24. Walter
Walter
TWO DAYS BEFORE THE PRESCOTT-SCHAFER WEDDING
FLEURAC, France—Walter spent the bus ride listening to Corinne explain the differences between the cave art at Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume, and today’s destination, Rouffignac, to a distracted Hildy, who kept glancing back to see if he was eavesdropping.
The notes he pretended to take were mostly scribbles, with the express purpose of winding her up.
The friendship between Hildy and Corinne had always intrigued him.
At first, he assumed it was a purely business relationship, but that didn’t account for their sibling-like bickering: quick with an insult but unmistakably bonded by loyalty.
He’d tried asking Corinne about it once, but she immediately shut him down.
“The last thing you fools need is a go-between. Talk to her yourself.”
It had taken a few years for Walter to realize she was right. Better late than never—or so he hoped. And now that Hildy had to pretend they were chummy, the opportunity seemed ripe for a semiprivate conversation.
Walter let the rest of the group filter past while he waited for Hildy. She seemed to be stuck on the pavement outside the stone overhang that marked the entrance to the cave. He suspected she needed a little encouragement to take the final few steps into the dark.
“Do you want to hold my hand?”
“In your dreams.” She marched past him, not stopping until they reached the mostly full open-air train waiting to carry them deeper into the cave.
“Looks like we’re in the back row.” Walter didn’t pretend to be disappointed.
“How convenient.” Her smile said hip hip hooray! The look in her eyes added a silent I know you planned this.
He climbed in after her, sliding across the bench seat until he was in whispering distance. “Read any good books lately?”
“We don’t need to chitchat,” she hissed. “This is an important cultural attraction.”
“Yeah, I got the rundown on the bus.”
“I knew you were spying!”
“Somebody had to pay attention. Corinne put a lot of work into that PowerPoint.”
“I was listening.” She cleared her throat, as though the lie left a bad taste in her mouth. “Mostly.”
“Then you know we’re going to be stuck here a while.”
“What do you mean, stuck? Is something wrong?” Her shoulder bumped his as she whipped around, trying to see into the darkness behind them. “Does this thing not reverse?”
He put a hand on her arm. “We’re fine. I just meant the tour is going to last a while. We don’t have to sit here in silence.”
“You really want to know about my reading habits?”
“Not necessarily.” He was playing it cool, when the truth was that Walter was hungry for any scraps of information Hildy might choose to share. Was she in a book club? Did she have a preferred genre? “I figured I should ease into the heavy stuff.”
“What heavy stuff?” she asked, suspicion dripping from every word.
“Just—mature and honest grown-up talk. Since you can’t run away this time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The last time I tried to have a serious conversation, you panicked.”
“Nope,” she said, after a pointed pause. “Still not getting it.”
“When I came to your office.”
Her huff of disbelief fanned the side of his face. “That is not what happened.”
“Explain it to me then.”
“You showed up at my place of work to taunt me about your fancy new job—”
“No, I came to tell you about it,” he interrupted. “I thought we could go to dinner and clear the air.”
There was a thinking silence. “What do you mean, go to dinner? Like a business dinner?”
“No, like Lady and the Tramp, nudging a meatball back and forth with our noses while someone plays violin.”
“Are you calling me a tramp?”
“Uh, no. Obviously you’re Lady.”
“That’s a little reductive.”
“Fine. You can be the tramp. Happy now?”
“Ecstatic. Never better.”
The guide chose that moment to speak over the PA system in heavily accented English. “We are entering one of the longest cave systems in the region. You will be traveling more than one kilometer deep into the center of the cave.”
Hildy elbowed him. “How far is that? I’m too freaked out to do metric conversions.”
“Think of it like … a walk in the park,” Walter replied, evading the question.
“But what if the train breaks down? This thing is a relic.”
“Then we’ll walk out.”
She paused as if he’d said something so outrageous it defied belief. “In the dark?”
“We have our phones.”
“Until the battery dies. Maybe I should have had the drugs,” she muttered, as the train resumed its forward crawl.
“I missed that station at breakfast.”
“Like the shamans used to do back in the day. Get high and imagine they were visiting an alternate dimension with their trippy art. As opposed to being buried under tons of rock in the pitch blackness.”
“Want me to distract you?”
“Maybe,” she said following a wary silence. “What did you have in mind?”
