Pauline chose, as she did nearly every day, to take her lunch hour on a bench strangely set away from the schoolyard, just outside of the woods. From this point she could eat her sandwich and fruit in solitude and see, with ease, if anyone was coming near. No one ever did; the girls in her class, in fact all the girls at St. Elizabeth's, invariably clustered together in the main area of the yard, cliques huddled at their usual tables, the occasional unpopular girl on her own.
There was no hour in the day Pauline enjoyed more. This she repeats, almost fifty years later, to Robert, who takes his customary place on her red velvet sofa, who listens with genuine interest and some admiration.
“Never lonely?” He asks this even as he knows the answer. It is more that his interruption triggers in Pauline attention to their drinks, which she rises to refresh. He cares but he also cares about her excellent gin and tonics, always served with many slices of fresh lime. He cares as well for these hours in the gracious space, and he consciously enjoys the awareness that he is at home here. It is the result of some effort but all the more satisfying because it has taken time.
Robert can see her grin, charming, even as her head is lowered in taking his glass.
“Never. And it was better, so much better even, after Sarah's...visit.” Robert watches her slim, elegant form retreat to the makeshift bar on the vintage console table.
“Tell me,” he says, really wanting to know.
The exact day is never recalled but that is unimportant. What mattered is that something unusual happened. There was tuna fish on rye and a pear in her bag, and a small thrill went through Pauline's frame, like always. It was the rustling of the brown paper, the way it marked the period of freedom and solitude. Pauline had one hand in the bag, reaching for the sandwich, when she saw Sarah walking in her direction. A bird from the woods cawed in an ugly way and this Pauline took as a warning.
As Sarah Gibb approached, Pauline kept her eyes on the girl's face. She did not mean to be rude; Pauline was in fact never rude, even to the girls at St. Elizabeth's most deserving of scorn. It was instead that this occurrence, this nearing of Sarah, was unreal. There was absolutely no reason anyone would do this and, realizing it, Pauline already had a vague and unformed sense of the reasoning.
“Polly, hi.” Tall for her age, darkly brunette, pretty and glossy in a natural way, Sarah looked like a girl any other girl would be pleased to welcome. She was in fact immensely popular at the school and, what was more odd, resented by no one.
“Hello.” Pauline, in spite of herself, admired Sarah's ability to stand there, uninvited to sit, yet not awkward in any way.
“It's nice here,” Sarah said, looking around as though seeing a new landscape when in fact it was nothing more than an extension of the yard she saw every school day. Still, Sarah's remarkable ease of manner made the remark seem right, even insightful.
“Do you mind if I sit?”
“And did you?” Robert asks this today, wanting to fully understand the workings of the woman's mind when she was a girl. Pauline Keeley is something of a legend in Pittsburgh, celebrated as a restorer of art, notoriously independent, yet good company and a hostess with the grace of bygone ages and salons of the European past. She entertains rarely but it is always an event, a coveted invitation.
Robert has his own place in her life. He simply is there, reassuring and companionable, an erudite and safe escort to be counted upon as such. Both he and Pauline have likened this status to that of a pet, though never to one another. Today, he perceives an occasion, a turning point, with revelation going to greater intimacy.
“Well, Lord. What could I do? Really, Robert. I wasn't raised in the wild, you know.” She sits again, delicately holding her own glass by the base, a silk wrap draping her thin body like a breeze.
Sarah sat, discretely distanced from Pauline, and said, “I can see why, you know, you like it here, Polly. God, the girls. Sometimes....” She leaves the sentence unfinished, there being no need to add more.
Pauline turned her head to take in her companion. She did not object to “Polly”; teachers, some of the girls, even her father used the nickname. Then – and the moment was extraordinary for Pauline – she looked at Sarah further and considered several realities at once, or in a cascade, one bit of awareness or wonder falling upon another. She is here now, Pauline thought, because I am both almost as pretty as she is and because I am not poor or strange. Sarah's family had more money than most and her father held some mysterious position with the government. They were not rich – no one in the neighborhood was – but there were signs of comfort beyond the ordinary. Women like Pauline's mother noticed that Mrs. Gibb dressed smartly at the supermarket and bought expensive cuts of meat. At Christmas, the Gibbses had hired help for their party, and the two cars in their drive were new and well-tended. The Keeleys were not as comfortable but their middle-class status was assured. If Sarah sought to visit with a poor girl, and for whatever reason, the implication of condescension would be too damning to be overcome.
Then, Pauline understood fully that this coming of Sarah was in no way random. She knew no more than this but she knew it absolutely. She also realized that she could not eat her lunch, it being rude to do so in front of the other girl. Her hands held her sandwich in her lap, like a handkerchief or purse.
