Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

waits to be accumulated about this and other details. The sense, in a word, of possession, the mysterious ingredient in marriage that nobody at all understands.

Is it possible that we were both involved in this way with the same man? As I listen to the pathetic little confessions we are making, creating two portraits of astonishing dissimilarity, my good sense tells me that the answer is no. Your R was not my R. What the hell, then, is the connection between us?

I watch you drinking a latte macchiato in the bar, surrounded by dark curving wood and stained-glass nymphs. We have paused in our reminiscences, and you are telling me about the house you bought on the Skagit River, how you drive to work each day through the fern-covered trees down one of the most beautiful stretches of highway in the state. I can tell by the calm, downbeat way you talk about this that you are happy nowadays, perhaps happier than you have ever been. Though you don’t brag, it is clear that, as usual, men are courting you. One suitor is a Chinese stockbroker from Vancouver, and another swain is the local vet, a guy who saves racing greyhounds. You don’t want to live with anyone at present. Your dream is to buy a ranch with your brother.

Through the windows of the bar, we can see the cavernous seventeenth-century stone arcade where African street vendors have spread out their wares on blankets. No other foreigners in Italy look quite as misplaced as these blue-black Senegalese, wrapped up like Siberian grandmothers against the freezing fog. Cross-legged on the pavement, they sit as motionless as the cheap wooden statues they are selling, along with counterfeit Vuitton luggage. And I wonder what remarkable antipodean memories of love and devastation are unrolling behind their still eyes, while the two of us review what is, after all, only a minor domestic drama. A common one, at that. Near the vendors, a newsstand displays a headline: SCANDAL IN PARIS: DEAD MITTERRAND HAD TWO WOMEN.

At lunch I ask you: Why did you run away like that? The question just pops out, and it’s the only spontaneous one I’ve asked you all day. Over the dish of roast meat and rosemary potatoes, in the middle of the chattering lunchtime crowd with two old waitresses rushing to and fro.

Your blue-green eyes, suddenly glacial, hook into mine and hold them. Didn’t you run away too? you ask, in a voice that chills presumption, and silences me. You pick up your empty water glass and drink an imaginary drop.

Yet in the wake of this rebuke, I experience a sensation of perfect happiness. A sensation so brief and slight that if it were pain it would be called a twinge. And it’s not even really happiness: it’s a kind of satisfaction, as if together we have solved a complicated problem. There is no reason for this, and no way to explain it, so I say nothing. But I take a minute to admire you as you sit across the table from me—to gloat over the shape of your face and lips and hands, almost as if I were a susceptible man. As if I were our ex-husband, R, falling in love with you all over again.

The inauspicious hour of the afternoon has rolled around again, and it is time to get you to your train. As we walk across the river, the sun is burning off the fog, but for some reason the temperature has dropped. I am wearing a down vest, and I’m freezing; my impulse is to take your arm, the way Italian women do when they walk together on the street, but I don’t. Below the bridge, the Po is mud-colored and swollen from the November rains. On the other side of the river we pass a travel agency outside of which, to promote tourism in China, someone has set up a peculiar pagoda-shaped booth in garish red, with gold dragons at the corners and lanterns hanging from the eaves. It looks so sinister that we have to giggle.

I wouldn’t go near there, you say. It’s either an opium den or one of those UFOs where they snatch humans for research.

Maybe it’s just a Chinese time machine, I say. You and I could end up rival concubines in the Forbidden City.

More laughter. We walk on toward the car, close together but not touching.

As we drive to the station, I feel a growing relief that this visit has gone off so well. Twenty-four hours. We got along marvelously, and it was so good for Theodora, I can imagine myself saying to my friends. She’s a lovely person, a strong, wonderful woman. I’ll inflate my own image with every admiring adjective I apply to you. At the same time, I can hardly wait for you to get out of the car. And I know from the winged restlessness of your glance that you are impatient as well.

And now the kiss, once more a shade too forceful; and then you walk swiftly into the station entrance between the taxicabs, and the sleepy porters leaning on their metal carts. You seem to dart, a slender black figure with a black bag, the peacock scarf fluttering airily behind you, and as you go you remind me of a figure from a children’s book. Peter Pan, maybe; or that capricious and slightly sinister little shadow of the Robert Louis Stevenson poem. A bit of past magic flickering out of sight.

Driving home up the hill, I turn on the radio, and tumble into the voluptuous sense of solitude one has after any guest leaves. Rounding a curve, I see in the distance that, as the mist thins, a phantom outline of the Alps has begun to sketch itself on the sky beyond the city. I think of you, probably already leaning your cheek in relief against the upholstery of a first-class compartment, pounding through the rice paddies and cornfields toward