and go back to, because it's where you live, and belong. What you need's the sort of place that hangs onto you; that's what I really mean. It keeps you, not you, it, and that's what keeps you going strong."

"And you think I'm going to need one of those of my own," he said. He had been ashamed of himself even as he said it. It was arguably excusable 'never any harm in asking' but just the same it had also been a cheap dodge to take advantage of her compassionate mood in order to wheedle something out of her, something that she didn't want to give him.

She'd raised both eyebrows and gazed at him over the big white plate of veal scallops in cream sauce, and then after a brief but unmistakably reproving silence, she had snickered. "Amby," she had said, 'really now, of course you will. Of course you'll need your place to live. Of course you need a house."

So the terms of their non-aggression pact, 'our treaty," she called it, after that little stutter had resumed evolution along the lines they had begun to take, arriving at it fairly soon after Walter's death.

"Look, Amby," she had said to him she was a practical woman making coffee in her kitchen, using her foot to steer her possessive grey-and-black striped tiger-cat along the mopboard under the sink so that she wouldn't step on it; she had called Merrion Saturday morning and asked him to come over two days after they had gone to bed together the first time because that seemed to her what should be done next.

"This sex business: we've got to talk about it. Come to some kind of agreement we both understand. Or else it's going to get out of control and cause all kinds of problems, maybe end up ruining us. I don't want that to happen. I don't think you do, either. Tell me you don't either, all right? Humor me, at least, and say it, even if you're not really sure yet. This is important to me. I'm surprised how important it is."

"It's important to me, too," he had said, sitting down at her kitchen table, and it was. Having left her very early Friday morning in the still darkness so as to spare her attentive early-rising neighbors the effort they surely would have made to deduce the implications of the presence of what she called his 'flashy car' in her driveway in the sunrise on his way home he had gradually begun to understand that he didn't know what he ought to do next, how to act or what to say the next time he saw her; arrive with an armload of roses or act as though nothing remarkable had taken place. He was slightly flustered to find that mattered to him. As it hadn't mattered, he realized, in the aftermath of what had become a fair number of other sexual friendships he had enjoyed over the course of what he was now somewhat startled to notice had somehow turned into quite a number of years.

"Thirty of 'em, in fact, give or take," he said to Hilliard. "And I have to say it's been quite a while since I can remember being actually concerned the next day about how the lady actually felt about the fun we had last night. Not since Sunny went and died on me, I guess. What was there to get all concerned about? All it was was just getting laid now and then. That's how the grown-ups have fun. And if we should run into each other again, or maybe call up and make sure we did that, well, maybe wed fuck again. Or then again, maybe not. If the time ever came then when we hadda new chance, wed see how we felt. "Inna meantime, many thanks, I hadda good time. Appreciate you lookin' out for me like that."

"That was the way that it worked. There was this one woman I got so I knew pretty well at the New England Regional Meetings one year, and she was just real hot to trot. So we connected, and for the whole three days of that conference there up at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, that is what we did: we fucked our brains out.

She had her regular steady boyfriend back home in Portland. He was a lawyer and she had no complaints at all; he took as good care of her as he possibly could good swift dash inna bloomers two or three times a week. Regular as he could be, but that hadda be his limit. He was married, and either his wife wasn't dumb enough so she would actually let him pack a change of clothes and get out of her sight for an overnight trip for fear he might not come back at all or else he didn't feel he could neglect his practice for three days at a stretch, I'm not really sure. Whatever it was, I wasn't complaining. She wanted her cookies and I wanted mine and we found we could make a deal. A loose woman at loose ends: I take her as a gift from God.

"She was back the next year, and the year after that, and so was I, naturally, and both times we picked up like wed never left off. The year in-between conferences, there's been nothin', no phone calls, no letters, no nothing; it's like for each other we don't exist except up in New Hampshire in June. But that once a year when we came back for the meetings, we came back all of the way. It was just the goddamnedest thing.

"The fourth year she didn't come back. I don't know what happened to her. Maybe the lawyer's wife finally found out and shot her or something like that. Or he divorced the bride and they got together. I was kind of afraid to start asking' around; thought it might look funny, you know? But it seems kind of strange, when you think about it: During those three years inna course of nine days I prolly fucked her thirty times. We were young; we did it like there was no tomorrow.

And today I don't know if she's alive or dead, and she's the same way about me, and I bet she's no more upset than I am. It was straight sex, no more'n that.

"Well except for Sunny, that's how all of them were for me; that's how I looked at it, and I've been happy. I've been a contented man. Now it seems like I'm not looking at it that way any more. Something here seems to've changed."

"See, I don't belong here, like you do," Diane said. "In this town. In this valley. Even though I've been here, more'n quite a while, it's not like I belong here. Or I didn't belong here, at least, when I first came. I just sort of settled in for a while, and at some point after that discovered I had stayed. As though I'd gone to sleep and when I woke up, here's where I was. Where else would I open my practice? And after that Walter was here. So when I decided that I was with Walter, I also realized that I'd probably be here for the rest of my life. I was at rest; where I belong became irrelevant.