Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

46. Thursday

Thursday

Will there be a time when I see Gabriel’s face and don’t feel this lurching vertigo at how beautiful he is or, at least, how beautiful he is to me? When he doesn’t rush into the hall at the sound of the front door closing behind me? Doesn’t take me into his arms and kiss me as if we’ve parted for months rather than just one night? When I don’t feel so choked with love, with lust, I am unable to speak? When will our passion, which has been so fierce in its reigniting, begin to diminish?

We seize each other, on this our fourth day as lovers, and do not even make it upstairs, clothes strewn on the parquet floor, the chandelier dazzling above me, our lovemaking fast and reckless this time. Afterward I show Gabriel the red mark where the edge of the bottom stair had pressed into my lower back so painfully I almost had to stop. Almost but not quite. Gabriel reaches down to kiss the mark, which will bloom to a bruise in a day or so.

“Why didn’t you say?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

He laughs. “No, it wasn’t. But I never want to hurt you. So you have to tell me.”

It is warm today and we decide to spend our free hours at the lake. It is foolish to risk being seen outside with Gabriel in broad daylight, particularly after yesterday’s intrusion from the journalist, but I do it anyway. I wonder if I take these risks because I long for it to be over, whatever that might mean. But, perhaps, it is simply that we are chasing the ghosts of before, the girl and boy who once spent a whole summer by this lake.

We spread out the old blue picnic rug, the same one from the day I met Gabriel.

“Do you remember that first afternoon?” I ask.

“Of course I do. I thought you were the rudest, most infuriating, completely dazzling girl I’d ever met.”

“You were the one who was rude. You told me to get off your land.”

“God, I was insufferable. And dressed like an old-age pensioner. No wonder you loathed me on sight.”

“You managed to win me around pretty quickly.”

We smile at each other, remembering. I realize it’s the first time I’ve been able to look back to those days without pain. That’s what the love affair has done, it’s softened our beginning into the thing it actually was, a giddying, vertiginous melding of two selves. For a short while, we understood what it was like to be each other. We could read a silence with forensic expertise, always asking the right next question so there was never a need for secrets. Nothing that could not be shared. No wonder neither of us could fully recover from it. No wonder we had to return.

For a few hours we have no one to please but ourselves. And we have this lake, this enchanting picture-book lake, where once upon a time, it all began.

We are both watching when a skylark soars above the water in a perfect, show-off vertical. And I know our thoughts are running as one, the way they always used to, when Gabriel says: “I’d happily take this as my forever.”

When it’s time for me to fetch Leo, Gabriel says he will do it instead. “Stay here, enjoy the sun,” he says, leaning over to kiss me. “I don’t pick him up from school often enough.”

We both know there is no question we could risk being seen in the playground together.

While Gabriel is gone I sit up and stare out at our lake, my mind transported to another time. As a teenage girl I did nothing but daydream. Now I find myself immersed once more as I imagine the life we might have had if our relationship had not foundered.

See us here in Oxford, a pair of clever undergraduates with the world at their feet. Walking hand in hand through moonlit streets, pausing to kiss in a cobbled alley. Punting on the river, Gabriel in a straw boater, me trailing my hand through the water. Writing papers side by side in the Bodleian Library. At night, Gabriel reading from his novel, waiting anxiously for my opinion. Me showing him my poems. The writer’s life I craved once upon a time, and secretly still do. Gabriel’s first novel being published, the two of us drinking champagne, dazed with joy and incredulous that the thing he had always wanted had actually happened. Later, an anthology of poems for me, Gabriel looking on as I read aloud to an enraptured audience. The two of us as parents, do I dare imagine that? Gabriel and me with our own little boy. My heart throbs at the vision of the family we might have been and, when Leo calls my name and I turn to see father and son walking toward me, I am shocked. As if I have dreamed them into existence.

“We are having a picnic,” Leo says, placing a wicker basket next to me on the rug. “You’ve got wine, I’m having Ribena.”

“Pretty much the same thing,” I tell him, and Leo laughs.

He begins to unpack the basket. Sliced ham, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, a little jam jar of French dressing. Echoes of that first moonlit dinner long ago.

“Leo suggested it. Good idea, wasn’t it?” Gabriel says, smiling at me.

I nod and quickly look away, worried Leo will pick up on something if we gaze at each other for too long. Every day it becomes harder to detach from my lover and shrug back into the role of Leo’s carer.

Gabriel uncorks the wine and pours it into two glasses, another wineglass for Leo’s Ribena that they have diluted at home.

“Cheers,” Leo says, raising his glass and taking enthusiastic gulps of his drink.

We smile at him, Gabriel and I, like a pair of indulgent parents.

It is a perfect afternoon, the sun still hot beneath a cloudless sky. We take off our shoes and socks and sit at the edge of the lake cooling our feet in its silvery shadows.

Leo lists the birds he can recognize by sound—lapwing, swallow, blackbird, and then, faintly from the woods, an owl announcing the fading of our afternoon.

“Can you teach me?” Gabriel says.

I sit there, face upturned to the sun, opening my eyes from time to time to check on father and son as they listen intently to the cries of wildlife, dark heads bent toward each other. “I love it when you’re not working, Dad,” Leo says, and Gabriel wraps an arm around his shoulder.

“So do I. We should do this more often.”

“It’s the best,” Leo says, swiveling his head from Gabriel to me. “Isn’t it?”

“It is,” Gabriel says, with more feeling than should really be allowed.

“It is,” I say, quietly.