Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

I gave it a rest. I told myself I needed some space. Good grief, we’d gone out six evenings in the past two weeks — one time, twice in a row.

She telephoned me on Wednesday. (We’d last seen each other on Saturday.) She didn’t have my number and so she called Woolcott Publishing, and Peggy stuck her head in my door and said, “Dr. Rosales? On Line Two?”

She could have just buzzed me, but clearly she was wondering what a doctor could be calling me for. I refused to satisfy her curiosity. “Thanks,” was all I told her, and I waited till she was gone before I picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi, Aaron, it’s Dorothy.”

“Hello, Dorothy.”

“I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

This was more direct than I was comfortable with. I felt partly taken aback and partly, I have to say, admiring. Wasn’t it just like her!

“I’ve been busy,” I told her.

“Oh.”

“A lot of work piling up.”

“Well, I’d like to invite you to supper,” she said.

“Supper?”

“I would cook.”

“Oh!”

I don’t know why this was so unexpected. Somehow, I just couldn’t picture Dorothy cooking. But trying to picture it made me see her hands, which were very smooth across the backs in spite of her raspy fingers, and golden-brown and chubby. I was swept with a wave of longing. I said, “I’d love to come to supper.”

“Good. Shall we say eight o’clock?”

“Tonight?”

“Eight tonight.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Later — much later, when we were making our wedding plans — Dorothy told me all that had gone into that supper invitation. She began with her reason for issuing it: how she’d grown aware, in the four days when I didn’t call, of the extreme quiet and solitude of her existence. “I saw that I had no close friends, no family life; and at work they were always complaining about my failure to ‘interact,’ whatever that means.…” She described how she’d rearranged her apartment before my arrival, frantically shoving furniture every which way and stuffing books and papers and cast-off clothes into closets, into bureau drawers, wherever they would fit; and how she’d racked her brains over the menu. “All men like steak, right? So I called the Pratt Library’s reference section to see how to cook a steak. They suggested grilling or broiling, but I didn’t own a grill and I wasn’t all that clear about broiling, so they said okay, fry it in a pan.… And then the peas, well, that was no problem; everybody knows how to cook a box of peas.…”

But did she give the same amount of forethought to what we would talk about?

Oh, probably not. Probably that was just happenstance. After all, it was I who started things, when I commented on the size of her apartment. “This place is huge,” I said when I walked in. It was shabby but sprawling, with an actual dining room opening off the living room. “How many bedrooms do you have?”

“Three,” she told me.

“Three! All for one person!”

“Well, I used to have a roommate, but he moved.”

“Ah.”

I accepted the seat she offered me, at the end of a jangling metal daybed covered with an Indian spread. On the coffee table she had already set out wineglasses and a bottle of wine (Malbec, I saw), and she handed me the bottle along with a corkscrew. Then she sat down next to me. This close, I could smell her perfume, or her shampoo or something. She was wearing a scoop-necked black knit top I hadn’t seen before, along with her usual black trousers. I wondered if this was her version of dressing up.

It seemed her mind was still on her roommate. She said, “He moved because I wasn’t … doctorly enough.”

“Doctorly.”

“For instance, one time he said, ‘Everything I eat tastes too salty. Why do you think that could be?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’ He said, ‘No, really: why?’ ‘Maybe it is too salty,’ I said. He said, ‘No, other people don’t think so. Is there anything that could be a symptom of?’ I said, ‘Well, dehydration, maybe. Or a brain tumor.’ ‘Brain tumor!’ he said. ‘Oh, my God!’ ”

I missed her point at first. She stopped speaking and looked at me expectantly, and I said, “What an idiot.”

“He would ask me to palpate a swollen gland,” she said after a pause, “or he’d wonder what his backache meant, a perfectly normal backache he got from lifting weights, or he’d want me to write a prescription for his migraines.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous!” I said. “He was your roommate, not your patient.”

Another pause. Then she said, “Actually, he was more like a … We were more like a couple, actually.”

This shouldn’t have come as a shock. She was a woman in her thirties; you would wonder what was wrong with her if there’d never been a man in her life. But somehow I had flattered myself that I was the very first one to appreciate her properly. I said, “You were a serious couple?”

She was following her own tack. She said, “I see now that he probably thought I wasn’t enough of a … caregiver.”

“Ridiculous,” I said again.

“So I said to myself, ‘I have to learn from that experience.’ ”

She still wore her expectant look.

This time, I got it.

I said, “Oh.”

“I wouldn’t want a person to think that I’m not … concerned.”

I said, “Oh, sweetheart. Dearest heart. I would never need you to be concerned for me .”

And I cupped her face and leaned forward to kiss her, and she kissed me back.

I could tell that people found Dorothy an unexpected choice.

My father said she was “interesting”—the same word he used when he was confronted with one of my mother’s more experimental casseroles.

My mother asked how old she was.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said.

(In fact, Dorothy was thirty-two. I was twenty-four and a half.)

“It’s only,” my mother said, “that I was thinking Danika Jones would have been closer to your own age.”

“Who?”

“Danika at work, Aaron. What do you mean, ‘Who?’ ”

Danika was our designer, the designer preceding Irene. My father had hired her as his final act before handing over the business, and all at once I thought I saw why. I said, “Danika! She wears toenail polish!”

“What’s wrong with that?” my mother asked.

“I always feel uneasy about women who polish their toenails. It makes me wonder what they’re hiding.”

“Oh, Aaron,” my mother said sadly. “When will you understand how attractive you are? You could have any girl you wanted; someday you’re going to realize that.”

My sister said Dorothy was okay, she guessed, if you didn’t mind a woman with the social skills of a panda bear. That just made me laugh. Dorothy was a bit like a panda bear. She had that same roundness and compactness, that same staunch way of carrying herself.

Only I knew that underneath her boxy clothes, she was the shape of a little clay urn. Her skin had a burnished olive glow, and there was a kind of calm to her, a lit-from-within calm, that made me feel at rest whenever I was with her.

We were married in my family’s church, but just in the minister’s private office, with my parents and my sister as witnesses. Surprisingly, Dorothy had told me that it would be all right with her if I wanted something fancier, but of course I didn’t. The simpler the better, I felt. Simple and straightforward. And we didn’t take a honeymoon, because of Dorothy’s work schedule. We just went back to our normal lives.

It was early July when we married. We had known each other four months.

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. “I mean early marriage,” he said. “The very start of a marriage. It’s like a whole new beginning. You’re entirely brand-new people; you haven’t made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this ‘we’ that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.”