The Lovers

Prose 6 of chapter 3

Clouds on the brink by Mary Tabor

He knew that courting her, if what he was doing could be called that, was courting disaster because he knew it was love at first sight. But she’d never buy that and he was lousy on the follow-through—he didn’t think he could ever leave Evan. He said, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He decided to talk about what he knew, the potting shed with its metal roof where he stored his garden tools, where Evan started her herbs, that he’d built behind the house. He pulled a screw from his pocket. “Do you know what this is? It’s a sheet-rock screw or dry-wall screw. A self-drilling screw, doesn’t need a pre-drilled hole, even into metal studs.” He said he was considering a greenhouse or perhaps espaliered apple trees, told her how he’d place the stakes near a wall so the warmth of the wall would make the trees grow faster.

She took the screw from his narrow fingers, his nails, clean and pared, his skin dry from his work on his garden, and rolled it in her palm, saved it like a memory, for later—the house they would never live in together, the roof he would never fix for her, for them, the silly gazebo that they both would find frivolous and unnecessary but want anyway out in the rose garden with all the varieties they would choose together, standing hip against hip in the nursery trying to decide which colors would blend with which. Should they go with shades of dusty rose? Remember those old English roses we saw growing in California?

But they hadn’t been to California together. She’d been there with me.

They would decide on ‘Fair Bianca,’ ‘Bredonne,’ ‘English Garden,’ and ‘Abraham Darby.’ And right in the center he would build that foolish gazebo, and they would sit among their roses and drink tea on cool afternoons, wine in the sultry dusk and talk about how they’d chosen just that color from the sunset in that rose with its full head of open petals leaning over the rail. How they’d known the sun would set just that way, how they’d guessed the colors from the sky. They would look up at the gazebo’s roof and remember where he’d had trouble with one ornery sheet rock screw that wouldn’t sit exactly right, how he’d had to take it out again and again.

All the things they would never do.

She placed the odd screw in the zippered pocket of her purse.

In this way, I suppose, she saved all the things she knew they’d never share, things he shared with Evan. Evan, who’s been betrayed like me.

Lena would want to get out of their house. “Isaac, I should go. Evan wouldn’t understand why I was here so early. We shouldn’t have come here. Why did you bring me here? I think you do want to get caught.”

“Oh, sure that’s me, the guy who lives dangerously. Makes me attractive, don’t you think?”

“You know, maybe, maybe not.” She stood up. “Come on, let me go.” He had her hand. She had her car keys out. She nudged him with the keys, “You may like living dangerously, but I don’t.”

“To the extent that we are, we’re safe.”

“Oh, getting philosophical on me, are you?”

“Who me?” he said. “Gimme those keys.”

“No way.”

She understood that he didn’t mean To the extent that we’re about to be caught or choose to live dangerously. She knew what he’d said was code for what he believed and had told her many times: “While nothing is forever, to the extent it can be, we are.” But she’d resisted his reasoning, said, “If nothing is forever, there is no can be, no extenuating circumstances could make that so.” And so she said now, “Then we’re not safe.”

Next: Prose 7 of "The Lovers" Chapter three

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Love,