III

        The thing with Sam and Barry stayed with me as I walked home. It stayed with me as I met Hannah. ("How's the big fisherman?" she asked.) It stayed with me as I showered and dressed (a good old white button down-my old standby-and dark slacks), then later as Hannah and I left my house and shimmied on up to Charlie's, which had become our regular haunt, a little steak and seafood joint down past the river and near the salt marshes.
        As we drove, I noticed how Hannah was a little quiet, off in her own world. She sat in her seat, the shoulder belt loose so her dress would not wrinkle, and looked out her window, the expression on her face somewhat serious because we had talked about Sam and Barry and because, before this, she had been mulling over other things which concerned us. Outside was a long row of clapboard houses, all built on stilts (ready for the next flood), and beyond that, thick electrical cables sagging between poles, then treetops, then sky. The sun threw its raspberry light across clouds; the moon could barely be seen, as it can during twilight, as a semitransparent wafer. I wanted it to be a nice night with Hannah-nothing sounded so good as that-though I felt my luck might not hold. My luck here, as with fishing, was running thin.
        "Just seeing her there doesn't mean she's sleeping with Barry," she said. "I mean, I know her marriage has fallen on hard times, but I can't see her with Barry Stone, can you?"
        "No," I said, "not really."
        "I think if she were to have an affair, it would be with somebody we don't even know, someone well outside her circle of friends. I think she'd allow John that courtesy. She wouldn't be down at The Pad with someone she was sleeping with"-she paused here, looking out at the sky-"unless of course she wanted to be seen with him."
        "That's what I was thinking," I said. "Maybe she wanted John to know."
        "Maybe," she mused, "but I don't think it would be that simple. I don't think Sam plans out her life like that. Her motives are never so clear. She's a woman of emotion." She moved over and put her hand on my knee. She looked at me, a soft concerned look, then smoothed hair from my forehead. "This has really upset you, hasn't it?"
        "Not so much at first," I said, "but it has now."
        "I thought, when I saw you, that you might be upset because you hadn't caught any fish or because you'd been writing."
        "Usually I don't care if I catch anything or not. I just like being on the water. And I haven't written a word all day."
        She seemed to think about this, sitting there in her beautiful dress (the one her father gave her the year before he died). "But writing does upset you," she said. "You write out of a sense of angst. It's a strange motivation. It's like you're trying to fix something you can't really fix."
        "Fix what?" I asked.
        "I'm not exactly sure," she said. "I don't want this to sound simple because I know it's not. I know it's a lot more complicated than this. In most of your stories, though, you have the same elements. I don't mean the stories are the same. But at some level, you're addressing the same problem over and over, getting at it from different angles, as though you want to solve it."
        "I think most writers are like that," I said. "But in my work I don't think I've been honest enough. I haven't let enough of myself leak into it. I put up this front-this person I wouldn't mind being-and wrote about him instead."
        "I don't think that's true," she said. "I think there's a great deal of yourself in each story, even the ones about women. I see it quite clearly."
        "If I could write anything," I said, "I'd write one long story that would help explain the others. I think I'm trying to write that now, only it's not going so well."
        "Why not?"
        "I really don't know," I said.
        "When you're more settled, the writing will be easier."
        I didn't know if that was true-still don't-but knew this: the problem I was addressing in my stories and the problem between Hannah and me were part of the same ball of wax, a problem which began with my childhood (two parents who fought too much) then followed me into adolescence (a father who went skipping off to Canada) and finally into adulthood (years and years spent at college because I enjoyed myself there and felt I might be a better person because of it). I knew this too: talking about my stories was another way to avoid talking about trouble between us.
        "I think you'd enjoy yourself more if you didn't spend so much time with teaching," she said.
        "I have to teach three classes a term, no matter what I write."
        "I mean, preparing to teach. You spend too much time preparing to teach."
