Riggs Park Read Free Page B

right.”
    “You can’t. Not when they’re grown. But it is all right. Or will be.”
    “Yes, of course. I know that.”
    But except for lip service, Jon stayed locked in his fortress of thinly masked grief. He took to wandering from his office to the kitchen for ice water, shambling back again, staring out the sliding glass doors at the ocean, so preoccupied that I began to dread working in the same space with him, even such a space as this, lovely and sprawling, with its view of the marshes and the sea. He was not ill-tempered, not inattentive. But a subtle, brooding quality crept into his manner, which he tried to hide with a false, jovial air that set my teeth on edge.
    To escape his moods, I took long walks on the beach—not that they helped. Outside the air was hot and gummy. The exquisite clear sunshine of July and August had given way to a burning September, an unseasonably hot October. The warm Atlantic waters refused to cool; the autumn fish stayed away; the festive red gaillardias put on a second season of wild red bloom in the sand. How was it that fall had come to the entire country except the Carolina coast? I longed for crisp air and brisk nights. My lungs felt flaccid from too much humidity, my skin parched from too much sun. Why, I was nothing but a crone who’d faced the millennium with a closer view of sixty than fifty! What made me think I could still hold a man? I was healthy enough (at fifty-eight, I wasn’t old yet, was I?) but in the eyes of the world (Jon’s eyes?) I must be fading. For me, that autumn on the sweet coast of North Carolina held such a damp core of sadness that even on the days when the water turned velvety blue-green in the slanted light and made my throat ache just to look at it—even then melancholy persisted in the soft air and ruined everything.
    One day I returned from my walk to find Jon staring at a picture I thought I’d thrown away, of me and my ex-husband, Wells, on a woodland hike early in our marriage. Jon looked up so guiltily that I might have found him with another woman.
    “Regretting you didn’t claim me first, during your treacherous youth?” I asked, trying for levity.
    Jon ran his hand up my arm, barely grazing the skin, and I was at once touched and annoyed by the physical effect he had on me, which seemed as out-of-season as the weather. “I’d give a lot to live my treacherous youth over again,” he said.
    He lifted a finger to my face, traced the line of my cheekbone. I didn’t want think about lost youth; I was more worried about what we seemed to be losing now.
    “Be serious, Jon. What’s bothering you?”
    “You think I’m sulking, don’t you?”
    “Well, aren’t you?” I asked, remembering his silent morning.
    Deliberately dramatic, he flung the picture into a drawer, closed it with a flourish, turned to me with a manic grin. “I hope not.”
    “Jon, don’t.”
    He moved close, studied me. “You know how you make me feel?”
    “How?”
    “You make me feel lucky. I haven’t felt lucky in a long time.”
    He kissed me on the forehead, leaving me disarmed, but none the wiser, and retreated into his office.
    If I could have confided in Marilyn, I might at least have taken comfort in having an ally. But my troubles seemed too humiliating, somehow. I would work through them, then confess. In the meantime, I invented endless explanations for Jon’s moods. He was grumpy because he missed traveling. He preferred working alone but didn’t want to say. He was worried about his book. That, at least, was true enough. The book was massive, so different from writing short pieces that naturally it took its toll. I’d seen how engrossed he was, working on a chapter about swimmers who’d been denied their chance for greatness when Jimmy Carter had withdrawn from the 1980 Olympics. Caught powerless in a whirlwind of politics, some had put the disappointment behind them and gone on to other successes. Many had not. It must be hard to write,