Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence by David Samuel Levinson

fingers tightly clamped around the fork and knife. She wanted to tell her friends what she’d just witnessed, but then the waiter was taking away her plate and setting down her coffee and a fresh pear tart, which she hadn’t remembered ordering. A few minutes later, she glanced up to find the stranger back at the window. When he caught her staring, he drew his full lips into a smile, showing teeth small and cramped, like a barracuda’s, she thought. Like Antonia’s, she thought. Then he was gone and Louise was paying the check—she always paid the check—and they were leaving, but not before Catherine said, “I’ll meet you outside,” and went to use the bathroom.
    Once she’d finished, she wound her way toward the door, thinking again about Antonia and Henry but mostly about the stranger. She wondered who he was and what he had wanted from Antonia and why he had spit in Henry’s face, like Wyatt had, she thought, with a tiny joy. Was he another writer felled by one of Henry’s reviews, or was he one of Antonia’s jealous, jilted lovers? The cloud of intrigue surrounding the couple filled her with both a deepening sense of curiosity and a growing unrest, because it seemed to Catherine that whatever had taken place among the three of them was scarcely finished, and maybe was only just beginning.
    Be careful, she cautioned herself, as she wandered into the twilit heat. Don’t let yourself get carried away. Even as she joined her friends at the entrance to the park and the lamps flickered on and they passed the gazebo, cigarette butts and empty beer bottles littering the floor—“A travesty,” Louise said—and made their way down the cement paths that led to the concert hall, she thought about him. She wondered again who he was and why he’d worn that look on his face when he’d said Antonia’s name, and what he was doing in the town if only to harass the couple. Of course what Catherine didn’t understand then, and what many of us don’t understand until it’s too late, was that she had already let herself get carried away. As she took a seat between her friends, the auditorium darkened and the crowd stopped shifting and went still.
    Then a spotlight fell on the stage, and the string quartet began to play, though Catherine didn’t listen, her mind elsewhere, remembering Antonia and Henry as they’d dashed away from the cafe, the stranger in pursuit. The music crescendoed around her, yet all she heard was the stranger, who whispered Antonia’s name into her ear with an awful ferocity—like someone who still cared for her intensely and had come to win her back.
    Yes, that must be it. He’s come to win her back, she thought, sitting with the idea, the unbridled romance of it. Just like that she turned the stranger from a spiteful writer seeking revenge on Henry into a lover with inexhaustible courage, who would stop at nothing to take Antonia away from him. She liked this version of the story, and so she went on imagining it, imagining again the stranger’s green eyes, Wyatt’s eyes, and how they’d flashed at her through the cafe window. How could Antonia have taken the look in his eyes as hostile, and not as the painful passion Catherine had seen? She replayed the moment when the man spit in Henry’s face, and again she trusted the stranger. How delicious it had been to watch Henry get exactly what he deserved! It was to Catherine like being there with Wyatt when he, too, had spit in Henry’s face. Now, as the recital ended and the auditorium filled with clapping, Catherine applauded the musicians even as she also applauded the stranger, his tenacity and his fearlessness, two qualities that had lived in Wyatt’s work, and which she wished had been more a part of his love for her.

The Longest Day of the Year
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    Every year, in honor of the summer solstice, the businesses along Broad