Maddy turned and looked at him. He had never been so close to her. Her eyes were a sparkling ice blue. “I don’t sleep with hockey players,” she said and turned and walked after me, leaving Harry gaping like a trout.
This became a story they told quite often afterward, and it always got a good laugh at dinner parties. But Harry didn’t talk to Maddy again for the rest of the term. When we did catch sight of him, she would either look the other way or make a disparaging remark. At the end of the year, we all dispersed, some to jobs or internships, others to country clubs and beaches. Maddy worked that summer in Washington for a congressman and had a brief affair with one of his aides. She wrote to me about it in excruciating detail, letters which I read in the evening while I was living in my parents’ empty apartment, interning at one of the city’s oldest law firms. It was our first summer apart. She came up only twice. We had one week together at the very end, however, by which time, thankfully, she had broken off the affair, and we went to the beach every day and just hacked around at night, going to parties or a movie or just staying in. Harry, meanwhile, went out to Oklahoma, where he worked building oil rigs.
It was fated they would meet again. It happened in the fall term of our sophomore year. The irony is that I was the agent of bringing them together. They had not spoken since the spring party. I had been invited to join one of the university’s elite literary societies, which I considered a great honor. At the initiation dinner, in the Leverett-Griswold House, I was surprised to see Harry at my table. Previously I had thought of him as nothing more than a star athlete. I would never have guessed he was also interested in literature. In my past experience, the two were usually mutually exclusive. But there he was.
I did not know yet that his father was an English teacher, and he had practically cut his milk teeth on Shakespeare and Milton. I had always prided myself on my knowledge of Shakespeare, but his surpassed mine. Not just his ability to recite many obscure passages with relative ease but also his sensitive appreciation of the human emotions that made the plays great. With his looks and memory, if he hadn’t been such a fine hockey player, I am sure he would have been a terrific actor. In any event, we soon became friendly.
One night I arranged a dinner in New Haven, to which I invited a number of guests. Maddy came, of course, and so did my new friend, Harry. It was at a Thai restaurant, and there were eight of us at a large, round table. The staff brought out many courses: coconut soup, prawn curry, roast duck, diaphanous rice noodles, fish in dry red curry sauce. We were drinking Thai beer and doing shots of ginger vodka. Maddy sat on my right, and Harry, as it turned out, sat on her right. At one point I noticed the two of them hadn’t spoken all night. It was like there was a glass wall between them. With me and the rest of the party, Maddy was more animated than usual, laughing, shouting questions to the people on the opposite side of the table, cracking jokes. Harry, on the other hand, looked as though he was at a funeral. He spoke occasionally to the woman on his right, but spent most of the evening sitting quietly, barely touching his food.
After dinner we all walked back to Maddy’s off-campus house on Elm Street, and she invited everyone up for a glass of wine. Most of us accepted, but not Harry.
“Thank you,” he said. “I have practice early tomorrow.”
Several days later, I got a call from Maddy. “You’ll never believe it.”
“What?”
“Harry Winslow asked me out.”
“He did? What did you say?”
“I said yes, of course. Any reason why I shouldn’t?”
I could think of many, but all I said was “None that I know of.”
What was so momentous about this was not that someone asked Maddy out—although it happened less often than people thought—but that she actually accepted. I had been with her on many occasions—on Long Island, in Manhattan and New Haven—when men approached her. They were usually older, more confident. She was never rude. She never told anyone to buzz off or flipped them the bird, or anything so vulgar. She just politely said “No, thank you.” Sometimes the more persistent ones, if we were in a bar or restaurant, sent her a drink; others even sent flowers if they knew where she lived. If they were too pushy, we just left. But in almost every case, she demurred.
With Harry, not only did she say yes but clearly she had thought about it and, having done so, liked the idea. It is possible she even expected it, from that first moment at the spring party. She was not a spontaneous sort of person. We shared so much, but we had not shared this. This was hers. It was a part of her life that was shut off to me. I resented this concealment, of course, and was jealous of it, but I also knew there was little that could be done about it. If she wanted it, I wanted it too. She was the shark, and I merely the pilot fish.
