The town of Glenn’s Mills, New York—small, nondescript, economically marginal except for the retired cardiologists and downstate corporate attorneys who buy up and rehab the old houses—rests at the bend of a river once so polluted with tannery acids it was given the name Vinegar Creek. This is the town where Arthur has made his whole life. His law firm, a one-man outfit on the town’s ten-block main street—trusts, wills, real estate, the occasional divorce—was his father’s before it was his, and though in school Arthur had thought first that he’d like to be an engineer, and then an architect, and finally a big-city lawyer, he has no regrets about living a life that was, in the end, simply handed to him: The spring of Arthur’s last year at NYU law his father, a two-pack-a-day Lucky Strike smoker, entered his office, removed his hat and coat and scarf, lit his first cigarette of the morning at his desk, rubbed his rheumatic hip once in the ice-cold room, and suffered a stroke of such lethal power that it succeeded in rearranging all the details of his son’s world in one painless instant. By the end of the week twenty-six-year-old Arthur was meeting with his father’s clients and scraping the mud from their boots off the carpet and finding that he liked it, all of it; the thousand choices of his life suddenly included the choice not to choose, and within a month he had canceled his plans to clerk for a federal circuit judge in Manhattan and was studying like mad for the bar. He telephoned the girl he’d been dating in New York—Miriam, finishing up her master’s in library science at NYU—and invited her north for a visit from which she would return for only one semester to complete her degree; she found a job in the county library, shelving books and reading to children; within a year they married. If asked, Arthur would say he didn’t so much begin his life as find it, like a wallet or a ring of keys he’d merely mislaid.
Now, for the first time in thirty years in this quiet town of trees and houses and shops—“Glenn’s Mills, New York, Gateway to the Hudson-Mohawk Valley Region”; a town where the theft of garden tools from an unlocked shed makes the papers; where the same man who cuts your hair on Tuesday will run on Wednesday to extinguish the flames of your burning house; where the shopkeeper who catches your child pocketing a package of baseball cards will close up the store and drive the boy home (O’Neil, ten years old, claimed to have done it on a dare)—Arthur has felt this life, this pattern of meaning with its exchanges of goods and services and affections, disturbed, even endangered—all because he has fallen in love with Dora Auclaire. For it is her loneliness he loves, above everything else about her; when he sees her on the street or at a party, or he finds himself, on the second Tuesday of each month, sitting across from her in the small classroom at the high school where their novel-reading group meets, and listens to her voice—calm, precise, ironic—advancing some opinion, inevitably superior to his own, about
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
or
Crime and Punishment
or
A Confederacy of Dunces
(and Arthur must confess: he almost never finishes these books, which tire and oppress him; he keeps going only to see
her
), it is her loneliness that he hears, and it is her loneliness that moves him to love her. If he found her simply pretty or clever or sexy or generous to children, Arthur would know what to do: nothing. Do nothing, and let the sensation fade over time, like the buoyant happiness that lifts his heart after certain movies, or the delicious nostalgia he feels each November when the first snow falls, evening comes on, and he walks home through early darkness and a world drenched in the dreamy half-reality of new snow. (And wasn’t there a dream he had this morning, something about flying, flying over water?) But he can’t do nothing. The core of her life is loss—a forty-foot plunge on a damp morning in May—and somehow Arthur has zeroed in on that core, and trapped himself there.
The office is quiet; above the door to the waiting room—a dim, shabby space with battered file cabinets, an old plaid sofa, a coffee table dressed with stacks of wrinkled magazines, and the desk where his secretary sits when he hasn’t given her the day off, as he has today—the clock reads ten forty-eight. He has canceled his appointments, meaning to use this wedge of time between finishing his work and leaving for New Hampshire (already he is running late; he should be out the door at eleven, to pick up their suitcases and feed the cat and hustle to the library to get Miriam, all before noon) to solve the problem of Dora Auclaire. But what is the problem, exactly? Isn’t it true that he, Arthur, has made no serious mistakes, committed no unpardonable sins against his marriage? He looks at the page, the words he has written:
Dear Dora
. It is written on a yellow legal pad; its length seems suddenly absurd. How will he fill such a thing? He means to record what he feels, to give it shape, to make sense of it by setting it in words. Instead, he rips the paper from the pad, wads it in his fist, tosses it in the wastebasket behind his desk (a moment’s worry—should he leave it there? But it says nothing, only a name . . . ), and begins again:
Dear Dora.
