There’s a lot to admire about Grandfather Pool. Even though he’s close to a hundred and moves very slowly, he walks by himself—doesn’t even use a walker. And even though his skin hangs on him like paper, you can see the outline of an excellent physique underneath. It’s as if his bones were playing hide-and-seek and temporarily chose a semitransparent place to hide. Still, I admit, I’d rather not get too near him (he’s not my grandfather, after all). I don’t want to listen to him in the hot tub, where we were both headed until I saw him, if he should try to talk to me as he has before. He likes to talk a lot when he gets the chance, as old people do, and old-man talk makes me uncomfortable and sometimes sad.
It’s odd how as men get older they slowly become more like women. The only man I know who handled his age really well was my father. He used to take me to this pool all the time, especially on weekends and holidays when I was around nine or ten (including a number of Memorial Days, which it is again today), until I thought I’d outgrown it, fool that I was.
I was addicted to the slide then. I liked the Lazy River and the whirlpool, but I spent half my time on the water slide. I loved it when he went on the slide with me, but when he got tired he’d still stand in the water and watch me every time I slid down. He said I always arrived with a smile.
Just as Grandfather Pool finally gets settled in the tub, I see a group of three men with walkers moving toward the kids’ pool, of all places, slowly and stealthily as if returning to the scene of their crime. I guess it makes sense because at the entrance to the kids’ pool the water’s only a few inches deep and they couldn’t handle anything much deeper. I notice they’ve got a lifeguard helping them walk and kind of sealing them off from the general public. The lifeguard is really ripped. He’s got lots of muscles, but his face is almost comically blank and completely disinterested in what he has to do. When you’re that young you live half in the present, half in the future, generally speaking. You can’t imagine the way the past invades the present when you get older any more than you can imagine a world without sex.
My father was a monogamous man. You could say he was the product of a different era when it was easier or more expected to be a faithful husband than it is today, but he was honest in other ways as well. When my mother got sick for a number of years, he took exemplary care of her, never missed a beat. Of course such behavior meant the premature death of his sex life, but that was never a consideration for him. I doubt it was ever more than a fleeting thought. He was honest in his business, too. I worked for him, so I know. I wish I’d never left his business, but thought I’d outgrown that, too. (The song “Young and Foolish” didn’t come from nothing.) Still, of all his forms of honesty, I’m most impressed by his lifelong fidelity—especially to a woman as difficult as my mother could sometimes be. He set too high a standard for me there. I knew even as a fairly young child, or certainly by my mid-teens, that I could never live up to it. Of course, once realized, I went a bit more than I needed to in the other direction and learned to say whatever I had to say to get women to go to bed with me since that was the way of the rest of the world, as I understood it.
It was a great shock when my father died nearly thirty years ago. It would have been a shock no matter how he died, even if it were from a slow-acting cancer. Still, it was a special kind of shock his having a fatal heart attack when he was only fifty-seven, not too far from the age I am now. As an orphan and only child (my mother had died six years earlier), I inherited a bit of money. I should have invested it or saved it or some ingenious combination of the two. Instead I traveled. I wanted to flee the country, especially the middle of it where I lived, in St. Louis, yet I also feared traveling (though my father had taken me to Europe as a child, then later as a teenager). I panicked at the thought of living among people whose language I couldn’t speak. As a compromise, I went to London.
It was undoubtedly too soon after his death to travel such a great distance. A part of me knew this. Although I had no siblings or lover of any consequence at the time, I did have a friend or two, especially Phil, who warned me about my trip to London; yet I turned a deaf ear. I was determined to go there, so I made arrangements quickly, even paying in advance for the first week at my hotel in Princes Square. In an effort to divert myself, I went to the usual tourist attractions and was by no means disappointed. Not by the attractions themselves, that is, which were pretty much what they were cracked up to be. But the routine of the ubiquitous guided tours and especially the commercialization of it all began to irritate me. I remember it bothered me in particular that you had to pay to visit the so-called holy West-minster Abbey. It also bothered me that all these places had gift or snack shops attached to them, like mosquitoes to skin.