“The offer of conversation is still on the table.”
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Unless you have a better idea?” They were practically invisible here in the back row, after all. He could be quiet if the occasion demanded.
“Do you see those lines?” their guide asked.
The beam of a flashlight illuminated the stone wall.
“Cave bears left those scratches with their claws. It’s like a map for them, to find their way back to the place where they spend each winter.
” The pool of light panned down to the ground.
“Regard the depression in the earth. That is left from a cave bear doing hibernation there.”
They passed a campground’s worth of prehistoric sleeping spots, beneath walls scored with deep vertical grooves that looked surprisingly fresh, as if the bears might return any day now.
“That’s what you did to me.” The thought traveled from Walter’s brain to his lips before he could censor himself.
“Flattened you with my huge ass?”
“Carved a permanent hollow.” He touched his chest, where the damage had been done. “A Hildy-shaped hole.” It seemed so clear to him now, that he’d never gotten over the impact of their first meeting.
“Are you drunk?”
He shook his head, then remembered she couldn’t see him. “No.”
“Then why would you say something like that?”
Because it’s dark, and we’re far away from everything we know, and I can’t stop thinking about kissing you, and I’m enough of a chump to convince myself our problems could be solved here and now, even though they’re littered like landmines across the last decade.
That about summed it up.
It seemed fitting to seize this moment, on a train that was literally taking them back in time. He’d always been a sucker for a metaphor. It was an occupational hazard when your entire career was devoted to seeking out the narrative arcs in other people’s lives.
“I think I might be having a revelation,” he said.
“Right now?”
“I didn’t schedule it in advance.”
“We’re in a cave, Walter.”
“So? Maybe it’s like a sensory deprivation chamber, focusing my understanding.”
She shoved him in the arm. “You do read my magazine! I knew it.”
“Occasionally.” Once a month, to be exact. From cover to cover.
“What is this so-called revelation about?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you.”
“If you can handle it, I can handle it.”
That was the rub: Walter wasn’t sure he could handle exposing his tender insides to Hildy, without any clue how she was going to respond.
He’d always known his anger with her was like a potholder he’d grabbed to keep from getting burned.
It made a flimsy barrier between his conscious mind and a deeper truth, which was that his feelings about Hildy were more complicated than rivalry and resentment.
Those other emotions had spilled over behind the coatrack, making Walter think he and Hildy might be on the same page, if they dug deep enough.
Only now, when it was too late to salvage his dignity, did it occur to him that he could have been deluding himself.
Maybe for Hildy it was simple: Walter was a stone in her path, to be stepped on or kicked aside as the occasion required.
What was the saying? When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
The problem was that he didn’t know which Hildy was real. Was she the impossibly charming girl who’d wrapped him around her little finger from their first hello, or the schemer who’d stabbed him in the back without a second thought? Talk about being in the dark.
“Just—forget it,” he mumbled.
“Oh, sure. No problem. You can lob a grenade at me, and I’ll pretend it never happened. That seems fair.” She shifted away from him. “I don’t understand you.”
“Join the club.” He could almost hear her frowning as she puzzled over that remark.
“Is this about the story?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you trying to soften me up?” she hissed, as if he were being deliberately obtuse.
“Soften you up for what?”
“Maybe you think I’ll just give it to you. The article,” she added, as if realizing how easily her words could be misconstrued.
“That would be a turnaround.”
“Excuse me?” Her tone made the chilly temperature inside the cave feel like a sauna. “What are you trying to do right now, Walter?”
It was a valid question. He wasn’t sure he had a good answer. “Turn back time?”
“Hate to break it to you, Cher, but that’s not possible. Take it from a woman who runs a lifestyle magazine. I am fully versed in all things antiaging.”
She was right, of course. They could never be that innocent again. Maybe the best he could hope for was to draw a curtain over the thornier parts of their past. Instead of forgiving and forgetting they could repress and compartmentalize. That sounded healthy.
The train trundled on, traveling deeper into the damp darkness.
Between the sensory deprivation and the strangeness of the experience—the closest comparison Walter could think of was Space Mountain meets The Flintstones—there was a loopy unreality to the experience.
France, the cave, a rickety retro train, the blanketing darkness, a silence broken only by the occasional contribution from their guide.
It turned out you didn’t need the drugs to cut loose.