The sadness she felt at breaking up with Julian manifested itself in an attack of bursitis in her hips. She spent several months taking analgesics and waddling like a duck, but refused to see a doctor, convinced the condition would disappear once she had gotten over her bitterness. And so it would eventually prove, although she arrived at the airport in New York limping. Richard Bowmaster was expecting the active, cheerful woman he knew. Instead he had to greet a stranger wearing orthopedic shoes and using a cane, who sounded like a rusty hinge whenever she stood up from a chair. However, a few weeks later he saw her without the cane and wearing fashionable ankle boots. He could not have known it, but this miracle was thanks to Julian’s brief reappearance.
In October, a month after Lucia installed herself in his basement, Julian came to New York for a conference, and they spent a wonderful Sunday together. They had breakfast in Le Pain Quotidien, took a stroll in Central Park that was even slower because she still dragged her feet, and went to a Broadway musical matinee hand in hand. Afterward they had dinner in a small Italian restaurant with a bottle of the best Chianti and drank to friendship. Their complicity was as fresh as on the first day. They effortlessly regained the secret language and double entendres that only they could understand. Julian apologized for having made her suffer, but she replied sincerely that she could hardly recall it. That morning, when they had met over their mugs of milky coffee and fresh bread, Julian had aroused a festive delight in her. She wanted to smell his hair, straighten his jacket collar, and suggest he buy a pair of trousers that fitted him. Nothing more. In the Italian restaurant she left her cane under the table.
Lucia, Richard, Evelyn
Upstate New York
By five in the afternoon, when Lucia and Richard met Evelyn back at the cabin, the winter day was already at an end, and a bright moon was shining. They were smeared with mud and snow from toppling the car into the lake, and had taken longer to return than calculated, because the Subaru had skidded out of control and ended up in a pile of snow. They had to use the shovel once again to clear the snow from around the wheels, then tore off some pine branches to place on the ground. Richard put the Subaru into reverse and at the second attempt it jerked backward. The tires gained traction on the branches and they were able to move forward again.
By that time night was falling and their earlier tracks were invisible. They had to drive on slowly, guessing where they were headed. They got lost a couple of times, but fortunately for them Evelyn had disobeyed their instructions and lit a kerosene lamp in the doorway that guided them over the last stretch.
After this adventure the cabin interior seemed like a welcoming nest, even though the stoves hardly managed to temper the cold that crept in through the gaps in the old wooden planks. Richard felt responsible for the poor state the primitive dwelling was in; over the two years it had been shut, it had deteriorated as if a century had passed. He resolved to come back every summer to air it out and have repairs made so that Horacio could not accuse him of negligence when he returned to the United States. Negligence: the word still made him shudder.
Given the snow and the darkness they decided to abandon their original plan of driving to a hotel. They also thought it unwise to travel around any more than necessary with Kathryn Brown in the trunk of the Subaru. They were not concerned about the state of the body, which would stay frozen, and so they settled down to spend their Monday night wrapped up as warmly as possible. Having been through so many stressful moments in the past few days, they resolved to set aside the problem of Kathryn for now and to take their mind off things by playing a game of Monopoly, which had been left behind by Horacio’s children. Richard taught them the rules. Evelyn found the concept of buying and selling properties, hoarding money, dominating the market, and forcing rivals into bankruptcy completely incomprehensible. Lucia turned out to be an even worse player than Evelyn, with the result that they both lost miserably and Richard ended up a millionaire. But it was a hollow triumph that left him feeling he had cheated.
They managed to rustle up some dinner from what was left of the donkey food, filled the stoves with fuel, and laid out the sleeping bags on the three beds in the kids’ room. They had no sheets, and the blankets smelled of damp. Richard made a mental note that on his next visit he should also replace the mattresses, which could have been concealing bedbugs or rodents’ nests. They took off their boots and lay down fully dressed: it was going to be a long, cold night. While Evelyn and Marcelo fell asleep at once, Lucia and Richard continued talking until past midnight as they had so much to say to one another in this delicate stage of getting to know each other more closely. They began revealing their secrets, imagining the other’s features in the semidarkness. They were trapped in their cocoons, their beds so close they could easily have kissed should either of them have dared.
Love, love. Until the day before, Richard had been thinking up clumsy dialogues with Lucia. Now he was bursting with sentimental verses he would never find the courage to write. To tell her for example how much he loved her, how grateful he was that she had appeared in his life. She had been blown in like gossamer by the wind of good fortune and here she was, present and close in the midst of the ice and snow, with a promise glinting in her large eyes. Lucia realized he was covered in invisible wounds, and he could clearly see the fine cuts life had inflicted on her. “Love has always been in half measures for me,” she had confessed to him. That was over and done with. He was going to love her without any limits, absolutely. He wanted to protect her and make her happy so that she would never leave, for them to be together throughout that winter, then spring, summer, and forever. He wanted to create the deepest complicity and intimacy with her, to share the most secret parts of his being, to draw her into his life and soul. In fact he knew very little about Lucia and even less about himself, but none of that would matter if she was to reciprocate his love. In that case they would have the rest of their lives to discover one another, to grow and to age together.
Richard had not thought he could ever again be in love as he had been with Anita in his youth. He was no longer the man who loved Anita; he felt as if he had grown the scales of a crocodile, which seemed almost visible and heavy as armor. He was ashamed of having always protected himself from disenchantment, from being abandoned or betrayed; frightened of suffering the way he had made Anita suffer; terrified of life itself; cut off from the formidable adventure of love.
“I don’t want to go on living this kind of half life,” he told Lucia. “I don’t want to be this cowardly man. I want you to want me, Lucia.”