Justin Cronin: Mary and O’Neil

Which was how it happened, though not then. He showed her to the office door-for a moment it had seemed possible they would kiss right there, an image so compelling, so completely disorienting, that Arthur quickly drove it from his mind-and a week later he telephoned her to tell her that the signed copies had been returned, and they agreed to meet for the lunch she had promised him, so that he could give them to her. The week of rain had become a week of snow, temperatures falling back into the teens though it was nearly April, and Arthur hurried the six blocks to the restaurant, wondering what he was doing. Was he doing anything at all? But when he arrived and saw Dora sitting at a booth in back, not at one of the open tables in the middle of the room, he knew. Without breaking his stride he stepped to the booth and slid himself into the narrow space across from her; he saw she was drinking tea. Her overcoat, heavy green wool with shawl lapels, lay over her shoulders. Her smile was almost a laugh. Was he late? he asked. No, no, she said, shaking her head. The window by their table was a wall of steam; someone, a child perhaps, had written something in the steam, fat letters now faded. She blew over her tea. The snow had kept her patients away for the day, she said. He wasn’t late at all.

The restaurant was shrouded in a heavy white light, and nearly empty. They sat together an hour, talking and eating their lunch of sandwiches and soft drinks while the waitresses, two old women Arthur knew by sight but not by name, sorted steaming silverware and smoked long brown cigarettes at the counter. Arthur knew what was said about small towns, but as a lawyer, he’d found the opposite was true: everyone had something to hide. It was possible in such a place to live a kind of secret life, and if anyone asked, he could always say that he’d done some work for her. He’d been a lawyer long enough to believe that there was nothing simple about the truth, that it came in any number of forms, and this was one. They talked about people they knew, about the patients at her clinic and their sad stories, and about their children, as any two people their age, meeting for a meal, might do. She did not talk about Sam, though in a way she did; so many years, she remarked, looking around, since she had set foot in this place; she was glad to see it had not changed. With her practice and the boys besides, she said, it was all she could do to grab a quick bite at her desk. She gave a little laugh. Time moved quickly, did it not? And yet it sometimes seemed she had been doing things this way forever, pulling her life and her children’s lives like a cart.

Then as the hour drew late, on the verge of their good-byes, Dora reached across the table, found his hand with hers, and gently held it. Just that: Dora held his hand. Arthur felt himself raked, like the surface of a pond. Twenty-nine years, and he hadn’t once done this, held another woman’s hand; and yet people did it all the time, he knew; did it as if it were nothing. Arthur saw that she wore a watch with three gold hearts on either side of the face: one for each boy, and one for Sam. A gift: he knew this without asking. Mother’s Day? An anniversary? It was the kind of thing he might have bought for Miriam; it was merely an accident that he had not. Her hand was warm, and a little damp. She brushed the back of his hand with her thumb, once, and then she let it go.

And yet the moment felt frozen, as if neither of them could leave it, like a room without doors. She pulled her coat around herself a little; her eyes darted to the counter, where the women were smoking and talking (Arthur’s eyes followed; no, they had not seen), and then found Arthur’s again, squinting. “Well.” She tipped one shoulder and smiled uneasily. He realized only then that she hadn’t worn her glasses. It made her eyes seem very large. “Was that, you know, all right?”

He didn’t know, and also did. His mind had filled with a white emptiness, like a field of whirling snow-like forty feet of air. He heard himself say, “Yes.”

When was this? March, a year ago. Arthur, in his office, sips his coffee, now gone cold. At eleven-thirty he will pick Miriam up at the library, and together they will leave for New Hampshire. Through the spring and summer he and Dora continued to meet, at his office or hers, or for lunch, always in plain view and broad daylight, and always under the pretense of work she needed done: a quarrel with the town over parking at the clinic, an old tax matter of amazing density and frivolousness, a meaningless dispute with a neighbor over a drainage easement. How did I get on so long without a lawyer, she said, how did I ever manage without you? One matter would be settled and before the ink was dry she handed him a fresh folder of papers, bringing the two of them together in a continuous flow of trivial tasks like a chain of silk handkerchiefs pulled from a magician’s sleeve. Her pleased face said: See what I’ve come up with? Before this is over, she joked, I’m going to be your best client.

But what was this? And-the real question-why wasn’t he, Arthur-happily married Arthur-troubled by it, or troubled more? In the past he had imagined himself having an affair-everyone did, you couldn’t not think about it-but never like this, this affair that wasn’t, quite. They held hands, not even really holding; she would rub his shoulder when he said he was tired, or touch his cheek with one finger, quickly, when another person might have stopped her hand in the air before his face. Each time they were together it happened, this touching, but only once, and never anything more. Yet it was also true that he had come, in some way, to rely on it; it did something for him that nothing else did. It made him happy, there was that, to be touched by another for no reason. But something else: it was as if, in those instants, he ceased to be who he was. His whole life became a memory, and not even of his own. Whose, then? He had met Sam Auclaire once, he believed, at the high school maybe-a play? parents’ night?-or else merely seen him, striding out of the hardware store with a sack of nails in his hand, or driving his pickup, ladders lashed to a frame over the bed, through the streets of town. Arthur remembered a tall man, muscular, with curly blond hair gone an early, peppery gray. So that was his answer. Dora touched him, and the happiness he felt was not his own but Sam’s, at being so terribly missed.

It went on like this into the fall. He never set foot in her house, nor she in his, and if anyone suspected (suspected what?), Arthur heard nothing about it. He told no one, because who was there to tell? His clients? The old women at the Coffee Stop? The man at the service station who changed the oil in his car? He wished for a brother, as he had many times in his life, but hadn’t one; he worked alone, and had few friends that Miriam did not share. His life was like a small, comfortable room, every piece in its place. Only by being with Dora did he step outside of this room, though only for an hour or two, and never so completely that at the end of their time together he could not return to it, and to the life he understood. He wondered how long it could go on.

Then, two weeks ago, Arthur found himself driving with Dora out of town, to see a parcel of land she said she wanted to buy. The town had begun to feel close to her-that was the word she used, close; she had always dreamed of building a house and raising her boys in the country. She said she wanted to get his opinion, but her meaning was clear: things had reached a certain point between them. The afternoon was cold and bright, and they drove the fifteen miles south with barely a word between them. For the first time since she had come into his office eight months before, dripping with rain, Arthur felt truly afraid. In Domingo they found the unmarked dirt road that led to the property, which was marked with a large For Sale sign pocked with bullet holes. Arthur recognized the phone number on the sign; it was the number of the county clerk’s office, in Harbersburg. On the phone Dora had told him that before the land had been taken over by the county for nonpayment of taxes, it had been a dairy farm.