Gillyflower Read online

  Our meals had arrived, and they sat there.

  “No,” Hugh said, shaking his great head almost sadly. “Look, Miss Forrest, you will probably add ‘insane’ to your list of adjectives descriptive of me, but I must tell you this anyway. I had a dream about you before I saw you the first time—at the play.”

  Whack. Concussion. The blow of the flatiron sent my head flying across the room. Everything I had imagined was true, and for Hugh too. Sweet Christ.

  “At the play?” I repeated, idiotically.

  “In the first row that Sunday afternoon, when you made me lose my balance. I wanted to kill you,” he said. He picked up a saltshaker and studied it. “I’m not sure I still don’t.”

  “And the drawing?” I said, yet more stupidly than before.

  “And the drawing made it clear to me that you had to be the woman in the first row. But the worst part of all was the dream.”

  “The dream,” I repeated.

  He did not appear to find my responses peculiar; I reminded myself he’d had a lot of experience with dialogue.

  “The night of my birthday, the night before you came to see The Lion’s Share, I had a strange dream. I dreamed I was up on the roof of a church—”

  “The church in that film,” I said.

  He looked at me with the very same look he’d given me in the theater; again it made my spine explode. “The church in that film,” he went on. “And I fell off the roof. . .”

  “And landed on the lawn. . .”

  “At your feet. And I looked up at you and. . .”

  “Felt lonely.” I didn’t realize I was going to say it.

  We stared at our plates. Hugh signaled for the waiter, who took away our untouched lunches, looking crestfallen. Hugh upended his bourbon into the glass of milk, downed most of it, offered me the rest (I drank it), took my hand, and headed for the door. All I allowed myself to think was that I was very hungry.

  18. Leon

  Possibly, I thought, I could learn to like Boston very much: it’s a city of walkable size, smaller than London, but with the same civilized, historical air, and the feel of being a sensible place where actual people lead actual lives. I suppose that’s rather ridiculous; one could say that my view of New York was warped by the fact that I’d only stayed in the best hotels and associated with the “upper classes” (America does have them, no matter what Americans say), and that might be true, but still, I liked what I’d seen of Boston. My memories of another visit, years before, had faded almost completely; that time our stay had been short and packed with tiring appointments. The hotel was very nice as well—not too big, not too ritzy (do pardon the pun), but dignified and extremely comfortable. I thought that if I ever really did take a vacation, I might come to Boston and really “do” the town.

  Anyway, Hugh and I were able to establish ourselves at the Ritz-Carlton by ten o’clock in the morning, and I sent out for a wonderful breakfast of fresh fruit, cereal, and spinach-filled croissants. I ate like a starving soldier: I was nervous already—also, I wanted to play for time, keeping Hugh in the room and occupied as long as possible. He was not much interested in breakfast, however; he played with the fruit for a while, assembling a series of still-lifes along the mantelpiece, then drank two coffees, a glass of milk, and a shot of straight bourbon from a little airline bottle he’d secreted in his pocket. He then, for some reason, had me send his shoes out for a shine, although they were in perfect condition. While he waited for them to be returned, he put on his great floppy slippers (his are the largest feet of any man alive) and lay down on the bed.

  “Leon,” he said, “do you think me handsome?”

  I looked at him with scorn. “Stop fishing for compliments.”

  “No, truly, Leon, what do you think?”

  “I think you’re bloody adorable,” I said, winking at him.

  He laughed. “Don’t try to steal a kiss,” he said, and threw a pillow at me.

  I laughed as well. It was an in-joke for us, from back in our navy days, when Hugh had bewitched the hideous and vile-tempered company laundress into doing up his considerable civilian wardrobe as well as his uniforms, a thing she was strictly forbidden to do by naval regulations. One day, quite late in the game, it finally dawned upon her that she was being used, and after giving him a proper tongue-lashing, she turned upon him in her wrath and said, quite inanely, “I’m warning you, Mr. Sheenan. Don’t try to steal a kiss.” It became the byword of the entire company.

