What He's Poised to Do

I walked farther down the train, bought two small bottles of gin, and walked back up the train, and Lisa and I poured ourselves drinks and came back to the past. She had given me a story and so I gave her one in return. At forty I had thought I would remarry, but I lost the woman I loved—not to another man but to illness. At forty-five, I thought I would never remarry. At fifty, I met a woman in a downtown bar. I was with a man who fancied himself a poet. She was a dancer twenty years my junior, so beautiful she made me feel both too old and too young. I drank too much, as I always did in those days—“how else to ascend / the twin peaks of Truth and That Which Could Not Be Said?” as the poet had it—and I treated Mary, for that was her name, to a recitation that, I am ashamed to report, contained a rather lavish description of her physical charms. “It was as if my entire personality had its shirttails out,” I said.

“And how did she respond?”

“She married me,” I said. I put a twinkle in my eye.

“Wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.” She settled back into her seat. The train clacked along. I felt guilty for having lied. Or rather, for having told the truth without telling the whole truth. Mary was the kind of woman who was easily mortified. She had a distaste for confessionals, outsized announcements, and any other type of behavior in which decorum fell under the wheel. That day she had looked at me with dread and left the bar. She married me, but only after nine months of silence, and nine more months of begrudgingly cordial conversation. I was not restored to anything approaching amity until we had spent a chaste summer in the company of some friends on the Cape. Then came the romance, and the rigors, and the loss, and the retrenchment, and the courtship, and the comedy, and the declarations (mine) and the withdrawal (hers) and the reiteration of the declarations and the marriage.

I did not explain any of those things to Lisa. The past cannot learn from the present, no matter how much it aspires to. As we neared Delaware, I let the string of the conversation out to her. She was funny on the matter of her children, one of whom was adopted. She told me about vacationing out west when they were young and how the boys invented a game called “square-ball.” I helped her stand when the train came into the station. Her arm was frail beneath my fingers. Time had taken its toll on the young bodies we remembered using for disreputable ends.

HER HAND (Atlanta, 2015)