David Gilmour: Extraordinary

“Did I ever tell you how kind that was?” I said suddenly.

Sally appeared to think about that, her glass tilting at a dangerous angle on her lap. “You were in love,” she said simply.

“I was. But all that driving. ”

She took a sip from her glass. “I like these martinis. How do you make them again?”

I must have looked surprised as one is sometimes at the end of a Chekhov short story. You don’t know what it means or what it implies about life, but you know it’s the truth. Sally would never live to make a burnt martini, but she wanted to know how to do it anyway.

In the seconds that followed, I felt a swoosh—a sudden, terrible regret. She seemed to read my thoughts, because she said, “You were fine.”

I worried I was going to burst into tears and lure the focus of the evening onto myself.

“I haven’t been much of a brother,” I said.

She responded with an absolving laugh. “You’re making up for it now. You gave me this,” she said, and raised her martini glass in bent fingers. “But you’re hesitating. You haven’t changed your mind?”

“No, don’t worry about that.”

“Good. I don’t want to worry about that.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“Just think of it as returning the favour for driving you to the dance.”

I didn’t know how to take this, whether to let it alone or not. Was it a joke? Of course it was, this retreat into flippancy. And yet not a joke you could feel good laughing about. I didn’t know quite where to rest my eyes. But I thought, Don’t perform. Just look at her. But I have never been good with silence, it makes my heart crash, and in that moment it seemed as though she too could hear it thumping and again came to my rescue. “Whatever happened to that girl?”

“She met someone else.”

“Ah,” Sally said, not surprised but not superior to it either. A tone of voice that summed you up like a sudden, flattering glance in a store window.

“Apparently, he was a very good dancer,” I said.

“They always are, those summer boys.”

“Anyway, I got over it.”

“You did indeed.”

I waited for the small blossom of pleasure to recede and then, seeking a fresher, more subtle kind, added, “Between you and me, Sally, I’ve always talked a bigger game than I played.”

We fell silent for a moment.

“Were you?” I said.

“Was I what?”

“A good dancer.”

“Oh, I loved dancing. I’d dance with anyone. ” She glanced out the window and I could see her as a teenager, at a dance, in a tangle of young bodies and coloured lights and those neon things they used to stamp your hand with, and for a second I wondered whatever had happened to all those bodies, those young bodies; and again it struck me that life was such a harsh business that no one, not even the beautiful like Sally, was ever safe.

I said, “Would you like another martini?”

“Oh boy, would I ever.”

I went into the kitchen, the pills still in my pocket. I had put a ball of cotton batten in the plastic vial so they wouldn’t rattle when I moved. It was a clean white kitchen with a lot of room. It was the kitchen of a woman who had raised children, who liked order in her life.

“Don’t forget the Scotch,” she said.

“It’s already in.”

When I came back, one of the candles was sputtering. I blew it out, found a pair of scissors in the desk drawer, cut the wick down and relit it. Settled back in my chair, I noticed that Sally’s eyes, pools of ink in a slightly swollen face, were observing me with what, I’m not sure. It was the regard of someone who is seeing something behind their eyes. I couldn’t tell, though, if it was good or bad.

I said, “Can I ask you something, Sally?”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering about your marriage the other day.”

She nodded her head as if to a question she had been asked many times before. “What part of the marriage?” she asked neutrally.

“The why part.”

Again she nodded, this time with a hint of amused sleepiness. “I had my eye on someone else. To say the least. But I couldn’t get him.Or keep him, anyway.”

“Tell me.”

I could see her recede into herself and then re-emerge. She had found something in there that pleased her. “There was a boy who went to my high school, a narrow-hipped cowboy. No, he really was a cowboy—wore a narrow-brimmed hat, drove a pickup truck, listened to country and western music.”

“A cowboy hat?”

“Even to school. He knew the etiquette, when you could wear a hat and when you had to take it off. Like when you go in a building, you take your hat off, but when you sit at a counter in a diner, you can leave it on. Some smart aleck stopped him in the corridor once, a hockey player, and said in a big attention-getting voice, ‘Hey Tex, can I try on your hat?’ He said, ‘Sure, if I can try on your underwear.’”

“Wow.”

“He made furniture. Kitchen tables, chairs, headboards. I remember once he was in such a rush to finish and get over to my place that he had wood chips in his eyebrows. God, he smelt good. You know what the French say about smell?”

“I do, yes.”

“Even in the truck I could smell him. He had a narrow chest and he always wore a cowboy shirt. It would have looked corny on anyone else, those imitation pearl buttons, but on him, it was like he was born into it. Like a skin. He called me Miss. He’d say, ‘What time do you want me to come and get you, Miss?’ or, ‘We should be getting you home pretty soon, Miss.’ His name was Terry Blanchard.”

“Did you ever kiss him?”

“Every chance I got.”

“And?”

“Ever kissed a cowboy?”

I said, “So what happened to him?”

“He had some kind of trouble in town. One night he turned up outside my window. He knocked on the glass and said he was going away for a while but he’d write. Would I write him back? And then he kissed me. There was a big country moon that night, the kind you can reach out with your finger and almost touch. I could see it over his shoulder. I said, ‘Come into my bed.’ It just came out, like hearing yourself talk in a dream.

“He slipped over the window ledge backwards and fell onto the bed, his boots in the air. You could see them against the skyline.

“I heard my grandmother walk by my room. She said, ‘Everything okay in there, Sally?’ She must have seen his truck in the driveway. And I said, ‘Grandma, just fine. I’m going to sleep now.’ Those country people, they’re a lot more sophisticated than you’d think. I never asked her and she never asked me, but every so often I’d catch her staring at me. Everybody gets up to something private, it’s just that every generation thinks they’re the first ones to do it right.”

“So did he write?”

“Never. Not a word. I used to go out to the mailbox—it was at the end of a long driveway—and throw stones at the power lines and the crows, even at the mailbox itself, while I was waiting. An old guy and his son delivered the mail in a car. I’d see the car at the far end of the highway where it broke through the cornfields. Walter, the son, would be in the passenger seat, his tanned arm hanging out the window with the mail in his hand. They’d slow down and I’d grab the mail. I think Walter had a tiny thing for me, but he had a kind of funny-shaped head, like a paint can. I suppose I was cruelly uninterested in him. I’d just snatch the mail, and without even saying goodbye I’d start to go through it—the local newspaper, ads for baking sales, bills from the local hardware store, even Christmas cards that had gotten lost for six months. I’d start off full of hope, there’d be all this stuff, but then there’d be five letters left, then three, then none, and I’d go through the pile again as though maybe I’d missed it.