Next morning after their splendid peaceful canal tour and equally easy dinner and night, they left the hotel midmorning, Lydia with a quiet determination that alerted Henry she was finally ready to respond to his declarations but with a gentleness in her usual bold stride that hinted at something else, as well. They paused at the flower stalls where on impulse she bought a great bundle of sunflowers, red and yellow and black, and all colors in between. She handed it to him, telling him it was for his apartment. That he needed to keep flowers. The first she’d bought him long since gone.
They walked until she led him along another narrow alley, this time entering into a small garden courtyard, with some of the largest and oldest trees he’d seen in Amsterdam, along with hedges and flanks and ranks of flowers; in beds, climbing the walls, on trellises, and covering several arbors. They sat on a bench beneath one of these, the brilliant cone of sunflowers set beside him. Butterflies drifted on fluttering wings.
“The truest beauty,” he said.
She watched for a moment, pensive. “It’s not something you can grab for, is it?”
“No,” he said softly. “Even watchful, you can sometimes miss it.” Then impulsively he went on. “We both seem to have moved forward. On that search, for true beauty, new beauty, new love. So surprising how that happens.”
“This place here, this garden, it took someone, likely many people over the years, to construct it. And yet it’s not grand or intended to be. In ways, it’s the childhood garden that an adult would create. Children are happy with daisies in a field. Adults demand more.”
“Sometimes too much.”
“Yes,” she said. “Then it ceases to be a pleasure and becomes an artifice.”
He touched her arm, the thin dark hairs growing there and she wrapped her fingers in his. “But isn’t there also a place for form? For boundaries of a sort? They don’t always have to break down into squabbles. Take this garden—we agree I think that it’s a formal evocation of some elemental, you suggested the childish, but elemental works just as well—it’s a formal creation not duplicating anything real so much as something dreamed. And so holds a perfection of its own. A sonnet. A sonnet in landscape. And the sonnet is a pure thing that has indeed changed over the years but always has its central essential meter and line, even to varying degrees, subjects.”
He stopped. Her eyes wide and snapping bright, delighted upon him.
“Do I amuse you?” he asked, smiling.
“Of course.” She smiled also. “Sonnets. Oh how they tortured me in school! Shakespeare and his Dark Lady. But it was a pleasant torture.” She paused and said, “Henry, is there a sonnet you had in mind? When you were speaking so passionately I thought I could see one just behind your eyes, perhaps wanting to break out altogether. Will you recite for me?”
“Are you acquainted with John Keats?”
“I’m not that old. But I know his work. Do you have a favorite? Will you recite it for me?”
He stood, his head bowed under the bower. “No,” he said. “Suddenly I feel foolish.”
She stood and turned away and walked to the end of the arbor and studied some blue and white blossoms vined there. She reached a finger and drew a flower to her nose. He followed her, waiting, silent. Then she said, “Henry?”
“Yes,” he said, and she turned. Her face struggling to be composed, stricken.
“Much of what you said yesterday mirrors my own thoughts ... my love ... for you ... And when you spoke of how I might feel ... of my concerns ... that was extraordinary. No one has ever done that before—”
“Lydia—”
“Please, love. Allow me. To say this. It’s not something I wish to do but have to do. For many reasons. Some of which you know and some which you can’t ... Things I have to work out on my own. Things that, and you have to trust me, are better if I work out alone—”
“I can’t imagine anything you can’t tell me.”
“Henry, please. This is difficult enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. It doesn’t make me happy to tell you this, but as I said, my soul demands it.”
“You’re frightening me, Lydia.”
“Oh, love,” she said and collapsed against him. He held her, trembling, the trembling running through both, then bent and whispered her name in her hair and she lifted her mouth and they kissed—as if to halt everything that was unstoppable.
Then she pulled away. And placed her hands above his elbows and stepped back to hold him at arm’s length, to make this small distance definitive.
She said, “I’m going to Paris, Henry.”
Blankly he said, “What? For how long? I’ll come if you want ...”
She dug into her shoulder purse and pulled out a cigarette and lighter, dropping the lighter which he bent to retrieve and saw the cigarette was broken by her struggle to get it free and she tossed that off and got another and he struck the wheel. She exhaled smoke and plucked the lighter from his fingers and returned it to her bag. And as she blew smoke again, tipping her mouth so the smoke went past, above his head, he saw composure settle back upon her. He felt he was witnessing death once again. The strange numbness as if he was elevated slightly above and to the side of himself.
“I don’t know how long. Several weeks at least, quite possibly a couple of months. Because I have to figure out what all this means and I can’t do that when I’m around you. Which you should consider a good thing. And there are parts that are just mine. At least for now. It’s been so delightful, so damned wonderful but it can’t continue as it’s been and you know that. It’s not only who I am but who you are as well. Who we are together. It scares me and exhilarates me and Henry I’m not twenty years old as you pointed out yesterday and this is what I need to do. So I’m going to Paris. To sort myself out, you can say. And if you know me as well as I think you do, you’ll understand. But there’s also this—I think it’s something you need as well. Even if you think you don’t.”
“I don’t,” he said.
Softly she said, “But I must.”
“I can’t talk you out of it, can I. That’s clear. Oh, Lydia. My chest aches.”
“Mine does too, Henry.”
“So,” he paused. “When are you leaving?”
She pressed her fingers against her eyes and took them away. Just above a cracking whisper she said, “Seven fifteen. The seven-fifteen.”
Stunned speechless he gazed at her. She held his gaze, a terrible tremble in the air between them. Finally he said, “Seven fifteen? In the morning?”
And something shrouded her as she drew herself upright. “No, love,” she said. “This evening.”
Then moved and held him, holding each other, silent, both knowing that for now they’d moved irreversibly beyond words.
Last thing, as he was ready to walk her back to her hotel, he caught himself and for the shortest of moments let free her hand as he retrieved the sunflowers.
He’d let them sit in their big jar until the water first went green and then daily dropped its level until the water was gone, the greenery long since rotted back, until even the rotted ends of the stems had dried in the jar and the flowerheads had lost most of their petals but for the few that remained, dried themselves by luck or chance holding on. And weeks more before he’d finally dumped those in the trash and washed out the jar and put it high upon a shelf.