Pictures Of Us

“I know it’s not much now,” she was saying, sweeping one arm toward the grounds, her dark blond hair swinging. She’d inherited my mother’s thick sleek hair, while I’d gotten my father’s unruly curls. “But they’re turning it into a restaurant and catering facility, and they’re only asking peanuts for anything scheduled before the first of the year.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, struggling to visualize the grounds cleaned up and a fresh coat of paint on the aging shingles. “But will it be done by September?”

“Partly.” She was hedging, walking away to inspect the few lonely tulips blooming near the fence. A nurse for almost twenty years now, she was wearing a denim jacket over light blue scrubs, which meant she had a shift at the hospital later. She looked much younger than her forty-seven years.

Actually, it wasn’t the wedding that meant so much to her. It was Jack. The prospect of sharing the rest of her life with him, after waiting for so long to find someone—that was the important thing.

“He’s the one, Tess,” she’d told me nine months ago over beer at the Trolley one Friday night. Even in the dim light of the bar, cigarette smoke choking the air, her eyes shone. Big and blue, they’d always been a mirror of Nell’s feelings—she couldn’t lie to save her life. And for too many years they’d reflected nothing but disappointment that was rapidly sharpening into bitterness.

“He’s gentle and funny and kind and…” She bit her bottom lip to stifle a grin. “He’s so good in bed. I can’t even tell you.”

“Please don’t.” But I laughed when I said it. My sister was happier than I’d ever seen her, and I could only hope that Jack was the paragon she made him out to be.

The thing was, he’d been close by all along. A high-school art teacher in Springfield, he adored his students and gave private drawing lessons out of the Craftsman cottage he’d restored over the past ten years. He paid his taxes, he volunteered at the juvenile center in Rahway twice a month and he liked cats and dogs.

“Clearly, he’s perfect,” my mother had teased at Thanksgiving, when Nell had chosen to introduce him to the family en masse.

“I like to think so,” Jack said, not missing a beat, and everyone had laughed, including Emma, whom I thought had developed a bit of a crush on him. What was more, he obviously adored Nell.

If he wasn’t arguing about a wedding reception at Willowdale Farm, why should I?

“It’ll be great,” I said, reaching out as she walked past me and grabbing her hand. She looked at me, eyes hopeful and even brighter than usual in the warm sunlight. “I can imagine some gorgeous pictures on that porch and under the willows.”

“I know!” She was beaming again, and she leaned in to give me an impulsive hug. She smelled like citrus and laundry soap, and her lips were cool on my cheek. “It’s going to be beautiful. Shabby-chic maybe, but chic nonetheless.”

I laughed and looped my arm through hers as she led me inside, eager to introduce me to the female half of the couple who’d bought the place and show me the dining room.

“Kara and Peter remind me of you and Michael,” Nell confided as we waited in the drafty front hall. I was admiring the wainscoting and the vintage sconces. “They met when they were in high school, too, and they knew it was love even then. Just like you two.”

There was a wistful note in her voice that I thought was more habit than anything else. As much as Nell loved Michael, part of her had been envious of us for years, of the time we’d already had together, of what she called the “lightning bolt” method of falling in love. How often had she told me, teary and heartsick after yet another breakup, that I should be grateful I’d found my life’s mate before I’d even had to go looking?

“He found you,” she’d said, although this was frequently uttered after a beer or two. “Love found you. How lucky is that?”

Very lucky, and I knew it. I knew it now, at least. Back then, I wasn’t always so sure. I was still in high school, a vague lifetime ahead of me, and there were moments I felt I’d simply traded one comforting certainty for another. Ballet had been my future for as long as I could remember, part vocation, part passion, part habit. After the surgery, even after I met Michael, I would sneak up to my room before bed or on a Sunday afternoon, warming up quickly before donning pointe shoes and testing pliés and relevées. Each time, my knee had shrieked its disapproval, and my body had stalled, unaccustomed to the physical demands after months away from the barre.

Michael had offered another kind of certainty. If ballet had been my first love, Michael was my second—he wasn’t so much the one as another one, although I’d never said that to him, and it wasn’t the case now, or even after a few months together. But even if he wasn’t exactly eloquent about it—and he wasn’t, back then—he’d never been afraid to tell me that I was the one for him, the one and the only.