No doubt, my father’s recent death contributed a little to my bitter reaction. I soon stopped going to the tourist attractions and began just walking around Hyde Park in the daytime and then at night getting pretty soused at one of the local pubs on Queensway before returning to my hotel room to sleep it off. It was on one of my evening trips to a pub that a quite attractive, if slightly waifish, young woman approached me with a troubled look on her face. She was a little shorter than average, with very white skin and dark shoulder-length hair, and wore a flower print dress that hid her figure more than revealing it.
Not really hearing what she first said to me, in part because she spoke with an accent, in part because she spoke quickly, I assumed she wanted money (everyone else did), so I fished out the change in my pocket and gave her a couple of pounds. Her troubled look quickly turned ironic.
“This man just gave me money, he thinks I want money,” she said, addressing the empty space around her, as far as I could see.
“I’m sorry I misunderstood,” I said, walking toward her. But she was walking away from me now with my money in her hand.
“Oh, I guess you do need the money, after all,” I said, laughing a little now myself.
“No, I don’t want your money,” she said, turning and walking after me and soon giving me a different combination of coins of her own.
“I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t hear you before. What did you want?”
“I asked you if you knew where the Spiritual Church is?”
“No, I’m sorry, I’m not from around here,” I said, once more walking slowly away.
“I probably gave you more money back than you gave me,” she noted.
That stopped me in my tracks, made me turn and walk back to her again.
“Obviously neither of us works in a bank. Why don’t you let me buy you something to eat or at least a drink,” I said, surprised by my sudden invitation as I pointed to the pub across the street. “My name’s Gerry.”
She uttered some pleasantry in return, but I could see she was nervous. She had one of those transparent faces that clearly revealed when she was thinking something over, as she was then, registering all the pros and cons of accepting my invitation.
“I was trying to get to the church, but I’ve only been there once before and now I’ve lost my way and no one seems to know where it is. I suppose I’ll miss the service anyway by now. My name’s Paulette,” she said, extending her delicate white hand to shake.
“If I go to a pub with you, will you expect me to have an alcoholic drink?” she asked a moment later.
“I won’t have any expectations one way or another. It’s just a place where we could talk,” I said, rather smoothly, I thought, again to my surprise. A car approached us then, which finally convinced her to get off the street, fortunately on the same sidewalk that I’d chosen.
“Is this something you do quite often?” she said.
“What?”
“Ask women you’ve just met to go to pubs with you?”
“No, I don’t have a pattern. Why do women always assume that men have a pattern?”
“They do, you know, behave in patterns. It’s merely a question of when the woman is able to unearth it.”
“You make it sound like women are all archaeologists. Is there some kind of school where they get their training, I hope?”
Finally she laughed.
“OK, then, since you’ve made me laugh I suppose I can go to your pub with you.”
“Fine,” I said, wondering myself why her decision pleased me to the extent it did.
Once in the pub my veneer of self-confidence didn’t last long. There are so many awkward things involved when you eat a meal with someone you’ve just met. I think Paulette felt the same thing. She became quiet most of the time, then laughed excessively at others. I quickly had two drinks, and before I was halfway through the first she changed her mind and had a beer herself.
I’d been drinking almost every night since my father died and hoped I wouldn’t start in about him and end up losing it. But I needn’t have worried because Paulette soon began talking about the man who’d just left her.
“It wasn’t just the time I lost,” she said, her earnest dark eyes tearing up, “I’m young enough to have more of that. It was what he did to my trust that I’ll never get over, I don’t think, what he did to my heart.”
That made me think of my father, for some reason, and I struggled to keep my own emotions under control. “Do you want to tell me what happened?” I said, hoping for a variety of reasons that she wouldn’t.
“Men don’t like to hear those things.”
