The Lovers
Prose 4 of chapter 3
He knocked on Lena’s open door. “Come on, let’s get out of here. How about a drive somewhere?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Out of the traffic, a drive into the country. Didn’t you do that when you were a kid? Go for a drive?”
“We’d do it on summer evenings,” she said. “Drive out for Breyers ice cream. My mother always had butter pecan.”
“What did you have?”
“In those days, mint chocolate chip.”
“So, you want ice cream?” he asked.
“No, coffee.”
“We always have coffee.”
“I can count on that.” She needed someone she could count on.
They took her car because he’d taken the subway to the office, and when they saw a Starbucks, he pulled up to the curb while she went in and bought the steaming cappuccinos they sipped through the plastic covers. He drove to where he wanted to be, his farm.
She would have questioned him, “We’re getting awfully close to the farm.”
“We’ll be alone,” he said, “I don’t want the rigmarole of a hotel. It’s too late in the afternoon for that, anyway.”
Sitting on the loveseat in his house, she would ask because Evan would be home soon, “You trying to get caught?”
“Right, the coffee crime.” He offered his coffee-filled paper cup in the gesture of a toast that she met with hers in a silent clink.
“I’m mad, or dreaming, and you know about me and dreaming.”
“You know you’ve got me saying that now? That quote. You quote when you’re upset.”
“More like misquoting. This probably wasn’t such a good idea, coming here.”
“It’s fine. You’ll be on your way soon.”
“So, we pretend.”
“I’m not pretending. I just wanted to be alone with you. You trying to ruin it?”
“Or forget everything like drinking from a river in hell.”
“Oh yeah, sure. Let’s do that. Quoting again, huh? Never mind. Okay, I’ll play. And what happens when you do that?”
“You forget your life.”
“All of it?”
“It’s like bang, you’re dead.”
“And everything’s gone?”
She nodded. But what she must have been thinking was that he’d somehow managed to forget how she’d loved him, given herself to him, when she’d turned thirty, when they first met, how he’d ended things, didn’t call her anymore. Of course, he was married. She’d known that. He didn’t want to talk about what he referred to as “all that,” and I can hear him saying, “Let’s just call it our stock market correction,” and that was that.
But what did either of them know about financial markets? Zilch.
***
I am like the skull that grins in at the banquet—the only way I can know who I was—because as you must know by now, their story is my story.
Next: prose 5 of chapter 3
Table of Contents
Love,
The coffee crime. Wow, that has to hit some buried memory in everyone.
Mary, your dialogue sounds so alive! Is it from your memoir [Re]Making Love? I ordered it, so will be reading soon. Or is it a new novel? Sorry for question, I still can't get used to my new reality with Substack and continue my discoveries. Great!