The Progress of Love

so many activities, you can just keep up forever,” Ron says. “For instance skiing. Cross-country. We were out nineteen days in the month of February. Beautiful weather this year. We don’t have to drive anywhere. We just go down the back lane—”
    “I try to keep up my interests, too,” says David. “I think it keeps you young.”
    “There is no doubt it does!”
    David has one hand in the inner pocket of his jacket. He brings out something he keeps cupped in his palm, shows it to Ron with a deprecating smile.
    “One of my interests,” he says.
    “Want to see what I showed Ron?” David says later. They are driving along the bluffs to the nursing home.
    “No, thank you.”
    “I hope Ron liked it,” David says pleasantly.
    He starts to sing. He and Stella met while singing madrigals at university. Or that’s what Stella tells people. They sang other things, too, not just madrigals. “David was a skinny innocent bit of a lad with a pure sweet tenor and I was a stocky little brute of a girl with a big deep alto,” Stella likes to say. “There was nothing he could do about it. Destiny.”
    “O, Mistress mine, where are you roaming?” sings David, who has a fine tenor voice to this day:
“O, Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear, your true love’s coming ,
O, stay and hear, your true love’s coming ,
Who can sing, both High and Low.”
    Down on the beach, at either end of Stella’s property, there are long, low walls of rocks that have been stacked in baskets of wire, stretching out into the water. They are there to protect the beach from erosion. On one of these walls, Catherine is sitting, looking out at the water, with the lake breeze blowing her filmy dress and her long hair. She could be posed for a picture. She might be advertising something, Stella thinks—either something very intimate, and potentially disgusting, or something truly respectable and rather splendid, like life insurance.
    “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” says Stella. “Is there anything the matter with her eyes?”
    “Eyes?” says David.
    “Her eyesight. It’s just that she doesn’t seem to be quite focussing, close up. I don’t know how to describe it.”
    Stella and David are standing at the living-room window. Returned from the nursing home, they each hold a fresh, restorative drink. They have hardly spoken on the way home, but the silence has not been hostile. They are feeling chastened and reasonably companionable.
    “There isn’t anything wrong with her eyesight that I know of.”
    Stella goes into the kitchen, gets out the roasting pan, rubs the roast of pork with cloves of garlic and fresh sage leaves.
    “You know, there’s a smell women get,” says David, standing in the living-room doorway. “It’s when they know you don’t want them anymore. Stale.”
    Stella slaps the meat over.
    “Those groins are going to have to be rewired entirely,” she says. “The wire is just worn to cobwebs in some places. You should see. The power of water. It can wear out tough wire. I’ll have to have a work party this fall. Just make a lot of food and ask some people over and make sure enough of them are able-bodied. That’s what we all do.”
    She puts the roast in the oven and rinses her hands.
    “It was Catherine you were telling me about last summer, wasn’t it? She was the one you said was inclined to be fey.”
    David groans. “I said what?”
    “Inclined to be fey.” Stella bangs around, getting out apples, potatoes, onions.
    “All right, tell me,” says David, coming into the kitchen to stand close to her. “Tell me what I said?”
    “That’s all, really. I don’t remember anything else.”
    “Stella. Tell me all I said about her.”
    “I don’t, really. I don’t remember.”
    Of course she remembers. She remembers the exact tone in which he said “inclined to be fey.” The pride and irony in his voice. In the throes of love, he can be counted on to speak of the woman with tender disparagement—with amazement, even. He likes to saythat it’s crazy, he does not understand it, he can plainly see that this person isn’t his kind of person at all. And yet, and yet, and yet. And yet it’s beyond him, irresistible. He told Stella that Catherine believed in horoscopes, was a vegetarian, and painted weird pictures in which tiny figures were enclosed in plastic bubbles.
    “The roast,” says Stella, suddenly alarmed. “Will she