True enough, I thought, thinking I was temporarily off the hook. Of course, I pretended to want to know, realizing I was already starting to like her.
“He betrayed me is what it amounts to. He left me for another bird. The details don’t really matter, do they?”
I nodded quickly to acknowledge her point.
“I’m sorry it happened to you,” I said, wondering if she’d been drinking herself through her crisis, too.
“That’s why I’ve started going to this new church I’d heard about, I suppose, to help me get through it …”
“The Spiritual Church,” I said, quasi-embarrassed to pronounce its absurd-sounding name.
“It’s not as daft as it may sound. It’s a very liberal, modern church. Its members all share their different stories with each other. It was very comforting the first night I went, but somehow I got lost tonight and couldn’t find it.”
“I’m sorry I thought you wanted money.”
“Am I really that shabbily dressed?”
“Not at all,” I said, before I realized she was joking.
The rest of the dinner went more smoothly. We talked about the usual things—movies, the Beatles (who everyone still talked about then), our families, a bit about our jobs. I told her that my plans were uncertain as to how long I’d stay in London, which I rationalized could be technically true. I just didn’t add that my return ticket to St. Louis was in five days and that there was no chance I wouldn’t take it, as I had to get back to my job.
She asked me about the States, of course, and why it was I was considering not returning. It was in that context that I told her my father had recently died and saw the same look in her liquid eyes she had when she told me the story of her lover’s betrayal.
Shortly after that we left the restaurant. She lived only ten minutes or so from my hotel, but the last few blocks were walked in silence. Finally I said, “Is there any way I can see you tomorrow?”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“You think we’re well suited for each other, then?”
“I think I’m going to miss you after you go,” I blurted, which was about as much as I’d ever said to any woman, being the cool, intentionally detached, idiotic type I was then.
“All right, if you really think so. I feel I was such a burden to you all night going on and on about my problems.”
I assured her she wasn’t.
She smiled, with a trace of a blush. “Well, then, can you come by tomorrow around seven?” she asked, very softly.
I was surprised how much I thought of her the next day. I figured it was because I hadn’t had sex since my father died but sensed I liked her, too. Either way, waiting was a part of the seduction process I had little patience for in my twenties, though not succeeding at all would be still worse, of course. With Paulette I sensed I’d have to wait to succeed, although I couldn’t wait too long since I had to fly back to the States in five days.
Instead of a pub, we met at a Japanese restaurant on Queen-sway Road. She’d dressed up more this time, wearing a conservative navy blue dress that screamed priggishness. It looked like a flight attendant’s uniform, I thought, or something a middle-aged librarian from St. Louis would wear. Meanwhile, I was dressed all in black, which I thought was cool at the time, though I now see I must have looked like a priest or a funeral home director.
Conversation was not as easy this time. We spoke in brief, halting sentences about nothing in particular, as if it were taboo to talk about anything that mattered to us. I’d just finished ordering another sake to try to rectify the situation when she suddenly started talking. “Obviously I’ve been a big disappointment to you tonight.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, trying to say the words as if I meant them.
“You can barely bring yourself to look at me, much less talk to me.”
I knew women were more emotionally open than men by and large (though not so with my mother and father), but she was carrying her honesty to an uncomfortable degree. I protested but she cut me off.
“Don’t tell me you’ve enjoyed it,” she said. “That’s what you said last time, but it couldn’t possibly be true now because tonight I’ve had about as much personality as a slug, I’d say, you can’t deny it.”
“I think we’re both a little nervous, that’s all.”
“Do you? That’s a more hopeful way to look at it. Is it too awful that I’m so blunt? Wouldn’t it be better if I were a smidgen more diplomatic?”
I shrugged reflexively.
“Don’t bother to respond, I already know the answer.”
At last my new drink came, which I made short work of. I noticed she was making progress on hers, too, and I felt a flicker of hope.
