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

last.
    ----
    — He was good to you?
    — Very. I can’t imagine what would have happened, what I’d have become.
    — Because of me.
    — Well. Yes. And me as well.
    — I used to live in Cambridge,
Thomas said.
On Irving Street. Years later, though.
    — I didn’t know that.
    She wondered how often she had walked along that street, which large house he’d lived in. She was leaning against the ferry’s bulkhead, watching the northern city slip away. Wind whipped her hair, which stung her face, and she turned her head to free it. She wore, as she did almost every day that didn’t require something more inspired, a white shirt and a pair of jeans. And today the raincoat, buttoned against the breezes. Thomas still had on his navy blazer, as if he’d slept in it. He had called before she was even awake, afraid, he’d said, that she’d go off for the day and he wouldn’t be able to find her. Would she like to take a ferry ride to an island in the lake? Yes, she said, she thought she would. She boldly asked him why he hadn’t come to her reading.
    — It was unnerving seeing you sitting there at mine. It’s always harder when someone you know is in the audience. I thought to spare you that.
    And in this, he was, of course, correct.
    — Your work,
she said on the ferry.
I don’t know when I’ve ever heard . . .
    Thomas wore an expression she herself had sometimes felt: pleasure imperfectly masked by modesty.
    — Your work will be taught in classrooms in a decade,
she added.
Maybe less. I’m sure of it.
    She turned away, letting him have the pleasure without her scrutiny.
    — Why do you call them “The Magdalene Poems?”
she asked after a time.
    He hesitated.
You must know why.
    Of course she knew and wished she hadn’t asked. For the asking invited confidences and memories she didn’t want.
You spell it Magdalene,
she said.
With the
e.
    — That’s the way it’s spelled in the Bible. But often it’s spelled Magdalen without the
e.
There are many versions of the name: Magdala, Madeleine, Mary Magdala. Did you know that Proust’s madeleines were named after her?
    — You’ve been working on the poems a long time.
    — I had to let them go. After Africa.
    There was an awkward silence between them.
    — They transcend any subject,
she said quickly.
Good poetry always does.
    — It’s a myth, her being a fallen woman. They thought that only because the first mention of her follows immediately the mention of a fallen woman.
    — In the Bible, you mean.
    — Yes. It hardly matters. It’s the myth we care about.
    — And they were lovers?
    — Jesus and Mary Magdalene? “She administered to Him of her substance,” the Bible says. I’d like to think they were. But the farthest most scholars are willing to go is to say that she let Him be who He was as a man. Seems code to me for sex.
    — And why not?
she mused.
    — All we really know of her is that she was simply a woman not identified as being either a wife or a mother — interesting in itself. And, actually, she’s touted now as being her own person. A woman important enough for Jesus to consider a sort of disciple. Important enough to be the first to carry the message of the Resurrection. That’s the feminist interpretation, anyway.
    — What was the reference to the seven devils?
    — Intriguing to speculate. Luke says, “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out.” We don’t know. Was she afflicted with a malady such as epilepsy? Was it an emotional or spiritual or psychological malaise from which she needed respite? Was she simply mad?
    — Your poems are exquisite in any event.
    On the port side, Linda saw Robert Seizek grasping the rails as if he were the captain of the ship. Perhaps he was studying the horizon as people do who are about to be seasick. She doubted he would remember his reading the night before, or even that she had been there. On the ferry’s benches there were teenagers, underdressed for the outing, small