  I wondered briefly if this would be one of Hugh’s increasingly frequent fear-of-aging days, but the hotel man came back with the shoes very quickly, and soon Hugh was ready to be off. It was nearly eleven o’clock. He began pacing.

  “I want to walk out in the sun,” he said. “Let’s hop it.”

  “Two things,” I told him. “One, there is no sun—it’s about to rain buckets. And two, you’ll be much more noticeable here than you are in New York. I thought you wanted to keep this visit quiet?”

  “Right as usual, old boy.” He sat down again. “But what shall we do till one?”

  I suggested a nap. My boiled-egg eyes were fast turning to stone.

  “No,” he said. “I want to do something. I wish to go shopping. I need a large hat. I really do, Leon; I have just the one in mind. But of course, you are right about going out now. I do not want to spend what’s left of the morning being interviewed by some puppy from a college newspaper.”

  “What kind of hat do you need?” I asked, sensing an errand I might send myself on so I could see a bit of the city. If I couldn’t take a nap, I’d as soon get out of the hotel. It was easy to see that Hugh was nervy about the luncheon with Miss Forrest and would probably become unbearable in a very short time.

  He lay back down on the bed, with his big feet on the pillows and his head hanging down a bit over the foot. He looked like a freakishly large marionette.

  “I’m thinking of a largish, soft, khaki-colored hat, with those little breathing-holes around the band, and I want the band to be brown and folded and on the thin side. Lots of stitching on the brim. No feathers or doodaddles. Rainproof, if possible. Able to be folded in the pocket. You know.”

  It didn’t sound as though it would be too hard to find. “I remember where some of the shops are from our last visit,” I lied, hoping that Hugh would believe my memory for such details could last so long. “Shall I go try to find you this hat?”

  I know now that Hugh must have been making a mighty effort to restrain his joy as I took his cunning bait and ran with it. “There’s really no need to bother,” he said nonchalantly, “if you’d rather stay here.”

  I told him I could use a breath of air, and as I took the lift down to street level I congratulated myself on my good fortune. I had made Hugh promise not to leave the suite before I returned, and he had done so with what seemed like sincere agreement, stating vehemently again that he did not wish to be “discovered.” I told him I’d be back in good time to ready him for his engagement. As was my habit, I scoured the room for contraband bottles before I left, but found nothing. Hugh appeared to be falling asleep when I closed the door.

  An hour and a half later, when I had become as thoroughly lost as Hugh must have known I would, I started to look for a cab. It had begun to rain quite hard. There were obviously only five or six cabs in the entire city of Boston, and these, when they did appear, ignored me with the greatest finesse. I asked directions of a policeman, who could not understand me, nor I him. He was speaking a Boston sort of English, I suppose, but I didn’t get it. I walked back six blocks to the shop where I’d purchased Hugh’s hat (I had found the perfect specimen, but only after trying a hundred places, though it was the kind of hat any respectable haberdasher in London would easily have been able to provide) and asked directions again, but this time I was given such a complicated set of instructions that my head began to ache in despair. A woman bystander suggested I take the “T,” or subway, and unleashed upon me the scenario for yet another imposs
ible journey. I could not abide the underground, in any case.

  By the time I found my savior—in the guise of a hippie-ish looking young man selling newspapers on a street corner, who gave perfectly simple and lucid directions in understandable, well-chosen words—it was clear to me that I would be late for lunch. And that Hugh had certainly planned it that way. I started to walk.

  As it happened, I was not really that far from the hotel, but by the time I found it, having circled and retraced my steps several times, it was a quarter after one. I was wet and angry and wanted nothing more than to repair to the suite for a wash and a change, but I was afraid I’d be needed in the dining room—though exactly for what I could not imagine. Hugh had made it plain that he did not want me to be present when Miss Forrest arrived, and while I could not really think what harm could come to either of them at a luncheon in a public dining room, a trusted little voice inside me told me I had to find them.

  I deposited my jacket and the dripping shopping bag containing Hugh’s hat at the coat-check and told the hostess in hushed tones that I’d like to have a drink at the bar before being seated a table. I chose a stool off to the darkest side of the bar, ordered some seltzer, and scanned the room by means of the large mirror facing me. I did not see Hugh at all at first, but then I noticed a long, ivory-colored leg extending out into the aisle near some gigantic plants. I moved a few seats to my left, and from there I was able to see them.