“Are you wondering what you’re doing taking this crazy British bird to a restaurant and listening to her adolescent prattle all night?”
I laughed, then said, “You’re way too hard on yourself.”
“Am I?”
“You’ve been through a lot lately. So have I.”
“You mean with your father?”
She asked me to talk about him and for a while I did. The same few friends, especially Phil, who’d told me not to go to London so soon after my father died, also advised me to talk to a therapist about him, but I didn’t listen to that advice either, so this was the first time I’d really talked about him to anyone. When I stopped, Paulette’s face was flushed with emotion. It’s strange how something that would have embarrassed me was so appealing when it happened to her. Our eyes locked, and she slid her arm across the table and held my free hand. I don’t know if my face flushed too, but other, unseen parts of me definitely did.
I don’t remember what we said during the rest of our dinner, only that she continued to hold my hand for several minutes. On the street after dinner, we stopped touching and talking as well. My inhibition frustrated me. What was the point of drinking if it ultimately kept me shy and silent? I realized vaguely, while I was walking her home, that I was behaving a bit like my father or how I imagined he’d behave. It was almost as if he were living through me, like a kind of ghost.
When we reached her block, she turned to me and said, “Are you feeling sad now?”
I shrugged. “I’ll miss you again, a lot.”
“Would you like to come up to my flat and talk a bit more? I don’t have much to offer you. Just tea and some chocolates,” she said, as if my decision would be based on the quality of the food she had. I said yes, I’d like that and followed her up the stairs, feeling my true self already returning.
Her place was small and had a somewhat disheveled look that reminded me of my own apartment in St. Louis. It had the look of a place whose occupant stopped caring about it several days before, which fit her story.
“Of course I’m horribly embarrassed by my flat.”
“Shouldn’t be. It’s much neater than mine.”
“Do you mean your place in London or St. Louis?”
“Both,” I said, lying fairly convincingly, I thought. “Every place I live in starts to look like every other place I’ve been in after a week or so.”
“Well, you’re a man, and that’s to be expected, but I have no excuse.”
I let that remark pass as I followed her into her kitchen, not wanting to risk her focusing on her recent romantic tragedy again. She opened her tiny refrigerator to remove some candy, and I thought I saw the top of a bottle of beer.
“Shall I fix you some tea?”
“Was that beer I spotted in your fridge?” I said.
“Oh, is that what you want, then?”
“If it’s all right.”
“You have a way of asking for things that makes it hard to refuse,” she said, removing the bottle and pouring it into two glasses.
I took a generous swallow, unable to think of a toast (one more thing my father was good at that I wasn’t) or even to look her in the eye. Instead, I said, “You say that as if it makes you sad.”
“The last one was like that, too. I gave in to him and look what happened.”
We both drank a little more. I was trying to deal with a flash of jealousy, which startled me.
“Let’s agree not to concentrate on what hurt us in the past, OK?” I said.
“How do we do that?”
I moved closer to her and gently stroked the left side of her face. Then we kissed.
“That shouldn’t have happened,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I’m making myself too easily available to you.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and we kissed again. Several more times, in fact.
“Now I’m doomed,” she half muttered.
I was too excited to know who was doomed and who wasn’t. I rose from the table and sort of pulled her up with me so we could fully embrace while we continued kissing. Finally, we started moving toward her tiny bedroom. An image of my father’s disapproving face suddenly popped into my head, as if he were saying, “You’re taking her under false pretenses,” so I reached back and took the bottle of beer from the table and drank some more of it while we undressed in her room.
Afterward, I felt her vibrating softly against me, and I realized how oddly beautiful everything with her had been. Then I realized she was crying, albeit very softly.
“I’m going straight to hell for this,” she said between half-muted sobs.
“It’s OK,” I said.
“No, it’s not.”
“What we did is happening millions of times all over the earth this very moment.”
“So is murdering.”
“I hope you see a distinction between the two.”
