Late Air Read online

  “Oh—” He looked around skittishly. “I don’t have clubs.”

  “That’s funny,” she said. She glanced at his cart.

  “You haven’t come across any strays?” he asked. “Seen anyone lurking about?”

  “No one but you!” said the oldest man, smiling.

  “This is serious,” said Murray. And then: “A criminal could be among us.” His tone surprised him.

  “Oh my God,” said the woman. She’d removed her visor and was adjusting the band. Why would she make it so tight?

  “Did you hear me, sir?” she said. The bull-necked man plucked peanuts from his hand.

  Murray heard his own voice: “This is serious.”

  “Sir?”

  Murray couldn’t remember if the medics had started an IV for Becky, an infusion of saline solution that would’ve stabilized her faster.

  “Something is wrong with him, Kate,” the man said, pulling the woman’s arm defensively. “Just get us to the next hole.”

  “Wait,” said Murray. “Do you ever play here early?”

  Before the woman pressed on the gas, she shook her head. “Look, I’m not answering any of your strange questions. We will report you.”

  As she sped away, Murray was almost certain no one had done anything about saline solution.

  Murray went to Widdy’s to eat something, just enough to raise his blood sugar. He walked dizzily through the door and looked around at everyone just going about their business, drinking and talking.

  At his table, Murray reminded himself to breathe deeply, while a server poured water into his glass and recited some of the specials. Snapper soup, a salad with endives, rib eye steak.

  “Just a turkey club,” Murray said. “And a gin and tonic.”

  On the course, his cell phone hadn’t been able to secure a clear signal, so when he saw three full bars rise, he became hopeful for a stream of stalled messages. But after five long minutes, not one vibrated—he thought it possible that Lisa Sanders had tried him at home or his office. No, that didn’t make sense. Everyone used cells in an emergency.

  He tried to relax his back more comfortably into his chair, kept his watch on his knee.

  Murray looked around as an unlikely pair—a younger man with his daughter on his shoulders—filled the last stools. She had strawberry-blonde pigtails and was holding a small plastic container in her hands.

  This father didn’t seem to think twice about placing her on the stool next to him and ordering her a Shirley Temple, plus a glass bowl full of maraschino cherries.

  A group of four loud men dominating the bar called him out. “That’s the way to prime her for college!” one said.

  Another man with snarled brown hair laughed. “Right!”

  The father had been wearing a hat, and when he took it off, he waved it dismissively at the group. He nudged his daughter’s bowl of cherries close to her. Though he couldn’t have been much over thirty, his hair was sprouting patches of gray.

  The focus of the loud men shifted to how badly the second nine holes had gone.

  No matter how closely Murray listened for evidence, he heard nothing of girl, nothing of mist or blue morning light—of forgetting to call the clubhouse.

  When his sandwich arrived, he realized he’d forgotten to ask for no mayonnaise. He reached for his knife and scraped off the fat and asked the waiter for a side of Dijon mustard. Nancy used to despise this about him, his need to special order, until she’d become pregnant and done the same thing. For a moment he felt as though she were here, in this room. He could see the wicker chairs of the little café where they’d met, on Boulevard Saint-Germain in the Latin Quarter.

  He’d entered soaking wet—it had started raining in the middle of his long run, a dozen times around the Luxembourg Gardens. It was still raining as he stood at the zinc counter of the café, just a few feet from Nancy’s table, where she’d been working. He’d kept an open stance, just close enough to notice the red lipstick stain on her cup. He’d tried to take patient sips of his espresso—was as careful about breaking apart the flaky center of his croissant and spreading blackberry jam over the flesh. Rain had poured steadily over the café’s windows, a beating that had seemed to soften his every gesture next to hers, as she’d copied page after page of her notes.

  Murray cut one triangle of his club sandwich into a smaller triangle. He considered the amount of salt, then decided he wasn’t very hungry after all, that the gin and tonic would be enough to raise his blood sugar. He drank from his glass until ice knocked his lips. The sounds of the bar were growing louder. Murray slid down the back of his chair a few inches more. He closed his eyes. What was the first word he’d read on Nancy’s pad? Just something to ground him: the one word in English that had lent him the courage, after several long hours of watching her, to say hello?