  There sat Hugh, like a great doltish child, with his hands in his lap, and across from him (I could only see her back, which was absurdly straight, as if she were practicing some kind of yoga posture) sat the mysterious Miss Forrest—in a pale-yellow dress, just as she’d promised to wear. Their plates sat in front of them, apparently untouched, and they appeared to be speaking very little. Suddenly Hugh threw some bills on the table, snatched up the woman’s hand, and propelled her out the door of the restaurant with breathtaking speed.

  My impulse, of course, was to follow, and so I did. Hugh left Miss F. in the foyer, fairly vaulted into a waiting lift, and was down again in a flash carrying his trench coat, my trench coat (I assumed for her), and a hat exactly like the one I had purchased a few hours earlier. Somehow, I reasoned, he’d taken possession of this hat within the last couple of days, and its description had popped into his mind when he was searching for an errand that would take me out of his way that morning. It was irritating, to say the least, but by that time I was too intrigued by the little drama opening before me to pay my irritation much mind. Hugh helped Miss F. into my coat (it did not do wonders for her), donned his own, bringing the collar well up around his face, pulled his blasted hat down as far as it would go, and left by the side door, arm in arm with his companion. It looked as if they were heading for the park, and I only hoped they would not step into the car we had hired, which was waiting at the curb outside the hotel. I wanted to shadow them at my leisure.

  19. Nora

  “Put this on,” said Hugh, wrapping me in a man’s raincoat that was, shall we say, a bit roomy, and at the same time stuffing his arms into an old battered trench I assumed was his own. The coat I was wearing could not possibly have been his: it was obviously meant for a much heavier man and came several inches below my knees—anything of Hugh’s would have dragged along the floor. He also produced a floppy sort of safari hat, tugged it down over his ears, and flipped up his coat collar all around so that only a bit of his face was showing.

  He looked me over and laughed. “Perfect,” he said. “Smashing.” He took my arm and steered me out the Arlington Street door, rushing me past the elderly doorman as if we were being chased by the hound of heaven.

  When Hugh had gone upstairs a few minutes before, “to fetch some things,” I’d stood in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in a state of perfect calm—or perfect insanity. I cannot say which. Standing there waiting for Hugh Sheenan did not seem like an abnormal thing to be doing. I did not feel nervous or upset at all. The conversation we’d had over the lunch we hadn’t eaten had shocked me while it was happening, but once what I privately referred to as “the thing” had been stated I’d felt the worst to be over. We were on equal terms at last; we both knew the score. And though neither of us understood what was happening—had been happening—to us, we were like two people on a scavenger hunt, both determined to gain possession of the same peculiar treasure and both in the grip of a manic and party-like mood.

  Even my embarrassment and my million insecurities seemed to have vanished. Although I had tried all day not to dwell on my appearance (which failed to reach anything remotely close to perfection, even on my best days), my first exposure to Hugh in the dining room had plunged me into an immediate depression. Next to him, I looked like what my mother would have called “something the cat dragged in.” I knew it shouldn’t matter, but it did. His charismatic presence was stupefying, and part of the anguish that had provoked me into tears so early in the conversation was probably simply that I felt so physically unworthy to be sitting there.

  I did not feel that way anymore, and it was glorious. I felt light and confident—like someone else, I thought, some happily unself-conscious being. I was afraid only that someone would recognize Hugh and force us to leave the small world we’d begun to create, even for a minute. As soon as he returned and put on his hat and coat I felt better: the only really noticeable thing about him then was his height, and people in Boston were not accustomed to scouting for celebrities anyway. Also, his being with me, an average-looking woman in a plain coat, made him less remarkable still. With any luck, I figured, we’d be left alone.

