Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

“—half a cantaloupe, two stalks of celery …”

She had her juice extractor out on the counter — a complicated piece of equipment I hadn’t seen in use since that time a few years back when she was dating a vegan. It had turned out to be a lot of work, as I recalled. Supposedly you could clean the thing in the dishwasher, but that wasn’t very practical, since the various parts constituted an entire load in themselves.

Wait.

When she was dating a …

I looked from her to Gil, who was sitting there placidly waiting for his drink. I looked again at Nandina.

She blushed.

I said, “Oh.”

How could I have missed so many clues?

Nandina’s frequent intrusions on my meetings with Gil, for instance. Granted, she had always been a bit nosy, but this was extreme: if Gil and I were conferring in the living room, she just happened to need a book from the living-room bookcase, and then, while she was at it, she had to offer us some refreshments, and when she returned with a tray, she would oh-so-casually linger to contribute her two bits, eventually drifting toward a chair and dropping into it as if without realizing what she was doing.

And her willingness to drive over to my house on the slightest excuse — to empty my fridge, check on the plastering, verify my choice of caramel or whatever-it-was flooring. Always in the daytime, you notice. Always when Gil was most likely to be there as well.

And those questions she had asked about his background. Why, she hadn’t been asking out of suspicion! That was personal curiosity. She was like a high-school girl who ferrets out the most trivial details about a boy she has a crush on — his gym schedule and his homeroom number. And, exactly like a high-school girl, she seized on every opportunity to speak his name. “Gilead,” she had said, and her spoon had halted in the saucepan.

Plus, she never changed into a housecoat anymore. I hadn’t seen her in a housecoat in weeks.

But did Gil return her affections?

I felt a twinge that was almost a pain. I couldn’t bear it if I were forced to pity her.

Consider this, though: Gil really hadn’t needed to meet with me as often as he did. More than once I had told him that the work appeared to be going fine, and he should just let me know the next time he had any issues to discuss. It seemed he constantly had issues. And at every meeting he was more talkative; more extraneous subjects arose; it seemed more like a conversation with a friend. Here I’d been flattering myself that it was me he was warming to! I’d sniffed the air when he’d walked in recently, caught the scent of Old Spice, and said, “ Somebody’s got plans for the evening,” expecting we might embark on a little chitchat about his social life. But he had merely turned red, and I had wondered if I’d overstepped — assumed too quickly that we were more than employer-employee.

Besides which, how come he had told her, but not me, that he’d be coming unusually early that evening?

I didn’t say anything direct to either one of them. I accepted a glass of Nandina’s juice, sat talking with them a few minutes, let Gil present his report on that day’s work. But underneath, I was extremely alert, and I saw how Nandina continued to hang around even though his report concerned some antiquated wiring they’d discovered in my living-room wall —not an interesting topic, and certainly not one that called for her opinion. I saw how their hands happened to brush when he passed her his empty glass. How she leaned against the doorframe and tipped her head alluringly as we were seeing him out at the end of the meeting.

Then she hurried back to the kitchen to start supper preparations, not giving me so much as a glance, allowing me no chance to question her.

I didn’t pursue it, of course. She was a fully grown woman. She had a right to her privacy.

Everything I knew about Gil so far had made me like him. He seemed to be a good man — honest, reliable, skilled, kindhearted. He may not have finished college, but he was clearly intelligent, and I imagined that he and Nandina could operate on a more or less equal footing. So I had no objections.

But I couldn’t help feeling, oh, a bit wistful as I watched them together over the next couple of weeks.

It was April, by then — early spring. Although the weather was still coolish, the daffodils were in full bloom and the trees were starting to flower. Gil and Nandina began to go out openly on what I guess you might call dates. The first date, shortly after the juicer episode, Nandina informed me about obliquely by announcing that she wouldn’t be cooking supper the following evening. Gil had suggested they try this new café in Hampden, she said. I said, “Oh, okay, maybe I’ll reheat some of that beef stew”—as if food were really the issue here. The next evening, I sat reading the newspaper on the couch, and when Gil rang the doorbell I let Nandina answer. He stepped into the living room to say, “Hey there, Aaron,” and I raised my head and said, “How you doing, Gil.” He looked sheepish but determined, his face gleaming from a recent shave and his short-sleeved shirt carefully pressed. How long had he been coming to this house in clothes too fresh to have been that day’s work clothes? Almost from the start of our dealings together, I realized. So he may have felt attracted to Nandina all along.

I was genuinely glad for them, I swear. And yet, after they had taken their leave, when I turned in my seat to watch them through the front window, I felt stabbed to the heart by the sight of their two figures walking side by side toward Gil’s pickup. They were almost touching but not quite; there was perhaps an inch or two of empty space between them, and you could tell somehow that both of them were very conscious of this space — acutely conscious, electrically conscious. I thought of a moment early in my acquaintance with Dorothy, when she had offered to show me around her workplace. She stood up and went to her office door, and I jumped to my feet to follow, reaching past her and over her head to pull the door farther open. I guess it must have confused her. She stepped back. For an instant she was standing under the shelter of my arm, and although there was not one single point of contact between us, I felt I was surrounding her with an invisible layer of warmth and protection.

Even that early, I loved her.

We met in March of 1996, during The Beginner’s Cancer . Byron Worth, M.D., was our writer — an internist who had already supplied the material for The Beginner’s Childbirth and The Beginner’s Heart Attack . These books were not particularly technical, you understand. They were more on the order of household-hint collections: how to sleep comfortably in the advanced stages of pregnancy, how to order heart-healthfully in restaurants. For the cancer book Dr. Worth had already turned in the chemo section, which included some delicious-sounding recipes for calorie-rich smoothies, but in radiology he fell short, by his own admission. He said we probably needed to consult a specialist. And that’s how I came to make an appointment with Dr. Dorothy Rosales, who had treated Charles’s father-in-law after his thyroid surgery.

She was wearing a white coat so crisp that it could have stood on its own, but her trousers were creased and rumpled, in part because they were too long for her. They buckled over the insteps of her cloddish shoes and they trailed the ground at her heels. This made her seem even shorter than she actually was, and wider. She was standing by a bookshelf when her receptionist showed me into her office. She was consulting some large, thick volume, and since her glasses were meant for distance she had pushed them up onto her forehead, which gave her a peculiar, quadruple-eyed aspect that caused me to start grinning the instant I saw her. But even in that first glance, I liked her broad, tan face and her tranquil expression. I congratulated myself for perceiving that her unbecomingly chopped hair was — as they say — as black as a raven’s wing.