Роберт Паркер - All Our Yesterdays

“Did what?”

“Anything. My grandfather fought a war, my father fought a war, I went to grad school.”

“That’s doing something.”

“Sure, but it ain’t high deeds in Hungary, is it?”

“Does it have to involve guns?” Grace said.

“At least it ought to involve courage,” I said. “Enough courage to at least act, and not just be a poor weak fool seeing both sides of every issue.”

“Last fall involved courage,” Grace said.

“What the hell did I do?”

“Enough.”

I shrugged.

It was hard to concentrate. Grace’s eyes were very large, and dark blue. She had a lot of thick auburn hair, and smooth skin and a wide mouth. She was five feet nine inches tall and strong looking, like the California beach girls that play volleyball on ESPN. I had met her in law school and loved her neither wisely nor well ever since. In the years we had lived together I had seen her naked a thousand times. I knew every hint and nuance of her naked body. I could remember exactly how she looked. And now, sitting four feet from her on the couch, I could hardly breathe with wanting to see her naked again. It was barely about sex. It was about possession. I wanted to be the one to see her naked. Not another guy. Me. The insubstantial room around us seemed to coalesce. The momentary couch on which we sat seemed random and kinetic. I could hear my heart. I could feel my breath going in and out. Reality seemed to heel beneath me the way a plane often does at takeoff. I centered on her eyes as she looked at me; held on them as the phenomenological world scattered and regrouped around her, and slowly settled and steadied and became again a small room in a nice condo inside while an odd early spring snowstorm raged and huffed outside, and the girl of my dreams sat quietly at the other end of the couch.

Under an empty blue sky, half a block from Merrion Square, Conn sat wrapped in a blanket, on a chaise, in the high-walled garden of a house on Clare Street. Against the back wall of the house, snaking up one of the porch pillars, was a thick trumpet vine, leafless yet at the earliest edge of a raw Irish Sea spring. Conn’s wound had healed and he was almost well. Hadley was reading aloud to him, some poetry by Yeats. She had kept her word, she had come to see him as he healed.

“ Why ,” she read, saying it right, understanding it, “ what could she have done, being what she is? ” And he joined her, reciting from memory. They spoke the last line in unison. “ Was there another Troy for her to burn? ”

“That’s a good one,” Conn said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Does your husband know you come here?”

“Oh, my God no,” she said.

“He’s not for a free and independent Ireland?”

“Oh, I think he is,” she said, “in his way. But he wouldn’t want me venturing among the rebellious ruffians.”

“What’s his way?” Conn said.

“His way?”

“You said he’s for a free and independent Ireland in his way. This is your way. What’s his?”

“Oh, well, he’s older. He’s stable. He believes in good business practices, and a calm homelife.”

“He’s in business?”

“Yes. He has a factory. Mulroney’s Heather Scented Irish bath soap. Mostly for export to America.”

“Not Winslow’s.”

She laughed, the volume of poetry closed in her lap, a forefinger holding the place.

“Now, what would that sound like,” she said, “—Winslow’s Irish soap?”

“It would sound like an oxymoron,” Conn said.

“You’re educated, aren’t you?” Hadley said.

“Self, mostly,” Conn said. “I like to read, my father was a schoolmaster.”

She had brought them lunch in a hamper. Cheese and bread and fruit and a bottle of wine.

“I had Cook pack this for us,” she said. She handed him an apple.

“Are you well enough to uncork the wine?”

“Yes,” he said around a bite of apple.

“Then please,” she said, handing him the wine and the corkscrew.

They sat together in the garden and drank the wine and ate the cheese and fruit and bread in the still-weak sunlight of early spring. The wine was a Graves, its flintiness refreshing against the richness of the country cheese, and the sweetness of the fruit. The wine added color to her face, a touch of red along the perfect cheekbones, and her eyes brightened. They finished the bottle.

“Wine’s gone too quickly,” he said.

“Remember when I met you the first day in the hospital?” she said. “And you asked for a bit of whiskey?”

“And you, being nursie-nursie, said I was too sick.”

She smiled and drew a bottle of whiskey from the hamper.

“Now you’re well,” she said. “It is time to celebrate.”

She poured whiskey into his empty wineglass, and some into hers.

“Just like that?” he said. “Neat? Like a man?”

“ Just like that,” she said. And drank.

He sipped from his glass, feeling, for the first time in what seemed too long, the warmth of the whiskey enriching him.

“No pretty little faces?” he said to her. “No delicate wrinkle of the nose, no ladylike heckle to suggest that whiskey is too strong a drink for fragile high church ladies?”

“I’m not fragile,” she said. “I like whiskey. I like many things that high church ladies aren’t supposed to like.”

“Do you, now? Well, that’s encouraging.”

“It was meant to be,” she said.

They sipped their whiskey.

“And Mr. Winslow?”

“I like him too.”

“Do you love him?”

She leaned back in her chair, and the pale sunlight rested on her face. She was wearing a mannish tweed suit and a high-necked gray wool sweater.

“Do I love him?” She swallowed more whiskey. “How utterly Irish of you.”

“To ask if you love your husband?”

“It’s in your nature,” she said. “The romance of lost causes.”

“Is loving your husband a lost cause?”

“A husband who sees to all your needs, and is proud to have a young and beautiful wife — that is not a lost cause.”

“And love is?”

“It certainly should not take precedence,” she said.

Her eyes were very bright and the flush on her face was deeper. She poured whiskey into each glass, and leaned back again, her eyes closed, her face to the lukewarm sun. Motionless in the wicker chair, there was about her a kinesis to which his own body vibrated like a tuning fork.

“Practical,” Conn said.

“Yes!”

“But pleasure loving,” Conn said.

“One does not preclude the other,” she said.

As he healed, Conn’s strength had come back, and he could feel it now in the bunching of muscle between his shoulder blades, in the resilience of his neck.

“Good to know,” Conn said. His voice seemed disconnected from the burgeoning center of him.

“Good to know both things,” Hadley said, her face flushed, her eyes shining. He could see her breasts move as she breathed. He hadn’t noticed that before. Was she breathing more, or was he seeing better?

“Are you well?” she said.

“Well enough.”

“Well enough for what?” she said, and her bright eyes were full of laughter now.

“Anything,” he said.

And she slid forward onto her knees beside him and he put his arms around her. Her mouth pressed on his and opened. He fumbled at her clothing. She helped him. And helped with his and they were naked on the cold grass, tangled in his blanket. He put his hands on her and felt a quiver ripple through her body. She arched against him, her mouth hard against his. His front teeth cut her lip. He tasted her blood for a moment, and hesitated; but she pressed even harder, and moaned softly, and the center of himself seemed to escape him and envelop them both.