The Progress of Love

tough it out, said Stella at the time, trying to make it a joke. She didn’t understand, probably didn’t understand yet, how that was one of the things that made it impossible. This white-haired woman walking beside him through the nursing home dragged so much weight with her—a weight not just of his sexual secrets but of his middle-of-the-night speculations about God, his psychosomatic chest pains, his digestive sensitivity, his escape plans, which once included her and involved Africa or Indonesia. All his ordinary and extraordinary life—even some things it was unlikely she knew about—seemed stored up in her. He could never feel any lightness, any secret and victorious expansion, with a woman who knew so much. She was bloated with all she knew. Nevertheless he put his arms around Stella. They embraced, both willingly.
    A young girl, a Chinese or Vietnamese girl, slight as a child in her pale-green uniform, but with painted lips and cheeks, was coming along the corridor, pushing a cart. On the cart were paper cups and plastic containers of orange and grape juice.
    “Juice time,” the girl was calling, in her pleasant and indifferent singsong. “Juice time. Orange. Grape. Juice.” She took no notice of David and Stella, but they let go of each other and resumed walking. David did feel a slight, very slight, discomfort at being seen by such a young and pretty girl in the embrace of Stella. It was not an important feeling—it simply brushed him and passed—but Stella, as he held the door open for her, said, “Never mind, David. I could be your sister. You could be comforting your sister. Older sister.”
    “Madam Stella, the celebrated mind reader.”
    It was strange, the way they said these things. They used to say bitter and wounding things, and pretend, when they said them, to be mildly amused, dispassionate, even kindly. Now this tone that was once a pretense had soaked down, deep down, through all their sharp feelings, and the bitterness, though not transformed, seemed stale, useless and formal.
• • •
    A week or so later, when she is tidying up the living room, getting ready for a meeting of the historical society that is to take place at her house, Stella finds the picture, a Polaroid snapshot. David has left it with her after all—hiding it, but not hiding it very well, behind the curtains at one end of the long living-room window, at the spot where you stand to get a view of the lighthouse.
    Lying in the sun had faded it, of course. Stella stands looking at it, with a dust cloth in her hand. The day is perfect. The windows are open, her house is pleasantly in order, and a good fish soup is simmering on the stove. She sees that the black pelt in the picture has changed to gray. It’s a bluish or greenish gray now. She remembers what she said when she first saw it. She said it was lichen. No, she said it looked like lichen. But she knew what it was at once. It seems to her now that she knew what it was even when David put his hand to his pocket. She felt the old cavity opening up in her. But she held on. She said, “Lichen.” And now, look, her words have come true. The outline of the breast has disappeared. You would never know that the legs were legs. The black has turned to gray, to the soft, dry color of a plant mysteriously nourished on the rocks.
    This is David’s doing. He left it there, in the sun.
    Stella’s words have come true. This thought will keep coming back to her—a pause, a lost heartbeat, a harsh little break in the flow of the days and nights as she keeps them going.

M ONSIEUR LES D EUX C HAPEAUX
    “Is that your brother out there?” Davidson said. “What’s he up to?”
    Colin went over to the window to see what Ross was up to. Not much. Ross was using the long-handled clippers to clip the grass along the sidewalk to the front door of the school. He was working at a normal rate and seemed to be paying attention to what he was doing.
    “What’s he up to?” Davidson said.
    Ross was wearing two hats. One was the green-and-white peaked cap he had got last summer at the feed store, and the other one, on top, was the old floppy hat of pinkish straw that their mother wore in the garden.
    “Search me,” said Colin. Davidson was going to think that was smart-arse.
    “You mean why has he got the two hats on? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Maybe he forgot.”
    This was in the front office, during school hours on Friday afternoon, the secretaries bent