The Long Way

Roxy came up in the late summer with two children and a husband who had been made manager of a gym in Poughkeepsie. She sat on the terrace at Ironwood and said the house was very large, and that she did not know how Hollis bore it. She said all of this in the bright, unstoppable voice of a woman who has never once considered that the world might have an opinion of her, and Hollis, watching her with the children on the lawn, thought: Roxy was on her second glass of iced tea and had not once mentioned the orchard, or the motel, or the wedding in a room with a flag in it. She has been happy every day of it, and I have spent three years being surprised by that, and I would like to stop being surprised by it.

Camille Reyes came in October, alone, for four days, and was charming, and said at dinner on the third night, with a glass of wine and the particular smile of a woman delivering something she has kept for years: "I have never understood what you did to him."

"I told him he was rude."

"You told him he was rude. In a barn. In front of a press."

"In front of a press."

Camille Reyes looked at her across the table, and something in her face came unclenched for the first time in six years. "He was insupportable before. He is insupportable now. But he is not the same insupportable." She put her glass down. "Julian says he has never once in his life seen Roman Ashcroft at ease with anyone, and that he has seen it with you, and that he is jealous."

"Of the barn?"

"Of the ease."

And Sylvie came, with three children of her own by then, and the two sisters sat on the dock in the last warm week and watched Ray Duval teach a fourth to swim, and Sylvie said, "Do you remember the kitchen floor."

"I remember the kitchen floor."

"I thought I would die of it," said Sylvie. "And now I have three children and a man who is late for everything, and it was three months of my life, and I would not give back the three months, because they are the reason I know what it is to be all right."

It was the second Wednesday of October, half past six, and she had been out in the rows since four.

Hollis came in from the orchard with wet boots and a basket of windfalls, and Roman was standing in front of the portrait over the mantel, which he never did, and he turned round with his hands in his pockets and said, "Do you know what I was doing when that was painted."

"Refusing to smile."

"I was twenty-two. My father had been dead a year. I had a company I did not understand and a sister of fifteen and an aunt who had decided I was to marry a cousin who could not sit up for an hour without a shawl, and I had concluded, in the course of that year, that the whole business of being a person was a matter of holding a line." He said, "You have cost me the line. You have cost me every line I ever held, and I have been trying for four years to be sorry about it and I am not."

She put the basket down on the rug.

"I walked three miles in the rain," she said, "and you said I was tolerable."

"I said you were tolerable."

"You were wrong. I am not tolerable at all. I am extremely difficult, and you have said so to my father, and my father agreed with you."

"I know."

They stood in front of the portrait of a serious boy in a black coat with his hand on a chair, and outside the windows the valley went gold in the last of the light, and the lake was flat and bright and the hills were folded up behind each other going west.

"Say it again," he said.

And she, who had been saying it for four years, in barns and kitchens and on a wet footbridge over a creek going brown under her, said it again."