  We crossed Arlington Street and entered the Public Garden through one of the side gates, cut across the soggy grass, and started along one of the paths that traces the edge of the pond. Although the rain that had started while we were in the restaurant had all but ceased, there were only a few people about: some elderly Chinese people engaged in hypnotic tai chi, a few teenagers searching the trash bins for soda cans, the occasional mother and child-in-stroller.Nobody looked twice at us. Hugh was striding along at a terrible pace. I pulled on his arm.

  “Wait up,” I said. “Where’s the fire?”

  He stopped dead, looked at me, and laughed. “So sorry,” he said. “I don’t even know where we’re going. What is this place?”

  “This is the part of the Boston Common called the Public Garden,” I told him. “If we take this path”—I pointed away from the pond—“it might be a little more private.”

  “Just the ticket,” he said, and we walked that way, more slowly than before. Eventually, in fact, we slowed almost to a stop.

  “Miss Forrest,” Hugh said. “I find myself in a most unusual state: at a loss for words.”

  “You’d better call me Nora.”

  “And you’d better call me. . . something. You’ve yet to use my name. How about ‘You Old Fool’?”

  “Hugh.”

  “Good. Nora, we seem quite safe here.”

  I looked around. A gentle fog had descended. We were approaching a corner of the park, surrounded by dripping pine trees, that looked, in the misty afternoon light, like the one place in the world I’d always wanted to be. There was a long bench with a broken seat, and we went and sat upon it after Hugh made a huge show of wiping it down with his blue handkerchief, which he then held up to me, sopping wet. “No more weeping,” he said. “We have nothing with which to staunch the flow of waters.” He squeezed it out, wadded it up, and tossed it into a barrel.

  We sat about a foot and a half apart, turned toward each other. I still felt perfectly at ease, but my mind was as blank as a bathtub. I waited for him to speak—or not speak. I felt I could wait there all my life, perfectly content. Dim memories of my “real” life seemed to stand outside the park gates, looking in wistfully, like orphans outside a rich kid’s yard viewing a birthday party—a party complete with a delicious pony. A faint consciousness of city noises hovered behind me somewhere, just barely keeping me pinned to a material existence. B
ut I still felt so hungry that my stomach betrayed me and growled.

  20. Rick

  I stayed out late with Emil and Jack that night not because I was having an especially good time, but because I had picked up an unspoken message from Nora that she wanted to be alone. Maybe she didn’t know it herself, but I did. Things had been going very well for us ever since what I found myself calling her “recovery,” and I didn’t want to push my luck. She’d left me once, before we were married, because I’d fairly forced her to go—forced her by not stopping her from leaving—and when we’d gotten back together, some five years ago, I’d promised myself that I’d never let her go again. That is not to say that everything was perfect; when is it ever, and who would expect it to be? But I respected her silences, and her separateness, too much now to underestimate them. She, in her turn, trusted me with them, and that was a gift in and of itself. Nora is the kind who will give and give and give—of her own accord—and who only really desires not to be asked to give that most precious of gifts: an explanation of herself.

  It’s true that men don’t talk to each other much—straight men, anyway. At least that’s what I’ve observed. Oh, I mean, men talk, but they don’t say much about their feelings or relationships—that’s common knowledge, and true. Men gossip in their own way, but they draw the line much earlier than women do. When something really awful happens, and letting their friends know about it is unavoidable, men stick to the facts. Their buddies listen and shake their heads and offer a few well-meant but trite condolences or commiserations. A lot of back slapping goes on. Rarely does advice rear its ugly head, and women find that hard to understand. I’m generalizing, of course, but still, on the whole, it’s all true. And as I sat in Barney’s with Jack and Emil, two dear old friends for whom I’d easily give an arm and a leg, I felt for once so bogged down in their inarticulate camaraderie I was close to screaming. It was just one of those nights; there was nothing particularly wrong, but I missed my Nora. I wanted to hold her in my arms and lie on our old couch in the moonlight with some kind of wordless music on the stereo and listen to her talk and talk and talk. I wanted to talk to her too. I wanted to tell her all the things I’d never told her, to open my soul to her and have her neaten it up, the way the mother did to the children’s minds in Peter Pan when she sorted out all their thoughts and dreams. It was a crazy kind of night; I remember wondering if there was a full moon or something.