The Canterbury Sisters (18 page)

I was in my nightgown and turning back the bed by 8:45. Face washed, teeth brushed, feet slathered in Vaseline and encased in thick, fuzzy socks. And I think I dozed immediately, but my room’s located just above the pub and it’s hard to tune out all the noises from below. The sounds of laughing and drinking, doors slamming, the drone of the telly turned to a rugby game, the shouts of celebration or disgust when one team or another scores. Noises like this always seem to seep up through the floorboards and into your sleep and I think I must have been dreaming about the pub, or specifically about one of the men I had seen there, when I startled awake.

So here I am. Here I lie, doing all my breathing and pillow-plumping tricks, frantically trying to jump back on the sleep train before it passes me entirely. But instead I seem to be caught in that worst-case scenario—when you’ve had an hour or two of sleep and it’s recharged you enough that you know you’ll be up for a while. If I were at home, I could work. But I’m not at home, and there is no work. Besides, something else is wrong with me. Something I can’t yet name.

I pull on my jeans and sweatshirt, then ease down the steep, narrow staircase and back to the pub. It feels a little strange to be walking around in public wearing just my thick, fuzzy socks, but I can’t face putting those boots back on a second before I have to. It’s not like I’ll ever see any of these people again. Let them laugh and point.

But they don’t. They don’t look at me at all. The pub is still fairly busy, and I squeeze into a seat at the end of the bar, in that undesirable spot directly in front of the cash register, and order a glass of the okay cabernet we’d had with dinner.
That would be a good name for it
, I think,
a good label.
“
I’ll have a glass of the Okay Cabernet.
”
The man I was dreaming of is still here, and that’s an odd thing, isn’t it? He’s playing darts and he’s the only one in the pub who’s bothered to notice me, in that way that even a blind man can sense the glance of a woman across a crowded room. I contemplate calling out, “You’re the man of my dreams, you know.” I don’t remember the details of the dream itself, only that he was there and that he was carrying some sort of camera.

A camera. Yes, the man was taking pictures of me, that’s right.

I watch him throw the dart. Lightly, with a low, long arc. It’s an effortless and artful movement, probably the result of innumerable evenings of practice. It lands in what appears to be the center of the board, although it’s hard to tell at this angle, and he turns and looks at me openly now, not a sideways flicker of interest but a full-frontal stare, making sure I’ve noted his prowess. I smile and raise my glass.

No, he wasn’t taking pictures of me. That’s not it. Not quite.

But he had been taking pictures of something. Something naughty and forbidden. Because when I had tried to look through the camera lens he had pulled it back and laughed roughly. A pirate’s laugh. And he had said, “That’s not for the likes of you to know.”

Not for the likes of you to know.
That’s what woke me up, his voice and the fleeting image of a man crouched behind a camera, a notion so clearly lifted from Claire’s story. She’d said she was obsessed with the videotape of her husband and his first wife, and I wonder if I would be the same. If I had the chance, would I watch Ned and . . . what’s her name? Now, that’s strange too. According to the rules of romance, I’m supposed to hate this woman. I’m supposed to tell everyone I meet how she ruined my life—or at least that she changed my life, and for a woman like me there’s not much difference between being ruined and being changed. They gallop like the same horse. But less than a week after learning of her existence, I’ve already gone and forgotten her name.

It started with an
R
, I believe. Rebecca? No, that’s the full name of our Becca. Her mother has slipped and called her that a couple of times. Rhonda? Robin? Rachel? Rachel. That doesn’t sound quite right, but it will have to do.

So . . . if I were offered the chance to see a movie of Ned and Rachel in bed, would I take it?

I know what the answer is supposed to be. I’m supposed to say “Of course not,” for curiosity leads to comparison and comparison leads to disaster. If we’ve learned anything from The Tale of Claire, it’s that. And yet if I were watching the two of them now, making the beast with two backs right here in front of me and God and everyone in this quintessentially British pub, I think some part of me would know that whatever Ned was with Rachel was not my Ned. He would be some darker, wilder version of Ned. The half of the moon you never see.