September 18, 1983

Tess,

I can’t believe how much I miss you already. Feels like months have gone by since I saw you, instead of just a week and a half. I’ve been busy, too, getting adjusted to life here in Straus. It’s a good dorm—Harvard Square is just outside—and I have a single room, which suits me. It’s not huge, but then, I don’t have to share it.

At the same time, since classes haven’t really started in earnest yet, I don’t have a lot to do but read and think about you. So I’ve been thinking about you a lot—what you’re doing, what school is like your senior year, if your new job is all right, everything. I’m pretty happy to be here (I mean, it’s Harvard. Who wouldn’t be?) but in those empty moments that I’m waiting around, wishing for something to do, I’d really rather be there, with you.

I began writing a short story about this, but I’m not going to share it yet. If ever. It’s still pretty rough, and in some places it keeps turning into a Penthouse letter. Not that I ever read them, you know. Really. Okay, forget I said that. Really, I’m reading poetry. All the time.

When I’m not thinking about you, that is. Have I said how much I miss you? I think I have, but it bears repeating. It’s so infuriating that we met only to be forced apart three months later. I guess it could have been worse (not meeting at all), but when you find something so awesome, you want to keep it next to you. You want to be able to touch it and look at it. Now I’m making you sound like an object, which is not the point at all. (Maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer. Crap.) It’s just, I love you, Tess. You’re the biggest part of my life, even way up here in Cambridge.

Write soon. I love you. And also? I love you.

Michael

CHAPTER FOUR

LATER THE SAME DAY NELL AND I toured Willowdale Farm, I was trimming fresh green beans in the kitchen when Michael came home. He pushed open the screen door and leaned down to pet Walter, who greeted him with his usual drool-and-pant doggy grin.

“How’s my girl?” he said, setting his briefcase down and tossing his jacket on the back of a chair.

I could sense him hovering behind me. He usually kissed the back of my neck when he found me this way, whispering kisses that made me smile and wriggle away before the meat burned or the vegetables dissolved into mush.

But we hadn’t talked all day. He’d left two messages, and I’d called back at his office, only to be told he was in an art meeting. The impromptu errand with Nell had helped distract me this morning, but I’d returned to a silent house and work that refused to take my mind off the issue of Drew Keating. By three, I’d given up and settled on the sofa with a bag of chips, flipping the channels through bad made-for-TV movies and home-design shows until I was drowsy and more than a little numb.

“Just waiting to hear about your conversation with Drew.” I didn’t turn around, and instead thwacked the ends off a dozen more green beans a bit more violently than necessary.

Michael lifted the lid of the saucepan on the stovetop, where chicken breasts were simmering in wine and garlic. The kitchen smelled delicious. I was paying for the junk food, and probably my attitude, with a decent meal.

“We talked,” he said finally, and I heard the scrape of chair legs against the floor as he sat down. “Can I talk to you now? Face-to-face?”

I set down the knife and took a deep breath before turning, and what I saw in his eyes evaporated the bitterness and resentment I’d been working into a team all afternoon. He was exhausted, and worried, and at the moment I was pretty sure he was more worried about me than about his brand-new son.

“I’m sorry.” I dropped to my knees in front of him, taking his hands in mine. “I’m being awful. Tell me what happened.”

He pulled me onto his lap, his thighs lean and bony beneath my legs, and I laid my head on his shoulder, breathing in his scent and his warmth as he talked. Eyes closed, Michael’s arms around me, I let the comfort of his closeness soothe the rough edges of my mood. Walter joined us, pressing his firm little body against my leg and nosing Michael’s hand for petting.

“He sounds like a good kid. Kid. I guess he’s more than a kid now, but it’s hard to get my head around it. And he was nervous, too, which was even weirder, because he…Well, he sounds a little like me when I’m rambling.”

I swallowed hard, holding Michael tighter, not daring to look into his eyes.

“And he wants to meet me. Well, us. All of us.” It was Michael’s turn to swallow, choking back sudden emotion. “He was kind of emphatic about that part, and he kept apologizing for whatever waves this was causing.”

