Bob
bob
Blythe and had met when they were twenty-two years old and fresh out of college. They had thought they were so old, and they’d been so young.
Blythe had grown up in Arlington, Massachusetts, the only child of a physician and a high school teacher. Her parents were older than most parents, and she had no siblings or cousins. She did have books and an imagination and mornings at preschool, which she enjoyed so much that at home she practiced teaching, putting all her dolls and stuffed animals in a row and standing in front of them, lecturing them about everything she knew and much she invented. Her parents told her that was when they knew she’d grow up to be a teacher.
She was happiest when they visited her Nantucket grandparents, who let her sleep in her magic room and allowed her free range in an attic packed with trunks of old clothes. If it rained, Blythe would lie on the chintz sofa in the living room, and when she came upon a thought she wanted to consider, she’d gaze at one of the gold-framed paintings of fruit in a bowl or a ship in a stormy sea, or two little girls in white dresses and pink sashes. She knew this was an old-fashioned house in which she was living old-fashioned summers, and she cherished them for the respite they gave her, the peace of being only herself.
As a teenager, she became more social. She made friends, played tennis, learned to sail, attended movies, especially frightening ones where she screamed as loudly as the other girls in the row of seats. During her last two years of high school, she learned to sneak down the back stairs to the kitchen door where she could leave and enter without her grandparents’ knowledge. When she was a junior and senior in high school, her world revolved around Aaden. When would she see him next? How could she abide living on an island so far away from him? Light was no longer magic. Only Aaden was magic.
When Aaden left for Ireland for good, everything changed.
Blythe was so heartbroken, so destroyed, she couldn’t leave her room. She wanted to lie face down in her bed and die.
Her parents, impatient with her depression, sent her to Nantucket for the summer. She took a job working for a children’s summer camp, and slowly, the campers’ joy in each day woke the joy she’d thought she’d lost forever. The children swam, built sandcastles, climbed monkey bars, and went screaming down slides. They fingerpainted terrible pictures of dogs and cats and thought they’d produced masterpieces. They fought one another and made up, snubbed one another and became best friends, built entire villages out of sand and jumped up and down, destroying the villages, laughing maniacally. They thought Blythe was the most beautiful creature who had ever lived. They wanted to sit on her lap, squeeze next to her when she read a story, ask her to braid their hair. Carla, the other counselor, said, “You really have a special knack with kids.”
Blythe thought about this a moment, then said, “Yes. Yes, I do.”
She’d always remember Carla and how one kind word from an acquaintance had shone light on the path she hadn’t even known was there, a path she wanted to follow all her life.
When she left the island to start her freshman year at college, she knew she was stronger than she’d ever been. She’d learned that love wasn’t only something between two people, but like wind, invisible, uncontrollable, everywhere, and full of surprises.
She attended UMass Amherst and made good, if not spectacular grades, majoring in secondary education. She dated and flirted but didn’t get involved seriously with anyone. As the months passed, she became more and more interested in the skills and arts of teaching. Her grandparents had left the Nantucket house to her, and Blythe knew that was love, too. The year she graduated from college, her parents told her they were planning to eventually move to Arizona for her mother’s arthritis. Arizona was beautiful, they told her. She should come visit, and maybe she’d want to live there for a while. Blythe had told them maybe. Someday.
In late May, Blythe went to a fabulous, celebratory graduation party at the home of a classmate whose uncle had been governor of Massachusetts. The house was a massive brick mansion with an enormous backyard surrounded by tall, velvety spruce trees, making it its own little world. The tables held glittering bottles of gin, vodka, and champagne and platters of finger food. It was spring, and the night was starry. In the library, a three-piece band played dance music.
Blythe attended the party with several of her friends, all of them wearing their sexiest clothes and layers of makeup. They’d drunk champagne as they were getting ready and had taken a cab to the party because they knew they would be too tipsy from alcohol and freedom to drive home.
Blythe roamed through the enormous, sparkling house, chatting with strangers, munching caviar, and sipping champagne. The rooms were filled with laughing, hugging, yelling, kissing young people, with unruly thatches of thick hair and bright eyes and strong bodies, all emanating a luxuriant glow of health and hope. This was her tribe, she thought, and graduates in parties like this all over the country belonged to this tribe, and they were brave and good and eager. They were going to rule the world.
The world on this side of the Atlantic.
