Nathan was staying with Saskia and their mother; back at the hotel Gwen announced with greedy satisfaction that she was going to watch sitcoms and eat candy in the bath. James took Julia toward the river. It was still very cold but the sky was clear and he needed, more than anything, for Julia to see and understand the beauty in this fine, proud city. He had grown up in a spare, rented apartment on the top floor of a Dorchester triple-decker. Later a scholarship spirited him across the river, and he spent four years at Harvard as an undergraduate, followed by many more at the Medical School and then a residency and fellowship at Beth Israel. The deep, turgid black of the Charles River stirred his soul; in the words of the anthem bawled in the happy heat of Fenway Park, he loved that dirty water. He would play her the song, he thought, when they got back to the hotel. Holding her hand, he felt like a boy, making a gift to her of every place he’d been happy. He wanted each site blessed by her gaze. He wanted her to see that he would always give her all he had.
“I understand why Pamela wanted to come back,” Julia said, leaning on the railings. They had walked to Harvard Bridge and stood looking down into blackness, halfway between the boathouses and jewel-bright polished cupolas of Cambridge and, on their other side, solid, honest Boston. There was a sharp wind coming in off the water and Julia pulled her collar up higher until only her eyes were visible. She had been quiet for some time and he had been waiting, patiently, to discover what it was she had on her mind. After a moment she added, “You didn’t want to move back when she did?”
He pulled her to him. In his arms she felt slight, even beneath the insulating layers of her winter coat. They had had similar conversations before, but it felt different in Boston. Here he heard the unspoken questions and understood her earlier silence. Will you leave London? Will you leave me?
“You look cold,” he said, gently. “Are you?”
“A bit.”
He began to lead her back toward Storrow Drive. “Here, take my scarf. Let’s go and have Manhattans in the lobby. Or something warm, maybe Irish coffee. You know, I do really love this town. But I love London also, and now London has you, which makes it the only place I’d ever want to be. I’m not going anywhere. You’re my home,” he added, and smiled to himself at his unconscious appropriation of another lyric from Boston’s defiant punk theme song. But he meant it.
“Thank you. I know, I think. Sorry. I suddenly saw just a glimpse into your life here, before we met, and I got jealous. Of a city. You had a whole life before I knew you, and I missed it.” Their gloved fingers were interlaced and she squeezed his hand.
“Truly, the only life I want is what’s ahead, with you. It was all practice, before.” After a moment he added, “Pamela is . . . an experience.” He felt that Julia had been graceful in the face of Pamela’s assault. Once that theatricality and confidence had captivated him but this weekend, seeing the two women side by side, he had found his ex-wife more than usually enervating.
He had been a fourth-year medical student when they met and Pamela had intrigued him, British and bosomy, full of sexual and intellectual confidence. They had taken Urogynecology together and she had challenged a famously irascible surgeon day after day, asking questions that infuriated him, immune to his loathing while better-liked students were regularly reduced to tears. James had found himself in her busy and unmade bed, where he stayed for the rest of medical school. They had been, in that way at least, a good match.
In adulthood they were not well suited. He had felt perpetually unsettled; she, increasingly defensive and competitive as he relied less and less on bolstering infusions of her own self-belief. She had exhausted him, and they had irritated one another. The divorce, they agreed—sometimes amicably, at other times in the throes of an accidental, old, appalling fight—had been the best choice they’d made together.
Now he was fifty-five and truly in love, deeply in love, for the first time in his life. Tonight, above all, he was grateful Julia had trusted him and come to Boston. She had the generosity to see that to keep his family on civil terms was so very important to him. He pulled her closer to him as they walked. He felt expansive with love for her.
“She’s very attractive. I was a bit intimidated.”
“You’re so beautiful, Julia; that’s crazy. Please don’t be intimidated by anything at all; she’s a friend now but we got divorced for a reason.” He tried not to speak ill of his children’s mother but this statement was not disloyal to anyone, and was true.
“Why did you get married?”
He considered. He had told Julia a great deal about the separation, but had talked little about what had come before. In general he did not spend a great deal of time in retrospection. “I was . . .” he considered “overpowered” and then said, “overwhelmed by her. She was—is—brimming with confidence and social ease, and I wanted both of those things. She sort of . . . kicked me up the ass, I think. I wasn’t superyoung but I was still pretty immature. I’d never really known anyone like that before. She was kind of the British equivalent of the Waspy girls who would never look at me. Except she looked at me.”
“And then?”
“And then I grew up, a little slowly I guess, and once I was more mature or self-assured, we began to fight. We outgrew each other.” He had talked enough, and so returned to the far happier present. “And now I’m with you, which is exactly where I should be.”
They had turned into the pedestrian mall at the heart of Commonwealth Avenue and walked in silence for a while beneath the canopy of yellow elms looming black in the darkness. Before them drifts of fallen leaves lifted and skittered in the sharp wind.
“What did Philip say about the dog?”
“It’s so hard to tell; he wouldn’t want to worry me but it didn’t sound good. I feel so awful he has to deal with it.”
James stopped and faced her, and took both her hands. He had been thinking for some time about how he could help. He watched her struggle with her guilt for distressing him, and for introducing a note of sadness into this first, small vacation. He could see she was anxious.
“Listen to me,” he said, gently. “When we get back to the hotel I’ll look online for the best vet in London. I’ll find the guy who looks after the corgis, just tell me how to help. Your people will be my people. And your dog, my dog.”