The Woman She'd Already Become

Her eyes slowly opened. I put my arm around her. She cuddled her naked body cozily against mine.

But there was a clatter of dishes from downstairs.

"We should probably get up," she murmured.

-----

People were packing and saying their goodbyes. Vernon and Lynn were there, and some of us went for a little hike across the fields. Mary Ellen wore a scarf on her hair. We ate a picnic lunch on the edge of the woods. You could see the church steeple off in the distance. Mary Ellen played with Abby's little niece, and I caught a glimpse of the patient, loving mother she would one day be.

Mary Ellen and I took our own leave soon after we got back to the house. The sky was dappled and glorious, the grass along the roadside verdant and lush. We retraced our route back out the lane, along the county road, the state road, the freeway. We talked about this and that, about some of the books we'd read in class. We had a paper coming up.

"I haven't really picked a topic yet," I said.

"I'm going to write about The Age of Innocence," she said. "It's kind of funny. What I want to write about isn't really even in the book. I mean, it is, but it isn't. It's kind of in the blank space between one page and the next.

"You know how most of the book is about Archer falling in love with his exotic cousin even though he's engaged to his lifelong sweetheart. Will he will run off with the cousin to live a life of bohemian passion? Or will he succumb to the pressure of his family and remain loyal to his solid, but somewhat ordinary sweetheart?

"And then you turn the page, eager to know what will happen. And in that act of turning the page, twenty years go by. And by the time the page has settled and you've begun to read the first words of the next chapter, Archer has already lived his life. His children, who were barely imagined a page ago, are now grown. He's followed one course, but not the other.

"I cried. I cried for Archer, for the life he chose, for the life he didn't choose, for the woman he married, for the one he didn't. For all those years that passed in the turning of the page. For Edith Wharton, who could imagine such a vibrant 'what might be' and then turn it, in the twinkling between one page and the next, into such a poignant 'what might have been.'

"That's what I'm going to try to write about, if it makes any sense. How it felt to turn that page and see that tangible, palpable 'what might be' turned with such finality into 'what might have been.'"

-----

We'd reached our exit. The enchantment of the weekend, of the strange bed in the strange farmhouse, of the crickets and the newly plowed earth, of the slow dancing in the moonlight, had stayed with us all the way back. I wondered how we would act toward each other when I dropped her off.

We drove in cozy silence down the tree-lined avenues. The sunset was just fading as I pulled up to her dorm. She took her bag.

We kissed.

It was the first grown-up kiss of my life. The affectionate kiss of someone with whom I'd shared something special, who cherished the memory and did not begrudge its intimacy, who sincerely wished me well and would be glad the next time she saw me, who was willing to give the man within me the chance to prove that he was man enough for the woman she had already become.