Where or When by Anita Shreve Page A

when we were here last.”
    She smiles.
    â€œIt was actually kind of a classy camp, I think now,” he says. “As camps go.”
    â€œYes, it was,” she answers. “Though I don’t suppose we knew enough then to appreciate the fact.”
    â€œI don’t think I noticed much of anything then,” he says, “apart from you.”
    He lets his hand slip off the banquette cushion and rest on her shoulder, the shoulder closest to him, and as he does so he can feel her stiffen. The touch to him is momentous, charged, the first touch since he last saw her. Of course, she is a stranger to him, a woman he has known only minutes; and yet he is certain he has known the girl forever.
    He removes his hand.
    He wonders, briefly, if she might be reticent about physical love, and then he has, almost simultaneously, another thought, an unwelcome one, a way to measure out the time lost, the thirty-one years, the measurement being the sum total of all the sexual experiences she has had, all the boyfriends, all the nights with her husband. The realization buffets him, makes him slightly ill, so that when she speaks, he has to ask her to repeat the sentence.
    â€œTell me about your wife,” she says again. She reaches forward to the table, picks up her glass as if to take a sip.
    He stalls, still awash in the confusion of his previous thought. He thinks about her question and then understands that it is for the hand on her shoulder. He drains the vodka, bites into the lemon peel. “She has short, dark hair,” he says. He hesitates; he feels lost. “She’s a good person,” he says lamely.
    â€œDo you love her?”
    He pauses. He must get this right. He must not lie. He senses she will know a lie. He swirls the ice cubes and the lemon peel in his glass. “I love her more than I used to,” he says slowly and deliberately.
    She brings the glass to her lips, as if pondering his reply. As he looks at her, the space between them becomes flooded with images: the two of them as children; the picture she sent him; the girl she might have been at seventeen; the woman she might have been at twenty-eight or thirty-five; herself in the embrace of another man—her husband? Her husband, about whom he knows almost nothing but who almost certainly has more hair than Charles does and probably (Charles winces inwardly) a flatter stomach. He imagines her lying on a bed with her hair undone. He sees her nursing an infant. The images elide and collide. He feels light-headed, signals the waiter for another vodka.
    â€œDo you want another glass of wine?” he asks her, and she surprises him by finishing her drink and nodding.
    â€œIt’s hard to take it all in, isn’t it?” she says. She shakes her head slightly, as if she truly cannot digest the fact, as if, like him, she can barely believe she’s been alive thirty-one years, let alone known someone that long. Though of course they haven’t known each other, he thinks.
    He looks out at the other diners in the restaurant: a table of businessmen, several tables of couples, mostly older couples. The waiter brings them menus, recites the specials of the day. Charles dutifully listens to the man, as does she, but for his part he cannot absorb a word. He won’t be able to read the menu either—he’s left his reading glasses in the car.
    â€œAre you hungry?” he asks her when the waiter has left.
    She shakes her head.
    â€œYou’re right,” he says. “You don’t look like your picture.”
    She seems embarrassed. “I think they were trying to make me out to be more interesting and glamorous than I really am,” she says with a wave of her hand.
    â€œThat’s not what I meant,” he says. “I meant you look more familiar to me now than you did in the picture. You look very familiar to me.”
    She turns away from him toward the waiter across the room. “Oh, I almost