And if I’m going to continue along this stream of honesty, I must add that the thought of Ned and Rachel on this scarred wooden floor doesn’t make me jealous, it makes me . . . something else. I’m not quite ready yet to use the word
aroused,
but I am distracted by the image. Distracted enough that I don’t notice that the man has left his darts and approached the bar. He is standing beside me, one hand on the back of my chair and the other waving a pound note at the barmaid, and he says, “So I see you’ve managed to lose your friends, but haven’t you, love?”

I look at him blankly.

“We get a lot of Americans coming through here,” he says. “Mostly girls, but always in groups. Hard to cut a bird out when she’s flying with a whole flock of them, isn’t it?”

“We’re walking to Canterbury,” I tell him.

He nods impatiently, as if to say, “Of course you are.” Apparently that’s been the source of this pub’s trade for a thousand years, its prime location halfway between London and Canterbury.

“What’s your route tomorrow?” he asks, probably more out of habit than out of any particular curiosity. He is shorter than I generally like men to be, probably no more than an inch taller than I would be if I slid off this stool and looked him eye to eye. No taller than Michael. His hands are thick and rough—something about him suggests a truck driver, or maybe a deliveryman, someone who lifts and carries things all day long. But his face is animated, the eyebrows shooting up and down as he talks, the mouth mobile and expressive. He’s easy. The sort of man where you see it all, right there on the surface.

“I’m not sure where we’re going next,” I say, surprising myself with the answer. But it’s true. At each previous stop, whether for lunch or dinner, someone in the group, usually Steffi, has peppered Tess with questions about the road ahead. How many hours we’ll walk, how many miles we’ll tally, the names of the towns we’ll pass through. But tonight no one thought to ask.

“I’m not sure what you call a group of pilgrims walking,” I say to the man, who’s just standing there and smiling, fiddling with the dart in his hand. I’m stalling for time, trying to figure out if he’s attractive. I think he is, in a way that’s Definitely Not My Usual Type, but that’s a good thing too, isn’t it—like taking an occasional swig of white zinfandel? He has that sort of testosterone-fueled self-confidence that I’m unaccustomed to, and my mind flashes back to a vineyard tour I took last summer in Sonoma. They had let me drive the truck, a big trembling truck loaded with grapes, and the road had been rutted and all of us wine writers on the tour had been “helping with the harvest,” just like the rich Londoners come out on Sundays to “help with the hops.” The real vineyard workers must have resented the hell out of us, but it had been fun to drive that big trembling truck.

I wouldn’t mind driving a truck again.

“Everybody knows a group of geese is a gaggle,” I babble on, and now he’s the one whose expression is growing vague. “But some of the group names for animals, especially birds, are very clever. A group of larks is an exaltation. An unkindness of ravens, that’s another good one. A murder of crows. A mustering of storks. Have you ever heard any of these? I’ve always found this sort of thing fascinating. And a group of hummingbirds is called a charm. Isn’t that one especially wonderful?”

He scrapes his palm with the point of the dart. It’s like I’m speaking a foreign language.

“A flamboyance of flamingos?” I try. “A parliament of owls?”

I don’t know why I keep trying to talk to men. It rarely goes well. And this poor guy is now standing here before me with his mouth literally hanging open. No, we’re not each other’s type at all. He’s nothing like the man back in London with the closely cropped gray hair, another person whose name I can’t remember, or maybe I never knew it. But that man and I had spoken of serious things. I had told him about my mother dying and Ned leaving. This conversation will not be anything like that.

Instead, he pulls over a bar stool, and we begin to talk of nothing. Or maybe I should say he begins to talk of nothing and I begin to drink harder. He says he has a part interest in this pub, that he’s sort of a silent partner, and he tells me stories of the people who have passed through. He offers to buy me a beer, even though I am clearly drinking wine. “You’d like a pint, wouldn’t you now?” he says, and I feel myself nodding before I even understand the question. So I end up with a beer sitting on my left side and the glass of wine on my right.

