Page 16 - WTP XII #3

Hank drove with the windows open, one hand on the wheel, taking his time on the narrow, winding road. As the temperature dropped, late afternoon
sun filtered through the leafy trees, the heat wave of the past week finally breaking. Beside him, his wife, Catherine, tapped her right foot and belted out “Dock of the Bay” along with Otis. Every now and then she hit a wrong note or veered off key which made Hank wince, a response he hid with a grin. At the end of the song, she switched off the radio, put her hand on his knee and said, “Remember Connecticut?”
“How could I forget?”
“We were young and beautiful.” “I was never beautiful. Only you.”
On their third date, they’d snuck away from a tedious dinner party, driven down to the dock and slipped out of evening clothes to swim beneath a waning moon. Hank could still see their naked bodies lit by the glittering blue-green phosphorescent light. Now, after more years than he cared to remember, it was still a mystery to him how a short, pigeon-toed son of a construction worker had ended up with such a beautiful, talented woman. He glanced at his wife. Dressed in tight pants, a sleeveless black silk tunic and a pale celadon cashmere shawl, her long white hair swirled around her face and into her eyes in the rushing wind. She brushed it away.
“I can’t believe he’s turning sixty,” she said. “We’re getting old.”
They were on their way to Gene Sabatini’s birthday party, small and casual according to Beth, his wife.
No presents. You’ll know everyone, she’d promised, except for an old friend of Gene’s from Chicago who happened to be in New York with his wife and daugh- ter. Back in graduate school Gene had been Hank’s clinical supervisor at the clinic where he’d interned and now volunteered every Friday; over the years they’d become best friends.
Gene’s house was an old grey-shingled Cape with a lawn sloping down to the sea. They parked in the street so no one could block them, walked down the long drive and let themselves in. While Hank sneaked the bottle of Knob Creek bourbon he’d bought for Gene up to his office, Catherine went off to find Beth.
By the time he came down, Catherine was sitting on the pale yellow couch in the living room, her portrait of Beth on the wall behind her, talking to a woman Hank knew he ought to remember. Lousy with faces, and getting worse with age, he dreaded another awk- ward encounter with someone who remembered him but to him was a blank. He refused to check out his suspicion that he had a mild case of prosopagnosia as the possibility aroused in him a deep sense of shame and failure, especially as the husband of a success- ful visual artist. Embarrassed, he slipped off to find Gene.
“So how does it feel,” Hank asked, “being sixty?”
“Crazy. One second I’m thirty, the next I look in the mirror and think who the hell is that guy?”
“Better not to think about time, the merciless bas- tard. Not tonight.”
“At least you’ve still got a kid at home.”
“Not for long,” In a year, Luca, their youngest, would be off to college. “Next year’s your fortieth, if I re- member correctly.”
“Trust me, the birthday was easier. All I had to do was stay alive.”
Thirty years before, Beth had threatened to leave Gene because she’d found out he was sleeping with
a younger colleague. Years later, when Hank refused to have a third child and Catherine, in an act of fury, had had an affair with Sam Richardson, her paint- ing teacher, Hank never confessed to Gene how his own marriage had nearly ended, how Catherine’s infidelity rankled him and how difficult he found it to
9
The Last Child
SuSan WadSWoRth