She’d heard from Aaden many times during her first year, always by email. He was studying business management at Trinity in Dublin. He spent holidays with his family at their grandparents’ home in Kerry. He sent photos of waves crashing against cliffs and castles on high hills. For the first few months, Blythe didn’t answer. It hurt too much to think of him, but she still sat in front of her computer, studying his pictures, missing him, loving him, hating him. By their sophomore year, his emails were less frequent, and by their junior year of college, Aaden stopped sending pictures or emails.
What a bullshit artist, Blythe decided. One night, weeping, she deleted every mention of Aaden from her files. She couldn’t imagine ever finding love again.
Her thoughts had pierced the happiness she felt that night at the dazzling party.
“Stop this now!” she told herself.
A couple involved in a serious conversation turned their backs on her.
“Sorry,” she told them.
She forced herself through the crowds and out onto the back patio, where she collapsed in a lawn chair with deeply soft cushions. Laying her head back, she gazed at the billions of stars and wondered where Aaden was at this very moment.
“May I join you?”
She focused her eyes and saw a handsome stranger in a tux smiling at her.
“Of course.” She waved her hand carelessly at the nearest chair.
was starting law school in the fall. He’d scored 170 on his LSAT, partly because his father was a lawyer who talked law constantly at the dinner table. Later, when they were on the verge of divorce, Blythe had reminded him that at their first meeting the first fact he told her about himself was his score on his LSAT.
Back then, in the beginning, Blythe had found herself charmed by this handsome, intelligent, and possibly insecure man—wasn’t blurting out his score numbers a sign of insecurity?
“I can’t remember any of my scores,” she’d said. Then, thinking she was absolutely hilarious, she’d said, “I can remember my name. I’m Blythe Anderson.”
had slid a patio chair around to face her. “Beautiful name, Blythe. Unusual. I’m Benedict.”
“And our favorite band is the B-52s,” Blythe joked.
They’d sat out in the sweet spring evening, talking and laughing as the moon rose and the night began, while dozens of other celebrants danced and swayed out on the patio. Two men in tuxedos dove into the swimming pool. Two women in elegant dresses were tossed, squealing and laughing, into the water, and an extremely tall, slender man stood on the diving board and orated a passage of poetry. “Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly.” People cheered and clapped and other men began singing foolish drunken frat songs.
“That poem is by Langston Hughes,” Blythe told . She wanted to tell him that poem would be woven into her classes when she taught seventh-grade English.
“Nice,” had responded, clearly not impressed with the poet or his poetry.
Aaden would have known the poet’s name. He could have recited those words from memory.
But Aaden was gone, and Blythe was determined to move on. Langston Hughes could not be a deal-breaker, especially with a man this charming, intelligent, and handsome. She felt no heart-stopping chemistry with him, but that was a relief, a life buoy tossed into the unsettled sea of her life.
They’d talked past midnight, discussing everything in their worlds, parents, old schools, old friends, but especially plans for the future, hopes for the future, and how it felt that they were finally grown-ups, adults, even though they’d reached the legal adult age of twenty-one a year ago. When they discovered they both had connections to Nantucket, they were elated. It was as if the world was beginning, because they were beginning, and Blythe sensed a bond with because they were there, in that place, at the starting line together, that night.
That first evening, when most of the celebrants had left, they remained on the patio, and as the night grew dark and cool, they finally spoke about their broken hearts. Blythe told about Aaden, and told Blythe about Ginger, the girl who’d left him during his last semester of high school. He showed her a picture of Ginger. He still carried one in his wallet. She was very pretty, with long red hair and tilted green eyes and a cute snub nose and legs that went on forever. She wanted to be a professional dancer. Her dream was to join the Mark Morris Dance Group and eventually start a dance company of her own. wanted to be a lawyer and join his father’s firm. Ginger told him she was moving to New York after graduation. He researched ways he could attend a college in or near the city. During Ginger’s last semester of high school, she made visits down to the city to explore professional possibilities. At the beginning of May, just before would graduate and Ginger wouldn’t, because she hadn’t attended any classes that last semester, Ginger texted that she wasn’t returning to Massachusetts. She was living with another dancer, Clark, who was also her lover.
“She didn’t even say she was sorry,” told Blythe that evening, trying to sound ironic but sounding hurt. “It was as if a robot wrote the text. Sorry,” he said. “I’ve really got to get over her. It’s been four years.”
“True,” Blythe said. “But high school romances are famous for breaking hearts.”
“Still,” said, “I thought we were special.”
He was such a nice man, and he looked so forlorn and Blythe was tired of herself for thinking about Aaden for four entire years.
On an impulse, she said, “ We are special. Because people who kiss each other even before their first date are extremely special.”
