“You should come back,” he said. “You bought that place. It’s your home.”
“It was. Not anymore.”
If he took this in, he made no indication. “When are you coming back?” he said. More insistent this time.
“Cam lives there now,” she told him. “Cam and Coco. They have a son.”
“I’ll help you move. We can use my truck.”
She had recognized, when she first laid eyes on Walt, how much he had aged—his hair mostly gone now, except for a few thin white wisps around his ears. Now she noticed something else—a vacancy in his eyes, not unlike that of her son before they’d started work at the clinic in Baltimore. Walt’s body looked surprisingly solid and strong, but she understood now that his mind was betraying him.
“Those damned newcomers that moved into your house,” he said. “They’re not even mowing the field like we used to. Whole place is going to seed.”
“They’re not exactly newcomers,” Eleanor told him. “I used to be married to Cam, remember? Coco’s from down the road. Evan and Betsy’s daughter.”
“I don’t care who they are,” he said. “I don’t think much of those two. They got themselves a bunch of goats. Crazy animals. Tearing up your garden.”
He was wearing his same overalls, and the checked wool jacket he had favored since the first time she met him. His face was thinner now, and though it appeared that he’d shaved, he’d missed a few places, and there was a piece of food—mayonnaise, maybe—on his chin. He wasn’t okay.
Slowly then, like a man in a dream, he reached for her. His fingers touched her hair and stroked it, as a lover of horses might stroke a horse’s mane. Eleanor stood there, unable to move.
“Pretty,” he said.
“I should be going, Walt,” she told him.
“That old woman isn’t home,” he whispered. “We can go inside. I want to take off your dress.”
“Oh, Walt,” she said. “That’s not a good idea.”
A look of sorrow and confusion passed over his face. He reached for her breasts. He was fumbling at the buttons on her blouse. “I always wanted to touch you,” he said. “That bastard that was always hanging around. He wasn’t good to you. I would have taken good care of you.”
Both his arms were around her now, his face buried in her breasts. He had pushed her against the side of the truck, the full weight of his body pressing down, and he was breathing hard. Whatever else was lost, he still had the grip of a man who’d worked all his life hauling and splitting wood, running farm equipment, moving rocks. His hands on her skin were rough. His breath was hot on her neck.
This was not the first time in Eleanor’s life that she’d felt a man’s weight holding her down.
“I love you,” he told her. “I want to kiss you all over.”
“No, Walt,” she said. “You need to let me go.”
His mouth was on her neck. His large hands were locked on her shoulders. Eleanor might have been scared, but what she felt, more than fear, was a terrible sadness.
“Get off me,” Eleanor said. She spoke in the voice a parent might use with a child, when she discovered him doing something that was not simply forbidden, but dangerous—a voice she had employed with Toby many times, back in the old days. “Get off me, right now.”
He did then. Recoiled, like someone who’s touched a live wire. Or simply like a person who has suddenly remembered he’s been dreaming and come back, reluctantly, to the world where the things a person dreams no longer remain possible.
“Let me give you some tomatoes,” he said. “The Early Girls came in great this year.”
Two months later came the news, from Darla. “Your neighbor Walt drove his truck off the road last Tuesday,” she told Eleanor. “Hit a tree. Died instantly. There’s a memorial service on Saturday.” Eleanor was due to fly to California that day, and sent her condolences.
84.
Car Wreck in Paris
The same week Eleanor learned of Walt’s death, a very different kind of loss struck her, though this one had involved a person she had never met. She was at her drawing table, working on the sequel toThe Cork People,when a voice interrupted the radio program to announce an accident in Paris. A car carrying Princess Diana and the man with whom she was spending the weekend—not her husband; he’d been out of the picture for a while now—had crashed in a tunnel. Diana was dead.
Eleanor took the news harder than made any sense. What connection did she possibly have with a British princess, the mother of a future king? But she had always loved Princess Diana—the idea of her, anyway, the mother she imagined her to be to those two little boys, close in age to her own children. Most of all, the struggles in her marriage that Diana had talked about so openly (never mind the obvious differences) somehow spoke to her own.
For the next three days, she kept the television on, following every stage of the grieving across Britain and the world. She watched the funeral, of course, and the procession that preceded it—the two motherless princes (one of whom Ursula used to say she’d marry someday) making their way down the wide avenue from Buckingham Palace behind their mother’s coffin, as thousands of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of them; the stoic, anxious expression on the face of Diana’s former husband, whose lover probably awaited him in a castle somewhere, when it was over. Elton John at the piano (the only one visibly weeping). The queen, in her hat. The endless display of photographs of the dead princess. Her hair. Her clothes. Her trips to Africa. Her dance with John Travolta. Her haircuts. Hertoo-thin body. Her sad and lovely smile. The expression on her face when she looked at her sons.