“Go on, please, eat,” Sarah said as this thought came to Pauline. “I just came by to say hi, really.” And nothing in Sarah's manner betrayed in the slightest anything more. Pauline saw that it was true, what the girl said, but she saw as well that Sarah's unawareness of a different motive did not mean that one wasn't in play.
“There must've been deer behind us in the woods,” she recalls to Robert. “We were just sitting there but I heard twigs and things crunching.” Robert smiles at just the right angles. They had met when he was a waiter at a downtown cafe, years earlier. Casual conversation between server and esteemed guest – Pauline – evolved as these things sometimes do. Rank became less important proportionately to the growing interest within the modest relationship; after a few months, it felt natural for Pauline to ask Robert over to her place for a drink.
He knew then how unusual the invitation was, and he has since given this reality much thought. Still, and for the three or four years and of their hazy friendship, Robert is careful to never overstep the privilege. He has ideas but he keeps them to himself. Three or four years is not so long. Meanwhile, Pauline is going on with her memory. “It was the crunching, now that I think about it, made me...recognize something.”
“You know, I think I'm a little jealous of you, Polly.” Sarah said this looking directly at Pauline and her face betrayed no jealousy or envy at all. Pauline had no experience with perfunctory adult exchanges, the polite chit-chat of parties and the like, but she knew at this moment that this was the exact form it took. The lovely and warm Sarah, elevating the presence of a girl essentially unknown to her, only softness and mild amusement at her own folly in her eyes. “I mean, you're just fine on your own and there's no reason why you couldn't have a ton of friends. If you wanted.”
Pauline of course knew this. Still. There was something offensive in Sarah's statement, something suggesting a reason in spite of the claim that none existed. Equally offensive was the burden on Pauline to say something in response.
“Maybe. I guess. I don't think about it, really. It's just nice to be alone out here.”
“God, and I'm here ruining it for you!”
Because you have to, Pauline thought, suddenly knowing the truth of the encounter. A girl near the school screamed, piercing the distance, but the sound had no menace in it. It was shock, or glee.
Pauline's slim legs are crossed as she speaks. Her voice is captivating, husky and scratchy, like the voice of someone who has not spoken forever. Robert rises and refreshes his drink. Skilled in these things, Pauline assesses the action – it is the first time he has ever done this – while maintaining the flow of her story. It is too bad, she thinks. It never fails, she thinks. Outside the cozy apartment, outside the few small rooms rich in fabric and art, the sky darkens and dusk falls on the city like a thin rain. Changing everything and changing nothing substantially.
Very little more was said by the girls. Pauline ate her sandwich, first offering half to Sarah, who declined and was overly appreciative of the kindness. The hour was passing and Pauline accepted the loss, yet this was not easy; she had to consciously try to ignore the unfairness, the theft of her one hour of peace, and even knowing that Sarah came for a reason did not lessen the effort.
“Why? What did you think?” Robert's interest remains authentic but that, Pauline sees, is hardly the point. He will take in what is meaningful here, if not just then. She shakes her head gently and the silver of her hair, coiled behind her neck in a loose chignon, bounces a little and gleams in the lamplight.
“It was feeling more than thinking. But I still had a sense, a...knowledge, that Sarah Gibb came to me because she was afraid of something. I did that to her, too. I think that, for a long time, she would see me out there by myself, and it made her...uneasy. I never meant to, of course. But just my being there, away from everybody, gave her the awful sense that her life, her popularity, was empty. I wasn't sure, mind you. It was a vague kind of knowing.”
The knowledge, which Pauline does not share with Robert, was confirmed just before Sarah left the bench that afternoon. There was a lengthy silence between the girls, not entirely disagreeable, but nonetheless eerie by virtue of Sarah's presence as being motivated by nothing explained. Pauline considered asking her – in some language she could not imagine – to leave. She would try to be polite and phrase it inoffensively, however that could be done, and because there were only twenty or so minutes left to the hour and Pauline was suddenly greedy for them.
But then she turned to look at Sarah and could say nothing. The girl was sitting with her hands clamped between her knees, shoulders hunched a bit, and her face, even in profile, was as vacant as any expression Pauline had ever seen. Sarah was staring out but in the way that sees nothing. Pauline felt a chill pass through her. Then she slowly ate her pear, feeling angry and imposed upon. What had begun as an annoyance and the theft of her private time had evolved into something unaccountably treacherous, like a secret to be imparted, a secret in touching distance, but still a thing unwelcome and not asked for.
The bell rang. Sarah said goodbye and Pauline resented as well the need to lag behind, as accompanying the girl back to class was unthinkable.
