The Last Time They Met Read Online Free PDF

so, she moved inland, to Indianapolis, where she was originally from. It’s safer there, I imagine. No possibility of ocean. I assume she’s still alone. Yes, I know she is. She writes occasionally to Rich.
    And why did Thomas continue to torture himself with ocean? she might have asked.
    They had walked to what appeared to be an industrial park. She remembered a Christmas Day, years ago, when she and Thomas had strolled empty streets in Boston, the only persons in a deserted universe. But then she had a troubling thought: though she could remember the day — the sense of endless time available to them, the promise of possibility around every corner, the clarity of the air — she could not feel it. And she found that she minded this inability to feel the past. It was disturbing, really, to be so removed from the texture of one’s life.
    Her skirt moved as they walked. She was ruining her shoes. Beside her, she could feel Thomas’s heat, even in the inhospitable chill. There was, about her shoulders, a contraction of self-consciousness. His physical presence was familiar to her, and yet foreign as well. All his cells were different now, overturned three times.
    — Do you teach?
he asked.
    — I do.
She named the college.
Part-time. My husband died two years ago and left insurance money.
    — I didn’t know. I’m sorry.
He who would know better than any man how useless sorry was.
Was it a long illness?
    — No. It was very sudden.
    Beside her, Thomas seemed to lope rather than to walk.
    — I started touring more aggressively after he died,
she said.
I found I didn’t think about Vincent as much in hotel rooms.
    They had reached a bench. He gestured for her to sit. She had her hands in the pockets of her coat and gathered them forward into her lap. The weekend lay before her, more defined than it had been just hours earlier. A year from now, she knew, she might be thinking, That was the weekend that I. . . . It was momentous after all, their having met after years apart. Momentous simply in this exchange of history, in the verification of one’s past. Thoughts of something larger were impossible; they ran against the grain these days, against the tide.
    — Was your marriage good?
he asked.
    No one ever asked her these sorts of questions anymore. There was, undeniably, a kind of exhilaration in having to answer them.
    — I think it was a wonderful marriage.
She knew nothing of Thomas’s second marriage, to the woman named Jean, only of its unspeakable demise and aftermath.
We had a lot of joy together. I remember thinking that when Vincent died: ‘We had a lot of joy.’ And very little unhappiness.
    — I’m glad.
    — But no one gets through life unscathed,
she said. And she wondered: was that true? Did anyone, at fifty-two, have an unscathed life?
Vincent never seemed to suffer, and I found that contagious. Life was more normal, less fraught than it had been.
    Had been with you,
she might have added.
    — Reason enough to love anyone, I should think.
    — We had just come back from what was to be our summerhouse in Maine. We’d gone up for the day to meet with the contractor. It was to have been a magnificent house — well, magnificent to us. After years of saving for it, it was finally a reality. Our only regret was that we hadn’t done it when the children were younger, though already we were thinking of grandchildren.
She paused, as if for breath, when really, it was the tamping down of anger that had momentarily stopped her.
I went out to the bank and left him in the house. When I came back he was on the floor, surrounded by oranges.
    — A heart attack?
    — A massive stroke.
She paused.
Nothing about his health had ever suggested the possibility. He was only fifty.
    Thomas put a hand on hers, which had escaped from her pocket in the telling of the tale. His was cold, his palm roughened to a papery texture, despite the writer’s fingers. He touched her awkwardly, the gesture of a man not used to