Mary and O'Neil Page 0,6

and nearly empty. They sat together an hour, talking and eating their lunch of sandwiches and soft drinks while the waitresses, two old women Arthur knew by sight but not by name, sorted steaming silverware and smoked long brown cigarettes at the counter. Arthur knew what was said about small towns, but as a lawyer, he’d found the opposite was true: everyone had something to hide. It was possible in such a place to live a kind of secret life, and if anyone asked, he could always say that he’d done some work for her. He’d been a lawyer long enough to believe that there was nothing simple about the truth, that it came in any number of forms, and this was one. They talked about people they knew, about the patients at her clinic and their sad stories, and about their children, as any two people their age, meeting for a meal, might do. She did not talk about Sam, though in a way she did; so many years, she remarked, looking around, since she had set foot in this place; she was glad to see it had not changed. With her practice and the boys besides, she said, it was all she could do to grab a quick bite at her desk. She gave a little laugh. Time moved quickly, did it not? And yet it sometimes seemed she had been doing things this way forever, pulling her life and her children’s lives like a cart.

Then as the hour drew late, on the verge of their good-byes, Dora reached across the table, found his hand with hers, and gently held it. Just that: Dora held his hand. Arthur felt himself raked, like the surface of a pond. Twenty-nine years, and he hadn’t once done this, held another woman’s hand; and yet people did it all the time, he knew; did it as if it were nothing. Arthur saw that she wore a watch with three gold hearts on either side of the face: one for each boy, and one for Sam. A gift: he knew this without asking. Mother’s Day? An anniversary? It was the kind of thing he might have bought for Miriam; it was merely an accident that he had not. Her hand was warm, and a little damp. She brushed the back of his hand with her thumb, once, and then she let it go.

And yet the moment felt frozen, as if neither of them could leave it, like a room without doors. She pulled her coat around herself a little; her eyes darted to the counter, where the women were smoking and talking (Arthur’s eyes followed; no, they had not seen), and then found Arthur’s again, squinting. “Well.” She tipped one shoulder and smiled uneasily. He realized only then that she hadn’t worn her glasses. It made her eyes seem very large. “Was that, you know, all right?”

He didn’t know, and also did. His mind had filled with a white emptiness, like a field of whirling snow—like forty feet of air. He heard himself say, “Yes.”

When was this? March, a year ago. Arthur, in his office, sips his coffee, now gone cold. At eleven-thirty he will pick Miriam up at the library, and together they will leave for New Hampshire. Through the spring and summer he and Dora continued to meet, at his office or hers, or for lunch, always in plain view and broad daylight, and always under the pretense of work she needed done: a quarrel with the town over parking at the clinic, an old tax matter of amazing density and frivolousness, a meaningless dispute with a neighbor over a drainage easement. How did I get on so long without a lawyer, she said, how did I ever manage without you? One matter would be settled and before the ink was dry she handed him a fresh folder of papers, bringing the two of them together in a continuous flow of trivial tasks like a chain of silk handkerchiefs pulled from a magician’s sleeve. Her pleased face said: See what I’ve come up with? Before this is over, she joked, I’m going to be your best client.

But what was this? And—the real question—why wasn’t he, Arthur—happily married Arthur—troubled by it, or troubled more? In the past he had imagined himself having an affair—everyone did, you couldn’t not think about it—but never like this, this affair that wasn’t, quite. They held hands, not even really holding; she would rub his shoulder when