Robert's drink is empty but, this time, he does not take it upon himself to make another. He believes that a new level of intimacy has been reached with Pauline, and this pleases him. He has the sense that the story is concluded – Pauline has ceased speaking and her face, turned toward the rich layers of fabric draping the window, suggests finality. But it is also clear that some element of it is undone, unsaid.
“Did she ever do the same thing again? Seek you out, whatever?”
Pauline does not turn to look at her guest as she answers. She can hear the ice clink as he jostles his otherwise empty drink. “No. That was the only time.”
“Well, it certainly made an impression on you.”
Still she does not turn her head. Her arm bends and a long, slender hand rests on her waist. “Yes, but only after, really. After I heard that Sarah killed herself in college.” She pauses, then adds: “You know, I can't for the life of me remember who told me about it. My mother? Maybe. Yes, she would have known about anything having to do with the Gibbs.”
Robert rises because the information, while not wholly shocking, triggers in him a reflex of needing to move. With the dark has come the sound of fireworks, enhancing the vague sense of menace created by the news of the suicide. Pauline is accustomed to the angry bursts of the celebrations in downtown Pittsburgh; living near to the Point, the explosions mark what is to her an endless series of regattas where the rivers meet. She chose brocade for the windows because it appreciably muffles the sounds, softening what otherwise brings to her mind, not festivities, but gunfire and invasion.
“Wow,” Robert say, feeling that the expression is too young for him but unable to summon anything else. “How did that make you feel?,” he asks, and realizes in the asking that the question is all wrong.
Pauline finally looks at him and as though she has no idea who he is, or how this man came to be in her apartment. “What? Feel? I didn't even know the girl, Robert.”
“I know. But, still. You remember the lunchtime thing really clearly. Like her coming to you was a cry for help.”
Pauline smiles just then and looks at him, and Robert thinks that this smile, gracious and natural, is in place at many different moments and in many circumstances. It strikes him now as a door slamming, an impression augmented by a blast of fireworks heard in the same moment. This impression is furthered, unpleasantly, by how Pauline maintains eye contact with him.
“'Cry for help'. How melodramatic, Robert! I didn't know the girl. I had no reason to know the girl, for heaven's sake.” The emphasis is hard, not lightly said. Her hands suddenly take firm hold of the sides of her chair. It would be comic to Robert, like a mimicking of an airplane passenger frightened by take-off. But it is not comic. Pauline's palms then run back and forth over the chair arms, and she says, looking at him directly still, “I have always had boundaries, I imagine you'd call them.”
Robert, like his hostess so many years before, has a sense of a reality he cannot define but knows to be disagreeable. The two exchange fragments of conversation after this, bits of gossip which he offers and Pauline shrugs away, and in a matter of minutes he excuses himself. He goes for his jacket but, like a scientist, also probes for something he believes must be there.
“This weekend, Paul. Are you doing anything? Feel like the Art Cinema?”
She rises in a strangely hurried manner, preparing to bring both cocktail glasses into her kitchen and surveying her parlor as though a great deal needs to be done, to set the room right. “I don't know. Call me, why don't you?” There is a quick peck on a cheek and he is gone.
Robert walks down Wylie Avenue, the sulfur of fireworks oddly pleasant in the air, the last stragglers exploding above. He must weave between small clusters of people leaving the Point and this annoys him. It is a relief to turn down 6th Street, take his time crossing the bridge, and cut through the park to his place on North Avenue.
His mind is blank for a good part of this walk. He knows his own mind; what will come to him must settle before it can be known as sure. On the bridge, however, knowledge intrudes, prematurely and almost violently. Robert recognizes that Pauline, elegant and disarmingly intelligent woman, friend or acquaintance, was not engaged in reflection earlier. She was not revealing to him an episode from her girlhood that profoundly affected her. Stepping off the bridge, he suddenly remembers what he did not believe he had seen. Pauline's face as he sat again, with the drink he had made himself. Then there was Pauline's intensity of expression soon after.
“I've been warned. Son of a bitch. Warned.” He says this out loud, smiling but aware that anger will follow. Three or four years is no minor stretch of time. To have wasted.
He turns the key and climbs the single flight to his apartment, feeling the space claustrophobic and ugly, when it is only plain. He retains the smile but it is prompted by incomprehension and, as he remembers Sarah Gibb remembered, disgust. A girl who had reached out as anyone troubled would, rebuffed by another girl with no heart, no sense of what human beings owe to one another.
Robert goes to his little galley kitchen and finds a bottle. He pours a drink, neat, not even concerned with the type of liquor. I have always had boundaries, I imagine you'd call them. For the rest of the evening, for the rest of his life, he will despise Pauline for cheating him, as he will reserve hatred for himself and his wretched, misguided confidence.
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