He says all the usual stuff, the stuff I guess he feels he has to say. How he noticed me right from the start within the group, how I’m the looker of the table. It’s not true and even if it were, the fact that he feels he has to talk like this makes me like him a little less. I’ve got a knee-jerk suspicion of flattery. Always have. Another thing that goes back to Diana, who would savor a compliment the same way I savor a good Bordeaux, rolling it around on her tongue, sniffing at it a little, her eyes closed and her expression expectant. Since I started thinking about this yesterday I’ve been doing a little inventory in my head, and if memory serves, she left my father three times for men who claimed to see things in her that he did not. Her flatterers always managed to fail her within days, maybe even hours, of her leave-taking. She always returned to the commune in the end, walking up the steps without explanation, dropping her satchel on the rocking chair beside the door. Her experiences with these temporary men never seemed to leave her either sadder or wiser, and there are times when I feel that my entire childhood was spent held hostage to a succession of trifling strangers who happened to tell my mother she was beautiful.

Strangers like this trifling man sitting beside me now, scratching some figure in the bar with his dart. An
S
, it looks like. Maybe he’s trying to spell my name.

“Don’t tell me I’m pretty,” I say, not because I don’t believe I am. Women who are always saying they’re ugly or fat or stupid annoy me. They’re the biggest egoists of all, just trying to turn one compliment into twenty. So don’t get the idea that I’m self-effacing. I don’t play dumb or let people cut me off in traffic or dig around in my pants for handfuls of fat to shake at my girlfriends, wailing, “Can you believe this?” I do not deny that on occasion I can be clever, witty, talented, good in bed, and yes, even attractive, but I’ve never trusted the men who point any of this out. Because I’ve known since childhood that flattery is the first shot fired in the battle of the sexes, and I can remember, all too clearly, listening to a newcomer at the commune telling Diana how special she was, seeing her eyes close, and knowing that soon enough I would be in the backseat of another car.

“All right then,” says the man with the dart. “You can be pretty and I can shut up about it and we can both have another drink. Because the whole world gets prettier, doesn’t it, love, when you take yourself just one more drink?”

And, fueled by this burst of philosophy, ten thirty becomes eleven and then eleven thirty and still we are sitting thigh-to-thigh until there are three empty beer glasses on my left side and two wineglasses on my right, and at some point he says, part command and part entreaty, “Come with me to the smoking garden.”

Come with me to the smoking garden.
Just the invitation every girl hopes to hear. But I am quite drunk by this time and so I slip down from my stool, wobbling as my furry socks hit the wooden floor. We walk hand in hand from the bar, our departure apparently fascinating to the clumps of locals who still linger there. Heads turn, and one of the men at the dartboard snickers, but I ignore it. I’ve gone into that zone. I couldn’t be deterred if this snickering man tried to tackle me. We go down the hall and through the kitchen, where a boy is washing dishes, out the back, the screen door slamming behind us, and into the smoking garden.

It’s dark. Only two dim lights, one over the door and another farther away, flickering uncertainly in the parking lot. I’m cold. I don’t have my jacket. But it doesn’t matter, for there is little preamble. He wraps his arms around me and kisses me. It’s good. Better than good. Quite a bit better, but wait . . . how can it be this good? For this kiss to be this good goes against every law of logic. I hardly know this man. He knows me even less. We have never seen each other before. We will never see each other again. But I guess that’s why it’s good, this kiss that comes with no past and no promises.

“Do you want to go somewhere?” he says. He speaks roughly, just as he did in my dream.

I’m woozy, both from the kiss and from my slow-dawning realization that somehow I’ve managed to get not just drunk, but capital-D Drunk, drunker than I’ve been in decades. Far worse than the tipsy afternoon back at the George and what is this country doing to me, making me slip and stagger, lose my equilibrium just a bit more with every step I take? I dig my fuzzy toes into the cold, wet bricks of the courtyard and try to focus. He says he wants to go somewhere, but where? It would seem as if we’re already at the only place in town there is to go, but he isn’t asking me out on a date, of course he isn’t. It must be close to midnight by now. Most of the village is sleeping. Upstairs the pilgrims are too. What he wants is for me to get in his car with him, to drive down a dark road. Park in some field and have quick, anonymous sex.

Which is insane, of course. It’s irresponsible. Raw. Risky. And probably exactly what I need.