John Kenney - Talk to Me

Ted stared at her, trying for… what, exactly?

There is a language that exists between longtime married couples, one of small looks and expressions, sighs and body language, the placement of the tongue against the back of one’s upper teeth, that tells epic tales, mood changes, moments, lifetimes. Everything truly interesting happens without words, Ted believed. He told this to young reporters who never listened and always overwrote.

“He’s not on TV, if that’s what you mean.”

Ted didn’t know what he meant and said nothing, though he was relieved the man wasn’t famous.

“He’s a lawyer,” Claire added, as if talking to herself. “Lives in the city. He’s British. Has his own plane. Not that that matters.”

Ted watched as Claire began to sip her tea, then stopped, wincing at how hot it was. She put the cup down and smoothed her hand over the countertop, cleaning off crumbs or dust visible only to her, neat freak, a thing Ted had watched her do a thousand times. Did this new man watch her do that?

Ted looked at the refrigerator. Has his own plane. Not that that matters .

“How long?” Ted asked.

She’d anticipated the question, as had her attorney, with whom she’d practiced this speech. Claire was eager to tell the truth about the relationship but her attorney advised her against that. (“We don’t use the word ‘affair,’ Claire. That’s a word that can cost us money.”)

“A while,” Claire said.

Ted nodded and chewed the inside of his right cheek, Claire noticing, a sure sign of his core anger building. She was ready. She was calm. She heard the rain on the gravel driveway, off the eaves of the roof, tapping against the windows.

They had met the way people used to meet, before online dating. Through friends. A bar in Harvard Square called the Boat House. A small place just up from the Charles River. Ted was working at the Boston affiliate of NBC, having moved up from Providence. She was Claire Ford then, graduate of Wellesley College, an account executive at the Boston office of Kenyon & Eckhardt. In the two years she had been there she had risen, done well. She worked on Coffee-mate, which regularly took her to New York. She dated often, though no one serious. It was a time of life, her particular beauty at twenty-four, when men would stop her in the street and hand her a business card or write down their number.

She saw Ted when he walked into the bar. The Van Morrison song “Into the Mystic” was on the jukebox. She was drinking a Miller Lite in a glass. She was wearing a pair of baggy Levi’s and a white T-shirt. Her hair was up but she reached back and took the elastic out. She remembered it all.

Ellen had been talking. Ellen Tracy, Claire’s roommate. They’d known each other at Wellesley. Ellen had an uncle who taught at Harvard and who had gotten them an apartment on Ware Street, a few blocks away. An airy two-bedroom for a few hundred dollars a month. It came with a parking space.

Ellen knew a boy from growing up in West Hartford. George something. He was living here now and worked in news. Had a new friend he wanted her to meet, a great guy named Ted Grayson.

Claire simply couldn’t believe how handsome Ted was. His half smile, one side of his mouth turning up, like a forties movie star. He was wearing a white oxford cloth shirt with the top button open and the sleeves rolled up. He was tanned and she thought she’d never seen a better-looking man in her life.

Claire could see Ted looking at her. The four of them got to talking, drinking beer, and listening to the jukebox. What do you do? Where did you go to college? Where are you from? What kind of music do you like? Did you play sports? Claire asked Ted where he summered. It made Ted smile. “We have a place in Woonsocket,” Ted said. “It’s called our house.” Claire liked the way he talked. She liked his voice.

Someone suggested they get something to eat, so they wandered up Mass. Ave. toward Central Square, deciding on Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. They ate burgers and laughed and Claire wondered if the others felt the electricity in the air, wondered if they noticed how she sat forward on her chair, leaning in, smiling and laughing and talking but really only to him.

After dinner, they left the others and went for a walk along the river. A July evening, the oppressive heat of the day gone, the air warm and soft now. The sky still not fully dark. Thick green grass stretched down to the river’s edge, the odd firefly dancing above it. Claire talked the whole time, Ted the good listener. An hour? More? They found a bench and sat. The more guarded she wanted to be with him the more she seemed to say, to admit. How she wanted to travel with children, three of them, how she wanted to live near Manhattan, bring them up traveling to a new country each year, have a garden. Her mother had had a big garden and… Is this dumb? she asked. No, he said. It wasn’t dumb at all. It was wonderful.

It got late and he walked her back to her apartment. He seemed awkward and extended his hand to shake hers good-night. She loved that, would remember that. She went on a lot of dates and most guys weren’t like that.

“Good night, Ted Grayson,” she had said, smiling.

“Good night, Claire Ford,” he had said.

She had wanted to kiss him. She knew she wanted to marry him.

She looked at him now, in the kitchen in the house in Bedford, still so handsome, freshly shaven, and for just a moment, the briefest movie clip sense memory, saw him again, as she first had. And just that fast it was gone. And what replaced it, what caused her an even deeper hollow, a kind of falling, was the thought that no one would ever see her again as Ted had once seen her, at twenty-four, so alive and lovely, so much time ahead of her, anything possible. Where had life gone? Where had he gone, this man she had once loved so deeply and now didn’t even like? Where had she gone, that young woman who had so many plans?

Ted felt it, too. Something had changed. And it wasn’t, to Ted’s mind, simply age. The freedom and possibility of youth, of life in your twenties and thirties, had vanished, certainly for him. Perhaps there were fifty-nine-year-old men out there who awoke each morning, giddy at the prospect of the day as they swung their achy legs out of bed, mildly dizzy from sitting up too fast, wondering if the sharp pain along the left temple was perhaps a tumor. He doubted it, though.

What replaced these dreamy thoughts of what could be was what could have been. He was no longer young. He was never going to speak French fluently or play the guitar or become good at chess. He would never run a marathon, never serve in the military, never sail alone to Bermuda. He would never be the recipient of a standing ovation from his local school or Little League team or homeless shelter for the remarkable gift of money and time he had given over the years.

Life was in the rearview mirror now for Ted. It was no longer a time of beginnings. It was a time for endings. Endings to jobs, marriages, friendships. It was the time of life when, more and more, the news from friends was bad. Sure, so-and-so’s kid just got a Fulbright or was clerking for such-and-such judge or got married or had twins or made partner. But more often came news of pancreatic cancer and heart attacks on paddle tennis courts or accidents on vacation. Claire, keeper of names and birth dates and whose child was working where and who had grandchildren and generally the person in the family who cared about others, usually sent the cards with a thoughtful note.

Life changes. This was the essence of news. Why did it come as such a shock to an anchorman?

“Do you love him?” Ted asked the refrigerator, staring at a magnet for a place in town called Plum Plums Cheese.