Amira appeared stunned when Julie told her that David was leaving for good the following day. Julie had come to think of her as being above genuine emotion or at least above the expression of genuine emotion. But sitting in a molded plastic chaise longue on the roof deck of Amira’s house, Julie watched as her neighbor gasped and brought her hand to her pretty bow of a mouth.
“But this is terrible news,” she said. “You’re being abandoned again.”
The words, which should have stung, passed over her.
It was a sunny day and the water was sparkling in the harbor below. About ten minutes earlier, Amira had lit up a joint. “I won’t ask if you want any,” Amira had said, “because I know you are now one of the eighteen people in the country who don’t smoke.”
“Try me,” Julie had said, and when Amira had passed her the joint, she’d inhaled eagerly. Hello, old friend, she’d thought as a wave of forgetfulness rolled in. Where have you been hiding?
There was too much to take in, too much disappointment and sadness and deep regret about things she couldn’t change. She supposed that one day she’d be angry at Henry about this, but for the moment she was almost relieved. He had told David the one thing that she had been trying to tell him for years but had lacked the courage to mention. Now she was back to a welcome state of bleary, false, fleeting peace. Someone in the neighborhood was practicing the piano again, and from up here, the soft music was blending with the reassuring sounds of children playing on the baseball field many blocks away. It was nice, in her current frame of mind, to be able to pretend it was a perfect late-summer afternoon.
“I’d rather not think of it as abandonment,” Julie said. “I’d rather think of it as the inevitable end of David’s summer vacation.”
“But now you can’t buy the house,” Amira said.
“No,” Julie said. It was so much easier to say now that she was stoned. “I can’t. You’d better let Richard contact the pool people so they can start digging.”
Amira pondered this for a moment as she tapped ash off the end of the joint. “I’m not going to let you smoke any more pot,” she said. “I don’t want to be a bad influence, and you were more alert when you were sober. I’m going to try to give it up, too. I can join a twelve-step group and tell my life story and find damaged boyfriends.” She flicked the joint off the edge of the roof with surprising vigor. “I’m also not going to let Richard buy the house unless he lets you stay there. He will do whatever I say.”
Julie was touched by this, the most considerate thing Amira had ever said. But the truth was, she had infinitely less control over Richard than she had over her various lovers. Julie suspected that Amira, who knew she needed order in her life, had married him for this very reason: he couldn’t be bullied or manipulated.
“Even if you could make him, I wouldn’t want that. I’ll be renting something for a year so Mandy can finish school here, and then I’ll buy a place in another town, one closer to work. I don’t want to have my old house looming above me every time I walk out the door. Or, even worse, watch it being knocked down.”
“But David was supposed to rescue Mandy,” Amira said. “Now he can’t.”
Amira’s English was flawless but occasionally fanciful. “Rescue” was a dramatic word, and in this case, Julie didn’t see the relevance.
“He was supposed to help with her college applications, and he did. He’s promised he’ll do more of it from San Francisco. I can’t complain.”
Amira lifted her round sunglasses from her lovely eyes, surveyed the horizon, and then put them back on. “If I see her on the steps of the library, I will let you know.”
Mandy preferred to read her way through the books tucked into boxes and shelves around the house. As far as Julie knew, she hadn’t used her library card in ages. She mentioned this to Amira, but she ignored Julie’s comment. “And what about the clarinetist?” Amira asked. “Is he coming back anytime soon?”
Julie had not explained the whole story of Raymond Cross’s wife to Amira, mostly because she feared that anything Amira would say about the situation would only make Julie feel worse—that she would be doing Raymond’s wife a favor by having sex with her husband or that once she was out of the picture, she could move in on Raymond. Julie had simply told Amira that it was over and had even stopped correcting her about the clarinet. At this point, it didn’t matter.
“No,” Julie said. “My clarinetist is not coming back. We’re all just moving on.”
Last week, he’d sent her an email with a file attached, which, when she downloaded it, turned out to be a piece of orchestral music she had never heard before—a little jazzy, a little cinematic. Perhaps it was something he’d written himself. She thought she recognized in it a melodic line that recalled the one he’d played for her that first night at the concert in Beauport. But she couldn’t be sure. He’d written nothing in the email, as if the sad, haunting piece of music said everything he needed to say. Maybe, when she thought about it, it said everything she needed to hear.