Nearly three weeks passed before I saw Rita again. I seemed to be saving her like a reward I hadn’t quite earned, but then as the days went by and I didn’t call I began to feel a sense of guilt as if I’d been avoiding her. It had always been like that for us, this anticipation and deferral, and then afterwards always the sense of having to start again, of being able to take nothing for granted.
In the end it was Rita who called.
“I guess you’ve been busy with school,” she said.
“Sort of.”
I had her and Elena over for supper. I hadn’t seen Elena since before I’d gone off to Africa, but she seemed unchanged, only more what she’d always been. As she’d grown older her blonde hair had gradually darkened to its present auburn; but otherwise she might have been simply a larger version of the girl who’d first befriended Rita in the schoolyard of St. Michael’s years before, still lank and precocious and brooding, still carrying her attractiveness like a kind of dare.
“I was starting to think you’ve been avoiding me,” I said, trying to sound genial, though the words came out like an accusation.
“Just waiting for an invitation, that’s all.” And she shot a look at Rita as if sharing a private joke.
I’d set up a table for our meal in a sort of anteroom to the living room that had sat empty till then. The room’s high-ceilinged spareness imposed an odd formality on us – we seemed reassembled as if at the Sunday dinners we used to share in the Amhersts’ house, with their atmosphere of enforced familial harmony.
“Your place looks great,” Rita said.
“Thanks.”
Not once during the whole meal did Elena look at me when she spoke, her eyes directed at Rita even when her comments were directed at me. I tried to engage her but each time her attention would shift, with always the same implication of hidden meaning – it was as if she’d set up a kind of force field around herself that couldn’t be entered except through Rita. At one point, when I was clearing away dishes to bring in dessert, she got up from the table and began to wander around the apartment, inspecting things with what looked like genuine curiosity, the prints on the walls, the books on my bookcase, the knick-knacks I’d set out on my mantelpiece; but then she sat down again without a word.
At the end of the meal she got up almost at once to leave.
“I’m sure you folks would like to be alone for a while,” she said, speaking directly to me for the first time, though with an undertone of almost menacing irony.
When she was gone, it was like a parent or chaperon had left the room.
“What was all that about?” I said.
“That’s just Elena. She overreacts sometimes.”
“What could she have to react to? I haven’t seen her in years.”
“If you want to know the truth,” Rita said, trying to sound casual, though she got up suddenly and began clearing dishes away from the table, “she was angry because you didn’t call. Like I said, she overreacts.”
I felt strangely moved, as if I were being given a kind of permission, an order, to play a role in Rita’s life.
“I really didn’t think you guys took that much notice of me,” I said.
“It’s no big deal. Anyway you’re right that she has a bit of a chip on her shoulder. From being adopted and everything.”
“You were adopted.”
“I just hide it better, that’s all.”
We finished clearing away the dishes. I kept expecting her to make some move to leave.
“Would you like some more wine?” I said.
“I dunno. I feel pretty drunk as it is.”
“In vino veritas.”
“I’m not sure how far I’d want to go with that.”
We carried our glasses into the living room. Rita took off her shoes and curled up at one end of the overstuffed couch I’d installed there, made small by its padded bulk.
There was a sudden mood of closeness between us.
“I always felt bad about that talk we had,” she said. “Before you left for Africa. About our mother.”
The subject had only come up that once between us, and then awkwardly, too weighted by that point by all the years of silence. But now it seemed imbued with a special allure exactly from having been so long avoided.
“That was my fault,” I said. “It’s not as if it has to be any big secret or anything.”
“I always used to wonder what she looked like. I’ve never even seen a picture of her.”
“Sort of like you, I guess. Dark-haired. Pretty.”
“Thanks. Seriously though.”
“To tell you the truth, sometimes I can’t even remember. It was quite a long time ago.”
I thought of mentioning her eyes – I remembered them as unnaturally dark, almost black, though perhaps only because I couldn’t think of them now except in contrast to the blue of Rita’s.
“It always seemed pretty wild to me,” Rita said. “People having affairs in a village like that. I used to think there’d been a mistake or something, that people just didn’t do that sort of thing back then.”
She didn’t ask about her father. That question had never been broached, seemed somehow less removed from us by time, less neutral. There was little I could have said of him in any case, a few shreds of gossip I’d overheard, a shadow I’d seen emerging from a stable door. In my mind he was not so much a person – someone with a history, a name – as an event, a thing that had happened and then been moved past.
It grew late. I offered to walk Rita back to her residence. We were plainly drunk now and yet the drunkenness had made us timid. Coming down the fire escape of my building Rita stumbled and fell against me, her hands grabbing hold of me as she struggled to regain her balance. I had an urge then to gather her up on my back like a child, so pleasant was the weight of her against me, so supple and frail.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
We walked to the residence in silence. The air had turned brisk, Rita’s cheeks colouring with the cold.
“So maybe we could see a movie or something,” I said.
“That would be great.”
“How about on the weekend?”
“I think that’s all right. I mean, I have mid-terms but I wouldn’t mind a night off.”
“I’ll call you, then,” I said.
She laughed.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“If you don’t, you’ll have Elena to answer to.”
And when she turned I thought there was a lightness in her step at the prospect of our seeing one another again.