“You girls could have done anything.” He looked at Jonathan. “You wouldn’t have believed this one. I was young back then. I mistakenly thought she was representative of her age. I don’t think I understood at the time how extraordinary you were.”
“We were kids,” I said.
“She’s still awfully bright,” Jonathan said fondly, and for the second time I wished he’d stop it with the praise.
But Eddie held firm. “She was extraordinary.”
It embarrassed me, this unchecked adoration of a stranger. I, who was accustomed only to the adoration of certain teenage girls who loved Jane Austen and Toni Morrison. I started talking about books, a brilliant conversational swerve on my part, as Eddie had read everything I could think to ask him about. Some of the books I recommended to him were books he turned out to have edited.
“I’ve never known anyone who reads as much as Daphne,” Jonathan said. Jonathan, who walked the line between amazed and appalled where my reading was concerned. The various stacks beside our bed at times exceeding the height of our nightstand.
“Well, now you know two of us,” Eddie said.
When the time came to leave—and that time had passed an hour before—Eddie took a tiny leather notebook from his shirt pocket and a tiny pen, asking if he might give me his number.
“I can put it right in my phone,” I said, reaching for my purse.
He shook his head, writing out his first and last name lest I find another scrap of paper in my bag that said “Triplett” and get confused. I thought of how that piece of paper was now the only thing I owned that he had given me. I’m sure he gave me plenty of things when I was a child, but life is long and there had beenmany moves in the years that intervened. Not only did I have nothing left from Eddie, I couldn’t remember what those things might have been. I held out my hand for his notebook so that I could write my number in return, but he declined.
“You may walk to the train station after lunch and say to your nice husband,Mon Dieu!That man! I thought we’d never be rid of him. If that’s the case then, you’ll be relieved you didn’t give me your number.”
“Eddie,” I said, and put my hand on his hand.
He looked at our two hands there on the table. He waited. “Your mother called me Eddie,” he said finally. “Only your mother and you and your sister.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“There would be no reason for you to know that.”
“What do people call you?”
Then he looked at me, smiling. “I’ll never tell you,” he said. “You’ll never know. You’ll have to call me Eddie for the rest of your life.”
We took the elevator downstairs together and Eddie walked us as far as the choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid before hugging me goodbye. His neck smelled lightly of Ivory soap, and I was overcome with the memory of that smell, that single night I had slept with my face buried in his neck for warmth. He shook Jonathan’s hand. He said he was going back to look for a particular Monet, a haystack in the snow, which he hadn’t seen in years. He had no idea if it would still be there, though surely they wouldn’t have sold it off. The Monet was the whim that had brought him to the Met on the day they’d shut the water off at Random House.
Jonathan and I did not go back to the American Wing. We walked out of the museum and into the clear May light. The dayhad been wrecked for anything else, and both of us knew it. We were going home.
“That was something,” he said after two full blocks of silence. Not that the city was silent. Only us.
The day was barely warm, but it had been an unusually cold May. The fact that it was warmer than the other days had caused people to run home and pull the bedspreads off their beds and then carry them back to the park so they could spread them out across the grass. Some of them, tight on time, lay in the grass without benefit of bedspread. “Do me a favor,” I said, taking my husband’s arm. “Let me go see Leda. Let me go for an hour or two and not feel bad about abandoning you, then I’ll take the train and meet you at home.”
He stopped walking. “When have I ever made you feel bad about seeing your sister?”
“Never, but I feel bad anyway. We were supposed to spend the day together and we haven’t and now I feel guilty because you’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow to go and see my sister,” he said. “In case you don’t remember.”
“I remember.”
Jonathan looked at me. “So here’s a compromise: text her and see if she’s home, and if she is, let me walk you over. I promise I won’t come up, no matter how many times she asks me.”
It might have been nice to walk through the park by myself and sort things through, but it was a reasonable request. We leaned against the stone wall that circled the park and I texted my sister to see if she was home and asked her if I could come over. Leda didn’t see patients on Thursday, she kept the day open to work on her column, but since the column only ran once amonth, she often spent Thursdays on errands instead, or went to a yoga class, or had lunch with a friend. I heard back from her right away, saying she wasn’t home but she was close. Twenty minutes? She asked me if everything was okay.
I told her yes.
“I’m trying to remember what you ever told me about Ed Triplett,” Jonathan said as we started out across the park. “I can’t remember anything other than your mother had three husbands. I’m not even sure I knew his name.” Jonathan saw this as a failure on his part. He loved to ask me questions about the past: high school friends and family vacations. He was sorry to think he hadn’t asked me more about someone I’d all but forgotten myself.
For me the past was a sinkhole. Not that it was terrible, but there was nothing for me there. “Eddie didn’t get much of a run,” I said. “A year, possibly two years start to finish. Leda and I were crazy about him, but when he was gone, he was gone.”