  “Are you alright?” Murray opened his eyes to the waiter’s scrunched features. He nodded vaguely at the suggestion of water. He watched the waiter’s hands wavering pink through the pitcher.

  He still could not remember the word Nancy had written down, but when he had said hello, asking her about her project, she said she’d been working on her dissertation, on James Baldwin’s writings. He came here and sat in this café. He had nothing. She’d held her cup by her mouth. Enough for bread. And coffee, she’d said with a laugh.

  Room, he thought. That had been the word he’d recognized, for Giovanni’s Room, the book her research had focused on. Nancy wouldn’t have wanted him to say book. She would have corrected with novel, or manuscript.

  He tried to stop the words, wanting all of them—all of her—out of his head, but it wasn’t possible not to recall that first day they’d spent together, how he’d described the Paris marathon he’d placed eighth in, how she’d told him about her “life in letters,” or her joking that she often spent whole days at the archives of the National Library, taking breaks only for a curbside smoke, he’d find out later. She’d said she admired him for his health, his optimism.

  He’d never really considered himself optimistic, just someone who measured days by exertion. Nancy brought him out of that, showing him the different quarters of the city, telling him about the writers and painters implied on different street corners. He had fallen in love with her willingness to forgive his upbringing, his uneducated family, his absent father, the strip mines they’d depended on.

  For a moment, Murray saw them, at the dinner table. His father pulling apart one of his mother’s soft rolls, black beneath his fingernails, even after washing. Murray saw his father’s shoulders hunched over the kitchen sink as he scrubbed along a bar of soap, his crooked fingers moving back and forth.

  Murray held a napkin to his lips without wiping. He watched as a large ice cream sundae was placed before the girl and her father. Three chocolate scoops covered in whipped cream. The father stole a cherry from his daughter’s bowl and placed it on top. Her stool had been angled toward him, and she was smiling from all the sugar.

  The girl held her spoon tight in her little fist, elbow jutting sideways as she worked out bites. She fed several tastes to her father, who leaned in and made enthusiastic faces each time. Murray looked away, back at his watch on his knee, still running numbers. Then he looked back up at the table, at the boldness of the red tablecloth.

  Murray supposed he could say it had all come crashing down with Nancy, finally, one scorching day in August 2002, even though who’s to know when the foundations of all you’d built together really started to crack? Crooked posts and rotting piers, dirty sand or too much water poured into a concrete perimeter, things you didn’t notice until one morning there were puddles in the basement, a bulge in the wall, flakes of white everywhere, signs his father had taught him to look for, those summers he and Patrick spent repairing old houses on River Street. It was easier when it was someone else’s life, he thought, when there were diagnosable symptoms.

  When his star Sarah Lloyd was a junior, he’d taken her out to some trails in
New London for a long run, and afterward he went for an ice cream cone. He hardly ever indulged, but she’d had a particularly good workout, and it was a hot day in mid-August. At first he’d stayed parked in the lot going over splits, looking up here and there to think, factor a specific calculation. Then on a small deck that wrapped around the parlor—how hadn’t he noticed sooner?—he saw her: Nancy. Sharing a milkshake with a man. He was handsome, with a full head of dark curly hair. A bulkier man.

  “I’m sorry, I should have asked.” The waiter came back with a menu. “Did you want anything else?” Murray shook his head, taking too long to realize where he was, surrounded by golfers, to slide out his credit card and place it over the bill tray, hands quavering.

  That August day sixteen years ago, he’d reminded himself: Stay in control. He’d been careful not to overreact. Maybe the curly-haired man was just a coworker from Beinecke? She collaborated on big projects, events, with all kinds of people on campus.

  But then that man—Richard, he later learned—had leaned in and licked some cream from her lips. They’d kissed.

