The Other by David Guterson Page B

tarnished nose-ring made out of preparing our concoctions—Cindy and I shared middle-aged amusement and middle-aged forbearance, bonding, I thought, by virtue of a generational contrast. At our table, Cindy sipped through her straw, then removed her sunhat with a sweaty flourish. She told me that for years she’d had a landscaping business and still did occasional landscape design, but right now she was writing screenplays. She’d written one, in fact, that had recently been optioned, about an eighteenth-century explorer in Florida “taken in by natives.” Her husband was a CPA and blues pianist. Her college-senior son was working with an NYU chemistry professor on…Cindy didn’t understand it, but it had to do with nanobots. Her college-sophomore son was an exchange student “studying snowboarding” in New Zealand, and her high-school-sophomore daughter, in a humbling surprise of parenthood, was now at cheerleader camp in Idaho.
    With this mention of her daughter, Cindy did something girlish—she reached back and laid her hair on her shoulder. When she turned her face to the side, I saw her as she might have been at Reed: as an ingénue painted by Vermeer, maybe with an earlobe poking out of her tresses. “To be frank,” she said, “I called you for a reason. The reason being that after seeing you in the paper I thought we should talk about a screenplay.”
    “What?”
    “Between the two of us,” she said, “we’ve got a story with juice.”
    “No one’s going to make a film about a hermit.”
    “Yes, they are,” said Cindy.
     
     
     
    S HE WAS HARD to stop. And I’d driven for close to two hours. So I sat there while she told me how she’d met John William at a Reed dorm dance and how, in the semidarkness, she’d noticed him long before he asked her to the floor, because he was the type that attracted her—“the boy next door with a dark side.” They danced to “Long Ago and Far Away,” by James Taylor, which in blunt despondency asks, “Where do those golden rainbows end?” and “Why is this song so sad?” and which is so languid it left them, Cindy told me, with no alternative to the “slow dance” mode of the era. This meant dancing very little, or for that matter hardly moving while in one another’s clutches, but it was also, or could be, an intensely pleasant exchange of scents, pressures, hot breath, adjustments of hands, small turns of the head, and noses brushing hair, all of which she experienced while dancing with this handsome, clearly well-bred, but rough-around-the-edges guy who so far had no name and whom she couldn’t remember having seen on campus; but it was only early October of her freshman year, and she hadn’t met a lot of people yet; she had so far, mostly, done a lot of apologizing for being from Aurora, Illinois.
    “Long Ago and Far Away” ended. They uncoupled, Cindy with reluctance. The guy she’d danced with didn’t say his name or ask for hers, but he did say, as he stepped back, “Marry me.”
    “Okay,” answered Cindy. But she also felt that if this was irony her dance partner had an excellent poker face.
    They went for a walk. A fall night, with all the silvery edges trees have on a fall night because of moonlight and dry air, all the little campus bushes looking lit and still, and (Cindy, at Starbucks, thinking screenplay) no dialogue. Cindy couldn’t tell if she was headed toward the college-library roof or going out for ice cream. She was aware that October moonlight showed her face to good effect; she was also aware that October moonlight was a romantic cliché associated with the heartland of America, from which she’d sprung. They walked without saying anything, leaving campus, and as their silence deepened she began to wonder, with burgeoning alarm, what it meant, this intense atmosphere of no words between people who’d just met. “Where are we going?” she finally asked.
    “Please,” he answered. It sounded like pleading.
    They