Peter Geye - Wintering

“I doubt he owns a suit jacket,” she said, and then looked out the window, though his boat was gone. “Does he have a girl?”

Well, I might have stepped in. Steered her away. Run to Harry’s fish house to tell him how he made me feel, how I saw us together, how I wanted him and nothing else. I could have. But I didn’t think I needed to, because I had no idea she’d be so true to her word. If I’d come to know anything of Lisbet during our short conversations, it was that she liked to talk — and talk big — and that had never counted for much in my life before then.

That evening, she saw Harry sitting in the Traveler’s Hotel dining room, and he looked even more exceptional than he had on his boat. That was the word she used the next morning. He ordered a pork chop and a baked potato and a crock of creamed corn. She was surprised to see a glass of milk before him, but even that glitch in the picture she was building in her mind didn’t deter her. She found it charming. The whiskey he ordered with his coffee and pie made him irresistible. Her father, she added, ate like a woman, only steamed green vegetables, white fish, salad, and sweet German wine.

By now, Harry had traded his oilskin pants for a pair of worn-hard dungarees but still wore his canvas work shirt, one side of his collar turned in, the other turned up. His face had a week-old beard scratched across it, and his hair probably hadn’t seen a comb in his whole adult life. She described all this as if I hadn’t registered every last detail every time I’d closed my eyes and begged for my real life to begin.

Lisbet saw him again the next night, and the night after. Each time, she allowed herself more generous fantasies. The firmness of his body. A sagacious streak borne by hours of contemplation out on his fishing boat each day. Finally, how he would be in bed. She was graphic about this last supposition. He would be silent, unlike her father, whom she’d heard bleating like a sheep on those rare occasions he’d made love with her mother. She imagined that when they finished he’d say something to make her see the heavenly night in a new light. That she spoke so uninhibitedly about such things proved at once that I could never be a friend to this strange city girl, even as she was trying to make one of me.

She came the next morning, too. She lingered by the window, looking out at the harbor and telling me how she’d brazenly flirted with Harry from across the dining room the night before. When they passed each other in the lobby after dinner, she told him to meet her at the harbor for a walk in the morning. She was waiting for him now, both uncertain he’d come and positive he wouldn’t miss it. She had her sketchbook along and she kept flipping it open and closed.

How could he have stayed away? And why would he? As sure as the clock struck nine, he was standing there by the water, in his dungarees again, but with his shirt tucked in, his collar right. She passed me a devilish smile — as though I were a part of her ploy — and went out to meet him.

She accepted his offered cigarette. He asked her about the sketchbook, which she had shown me more than once, standing at the counter. There were several pictures of him in his boat. Of the lake and the sky and woods. Even I, never having seen a true work of art, could tell she was gifted. Perhaps even more. She wanted to show him her work, but couldn’t bear it — turning to one drawing, then another, always closing the book before he could see them. I thought she was faking that coyness. I watched them smile and laugh and smoke before they walked away. I saw her father’s sloop sail out of the harbor three days later, but I didn’t see Lisbet again until she came back, a month later.

For years I was haunted by what came to pass between them on that day they turned up the alley by the Traveler’s Hotel, no doubt heading to Harry’s fish house. I was aware even then that something decisive was happening, and as much to me as to either of them.

It would be nearly half my life before I finally found out. Being proper, I never asked Harry. And Harry, being a gentleman, wouldn’t have answered if I had. But Lisbet, well, in the late winter of 1965 she gave evidence that she’d been waiting all that time to bring the story to me. It was my first season living in the house that Harry built for me on the Burnt Wood River. He and Signe and Gus had been my only guests until that morning she came to my door.

Our lives were by then so bound together that only deaths could untangle some of the knots, but at that moment she and Harry were in the middle of their messy divorce. I’d made friends with Gus and Signe not because I had any ulterior motives, simply because it was only natural, given the amount of time Harry and I were now spending together. Standing at my door, Lisbet looked very much as she had as a young woman in the apothecary all those years before. She was still nearly as beautiful, even if she wore her lifetime of disappointment in the lines around her eyes. She held me in those eyes, standing there in my kitchen. I offered her coffee, which she rejected with a wave of her hand.

“Harry has built you a lovely home, eh, Miss Lovig? He once did the same for me.”

“I paid Harry as I would any other carpenter, Lisbet.”

“I suppose you have paid him, if that’s what you’d prefer to call it.”

I bristled, of course, but didn’t know what to say. If I’d been in her shoes, I might have confronted me, too.

“Harry and I are divorcing. I’m sure he’s told you. I’m sure you know why. I’m sure you see the reason why every time you catch your reflection.”

“Oh, Lisbet, let’s be honest about all of this.”

“You want honesty? Certainly, let’s be honest. Harry has a habit of the grand gesture. Standing here under this vaulted ceiling, no doubt you’re daily reminded of that. But he was the same with me.”

She walked across the kitchen and stood close to me. “We made love the first day we met. Right on the floor of the fish house. It was the first real thing I’d ever done.” Her eyes narrowed and wandered to the carpet. “On a blanket on the floor. Wood shavings in my hair. It felt terrible and wonderful. And I had been exactly right about him.” Now she looked back up at me and her eyes widened again. “I actually thought of you while I lay there, watching my life come to me. I thought of you because I didn’t want to become you. A spinster before you had a single gray hair.” She looked up and down her nose at me. “I wanted to be the woman I was in just that moment. When we finished he got up and walked across the room and brought me a glass of water. He lit a cigarette and handed it to me. Then he said, ‘You’ll stay here. You’ll be my gal. We’ll get married.’

“You know as well as I do that he never says anything he doesn’t mean sincerely, I’ll give him that. It’s one of his great faults.”

She took a long look around my house, then shook her head.

“He asked me to marry him even with you sitting down there at the apothecary, taking care of that meshuga in the attic. He ought to have built you a castle for all you did for him.” She opened her hands as though everything were plain to see.

“The grand gesture, Berit. Marrying the first girl who’d have him. Forsaking a mother he had no right to. Endangering his son that season up in the woods. Now your quaint little house right up the road. How convenient for you both.”

“You’re a cruel and selfish woman,” I told her.

“You’re not?”

“Harry’s my friend, and if he’s divorcing you, it’s because you’ve failed him and made him miserable.”

Her eyes widened — so wide the lines around them smoothed — and her lips pursed. “I’m not blind, Berit. I’m not a fool. Do you think I didn’t know he was in love with you before I ever met him? Do you think I came here because he was some great catch? I married him because I wanted to be the girl on the floor of his fish house, not a girl like you.”