        "Maybe I do," I said, but before I could say more (how I'd slacked off a bit in grad school and needed to catch up), Charlie's presented itself to us, just as we rounded a stretch of pine trees, a big beautiful restaurant (designed in the style of a depression era wilderness lodge): it looked out towards the salt marshes and, beyond that, to the Gulf. I always liked going to Charlie's: it was the type of restaurant I could not afford while in grad school-the type with decorative base plates, three forks at each setting, oil lamps (not hurricane candles) on every table. Cars were parked tight around its gravel lot, but we managed to squeeze between an RV and a Mercedes. We sat there for a moment, just looking off at the restaurant, how people filled its windows (waiters, a wine steward, customers at each table) and how other people were filing in though the front doors, hoping for a good dinner where they could forget their troubles, which, I suppose, is what most people want: a good night out where discouragement cannot touch them. I was reminded, too, of other times Hannah and I had come to Charlie's-times when we were more in love, more hopeful that we'd end up moving in together and eventually tying the knot, though those ideas seemed pretty distant right then. Hannah sat beside me, her dinner purse (the one she saved for special outings) clutched in her lap. Our windows were beginning, just at the edges, to steam. I was aware that we had sat there too long, that this meant something, how we were waiting for some moment to arrive. Outside, a group of people passed us, their voices drawing high and filled with a certain happiness, all of them shuffling along towards the front entrance, large glass doors framed in brass. Hannah touched my shoulder, a light questioning touch, then smoothed her fingers through my hair. "Is there something you're thinking?" she asked.
        I waited a moment then turned to her, finding she was already looking at me. Pearly light slipping in through the window behind her. I was struck then with a small but sad realization: tenderness, at times, was becoming a struggle for us. I did not like how that made me feel. "Do you feel like we aren't doing so well?" I asked. "As a couple, I mean."
        She thought about this for a moment, her eyes drawing up to my car's ceiling, which was nothing more than vinyl patterned with pinpricks. "I wouldn't say that," she said. "We've just hit a difficult spot."
        "What does that mean?"
        "I'm not sure I really understand it yet," she said. "It's hard, but not too hard. I take the good with the bad."
        "Do you?"
        She nodded, though I knew that this was mainly talk, that "the bad" often led to a place where things came apart, despite the best intentions of any two people.
        "I'd like to think it works that way," I said, "that people just tumble through, reasonably unscathed, but I'm not so sure it does."
        "Sometimes," she said, "I think you expect too much because you're a writer. You want things to progress in a straight line. All trouble must expand into some larger trouble. Any detour must be its own end."
        "Maybe I do think like that," I said.
        She leaned away from me, back against her door, far enough to regard me with a good long look. She sat there, her arms crossed, her hair falling in curved ringlets, like delicate wood shavings, around her shoulders. I was filled with longing for her, a type of sorrowful distant longing I had not felt for a person in years.
        "Are you still hopeful about us?" I asked.
        "I am," she said, though I could tell she was hedging. "Not quite as hopeful as I was, but hopeful. Are you?"
        "Most the time," I said.
        "Maybe it's nothing more than the Four Months Blues," she said.
        "Maybe," I said, though I suspected that that too was not the full truth.
        "It might be that," she said, "or something else." She glanced outside. "You hungry?"
        "Mm-hmm," I said.
        "I think a nice dinner would do us the world of good, don't you?"
        I was about to say, "Yes," but while she was talking, I looked off at the restaurant-good old Charlie's, that gorgeous lodge with windows across the second (and highest) storey, each pane of glass frosted with the letter "C." Oil lamps glowed inside. Waiters (dressed in white dinner coats and cummerbunds) moved between tables. I saw, in the dim parkinglot-who else?-but Sam and Barry, standing right beside the entrance, waiting to go inside. It did not surprise me for some reason, seeing them there, though it should have. I had thought about them so much that finding them at Charlie's seemed only natural. They had been joined by four other people, two of whom I knew from my college: Al Rowlins and Geena Hughes, both of them science teachers. I saw how nervous their friends looked, how they were holding themselves with a posture that appeared not quite relaxed. I thought, too, I might've been wrong about Barry and Sam, that they might actually be meeting for business-our early interpretation influenced by Missy and her white umbrella-though I sensed, even then, this reexamination was wrong. As we watched, Sam and Barry, along with their friends, shuffled inside, Al holding the door then letting it swing shut behind them. Inside, they walked to the Maitre D's podium, where they were met by a man wearing a full tuxedo, then were led off to a table. Hannah was the first to speak, an audible catch worked into her voice: "In ways," she said, "it reminds me of my own divorce."
        "I didn't think you believed they were sleeping together."
        "Don't know if I do," she said, "but she looked real lonely just then, standing around with people she didn't know very well. I'd forgotten how desperate marriage can make a woman."
        "Towards the end of your marriage, did you have an affair?"
        "No," she said, "I wanted to, but didn't."
        "Did your husband?"