I thought I heard her chuckle a little. At any rate the sobbing soon stopped, and feeling encouraged I continued talking. “I thought you weren’t a Catholic any longer. I thought you’d joined the Spiritual Church, which doesn’t believe in an afterlife.”
“I don’t know what I am anymore, other than confused.”
I put my arm around her and held her against me. Eventually she closed her eyes and began breathing more easily. Outside it had begun raining. I could hear it through her thin, dark windows.
“I love the rain, don’t you?” she suddenly said.
“Sometimes.”
I wondered how long it would last, then if it were raining back in St. Louis on my father’s grave. I remember one day we drove to the lake in Creve Coeur. He always loved to be in any kind of water, while my mother usually considered it too much of a fuss. I was somewhere around eighteen, and he was walking with me along the water’s edge in bare feet. My first girlfriend of any consequence had recently left me, and I’d confided in him about it.
“Did you love her, Gerry? Did you feel that you did?”
It was the first time I’d really considered that question. “I don’t know,” I said.
“You want to feel that you do before you have sex with a woman. I know you can’t always tell, but you should try to know if you can,” he said, looking straight at me, “and then be sure to tell her you do. It works out best that way for everyone.”
A minute or so later I whispered the words that would have pleased my father, if they were true. But I decided they were close enough to “truth,” given the wide latitude he allowed for individual confusion. Paulette said nothing after my short speech that ended with the “l” word. When I checked, I couldn’t tell if she’d fallen asleep or not. A little later I rolled over on my side and fell asleep myself.
In the morning when I woke up, I was alone. It was the kind of thing I’d done myself more than a few times after a one-night stand, right down to the letter that she’d left for me on the kitchen table, where we’d gotten high. I remember that I didn’t pick the letter up right away. I was still excited by her passion from last night and didn’t want that to end. Then I realized that it could say anything, that it might even be a torrid love letter praising my sexual performance to the skies.
Dear Gerry (it began conventionally enough),
Last night some time after we made love you mentioned, in a barely audible voice, that you loved me. You said it very softly, but you said it, and, dumbfounded, I didn’t respond and actually pretended I was asleep, for which I apologize. Your real sleep soon followed but, because of your words, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Instead I wrote you this letter and now plan to take a long walk in Hyde Park, from where I’ll eventually leave for work. By the way, you are free to feed yourself from whatever edible crumbs you can find in my kitchen (I do have a bag of crisps that I think might appeal to you) before letting yourself out. Had I any inkling before our evening started that you’d end up being my guest I would have provided more food. At any rate, eat whatever you want and just let yourself out. The door will lock automatically.
Obviously, I’m not much of a writer and this letter is especially hard to write, so I’ll just get to the point of it. You know from listening to me as patiently as you did how vulnerable I am right now and why. And you also know that when people are vulnerable they often make poor decisions that they shouldn’t have made. I, for instance, would not have done what I did with you last night were I not so vulnerable myself. I won’t deny that I’m attracted to you and that you struck a deep chord in my heart, but even so, it would not have happened so quickly. But it did and now you’ve said you love me—a poor, lost girl who couldn’t even find the church she wanted to go to for comfort. Yet, somehow, for some reason, you said those words to me. Of course sometimes people say things they don’t really mean and wish they hadn’t. By pretending to be asleep I deprived you of the chance to take your words back.
Now I find that I need to know if you meant them or not. If you did mean what you said, please call me tonight so we can plan our next meeting. I’d also like to know, straight up, what the odds really are that you’re staying in London permanently and if not, just how long you are staying—a year, six months, two months?
If, on the other hand, you didn’t mean your words, do me the favor of not seeing or calling me again as I cannot tolerate another great disappointment right now. I will be home tonight hoping for your call.
Paulette
I read the letter a number of times before I dressed and left without eating—looking around myself several times while heading for my hotel. Once there, I thought I could finally relax, only to continue reading the letter in my hotel room as well. I’d never received a letter that demanded an answer by a set time. That kind of pressure was anathema to me. Why was she acting this way, I wondered, even though part of me knew.