  FOUR

  Marjorie was Nancy’s closest colleague, and friend, at Beinecke. Making new friends had never come easily, and in their first year of marriage, Nancy had resented Murray a bit, for the suddenness of their transition into the unknowns of New Haven—also this feeling that they’d moved here for his work, not hers, when she’d invested just as much in her career as he had. Nancy was grateful for Marjorie’s camaraderie; she was a curator, too, in Modern Manuscripts, and they’d bonded over a shared passion for James Baldwin and French surrealist poetry. She’d turned Nancy onto the unpublished works of Desnos, Éluard, and René Char written during the Second World War, and just yesterday Marjorie had suggested going to a Master’s Tea at Saybrook College this afternoon, on La Résistance, over lunch.

  At first Nancy hesitated; such events were reserved for undergraduates—their attendance seemed intrusive. But Marjorie assured her she was good friends with the professor giving the lecture, Richard Nevins, and that he’d be delighted to see them there.

  At a quarter till one, Nancy was surprised, irritated really, not to find Marjorie in the front lobby according to plan. Nancy hated when someone was even a minute late—she and Murray both did—for the valuable time lost waiting. She distracted herself by looking out through the library’s glass doors to Commons dining hall, where a handful of students in hats and mittens juggled books and coffee thermoses.

  She slipped on her own leather gloves. Outside, she brushed some snow from the low marble wall that divided the library from the rest of campus. It was cold, but not so terrible for February. Her peacoat was lined, and she hoped to get through the winter without needing a larger one. At eighteen weeks, her bump could still be hidden, and she was glad for that, not to be so noticeable. Coworkers might think less of her, assume she wouldn’t accomplish as much before she took leave. Maybe times had changed, but still she felt it: how quick people were to judge by appearances, especially women’s, reducing them to their bodies.

  “How’s it going?” Marjorie laughed, a warmth that always lifted Nancy’s mood. Marjorie looked radiant as ever in her fur-hooded parka, her black hair luminous despite winter. She had spent last month in Casablanca, and Nancy hadn’t been able to help feeling some envy when Marjorie first described the sunshine, the slow-cooked tagine, the reading she’d done for pleasure.

  Luckily Saybrook was just around the corner. They had to hurry and slip through the college’s gate before a student exited, iron clanging heavily behind them. Inside, the stone courtyard was crisp with cold light, the benches rimmed with more snow, more students and faculty bundled up and hurrying for the Master’s House. A floating lotus plant on an ivory stand marked the entryway; oriental rugs and a stunning array of mahogany furniture filled the living room.

  Nancy was glad to recognize the Master, Annette Woodson, an art history professor who’d written on Beinecke’s rare indigenous map of Mexico City, though Annette didn’t offer the same recognition—because maybe Nancy hadn’t worked here long enough? Was her face too bloated?

  “Your house is beautiful.” Nancy filled the silence.

  “Home,” Annette said. “This is my home.”

  “Well, it’s beautiful,” Nancy snapped, which surprised her. Luckily Annette was too distracted by other students coming in to respond. Nancy drifted over to the table for tea. She sifted through flavors, comparing mint and chamomile, as if they were more complicated than their names. Marjorie was already busy socializing with other faculty, so Nancy joined them, taking a few timid sips of hot water and biting her lip.

  “Nancy”—Marjorie reached for her arm—“this is Fareed, our expert on Proust, and here,” she said, “our famous Richard. Richard helped me with that symposium last fall, the one on Gide, and he loves Colette.” Marjorie smiled, as if waiting for Nancy to affirm the magic of Chéri, but Nancy couldn’t distill her thoughts in so little time—she felt this fog; she only nodded, took another sip of tea. Richard just looked at her, as if perplexed by her own sense of fraudulence.

  Then the lights dimmed, and Nancy and Marjorie found their seats while the Master began an introduction. Nancy felt a pin drop. She made a tenuous hash mark on her pad, the one she’d brought exclusively for the talk. She took another sip of tea.