        "I've never asked him that. It's one of the few things which keeps us friends." She undid her safety belt, letting it recoil, then unlocked her door, my car sounding an impatient beep. "Come on," she said. "I think we should probably get some dinner."
        "I think so too," I said.
        All through dinner, we tried our best to fall into our old happiness: we touched hands under the tablecloth, we poured each other wine, once she leaned her head against my shoulder, surrendering herself to the affection between us. None of this, however, felt as natural as it had on previous visits. We were hoping for some piece of good fortune to come our way-something that would make us feel pretty damn in love and get us to believe that being together was as right as rain, the next best thing, as necessary as life itself-only this good fortune did not slip down into our evening. It was just me and her and the space between us, the space that had started making itself known only a month ago and now would not leave. She was a woman of solitude and philosophy, of condos and kayaking, of wide open spaces and ideas without answers. I worked in an English department; I believed in narrative lines and questions with answers, in plot twists that brought a character thundering home. I had dated a few girls back in California, two of whom I had loved. She had married then divorced. She believed that life was a type of expansion, one where a philosophy student could find happiness in realty, where the Democratic Party and National Public Radio held enough benevolence to see a person through. As for me, I was just trying to get by and do the best I could. Trying to fall in love and hold onto the good things life had sent my way. We both had fallen into a place where love was not truly with us, though neither one of us wanted to admit such a thing.
        We did not see Barry and Sam while we were eating. They were seated on the other side of the restaurant, where the view opened to the parkinglot and beyond it to thickly wooded land owned by the National Park Service. We looked out onto the salt marshes. Past that, we saw the Gulf, how the reflection of moonlight, drawn out into a long straight line, snaked across dark water. I was glad we were here on this side of the restaurant, glad we couldn't see them: their presence had affected us, had made Hannah remember what a raw deal divorce can be (no matter who you are) and made me think about my own parents who had gotten divorced (via registered mail from Vancouver) when I was thirteen. We did not see them until we were getting ready to leave-after we had paid the bill and left a tip and collected our things. Though it was not Sam and Barry whom we saw first. First, we saw John, of all people, sitting in the dimness of the bar, his body firmly planted on a wooden barstool, his shoulders hunched over, his weight supported by his elbows. Beside him, a bar glass holding nothing but a squeezed lime wedge and two ice cubes.
        Hannah and I had been talking about going off to my place, maybe taking a long walk along the river, but that stopped when we saw him. He was stooped over, looking far across the restaurant to where, at a window table, he could glimpse his wife and Barry, along with their four friends. I walked up to him, put my hand on his shoulder, then took the barstool beside his. Only then did I see the other bar napkins, now empty, on which previous drinks had been served. He looked over at me, his eyes bleary and red-looked at me and Hannah both. Only after a good long moment did he seem to understand who I was and what I was doing here. He picked up his glass, rattled the ice, then set it back down. "I didn't want anyone to see me here," he said.
        "I didn't know whether we should come over or not," I said.
        "Doesn't matter," he said. "In fact, I'm glad you're here. Glad, so you can remind me what a goddam sap I turned out to be."
        "You aren't a sap," I said.
        "Only this afternoon I was thinking about going up to Keyser Springs, getting us a room." He pushed the glass away from him. "That's a spineless, goddam sap for you." He signaled the bartender. "I sit here, and I'm not even doing anything to stop them either."
        "If it were me," I said, "I'd wait until I was home."
        "Then it'll be too damn late," he said.
        The bartender came over: he was a young man, wearing a white shirt and black vest, and, unlike other waiters, a bolo tie fastened with a silver-and-turquoise slide. "I'll serve you one more," he said to John, "but it'll have to see you home."
        "See me home!" John said. "Is my money no good here?"
        The bartender looked at me, and at the same time, picked up a glass (one which had been in a glass rack) and wiped out its interior with a white dish cloth. "What'll it be?" he asked.
        John looked at his empty glass, at the other napkins, then at Hannah and me. He seemed confused all of a sudden, an alcoholic's dreaminess washed across his features, as though he had trouble, for just a moment, understanding where he was or what had happened, then his eyes locked on to us, more focused this time, that dreaminess gone, replaced by regret. "I wish you hadn't seen me here," he said, forgetting of course that he had said just the opposite not more than two minutes ago. "Wish I'd gone to the movies. Wish I'd moved to D.C.. It's pretty nice there this time of year."