Their first date was at an Italian restaurant, an old-fashioned red-sauce place near Wooster Square that closed years ago. Harry didn’t have a car, so Maddy drove with him squeezed into the passenger seat of her red MG. After dinner, they went to a bar and then back to Maddy’s room. There, as she told me later, they stayed up all night talking and looking at her photo albums. Old Kodaks, the edges serrated, their colors muted. Pictures of her childhood, when she was raised by her grandmother, as an infant, later skinny in a one-piece on the beach. Birthday parties, swim meets. Photos of her father, young and muscular with his shirt off, his hair still full and blond, at a friend’s wedding, playing golf, at Christmas. Her brother, Johnny. A succession of stepmothers. A yellow Mercedes convertible that later wound up wrapped around a tree. Men in turtlenecks with sideburns, women in Lilly Pulitzer and bouffant hair. Everyone smoked. I know these images well. They were my life too.
It was a month before they slept together, she said. During that month, I barely saw her. Suddenly, the two of them had become inseparable. They met after class, dined together at Mory’s or in her apartment, where funnily enough Harry did most of the cooking because Maddy, being a child of privilege, had never learned how to navigate a kitchen. Instead of driving down to New York with me, she went with Harry now. The city was still new to him, and she delighted in showing it to him. She took him to all our favorite places, Bemelmans, the White Horse, Vazac’s, the Oak Bar. They spent hours at the Frick and the Met, drove out to Luger’s in Brooklyn, danced at Xenon. She took him to “21” for the first time and charged the meal to her father’s account.
After that first month, there was another and then another, until it blurred into a year. It was clear to me, and to them, that they were in love. I had never seen Maddy so happy. She glowed. And I knew the only course of action available to me was complete and utter acceptance. I could not have her to myself anymore, and, if I fought it, I would risk losing her entirely. Instead I became an acolyte, lighting the candles, carrying the cross, swinging the thurible. Initially, I hesitated, wondering if it would last, waiting for the relationship to break off under its own weight. But it never did.
In the summer after sophomore year, they traveled to Europe together, staying with friends in England, hiking in the rain through the Lake District, traveling down to the Côte d’Azur, stopping at vineyards along the way, visiting old friends of her grandmother’s. Then they went to Santorini, where they slept on the beach and got brown as nuts, swinging back through Marrakech and then Barcelona before coming home.
I did not join them but every few days got enthusiastic postcards from Maddy. I was wildly jealous, but what could I do? I had another internship, my sights already fixed on law school. When in our senior year Maddy told me they were going to be married after graduation, I was genuinely happy. I could see that Harry loved her. Not for her beauty but for herself. He had penetrated beneath the armor to see the soul inside and knew that what he found was gold. I had been aware of it all along, of course, and it gave me a certain satisfaction to know I had been there first, that, in this one thing, he would always follow me.
H
arry’s plane touches down at Nantucket Memorial Airport. It’s still low season, and the airport is relatively empty. It’s a little after eleven. Johnny has to use the bathroom, and they have a late breakfast at the little restaurant in the terminal. Johnny has pancakes and bacon. Harry, coffee and scrambled eggs. The restaurant is full of pilots, a few in uniform, but most of them recreational fliers like Harry. They fly over for the day, have lunch, and fly back. They are doctors, small business owners, retirees. It is a small confederation. They like nothing better than sitting around talking about flying. Normally Harry would join them, but not today. Today he has Johnny. He wants the day to be about his son.
“How did your mother seem before she left, pal?” he asks.
“Okay, I guess,” Johnny says, swinging his legs distractedly. “She was a little sad sometimes.”
Harry nods his head. He can barely bring himself to look into his son’s eyes. They are Maddy’s eyes. Her sadness is his fault. It is all his fault.
“How are you, Daddy?”
Harry is surprised by the question. It might be the first time Johnny has ever asked anything like that, revealing a maturity, a growing awareness of others that is so often among the last traits to develop in children, if it does at all.
