field mouse in a snake. His fingers lie quiet and flat on the glass table. She averts her eyes. When she looks again, she sees that he has fallen asleep.
S HE DEPARTS next week, just as she had moved into the old Sparks Street apartment, with one large, heavy suitcase sufficient to contain all her paraphernalia—the blue jeans of which she takes such excellent care, velvet skirts in many shades of pastel, little-girl long dresses, wool socks, and underwear rolled up in tiny balls—bending under its weight until Max wrestles it from her hand and lifts it into the trunk of a waiting taxi. Everything else remains with Max: the see-through birdhouse outside the upstairs bedroom window, disaffected while its clientele feeds off the summer’s bounty, the marks left by cigarettes burning at the edge of the Chinese Chippendale coffee table, a profusion of arrangements Max thinks he has neither the energy to undo nor the science to continue.
Later that summer the quickie divorce comes through. They meet at the office of the lawyer who handles Max’s trust. When the papers have been signed, she holds out her hand to Max and then her cheek, which he kisses.
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! are her parting words.
V
M Y DEPARTED tenants’ spoors are everywhere, I complained to Charlie. Such odd people. They have lined all the drawers! White linoleum, with red strawberries! Not just here, in the kitchen, but even the bureau drawers. In my bedroom, all through the house. Look: a vegetable juice machine! An electric knife sharpener and a wall bracket for the Dustbuster! The thing itself is in the pantry, plugged into the outlet, gathering force. You can hear it breathing. Do you suppose someday they will drive up to the door, use the set of keys they forgot to return, and take away all these gadgets? Come to think of it, these aren’t really spoors, they’re more like abandoned pets! What people do when they leave a rented house at the end of the summer—a dog tied to the cherry tree so he won’t make them feel bad as he races after the car.
We were having a cup of tea at the kitchen table. I had returned to Billington for the first time after two years’ absence from the house and from Charlie.
A FTER THE DIVORCE , my principal sensation was embarrassment: the near certitude that she had made a fool of me.Hiding would be easier, I supposed, in Cambridge than during weekends in Billington. Fortunately, the real estate agent—contacted on my behalf by Charlie—quickly found a best-selling writer eager to rent the Billington house from year to year. His real goal was to buy a place in the valley; if my present mood continued, why wouldn’t I, in time, sell my property to him? On his side, the package deal included a wife, seemingly ready to keep up the garden, and two small children with turned-up noses. I liked thinking about the children; they would learn to swim in my swimming pool, and later on in the year, zipped up in snowsuits, matching knitted ski hats on their heads, they would slide down the meadow on my Flying Eagle sled. I had been careful to point out its presence in the garage. The picture was rather like what I might have imagined for the issue Camilla’s birth control device had stopped in its tracks.
Toby was in Cambridge during the summer of my divorce, hanging out, as he put it. We saw each other often. I would find him waiting in the kitchen when I came home from my office at Langdell. He would have prepared a surprise, one of the recipes for sherbets and Italian ices he was always trying out. Sometimes the Cambridge heat was so heavy that, instead of eating the surprise in the garden, We turned on the air-conditioning and took refuge inside. We talked about Camilla nostalgically, as though we had known her very long ago; I assumed he wanted to comfort me without letting his purpose appear. Pratt had indeed accepted him as a special student; he would be working for Charlie part-time. But he
S HE DEPARTS next week, just as she had moved into the old Sparks Street apartment, with one large, heavy suitcase sufficient to contain all her paraphernalia—the blue jeans of which she takes such excellent care, velvet skirts in many shades of pastel, little-girl long dresses, wool socks, and underwear rolled up in tiny balls—bending under its weight until Max wrestles it from her hand and lifts it into the trunk of a waiting taxi. Everything else remains with Max: the see-through birdhouse outside the upstairs bedroom window, disaffected while its clientele feeds off the summer’s bounty, the marks left by cigarettes burning at the edge of the Chinese Chippendale coffee table, a profusion of arrangements Max thinks he has neither the energy to undo nor the science to continue.
Later that summer the quickie divorce comes through. They meet at the office of the lawyer who handles Max’s trust. When the papers have been signed, she holds out her hand to Max and then her cheek, which he kisses.
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! are her parting words.
V
M Y DEPARTED tenants’ spoors are everywhere, I complained to Charlie. Such odd people. They have lined all the drawers! White linoleum, with red strawberries! Not just here, in the kitchen, but even the bureau drawers. In my bedroom, all through the house. Look: a vegetable juice machine! An electric knife sharpener and a wall bracket for the Dustbuster! The thing itself is in the pantry, plugged into the outlet, gathering force. You can hear it breathing. Do you suppose someday they will drive up to the door, use the set of keys they forgot to return, and take away all these gadgets? Come to think of it, these aren’t really spoors, they’re more like abandoned pets! What people do when they leave a rented house at the end of the summer—a dog tied to the cherry tree so he won’t make them feel bad as he races after the car.
We were having a cup of tea at the kitchen table. I had returned to Billington for the first time after two years’ absence from the house and from Charlie.
A FTER THE DIVORCE , my principal sensation was embarrassment: the near certitude that she had made a fool of me.Hiding would be easier, I supposed, in Cambridge than during weekends in Billington. Fortunately, the real estate agent—contacted on my behalf by Charlie—quickly found a best-selling writer eager to rent the Billington house from year to year. His real goal was to buy a place in the valley; if my present mood continued, why wouldn’t I, in time, sell my property to him? On his side, the package deal included a wife, seemingly ready to keep up the garden, and two small children with turned-up noses. I liked thinking about the children; they would learn to swim in my swimming pool, and later on in the year, zipped up in snowsuits, matching knitted ski hats on their heads, they would slide down the meadow on my Flying Eagle sled. I had been careful to point out its presence in the garage. The picture was rather like what I might have imagined for the issue Camilla’s birth control device had stopped in its tracks.
Toby was in Cambridge during the summer of my divorce, hanging out, as he put it. We saw each other often. I would find him waiting in the kitchen when I came home from my office at Langdell. He would have prepared a surprise, one of the recipes for sherbets and Italian ices he was always trying out. Sometimes the Cambridge heat was so heavy that, instead of eating the surprise in the garden, We turned on the air-conditioning and took refuge inside. We talked about Camilla nostalgically, as though we had known her very long ago; I assumed he wanted to comfort me without letting his purpose appear. Pratt had indeed accepted him as a special student; he would be working for Charlie part-time. But he
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