“But did he say why?” I asked, finally getting up to walk back to the stove. The lid on the chicken pan was rattling, and I needed to turn down the heat. “I mean, why he’s getting in touch now?”

“He said there was a reason.” Michael loosened his tie and then slid it free of his collar. “He’d rather tell me—us—in person, though.”

I was moving the chicken breasts around in the pan to keep them from sticking, but my mind had already jumped ahead to the moment I would look this young man in the eye. The idea was overwhelming, and a host of other thoughts accompanied it. What if Sophia joined him? How was Emma going to react? How could we be sure that Drew was in fact Michael’s son?

“Tess?”

I must have frozen—I looked down to find the wooden spoon motionless and the pan lid in my other hand, suspended over the counter, dripping condensation.

“I’m sorry.” I finished with the chicken and wiped my hands on a kitchen towel. “It just struck me that…well, how do we know Drew is your son, biologically?”

Michael’s frown deepened, a worried slash above eyes gone still. “We don’t, not officially. But I don’t doubt it, Tess. And I can’t ask him to prove it, at least not until I’ve met him.”

Outside, a squirrel bounded through the yard, and Walter, parked at the screen door, barked his disapproval. I hushed him and turned back to the green beans, still piled on the cutting board.

“You’re right. It’s just that it’s so unbelievable,” I said, running water in another pot. “But too believable at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

He was silent for a moment too long, and when he spoke, his voice was tight. “You mean it’s too easy to believe that I slept with Sophia?”

I actually whirled around, for possibly the first time in my life, and water splashed over the rim of the pot, splattering my shirt. “No! No, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s just that this kind of thing does happen. You see it on TV and in the movies and on the news, but when it happens to you…I think you’d be the first to admit it’s a little surreal.”

He nodded, and then he was up and out of his chair, dabbing at my shirt with a tea towel, taking the pot from my hand and turning off the tap. His arms were encircling me, hard, his face in my hair, before I could say a word about Sophia’s call to me that morning.

Then Walter woofed at someone in greeting, and the screen door opened as Emma swung through it. Her backpack hit the table with a thud. “God, get a room, huh?”

She was leaning into the fridge a moment later, grabbing a can of diet soda before slouching against the counter. Michael and I separated with a sigh, and as Emma popped open the can, he kissed her forehead. She grunted “Daddy” in a tone of outraged humiliation, but he just shook his head and laughed.

“How was school?” I asked absently, adjusting the heat beneath the beans. I glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Did you have yearbook after?”

“Nope,” she said, hoisting herself up onto the counter, her sneakered feet swinging. “That’s tomorrow. I was doing costumes for the play.” She had inherited my mother’s love of fashion, and her facility with a sewing machine.

“What are they mangling this year?” Michael stepped back as Emma aimed a light kick at him.

“They’re doing Bye Bye Birdie, and they’re not mangling it at all,” she protested. “Or not much, anyway.”

The hair clip she’d been wearing this morning was gone, and the thick blond mass of her hair rested on her shoulders as she leaned forward. Her cheeks were flushed, and the tentative coat of mascara she’d been applying most mornings was long gone. She looked like my little girl again, and very much like Nell, I realized.

Would Drew look like Michael?

“What’s for dinner?” Emma said suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. “You two are probably hungry if you hung around here macking on each other all day.”

Michael snorted, but I hid my reaction by checking on the couscous steaming in another pot.

Once upon a time, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Didn’t all relationships begin that way, curiosity and infatuation making desire more potent, more immediate? After the first time that summer, we’d made love everywhere and anywhere we could, as often as we could, tangled together on the smelly old mattress up in my attic when everyone was asleep, reveling in the afternoon sun that streamed across Michael’s bed when his mother and sister were out. Everything was still new, still a discovery, every sigh or twitch of surprise a victory and a treasure.

Of course, twenty years down the road, we felt that particular urgency less often, and sex was sometimes more comfort and communication than passion. But it was still one of the threads that held us together—I’d treated that bond too lightly all those years ago. And the incredible news of a child of Michael’s wasn’t the only thing rattling me. It was wondering if Michael had believed then, or believed now, that I didn’t love him as completely as I knew I did.