I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum to try to distract myself, and then took a cruise on the Thames but found little relief. I was excruciatingly aware of time. Soon Paulette would be waiting by the phone with only one answer she could accept. She was proud and demanded to be taken with the utmost seriousness, or not at all. I was in awe of her strength of soul even as it tormented me. I didn’t know a woman could take such a stand or believe in principles so fiercely. God knows I wanted to keep seeing her and sleep with her again, but to do it I’d have to lie much worse than I already had. Even if I told her that I loved her or knew I could, the mere admission that I was leaving London in four days would shatter the little trust she might still have in me.
And so the hours ticked on, and predictably I went to a pub quite a distance from Queensway and tried to drink away the picture of her by her phone that I was convinced was now planted in my mind forever.
It’s odd what our brains choose to remember. I recall vividly the day when I had to make my decision, but not the next four. (The letter I remember verbatim because I took it with me back to the States, where I read it many more times over the years.) Those days all ran together in a blur of anxious tourism and alcohol, until eventually I was back in St. Louis, probably back in this pool again, too.
I thought it would be easier to stop thinking about her once I was home. I thought I’d go back to mourning my father until that slowly lessened, while Paulette would vanish in a matter of weeks if not days. Instead, my memory of her (aided by her letter) made her more vivid, as if I were seeing her on a daily basis. Paradoxically, the main relief I got from Paulette was thinking about my father. It was as if he was still helping me out once again from his grave.
My thoughts are interrupted by a splashing fight that’s broken out near me between two ten-year-old boys. They look somewhat alike—maybe they’re brothers—and splash each other with equal ferocity. To get out of their range, I walk over to the kids’ pool, where the old men with their walkers sit dangling their toes in the water, their lifeguard hovering behind them. I sit on the ledge looking at them, at Grandfather Pool in his hot tub, then at the giant clock on the wall, where I’m surprised it’s as late as it is in the afternoon.
After a few months it got much better about Paulette, and she might have become one of those occasional twinges of guilt we all learn to put up with but for another letter she suddenly sent me.
Dear Gerry,
Are you surprised to hear from me? It was much easier than I expected to get your address, but I did wrestle with the decision of whether to write to you or not and though a lot of me didn’t want to, because of my conscience, I ultimately decided to write.
Your one-night stand with me had more consequences than you might imagine, at least for me. A few weeks after our time together I found out I was pregnant and then had to decide what to do about it. I thought of writing or calling you then, but since you’d already chosen not to contact me it seemed rather futile.
Ultimately, after much agonizing, I decided to have an abortion, which happened a few days ago. I guess I’m not much of a Catholic after all. I’m telling you this without expecting or wanting any kind of reply simply because I think people ought to know that they can create life when they do (in your case it was apparently quite easy), and ought to know when they’re involved, albeit indirectly, in decisions involving what happens to that life. Anyway, I won’t bother you again. I’ve handled things very badly, although you did trick me along the way. Still, I hope one day you do find someone you can love and respect enough to marry and start a family of your own with. My church says, “Children are the meaning of life.” T. S. Eliot says, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”
Paulette
“She’s lying, don’t fall for it,” said Phil, who’d originally advised me not to go to London.
“How do you know that?” I said, waving the letter in my hand.
“All right, I don’t know it, but she probably never got pregnant, and anyway you’ll never know one way or the other. It sounds like a scam to me to guilt some money out of you.”
“She didn’t ask for any money. She’s the most honest woman I’ve ever known.”
“Then why would she write you? It might make some sense to write when she was pregnant and didn’t know what to do. Why not write you then? By the way, if she had, what would you have done?”
“I don’t know.”
“OK. But since she says she went ahead and got the abortion on her own, her only motive could be to hurt you, which she’s already done, or to eventually get some money out of you.”