        Hannah, I saw, was beginning to pull away, looking at us from a great distance, as though we were characters on a movie screen, her own divorce the only lens through which she could understand such a thing. It was pressing down on her hard, this moment, hard in a way I couldn't have expected.
        The bartender took another glass from the glass rack, began wiping it down, turned to me then said: "You make sure he gets home OK. He's been here for about a half hour. Has been drinking as fast as I can serve him."
        "I'll make sure," I said.
        When I turned again to John, I saw that he was struggling to stand, lowering himself from the barstool, his hand griping the bar for balance. He stood there for a moment, just looking across the restaurant, towards the window table where his wife was sitting. He took one step, then reached into his pocket, removing a five dollar bill which he slapped down as a tip. "I was never quite ready to be forty," he said, his voice adopting a quick definite tone as if he were answering a question we had asked. "It was all too much for me. You know that?" I said I knew. "And," he added, "I've always liked fishing." He looked one last time towards his wife, only this time, when he turned her way, she was standing, a cloth napkin in her hand, her jacket draped over the back of the chair. She stood, still talking to Barry, and as she was setting the napkin beside her plate, she happened to look our way ( I gathered) for the first time all night. She saw her husband here with Hannah and me, the bartender behind us (rearranging the high-end liqueurs and cognacs that were kept on a display shelf); her eyes narrowed for a moment as she singled out her husband, then she pushed in her chair, the other people at her table chatting away, good times their friend, trouble a distant cousin. It was only Barry who, after a moment, looked at Sam, then us, then Sam again. She said something to him as she put her hand on his shoulder then left the table, looking back only once, towards us at the bar, before she continued off to the Ladies' Room, or the public phone, or wherever she had intended to go. Old mushmouth Barry did not look our way again, only ate quietly, staring down at his plate, silenced (most likely) for the first time since noon.
        John began to leave, taking careful yet determined steps across the floor. As he passed Hannah, she spoke to him in a quiet hushed voice she had never used with me: "You can be OK," she said, "even if you're by yourself." He left then, shuffling out the door. I followed him, though Hannah stayed behind, looking off at the bartender who was, right then, pouring port for other customers.
        "You know what I remember best?" he said when we were outside. Cold air lifted off the water. We were surrounded by the smell of the sea and by faraway sounds of traffic, a group of semis shifting up through the gears. Above us, the moon carved a perfect hole through thin clouds.
        "What," I said, "what do you remember best?"
        "I remember how, when we first got married, she would make us tea," he said then stopped, gazing off towards the marsh, where night birds flew across the horizon, "how she'd make us tea and we'd drink it in bed. Just the two of us there, you know? Reading or perhaps just talking. It was the nicest damn thing. Every night like that." Light from a car, pulling out of Charlie's, swept over us, then the ground was dark again. "It's funny," he said, "that something so nice could become like this." We walked a ways, loose gravel crunching under our shoes. "This is something that'll stay with me," he said, "something I won't be able to turn away from."
        "I know," I said. If I knew one thing from all those stories I had written, it was this: that such a night was beyond brotherhood. No amount of fishing trips or mountain weekends or nights in a bar would ever take this moment away and make it better. This would stay with him the rest of his life, the two of us standing near White Heron Point and looking off across a Government-protected salt marsh. He would remember being here and trying to reconcile those two images-his wife bringing him tea and her sitting at a window table with Barry Stone-all his powers of reasoning set about to unravel the middle years, which was of course my problem as well. I was good at beginnings and at endings; it was the long murky middle I had trouble navigating, the part where love led to a deeper love, where intimacy swung down and expanded upon itself, the part which my parents and grandparents and pretty much everyone I knew had blundered.
        When we got to the first cross street, he stopped. "If you don't mind," he said, "I might just continue on by myself."
        "You going to be OK?" I asked.
        "Don't know," he said, then began walking, taking slow careful steps, far from the road, where even he, in his post-drinking stupor, would not accidentally wander out into traffic, mistaking asphalt for dirt. After he'd taken three or four steps, he turned to me and said: "You know, I've lived much of my life as a happy coward. I'm glad I can't live that way no more." Then he put his hands into his trouser pockets and began walking again, his body bending into the night. In the coming months, he and Sam would file for divorce; he would make a failed attempt to date Missy Gardiner (she had no interest in him as a free man); and the following year, he would request a transfer to Mount Rushmore (which was nothing like the Washington D.C. he'd once longed for). On that night, though, I saw him shrinking away, doing his best to walk a good straight line and trying, with whatever reserves he had, to take this blow with a fair amount of dignity.