AS I FINISHED MAKING DINNER, I thought back to those years so long ago when Michael and I were moving beyond the exhilarating newness of our relationship and into something solid, even with several states between us.

Surprising everyone, myself included, I’d applied to New York University during my senior year and been accepted. As a student whose grades had always been an afterthought compared with my form in pirouette, I’d managed to raise all my marks during the first half of my senior year—mostly because I had little to do but study, write letters to Michael and lie on my bed, moping and missing him. I’d given up the movie-theater job because the assistant manager was creepier than I could handle, especially when it was just the two of us behind the greasy concession counter on slow weeknights, and had taken a job at a bookstore downtown, instead. The owner was a wry, gentle man in his midfifties, and I was given just enough shifts to keep me busy a few afternoons a week and make some spending money.

Until Michael came home for the summer, nothing truly distracted me from the misery of being without him. When I moved into my Tenth Street dorm at NYU that September, though, it took a mere few minutes before I realized that this year distraction wasn’t going to be a problem.

The dorm was a converted hotel, and the rooms on my floor were former suites, with two generous bedrooms, a bath and several enormous closets. As dorm rooms went, it wasn’t the standard concrete-tiled cell I’d imagined, but I had four roommates. Living with four other girls was a shock of tempers, shower schedules, borrowed clothes and spontaneous bitch sessions about everything from boys to classes to the comparative number of calories in Famous Ray’s pizza versus Sbarro’s.

After a weeklong bout of what had to be estrogen shock, I loved it.

And I loved my classes, too, or at least most of them. The Psych 101 lecture at 8:00 a.m. wasn’t my favorite thing, but my other classes were just challenging enough to keep me interested, and life in the Village was exhilarating. Everywhere I went there were cafés, bars, vintage shops, newsstands, record stores and people. After years of trudging only into Penn Station and then uptown to Lincoln Center for ballet lessons, I found the Village young, alive and more like a small town than I could have imagined. I hadn’t stopped missing Michael, who was back at Harvard for his sophomore year, but the constant sharp pain I’d felt the year before had dulled to a low-level twinge. We wrote letters once or twice a week, although he was more consistent about getting to the mailbox than I was, and we managed to sneak in phone calls once in a while, too.

The sense of freedom was so delicious it seemed I could actually taste it with every breath of crisp autumn air. My sophomore roommates, Sydney and Marissa, were more than happy to show me around the neighborhood with fellow freshman Jane, from Connecticut, and Carter, a Southerner who constantly needed reminding to close her mouth and stop staring when we were out in the city between classes and on weekends. Manhattan wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but I’d never before had the chance to make my own mark on it, staking out my favorite coffee shop, the secondhand store that sold the best faded jeans, a diner that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day and made killer scrambled eggs for just a dollar fifty.

Sharing my experiences with Michael wasn’t easy, at least not in letters. He was the writer, not me, and his lazy, detailed descriptions of his Cambridge neighborhood were like something out of a travel guide. So the notion of him visiting didn’t take long to be born—unlike last year, when my parents had looked at me with a combination of horror and amusement at the suggestion I take the train up to stay with Michael one fall weekend, this year we were both free to come and go as we pleased.

“Y’all do know Thanksgiving is just around the corner, right?” Carter had drawled when I broached the subject of Michael’s impending visit.

“So they can’t wait,” Jane argued, folding laundry she’d brought up from the dorm’s basement. “It’s romantic. Which is more than I can say for me at the moment.” She’d had a fling with a junior philosophy student she’d met in the dining hall, which had ended in tears and avowals that Kant had ruined her attempt at a sex life.

In the end, Jane and Carter were both a bit awed that I had a sex life, and Marissa and Sydney agreed to let them bunk in their room when Michael arrived. The countdown began at that moment, after an excited and expensive call to Cambridge, and I spent the next week alternately pacing the confines of my room, daydreaming about what we would do while he was in the city, and feverishly trying to get ahead on my class readings so I could enjoy the weekend without guilt.

