Eddie sighed and put down his glass. “Meaning I don’t know what she knows and neither does Skip and neither one of us asks. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. Mostly I’ve stopped thinking about it, because I have found that when you start to wonder about who you’ve hurt in this life, you can easilylose your mind. Did I damage Polly’s happiness? Did I damage your mother’s happiness? What about Skip’s? What about yours?”
“Not mine,” I said.
“Well, that’s a comfort.”
“And not my mother’s. She made her choice. She knew what she was getting into.”
“No, she didn’t.” Eddie finished the wine in his glass and then set the glass aside. “I promised her I’d stop seeing Skip, that I’d stop seeing men. For the record, I lied on both counts. I meant to keep my promises and I did not. I’d love to present myself as a sympathetic character, but I’m not entirely sure that I am. Continuing to meet up with your college boyfriend for the rest of your adult life is a ludicrously bad idea, but somehow we made it into our mid-seventies without stopping. That makes us sound like we were star-crossed, like Romeo and Tybalt, when really we were more like a habit. Every point at which we should have drifted, we clung. First the extension granted by Skip moving to Cambridge, then our marriages, then there was AIDS. In the eighties, Skip was adamant that we only sleep with one another, though I guess for him that meant sleep with me and with Polly. I didn’t exactly do a yeoman’s job keeping that promise either. There were always too many other yeomen around.”
“Were you in love with any of them?”
Eddie looked at me. “By which you mean, did I give my heart to anyone other than Skip Hotalling?”
“Let me know when I cross the line.”
“There are no lines,” he said. “You and I reside on the same side of the line.”
“We do,” I said.
“Love,” he said. “Yes. Skip aside, I was in love twice, once fora long time and once for a short time. Wait, I take that back. I’m going to say three times. One long, two short. And honestly, we could count your mother. It was an entirely different sort of love, but still, I loved her. But through all of that, Skip persevered. That’s just the way it was, the way we were.”
I nodded.
“Were you in love with anyone in college?”
The abrupt change of direction caught me by surprise. “Fred Bowen.”
“Oh, I wish I’d known you then. Tell me about Fred Bowen.”
I didn’t even think he asked to spare himself more questions about the intricacies of his own past. He wanted to know, and so I told him. “Fred majored in biology, played outfield, and once wrote me a sestina.”
“And you loved him?”
I covered my heart with my hand to commemorate the place where Fred Bowen had once resided. “With my whole heart.”
“You went around together? People knew about the two of you?”
He had bought a bottle of red nail polish and written “Fred loves Daphne” in clear block letters on the white enamel underside of the sink in the men’s locker room. He brought me there in the dead of night for my birthday, had me lie down on the floor. “Close your eyes,” Fred said, working us under the sink. “Now open them.”
“Everyone knew,” I said.
Eddie nodded. “Good,” he said. “Good for you. But now imagine that no one knew, and everything that happened between you and Fred was a secret with potentially damaging consequences, and over time you got very good at keeping everythingto yourself.”
“I get the point.”
Eddie reached over and took my glass of wine. “I’m not entirely sure that I get the point. It was a long time ago,” he said. “That’s what I want to tell you. It all happened in another lifetime, to different people. We should never speak of it again. So, what happened with Fred?”
Fred, so sunny and tall, always walking around with a baseball glove in his hand. “He left me for a girl named Breelyn. I became unreasonably fixated on her name,Bree-lyn. I hated that.”
“And did Fred and Breelyn have a long and happy life together after they ran off and left you?”
I shook my head, eating my omelet with satisfaction. Breelyn had a semester abroad in Spain. The relationship, from what I was told, did not survive the distance. “They did not.”
“Everyone shuffled through relationships with several other people, perhaps many other people?”
“To the best of my knowledge,” I said. “But my knowledge only extends to the end of college. I never got into this business of looking people up. It seems like such a depressing habit.”
“I’m sure it is,” he said. “It’s a luxury not to know what happened to the people you were once in love with. Unfortunately, it was not a luxury I was afforded. Which leads me to an unpleasant question.”
