On their fifth anniversary James took Claire to a restaurant that was not a club and not a diner. He stood up as if to speak and she said, “If this is a toast I will leave.” He sat down. He said, “It is just wine.” They drank wine. They went home to June and a sitter who had fallen asleep on the couch. Claire paid the sitter and sat on the floor of June’s room and listened to the child breathe. Breathing was the only speech she wanted.
Sometimes she still heard her own voice in the garden.
He is touching her. At my dinner.
The sentence had been necessary.
It had also been a door. Through it went the first date, the first dress, the first seating chart, the first version of Grant as only a father. On the other side: a courthouse, a plant, a diner, a daughter named for a month that had to wait.
Claire would walk that garden again in dreams. In some dreams she did not walk. She stayed and smiled and the toast happened and the waist remained. Those were the worse dreams. She woke from them and put her hand on James’s back and waited for the room to be an apartment and not a club.
James said, without turning, “Garden?”
She said yes.
He said, “We’re not there.”
She said I know.
Knowing is not the same as the body knowing. The body still had satin and grass. The body still had Patricia’s low voice. Do not make a scene. The body had made a scene by walking. Walking is a scene that does not shout. It is a scene all the same.
Save it for the toast.
There was no toast.
There was a life after an unfinished dinner.
The lights stayed pretty only in memory.