I listened, I nodded, but in the end I wrote Paulette a shortish letter expressing my sympathy and regret, and including a check for two hundred dollars, which I told her I’d heard from asking around should cover the operation.
A week or so later she returned my check, torn in half without comment. I still remember how I stared at it, stunned by my clear sense of the person it now revealed, a person I’d chosen to let go without knowing why, other than I judged myself incapable of handling the situation. Yes, I could have acted very differently. I had a job and some money and no dependents. I could have stayed longer, then offered to support her and live together in the States.
When you’re young, you think most of what you want for yourself will eventually happen, as if some secret cosmic force is guiding you toward it. It’s only much later that you discover you’re not going to win the Nobel Prize, or become a multimillionaire, or live for the rest of time with the love of your life. I was young enough to believe in the possibility of that ultimately benign universe, but I was also an orphan who’d just lost his father, and I already wasn’t so sure about having any guarantees. I only knew I hated the way things had turned out with Paulette. What force made me lie to her and walk away from someone I really wanted?
I began writing her, but my letters were never answered. The next thing I tried was the telephone. Fortunately, there was no caller ID then, and after a few days I was finally able to get her on the phone.
“It’s me, Gerry,” I finally said.
There was a silence, which I quickly tried to fill by asking if she’d gotten my recent letters.
“I did get them,” she said tersely. “I got them but I don’t know why you sent them.”
“I was hoping you’d forgive me, and would let me see you again. I think about you all the time. I …”
“Please don’t say that.”
“I know I made a terrible mistake,” I said soberly.
“Kind of a revealing one, wouldn’t you say?”
“I panicked, I admit, but this had never happened to me before.”
“You never took advantage of a girl before?”
“No, I meant I never loved one before. But it was just one mistake.”
“It may have been one mistake, but it had multiple consequences, so it really was probably more than one mistake.”
“What do you mean?” I blurted.
“You want me to rattle them all off? OK. You lied to me about living here. You lied about loving me. You deserted me in my hour of need, and as a result I panicked and did the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do, which has scarred me for the rest of my life. Does that answer your question sufficiently?”
“It’s scarred me, too. I did lie about living in London and I did panic about calling you that day because I didn’t want you to find out that I couldn’t stay in London, but I didn’t lie about loving you.” Then I told her she was the only person in the world I did love or would ever want to have a child with, realizing after I said it that it was true.
“It’s too late, Gerry. It’s much too late.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I protested.
“I’m sorry. I’ve made mistakes in this, too. Many mistakes. I forgive you for yours and I wish you well, but please respect what I need and don’t call me again. Goodbye, Gerry,” she said in a tone just ambiguous enough to allow me to rationalize calling her again. In fact, I called her five more times in the next month. In each case I drank first, the last time quite a bit. Her response was always the same, except she ended the last call more quickly than she had the others, and yet enough of her normal self emerged in each conversation to make me yearn for her and to realize more acutely each time the immensity of my mistake.
There was only one thing left to do: go to London (without telling her) and propose to her. It would be difficult to arrange at my job and might get me fired, but I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t even tell Phil about it, knowing what he’d say anyway.
I remember that I didn’t say a word to anyone during the flight and barely looked out the window. I didn’t read or watch either of the in-flight movies. I simply thought or, more accurately, let my mind run where it would. I did take three short naps. The first nap was dreamless, but in the next one I dreamed about making love to Paulette in my St. Louis apartment. She was trying to get pregnant and in the dream we somehow knew she had. That dream seemed straightforward enough to me, but it was followed by one during my last nap that was much more mysterious, in which I dreamed I was playing hide-and-seek with my father. It began in the country, or at least on land more rustic than the neighborhood I grew up in near St. Louis. We were laughing as I ran after him, but soon he was out of sight. I was running by myself, occasionally calling out his name, but now in a different setting, where it was twilight by a lake. I was feeling anxious as I turned a corner and saw a cave. Still, I ran into it calling his name. The cave seemed to expand as I ran through it, as if it were made of elastic. I ducked my head, crossed another dark passageway then saw him suddenly, in an illuminated corner. He was smiling as I ran to him. When we hugged, I seemed to disappear into him. He was left standing alone, yet I was happy to have merged with him.