I met him at Penn Station on a Friday afternoon, hovering at the Amtrak arrival gate, dressed in my favorite jeans and a new sweater, a scarf looped around my neck that I knotted and unknotted with nervous fingers. When his face appeared on the escalator ascending from the track, blurry with sleep but searching me out with those dark, wide eyes, I nearly yelped with excitement.

The good thing is, when you don’t care who happens to watch you kissing your boyfriend in greeting, you can’t be embarrassed about it. I certainly wasn’t. If anything, it was a little thrilling to give all those gray-suited commuters an eyeful.

That evening is still a blur. There were the introductions to my roommates, a brief walking tour of Washington Square, which was windy and crisp in the fading light and studded with gold light from the main campus buildings bordering the park, and then a noisy, crowded dinner at a local hamburger place.

I was a bit giddy—I can see that now. The excitement and anticipation on top of a grateful rush of love for my roommates, who were being incredibly generous, was heady stuff. I wanted Michael to be part of everything in my life at NYU, and even then I knew that I didn’t sound quite like myself. I was babbling, laughing too loud, my cheeks hot and my pulse racing. But part of that was due to a mounting sense of panic.

Michael was friendly with the girls, and he was as affable as ever about the evening’s plans, but something was wrong. Aside from those initial kisses, some connection between us had shorted out—for the first time ever, being with him felt awkward. The physical space between us seemed bigger, colder, devoid of our usual silent language of expressions and glances.

He was quieter than usual, withdrawn in a way only I would notice, despite his nodded replies to my friends. That dark head was set low, hunched into his shoulders, and his eyes were somehow too bright—they looked nearly as panicked as I felt, I realized as I stared at him across the table while we divvied up the bill for dinner and Marissa and Jane figured the tip.

The others were heading to see An Officer and a Gentleman over on Sixth Avenue, so Michael and I waved them off at the corner of West Fourth and turned toward the dorm. He took my hand as we walked, and I held on, grateful for its warmth in the chilly night air. Upstairs, my room was quiet and dark, the only sound a gentle shush from the filter of Jane’s small fish tank, the only light its fluid blue glow.

I reached for my desk lamp, but Michael stopped me. “Don’t,” he said, reaching for my hand and spinning me so he could shrug off my coat. His worn denim jacket dropped to the floor next, and then we were on my bed, a fumbling, tentative meeting of mouths and hands.

But minutes later, skin to skin, hearts beating in time, everything shifted. Our bodies remembered each other without hesitation, and in those hours that seemed to stretch out endlessly till morning, we were able to find our way back to each other, somehow communicating everything we hadn’t yet been able to say. Sometime long after midnight, we found the words, too: I wanted him to like my new life; he was ashamed to admit that he was slightly jealous of it; we still missed each other; college would be difficult when it meant spending so long apart.

There was more, silly things that no one but us would understand—I called him Hemingway sometimes, and he liked to hum “Tiny Dancer” in my ear to make me giggle—and then the conversation melted into kisses again. With Michael around me and above me and inside me, everything melted away—school, my friends, the world, all gone, subsumed by a rush of sensation and emotion. Michael snored as I lay there afterward, blasted, wrung dry, yet grateful that I could spend the night with him in arm’s reach. It was foolish, and it certainly proved how young I was, but in those moments before I drifted off to sleep, I believed that nothing would ever truly be wrong between us that couldn’t be solved by a night in bed.

WE DIDN’T SHARE THE NEWS about Drew at dinner, by tacit agreement. Emma was in one of those rare effusive moods that seemed to come too seldom in fifteen-year-old girls, chattering about the play and her friend Simon’s run-in with their French teacher, and neither Michael nor I had the heart to shatter the atmosphere. She set herself up in the dining room later, books spread across the table and iPod humming in her ears, while Michael and I settled in front of the TV.

There was nothing in particular to watch, but neither of us minded. I flipped channels aimlessly, landing here or there for a few minutes, but what we were both enjoying was our physical proximity. We were curled into one end of the sofa, his arm around me, my head nestled into his shoulder, our hipbones knocking together when either of us shifted. The window over the sofa was open, and the soft night air carried the fragrance of fresh-cut grass and wisteria. For the first time that day, I was content, or nearly so.