“Well, I guess I’m a little sad too.”
“Why?”
“Because I miss your mommy, and I miss you.”
“Maybe if you came back home, then both you and Mommy would be happy again.”
Harry looks away and pats his son’s hand. “I’d like that very much. Come on, pal. It’s wheels-up time.”
T
hey are back together and once again in the house on Long Island, the sound of laughter and music and voices emanating from the house. It is summer. Outside the sun is shining, the sky is blue. There they are on the lawn, planning a beach excursion or a dinner party or just sitting in chairs reading. Sailing on the pond, where on Sunday afternoons there are regattas. Maddy cooking or in the garden. Johnny playing with a friend. He is older now. Taller, slender like his mother. He has her beauty.
His heart condition has gone away. It’s as though it never happened. He plays tennis now. I let him use my court. There are even a few girls around, an inkling of what it will be like in a few years. He will be devastating. Women will fall at his feet. Harry comes out of the house, looking well. He completed his novel. It was another bestseller. His last book is being turned into a movie. Who else is there? Well, I am, of course—happy to have my proxy family united again, warm in their shared love, contented as a favorite uncle. Ned and Cissy are there too. She is carrying her first baby in her arms.
How did it all happen? How does anything happen? They realized they loved each other too much. And, like all truly happy couples, they were complete only when they were together. Pain is transient but love eternal. Harry and Johnny landed, and Maddy returned from Mexico. When Harry brought Johnny back home, Maddy invited him in. Inspired by her trip, she had just been to the store and was roasting a pork shank. Making chile ancho relleno. Would he like to stay for dinner? There was cold beer in the refrigerator. They sat around the table as they had so many times before, wearing the comfort of being together like an old coat. There was laughter. Maddy told them about Mexico. About the color the sea turned at sunset, about the parrots in the jungle. She brought back Indian blankets, a sombrero for Johnny. They told her about their flight. Johnny showed off his knowledge of English kings. It was King George the First, he said. He came after Queen Anne. He was German. They clapped, and he smiled, appreciative of the applause but happier still that his mother and father were together again.
After dinner, they put Johnny to bed the way they always had, with stories and a kiss on the forehead. Then they talked deep into the night, soaking up each other’s thoughts, laughing from sheer joy in each other’s presence. There were tears but no recriminations, no anger, no fear. There was no need. It was as though their lives had never been altered. When it was time for bed, there was no question whether Harry would stay. He simply followed her upstairs, and she expected nothing less. They then made love, slowly, securely, happily, the way they once had, the only way two people who are truly in love can.
And Harry never left. Love endured. They grew older. They got dogs. Johnny went to Harry’s old school, then Yale. He never played hockey, but that mattered to no one, least of all Harry. Instead he had a flair for languages and spent a term abroad in Paris, staying with friends of the family. We all came over and visited once and took a cycling trip through the Loire Valley. Johnny knew Italian, Spanish, and French, and was learning Mandarin. He was interested in foreign relations. Maybe even law.
He and I had lunch a few times a year. I drove up to New Haven, and we ate at Mory’s, or, when he was down in the city, we met at one of my clubs for lunch. Every year during the Christmas holidays, we went to a Broadway play or musical, just like when he was a boy. I loved hearing about his life, about his interests. In addition to his mother’s looks, he has her passions and sensitive nature, and his father’s sense of humor and knack for making everything look easy. He is such a perfect combination of the two. I couldn’t be more proud of him.
In the spring we would all go skiing in Breckenridge for a week. Summers were spent on Long Island, and Johnny came out as often as he could, usually bringing with him one in a succession of beautiful, tan girls with white teeth and honey-colored hair. They would join us in trips to the beach, their firm breasts barely concealed by their bikinis. Johnny, lithe and tightly muscled, the scar on his chest just visible when he had his shirt off, paddling one of the canoes. There were still swimming races. Maddy still won most of the time, but one time I saw Johnny hold back and knew he was letting her win. He was now much taller than both of them. Maddy still had her figure, but Harry had put on weight. Both of them had gray hair.