I woke up amazed by my dream. In ten minutes we’d be landing at Heathrow. I remember I spent almost no time at all in my hotel, stopping only to brush or wash a few key places. Then I was out in the London dusk, where it was chilly and purplish gray. I had only her face in my mind as I set off toward her apartment. I remember passing by the street where we first met, then past the pub where we went shortly after meeting, and then, like a stop on a tour, the Japanese restaurant where I took her to dinner on Queensway Road. I’d retraced in my mind the route we took so many times (even before I made the decision to go back to London) that I wasn’t surprised that I only made one minor mistake before finding her place.
Except that it wasn’t her place. She didn’t answer her buzzer, which I tried intermittently for ten minutes or so. Finally someone asked me who I wished to see? It was a clear-eyed, dowdily dressed woman of fifty who identified herself as the building’s manager.
“Paulette,” I said. “I came to see Paulette.”
“She moved out, I’m afraid.”
“What?”
“Yes, she cleared out two weeks ago.”
I looked at the buzzer and saw the name card had been replaced by that of a man (a man whose face I still sketchily recall, as I hung around after the landlady left, eventually knocked on the door, and looked into his uncomprehending eyes when he answered that he didn’t know anyone named Paulette).
“Do you know where? Did she leave any forwarding address?” I asked the landlady.
She shook her head like a metronome. “I remember she said she was leaving London. I think she said she was going out of the country or maybe she said to the country. I really couldn’t say. Out of London for sure, with no forwarding address, I’m afraid.”
Of course I tried the operator, but there was no listing for her in London or in a number of other towns I tried. It was years before the Internet, when you couldn’t track people down and you had to rely instead on your memory and its infinite limitations.
It was, of course, obvious that she didn’t want to see or hear from me again. There was no ambiguity now. Everything she said and did was honest and sincere. That was the shocking beauty of it. I paid a lot of extra money to leave London the next day.
The old men in the pool are making noises—new, disturbingly high-pitched noises, like a cross between a violin and the whirring of mosquitoes. Maybe it’s because it’s raining now, and one can even hear some distant rumblings of thunder. In any case I start moving toward the hot tub, where Grandfather Pool has staked out his temporary home. Sitting there in the steamy part of the pool, his face seems slightly out of focus, as if I’m seeing it underwater. But I move toward it nonetheless, preferring the threat of his conversation to the reality of those weird, high-pitched noises from the old men in the kids’ pool.
There are certain people you never recover completely from losing, and Paulette was one of mine. My father, of course, was another. Or maybe it’s life itself we spend all our time trying to adapt to or recover from. And yet we do recover, partially, at least, as most of us choose to go on. Eventually I laughed again. I made progress in my work that brought me some satisfaction. I aged reasonably well. In time I went on to new women, a couple of whom even lived with me for a year or so. But it’s also true I never got married or had a child, though these last few years I often find myself wishing I had. Those of us who can’t love adults in a lasting way often turn toward children for their solace, and I wish now that I had acted on this tardy knowledge earlier. I think that even my father felt something like that in his decision to have a child, although I can’t be sure.
I’ve entered the tub now where men shut their eyes to forget their lives for a while. I’m sitting opposite Grandfather Pool, wondering if he still remembers my father, when he used to come here with me. In the dreamlike light of the pool, whose windows seem to turn the sunlight gray, I can almost see my father’s face in his. I wouldn’t mind if he talked now, but Grandfather Pool is being as quiet as an angel. Perhaps there’ll be no old-man talk today, after all, though I wouldn’t really mind if there were. No, I really wouldn’t mind that at all.