The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online

necessary as the Valium she kept on hand in the medicine cabinet (the Valium an unexpected boon in the aftermath of Emergency).
    She was a decent teacher, and sometimes others said so (
I’m told your classes are; You are my favorite
), but it seemed a shriveled life all the same. She supposed there were events that impinged upon her consciousness. Later she would recall that she had been a Marxist for a month and that there had been a man, political and insistent, to whom she had made love in a basement room and with whom she’d developed a taste for marijuana that hadn’t gone away until Maria. And for a time she would own a remarkable set of oil paints in a wooden box, a reminder of an attempt to lose herself on canvas. Oddly, she did not put pen to paper, afraid of conflagration, as if the paper itself were flinty.
    But mostly she walked alone, down Massachusetts Avenue and onto Irving Street. Along the Charles and to Porter Square. On Saturdays, she walked to Somerville or to the Fenway. She had no destination, the walking destination itself, and sometimes, when it was very bad, she counted rhythmically, the closest she ever came to chanting a mantra. What impressed her most was the endurance of the suffering: it seemed unlikely that one should mind another’s loss so much. It was shameful to go on at length, she knew, even in the privacy of one’s mind, about personal disasters when so many truly were abused. (More shameful still that news of Entebbe or rioting ghettos put suffering in perspective for only moments at a time, the self needing to return to self; and sometimes news of battles, both foreign and domestic, made the suffering worse: one longed, after all, for someone with whom to share these bulletins from hell.)
    On a day in September — there had been months of walking — Linda entered a café in which wooden tables had been set perpendicular to a counter with a glass encasement of sweets. She ordered coffee and a peanut-butter cookie, lunch having along the way been missed, and brought them to her table, where she had laid out grids for lesson plans. It eased the tedium of the job to work in a café, and for a time she lost herself in the explicated themes of
Ethan Frome
and
The Glass Menagerie.
Outside, the sun had warmed the brick but not the people who practiced hunching into their jackets in anticipation of winter. A commotion in a corner claimed her attention, willing to be claimed. A woman with two poodles had set them improbably in booster seats on chairs and was feeding them bits of expensive macaroons from the glass case. She spoke to them as a mother might to toddlers, wiping snouts with a lacy handkerchief and gently scolding one for being greedy.
    Linda watched the scene, incredulous.
    — She’ll keep their ashes in the cookie jar,
a voice behind her said.
    Linda turned to see a man with vivid features and eyebrows as thick as pelts. A wry expression lay easily on his face. A cosmic laugh — unfettered, releasing months of grim remorse — bubbled up inside her and broke the surface. A sheaf of papers fell off the table, and she tried to catch them. She put a hand to her chest, helpless.
    There were introductions, the cosmic laugh petering out in small bursts she could not control. The laughing itself was contagious, and the man chuckled from time to time. She put a hand to her mouth, and the girl behind the counter said,
What’s so funny?
One of them moved to the other’s table (later they would argue who), and Vincent said, apropos the cosmic laugh,
You needed that.
    He had wide brown eyes and smooth skin tanned from some exercise or trip away. His hair was glossy, like that of an animal with a healthy coat.
    Turning, her foot bumped the table pedestal, causing coffee to spill onto his polished shoe. She bent to wipe it off with a paper napkin.
    — Careful,
he said to her.
I’m easily aroused.
    She looked up and smiled. As easily as that. And felt another tide come for her at