The Other by David Guterson Page A

specimen trees in the Washington Park Arboretum, just a few miles from where we live now. Sometimes, on walks, Jamie and I sit in this gazebo to get out of the rain, maybe looking at a small tree-handbook we carry, with its descriptions of leaves and needles, its pencil drawings and index of Latin names, or warming our hands in our pockets and reading the graffiti penned on the posts; or, at some point, I’ll mention the neuroma in my foot or Jamie the arthritis in her fingers, or, most likely, the two of us will add another segment to our dialogue on how our grown-up sons are faring. You would think that sitting sheltered from the rain in the gazebo where you were married would feel romantic, and it does, but the fact that it feels romantic no longer seems, to either of us, important. We leave that feeling in the background, so—for example—if you were to see us deliberating over jars of pasta sauce at our regular grocery store, the Trader Joe’s at Roosevelt Way and 45th, it wouldn’t occur to you that romance is part of our relationship, and in the same way, it wouldn’t occur to you if you saw us in that gazebo. You would just see a couple at midlife, identifying trees together or talking quietly. You would, I think, barely register our existence on your way to wherever you’re going, just as we hardly noticed other people when we were walking, thirty-two years ago, in the Dolomites.

 
     
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    G ODDESS OF THE M OON
     
    O N A S UNDAY this April, the Seattle Times ran a front-page feature, continued, densely, on two inside pages, about me and the hermit of the Hoh. It included a photo, lifted from the ’74 Roosevelt High School annual, in which I’m wearing a black bow tie and a white dinner jacket, a shag haircut, and a mustache, and another of me taken this April on the South Fork of the Hoh, sitting with one leg over the other and gesturing toward the water. I’m described as, among other things, the hermit’s only friend, and it was this, apparently, that prompted a call I got shortly afterward from a Cindy Saperstein.
    I didn’t know what to make of her at first. The sentences emitting from the other end of the line were so pell-mell they put me off balance. Was I really John William’s friend? she asked. If so, she wanted to sit down with me, because years ago, she said, she’d been his “flame.”
    I said John William had never mentioned any “flame.”
    “Okay,” she said. “You’ve been getting weird phone calls since the newspaper thing.”
    “No,” I said. “Well, one.”
    “This isn’t a weird call. I went with him at Reed. My name’s Cindy Saperstein. Houghton then. I was his girlfriend.”
    I considered hanging up. “Come on,” Cindy pleaded, “I went with him at Reed. Gnosticism, right? Always talking about the Gnostics? Did he go off with you constantly about the Gnostics?”
    “Constantly.”
    “So let’s meet.”
     
     
     
    W E CONVERGED , three days later, on a Starbucks halfway between Seattle and Portland. Since I was unsure about traffic, I beat her there by fifteen minutes, an interval I partly spent watching drivers maneuver to park in an undersized lot, including Cindy in her unwashed Volvo station wagon with its barricading dog-screen and defiant, if moot, KERRY/EDWARDS bumper sticker. Why did I dismiss the woman who struggled out of this iconic vehicle with a large sisal handbag and a practical sunhat as not the person I was waiting for? The politics were apropos if I extrapolated forward from Reed in the mid-seventies, and the woman herself was of the right vintage, but it still seemed impossible that this gray-haired Democrat—who’d advised me to look for “a past-her-prime earth mother”—had once been John William’s “flame.”
    It was 2 p.m., and Cindy wanted a midsized iced Mocha Frappuccino made with skim milk. I wanted one, too. I think we both enjoyed watching the barista because of the federal case this young woman with a tiny