“What?” looked confused.
Blythe rose from her chair and sat on ’s lap and wrapped her arms around him. The surprise on his face made her laugh, and she was still laughing when he pressed his mouth against hers. He put his hands on her waist and tugged her closer, completely focused now. She gripped his hair and he cupped her head in his hand.
When they stopped kissing, said, “Do you know what would be really special?”
Blythe smiled. “What?”
“Having sex in the bedroom of the house that belongs to someone we don’t know.”
She laughed. “I don’t think so. Besides, that kiss was special all by itself, don’t you think?”
“Not special enough,” said.
He lifted her up as he rose, holding her in the traditional crossing-the-threshold position, and carried her to the hammock hung at the back of the yard. He carefully laid her in the hammock, and very carefully climbed in next to her.
“Have you ever had sex in a hammock?” he asked.
“ Can people have sex in a hammock?”
They were both laughing, and then they were kissing, and buttons were unbuttoned, and bare flesh was exposed, and the hammock rocked wildly as they tried to slide off their garments. Only half-undressed, tried to ease his way on top of Blythe, and his movements were enough to send the hammock into a swirl that dumped them both in the grass.
They lay there chortling, ridiculously pleased with themselves.
“You know,” said, “for the last ten minutes, I didn’t think about Ginger at all.”
“Me either!” Blythe said, which didn’t really make sense, and they laughed at that.
Blythe’s grandmother had told her over and over, “Be sure to marry a man who makes you laugh.”
After a while, helped Blythe up. The party house was in darkness now. Everyone had left while they were kissing in the hammock.
“We closed down the party,” Blythe said.
“Now that’s special,” said.
They walked to their Ubers and agreed to meet for lunch that afternoon. Blythe knew she wasn’t in love with him, and he wasn’t in love with her. They knew they were both rebound cases, but she felt less heartbroken and abandoned, and he was, really, a good guy.
They dated all that summer, meeting in ’s apartment or at restaurants or pubs to share all the events of their day. They became lovers. wasn’t as romantic as Aaden had been, but he was more protective. Less dramatic, more tender. Less interested in poetry, more capable of reading the small print in documents. He took her arm when they crossed the street. When they walked down a sidewalk in Boston, he made sure to be on the outside, closer to the curb, so she’d never be spattered by a car passing in the rain. He never left her alone when they went to a cocktail party where she was a stranger. When she had her period, he brought her boxes of expensive chocolates and watched any Hallmark movie she chose, even though the movies often made her cry. He understood the boundaries and laws of the real world.
When Blythe was with , she felt safe. She felt loved. There was no crazy, compelling energy between them, no blazing candle that would soon burn out. This love was different from what she felt for Aaden. Aaden’s love had been like lightning. ’s love was like the sun. She flourished in his love, and he flourished in hers.
After they’d been together a year, proposed. They were on Nantucket, living with his father and mother in their enormous brick house on Fair Street, and they’d taken a picnic basket with them and beach towels and walked along Surfside Beach until they found a private spot. They tossed down the blanket, holding it in place with the basket and cooler.
“Why is the cooler so heavy?” she asked.
opened it and brought out a bottle of champagne. “Probably because I brought this.”
“Why?” she asked. It was late morning, and the sun was high and hot, but a salty breeze rippled over them. She was wondering whether she should put on her straw sun hat.
“Because I brought this,” said. And he held out a velvet box.
Blythe gasped. She didn’t take the box right away but studied the man holding it. Her teddy bear, she often called him in bed, because he had a hairy chest and loved to snuggle with her. He never called her pet names, not darling or dear or honeybun, and she knew he never would. She had asked him one day, kiddingly, if for her next birthday he would bungee jump with her in Colorado. He’d considered this and told her that he’d do many things for her, but not bungee jumping. That was too extreme an experience for a thrill. She’d known right then that she loved this man, that they could make a good life together, that he would never ignore her, like her father did, or leave her, like Aaden had.
“Go on,” she’d said that morning at the beach, “you have to say it.”
had looked so happy. “Blythe, will you marry me?”
She laughed and cried a little when she said, “, I will.”
He put the exquisite oval cut diamond on her finger.
“It fits perfectly!” She was truly surprised.
Almost bashfully, admitted, “I took your turquoise ring to the jewelers to be sure it was the right size.”
“Of course you did,” Blythe said, and threw herself against him with such emotion they both fell backward on the towel. was surprised when she lunged at him, and Blythe loved him even more because he’d been surprised.