        A few minutes later, I returned to find Hannah, still at the bar, holding a whisky sour, the maraschino cherry floating in the liquor, though the liquor was a good ways gone. She was looking quite down when I saw her, quite down and very much alone. During my absence, she had no doubt sketched out the end of our own relationship, our final night at a place called Charlie's, the drive home pointedly quiet, though when she actually saw me, some of the loneliness was gone from her eyes, some but not all, and the lessening of this was something I had not expected: I, too, had believed we'd begun the gradual, awkward dance of breaking up. I sat beside her, our arms almost touching, and looked across the bar, the two men who had been drinking port were now gone, their seats taken by a young college couple (not my students, though they looked young enough), who were drinking gin and tonics. The bartender did not card them. We sat there a good while, not saying much at all. We did not even notice when Sam and her party passed us on their way out, though we did look at the last moment to see Sam, almost at the door, her jacket folded over one arm, her hair still perfectly arranged. She saw us too, and after her party had already exited, she turned towards us, just briefly, as though she were asking us not to judge her too hard. We did of course, though maybe we shouldn't have. Good things come to an end; sometimes no one is to blame. Hannah looked down into her drink, where the maraschino cherry rested, and appeared to think about this for a long time.
        We sat at the bar a while: me thinking about John, Hannah looking down into her glass. When we did leave, the parking lot was nearly empty. Sam and Barry had long since left, most likely heading back to his house where they would have a long talk, Barry not quite knowing what he had gotten himself into. We walked close, Hannah and I, though we did not touch, did not hold hands. We were no longer breaking up, I knew. At least, we weren't breaking up at the moment. I unlocked the passenger's door and helped her inside. When I had the engine good and warm, I pulled away, leaving Charlie's behind us, small oil lamps still flickering in their windows.
        "Do you know what I wish?" Hannah said after we'd turned on to the highway.
        "No," I said, "what?"
        "I wish that we were very young. Teenagers, I guess. And that we didn't know how trouble worked through the world. I wish I had yet to go to college, and you had yet to go to grad school."
        "We are young," I said.
        "We're young," she said, "but not very young. We're not teenagers. I'll be thirty-one next month."
        She leaned towards me, resting her hand on my knee, as she often did while I drove. For a moment we were quiet, pavement stretched out before us, our breath barely visible on the windshield, my car's engine just thrumming along. Outside, the road was empty, except for our car. I did not know what all this meant: if we were only delaying some final night together or if we had faced danger and had passed through it, dropping down into a place where for a time we might be saved. I waited for her to rest her head against my shoulder and eventually she did, a few stray strands soft against my neck.
        "I'm glad I'm not alone tonight," she said. "I'm glad I'm with you."
        "So am I."
        "Are you?" she asked, pulling back to see my expression as I answered.
        "I am," I said.
        She stayed that way for a good long moment, just far enough away to see me as I was, my features outlined against a dark sky. At last she said, "There's something I've always wanted to know."
        "What?" I said.
        "If I were in one of your stories, what would you say about me?"
        I signaled to turn onto a different highway. Nothing but a long stretch of road, my headlights making it appear slightly less dark than the world which surrounded it. "Truth is," I said, "I'd never be able to write about you. I'd never get the details right."
        She leaned back into my side then, her head resting on my shoulder as it had been before, the two of us huddled close. "You're a terrible liar," she said. "I know enough to know that." She put her hand on my knee and let it stay there.
        We drove that night past Three Dock Point, past Meyer's Field, past the college where I taught. Outside, the musty odor of marshlands filled the air. Already I was trying to forget the evening, though I could not. This evening would stay with me too. I found myself, then, falling into a posture of gratitude, a feeling I have not allowed myself to feel enough through life. I was grateful to have Hannah (even if we would, some day, choose different paths); I was grateful to have John as a friend (though I felt very sorry for him); I was grateful to have a house, to have a car, to have gone to school for such a long time. I was grateful to be a parttime writer and to teach novels I thought were important. I was grateful even for the road out in front of us, how it was surrounded by trees older than our parents, how it curved along the moonlit water, and how, if we were lucky, it would bring us tumbling through, hoping for closeness that was not yet ours, and let us off, a long time from now, at someplace good.

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The Last Good Night