  Richard was at the podium now, a projector flashing its empty white light on the wall behind him. Eventually the image of a novelist—Jean Giono—appeared sidewise; the lens adjusted, zoomed in.

  Richard had thick curly hair and a bit of a paunch, but it was soft, inviting in its own way—and the minute he’d launched into his first slide about Giono’s origins, he was waving his hand freely. When he arrived at an important point, he slowed, just enough to make his idea clear, emphasizing certain words, first in French, then in English. He took long pauses between slides to reflect, and when he became particularly eager, he raised his hand higher, like he might seize something to write with.

  In the end, he’d use a whiteboard to make a diagram, squeaking boxes around each major event in Giono’s life, starring the most tumultuous period in the 1930s—when Giono had started a pacifist commune on the Contadour Plateau in Haute Provence, a group that had been misconstrued by the Resistance Movement as evidence of Giono’s collaboration with the Vichy regime—but Richard fervently refuted these allegations. He explained how Giono had suffered posttraumatic stress disorder from the Great War, how the French countryside had always been sacred to his writing; Giono had spent most of his life in the tiny mountain town of Manosque, had drafted all of his novels from a small library whose largest window had overlooked the quiet of the Alps—total war, Richard said, had threatened to destroy the safety of that perspective—sa sécurité—he repeated several times. Eventually he stopped and looked around, as if he had one more bit to add, but instead he only blinked into the quiet, lips turning in a little smile toward his audience. There were a few claps, then more, until everyone finally joined.

  Richard’s face was glazed with sweat. Nancy did not know so much perspiration was possible without more physical labor. He was different from other academics, she thought, and continued to think as he pointed enthusiastically at each student with a question.

  Nancy could not remember when she and Murray had last had sex; well, she could, but she didn’t like to think about how long it had been. Murray had been the first to object, before they’d made it through the amnio last week. He’d said he was worried the fetus was too fragile. She’d felt like such a fool for unhooking her bra before their bed, waiting for him like that, so exposed, expectant.

  Richard was flooded by students afterward, and though she’d hoped to have just one word, to ask her question about historical narrative, she and Marjorie couldn’t stay any longer. Marjorie just waved—then on their walk back, she’d turned to Nancy. “Wasn’t that great?”

  “It was,” she said, realizing her shortness of breath, her expanding ribs, the
air colder, harsher to her lungs.

  Murray often asked how she was feeling physically, but never about her work, the disruption, how suddenly her focus would have to shift, and in the middle of her first major exhibition at Beinecke. As she pushed through the building’s heavy doors—Marjorie insisted on going in first, on holding the door for her—she was surprised by the suddenness of tears brimming, though Marjorie didn’t seem to notice. In her office, Nancy continued to ruminate over the feeling that she gave more emotionally than Murray did, letting him go on about his practices day and night, attending as many meets as she could, never complaining when he used his only free day—Sunday—for his own training instead of spending time together. Was it so much to ask for the same support, the same level of understanding?

  She’d confided in Marjorie before, about her fears and doubts, how they’d worsened these past weeks, but Marjorie had assured her it was all hormones, that they heightened everything. She said she’d felt the same when she was pregnant with her twins; she’d been as enraged by Bill’s neglect, the hours he’d put in at the office when she’d needed him most. Later she said Bill confessed how worried he’d been about making ends meet, and though Marjorie was like Nancy in that she didn’t believe in strict role divisions, Marjorie said she could understand now where Bill had been coming from. She felt that Bill—Murray, too—needed to cope with uncertainty in his own way.

  So the following week, when Murray called her at work and suggested they go to the hardware store for a can of low-VOC paint, Nancy jotted a note in her planner: Murray channels his worries through action. She felt as assured when he didn’t want her on a stepladder or breathing in toxins—so she would alternate between watching him from the doorway and resting in the living room. She tried to make herself comfortable in Murray’s recliner, using the back pages of an old wall calendar to sketch out the dimensions of Baby’s sleigh crib and the antique dresser they’d found at a yard sale.