The problem is that there is nothing to say, no story to tell and therefore finish; that nothing has, in fact, happened between them at all. And yet: like every secret Arthur’s has a history, an arc of events. Pressed, he would trace this awkward, silent moment at his desk to an afternoon a little over eight months ago, when Dora came to see him in his office. He had done some work for the clinic before—a zoning variance for an addition, permits to build it, the odd dispute with a patient over billing—so when she entered, shaking her umbrella, and told him the matter at hand was personal, he was surprised, and interested; he wondered what it could be. There was some money, she explained, that she’d inherited from an aunt—not much, just $60,000—that she wanted to put away for the boys. Could he draw up some kind of . . . well. What did one call it? A trust? She said the word as if she’d only just learned it, though of course she knew just what she was asking. There were beads of rain in her hair, which she wore short, in neat layers, making a dark frame around her face. She liked the sound of it, she said, smiling at him:
a trust
.
He offered her a seat and set to work. And how was she? And the boys? (He remembered two: Josh, the younger but a strong kid like his father; his older brother, Leo, the more delicate, a boy who liked to read and taught swimming at the Y.) He drew up the papers at his desk. It was easy work, pure boilerplate, though just the kind of work he liked—putting money aside for children. Dora named her brother, a surgeon in San Francisco, as one trustee, herself as the other; she had already visited her broker and invested the money in a sensible mixture of zero-coupon bonds and blue-chip stocks. Her will was up to date, she thought, she’d taken care of that right after Sam had died—she said this last phrase quickly, almost as one word—though if it was not too much trouble would Arthur mind having a look at it? A thick envelope, full of folded paper: she had brought it in her bag.
And so on, through that afternoon and part of another, when the papers were ready to sign. He would call her, he said, when the documents came back from the brother in California; he could mail her a copy, or else she could come to pick it up, and of course he would keep one in his office, on file,
her
file. Fine, she said. Fine.
They looked at one another. Their time together was through. It’s funny, she said then, buttoning her coat—and was she blushing? And was he?—it’s funny how you can enjoy doing something like this, something so
mundane,
with someone whom you like. Did he know that sometimes—well, once or twice—she had thought that the two of them should have lunch? She liked what he’d said in reading group about that book—
Mrs. Dalloway,
that was it—about how every character in the story was alone, and either succeeded at it or failed. She’d thought it right then; the two of them could be friends, real friends who did things together. But how could he have known? She’d only just told him, of course.
Which was how it happened, though not then. He showed her to the office door—for a moment it had seemed possible they would kiss right there, an image so compelling, so completely disorienting, that Arthur quickly drove it from his mind—and a week later he telephoned her to tell her that the signed copies had been returned, and they agreed to meet for the lunch she had promised him, so that he could give them to her. The week of rain had become a week of snow, temperatures falling back into the teens though it was nearly April, and Arthur hurried the six blocks to the restaurant, wondering what he was doing. Was he doing anything at all? But when he arrived and saw Dora sitting at a booth in back, not at one of the open tables in the middle of the room, he knew. Without breaking his stride he stepped to the booth and slid himself into the narrow space across from her; he saw she was drinking tea. Her overcoat, heavy green wool with shawl lapels, lay over her shoulders. Her smile was almost a laugh. Was he late? he asked. No, no, she said, shaking her head. The window by their table was a wall of steam; someone, a child perhaps, had written something in the steam, fat letters now faded. She blew over her tea. The snow had kept her patients away for the day, she said. He wasn’t late at all.
