when we were here last.â
She smiles.
âIt was actually kind of a classy camp, I think now,â he says. âAs camps go.â
âYes, it was,â she answers. âThough I donât suppose we knew enough then to appreciate the fact.â
âI donât think I noticed much of anything then,â he says, âapart from you.â
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.
âTell me about your wife,â 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. âShe has short, dark hair,â he says. He hesitates; he feels lost. âSheâs a good person,â he says lamely.
âDo you love her?â
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. âI love her more than I used to,â 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 manâher 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.
âDo you want another glass of wine?â he asks her, and she surprises him by finishing her drink and nodding.
âItâs hard to take it all in, isnât it?â she says. She shakes her head slightly, as if she truly cannot digest the fact, as if, like him, she can barely believe sheâs been alive thirty-one years, let alone known someone that long. Though of course they havenât 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 wonât be able to read the menu eitherâheâs left his reading glasses in the car.
âAre you hungry?â he asks her when the waiter has left.
She shakes her head.
âYouâre right,â he says. âYou donât look like your picture.â
She seems embarrassed. âI think they were trying to make me out to be more interesting and glamorous than I really am,â she says with a wave of her hand.
âThatâs not what I meant,â he says. âI meant you look more familiar to me now than you did in the picture. You look very familiar to me.â
She turns away from him toward the waiter across the room. âOh, I almost
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