The restaurant was shrouded in a heavy white light, and nearly empty. They sat together an hour, talking and eating their lunch of sandwiches and soft drinks while the waitresses, two old women Arthur knew by sight but not by name, sorted steaming silverware and smoked long brown cigarettes at the counter. Arthur knew what was said about small towns, but as a lawyer, he’d found the opposite was true: everyone had something to hide. It was possible in such a place to live a kind of secret life, and if anyone asked, he could always say that he’d done some work for her. He’d been a lawyer long enough to believe that there was nothing simple about the truth, that it came in any number of forms, and this was one. They talked about people they knew, about the patients at her clinic and their sad stories, and about their children, as any two people their age, meeting for a meal, might do. She did not talk about Sam, though in a way she did; so many years, she remarked, looking around, since she had set foot in this place; she was glad to see it had not changed. With her practice and the boys besides, she said, it was all she could do to grab a quick bite at her desk. She gave a little laugh. Time moved quickly, did it not? And yet it sometimes seemed she had been doing things this way forever, pulling her life and her children’s lives like a cart.
Then as the hour drew late, on the verge of their good-byes, Dora reached across the table, found his hand with hers, and gently held it. Just that: Dora held his hand. Arthur felt himself raked, like the surface of a pond. Twenty-nine years, and he hadn’t once done this, held another woman’s hand; and yet people did it all the time, he knew; did it as if it were nothing. Arthur saw that she wore a watch with three gold hearts on either side of the face: one for each boy, and one for Sam. A gift: he knew this without asking. Mother’s Day? An anniversary? It was the kind of thing he might have bought for Miriam; it was merely an accident that he had not. Her hand was warm, and a little damp. She brushed the back of his hand with her thumb, once, and then she let it go.
And yet the moment felt frozen, as if neither of them could leave it, like a room without doors. She pulled her coat around herself a little; her eyes darted to the counter, where the women were smoking and talking (Arthur’s eyes followed; no, they had not seen), and then found Arthur’s again, squinting. “Well.” She tipped one shoulder and smiled uneasily. He realized only then that she hadn’t worn her glasses. It made her eyes seem very large. “Was that, you know, all right?”
He didn’t know, and also did. His mind had filled with a white emptiness, like a field of whirling snow—like forty feet of air. He heard himself say, “Yes.”
When was this? March, a year ago. Arthur, in his office, sips his coffee, now gone cold. At eleven-thirty he will pick Miriam up at the library, and together they will leave for New Hampshire. Through the spring and summer he and Dora continued to meet, at his office or hers, or for lunch, always in plain view and broad daylight, and always under the pretense of work she needed done: a quarrel with the town over parking at the clinic, an old tax matter of amazing density and frivolousness, a meaningless dispute with a neighbor over a drainage easement. How did I get on so long without a lawyer, she said, how did I ever manage without you? One matter would be settled and before the ink was dry she handed him a fresh folder of papers, bringing the two of them together in a continuous flow of trivial tasks like a chain of silk handkerchiefs pulled from a magician’s sleeve. Her pleased face said:
See what I’ve come up with?
Before this is over, she joked, I’m going to be your best client.
But what was
this
? And—the real question—why wasn’t he, Arthur—happily married Arthur—troubled by it, or troubled more? In the past he had imagined himself having an affair—everyone did, you couldn’t not
think
about it—but never like this, this affair that wasn’t, quite. They held hands, not even really holding; she would rub his shoulder when he said he was tired, or touch his cheek with one finger, quickly, when another person might have stopped her hand in the air before his face. Each time they were together it happened, this touching, but only once, and never anything more. Yet it was also true that he had come, in some way, to rely on it; it did something for him that nothing else did. It made him happy, there was that, to be touched by another for no reason. But something else: it was as if, in those instants, he ceased to be who he was. His whole life became a memory, and not even of his own. Whose, then? He had met Sam Auclaire once, he believed, at the high school maybe—a play? parents’ night?—or else merely seen him, striding out of the hardware store with a sack of nails in his hand, or driving his pickup, ladders lashed to a frame over the bed, through the streets of town. Arthur remembered a tall man, muscular, with curly blond hair gone an early, peppery gray. So that was his answer. Dora touched him, and the happiness he felt was not his own but Sam’s, at being so terribly missed.