Until they came to rest on me. It was sunlight. In that instant of recognition, his eyes brightening, I felt like a complete fool. How could I have made him wait? How had I allowed myself to wait? Rooted in place, I shook my head like I did not believe.
“Oh my goodness, Brenda.” Charlie stopped an arm’s length away. “Oh my.”
For once I was the shy one, holding back because the pull of him was so strong.
“Let me look at you,” I said, though I was already doing it. He had developed some, muscled out in his chest, his arms like ropes. Though his forehead was even more prominent with the buzzed haircut, and a healthy tan that had lightened the color of his hair. Charlie in all his goofy glory, and I felt a thrill flutter through me like wings.
He set something at my feet. My parents’ picnic basket. I laughed. “I can’t believe you brought that here today.”
“I took good care of it,” he said. And the fear came over me: Had he returned the basket because this was the only time we would see each other, and then he would be swallowed back into his secret war job in the hinterlands, and I would return to playing hymns and sleeping in a boardinghouse, and this morning might be all we would ever have?
“Of course you did.” I moved forward, to hug him, and doing so made me step into a shadow. Was that Chris, like a devil on my shoulder? No, I looked up and the sidewalk there had a roof over it, like a porch, to shield pedestrians from the sun. But I felt the darkness of my transgression as though it was the dress I wore.
There was only one way forward. I put my arms around Charlie and pulled him close. His back felt stronger under my hands, firmer. At first he did not hold me back, but I stayed right there.
After a while, who knows how long when your desire is that keen, his hands rose to my waist, thumbs on my hip bones as though I were naked. I did not flinch or pull away. At last he succumbed, wrapping his arms around my waist and drawing me against him, pressed together the length of our bodies. I felt the world falling away, a rush of relief and a sharpness of want. What had I ever been thinking?
I remember that day with Charlie as clearly as the day we met. Our childhoods had ended, blunt as a cinder-block wall. We did not yet know each other as adults.
I was the one who released the hug first. I wish I could take it back. But guilt about Chris still shadowed me, and the secret of it came momentarily between us. “Come on for a walk,” I said. “You don’t know this town.”
Why couldn’t I have been kinder? How did I forget that life is short, and we ought to be our best in every moment? Charlie scooped up the picnic basket, offered his arm, and we promenaded. Or no: I led and he followed. Despite my conscience, in some deep, awful way, I still thought I was better than he was.
Lizzie was reading on the bench when we approached, feet tucked under her rump. “Hello, lovebirds,” she called.
“This is Lizzie,” I said to Charlie, as she stood and shook his hand, giving him a once-over and not hiding it.
“So Prince Charming is real after all? I was beginning to worry.”
“I’m feeling pretty real today.” Charlie gave his arm a pinch. “Great to meet you.”
“What do you do for work, Charlie? Where do you live?”
He ducked his head, a gesture of shyness that had irritated me back in Chicago, but that now I saw differently. Modesty, maybe. The opposite of bragging.
“Oh, this and that,” he said. “I live outside of town.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “You’re one of those Los Alamos guys.”
“I, um—”
“Don’t worry,” she laughed. “I’m not a spy.”
“That makes three of us,” I said. “We’re only here to drop off a picnic basket.”
“Sounds perfect,” Lizzie said. “Just be sure to smooch each other all the time.”
Charlie blushed, and I did too. “Are all married women this brazen?” I asked.
“I like to think I’m special,” she answered. “Leave the basket. I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks,” I said. And I don’t know why, but I gave her a hug, quick and fierce.
“Oh go on.” She fanned the air before sitting again. “I’m trying to read.”
We ambled away—no planned route, no destination—a companionable silence.
“Who was that?” Charlie asked after a while.
“Who, Lizzie?”
“The woman hanging laundry in back. She gave me a double-barreled frown.”
“Oh, that’s Mrs. Morris. She hates me but I don’t know why.”
“Because she doesn’t know you,” he said. “Otherwise she’d love you.”
That reply made me think of my mother, and how deft Charlie always was at dealing with her prickliness. He’d done it again with Mrs. Morris. I pulled him closer. “Tell me about your work.”
“I’m not allowed to say,” he answered.
“But you can tell me, Charlie.”
“Actually, no. It’s against the law, and might be treason.”
“Do you have to take everything so seriously?”
“Brenda.” He hesitated, which at the time I thought was insecurity but now believe was him showing patience with me. “It is serious. There are women on The Hill who don’t know what their husbands do all day.”
“What could the army possibly be up to that would require couples to keep secrets from each other?”
After another minute of strolling, he replied. “I guess I can say that my job is something like what I did in your parents’ basement, only a million times more complicated. I’ve never had to work so exactingly or concentrate so hard.”
“Do you like it?”
He stopped. “Do I like it?”
“Sometimes when I’m learning a complicated new organ piece, the difficulty is part of the pleasure. I’ve been working for months on the Bach Toccata in D Minor, for example, and it is pummeling me, but in a way I really enjoy.”
He smiled, and without thinking I reached over and touched his face. Right this minute, all these years later, I am so glad I did that, because his grin grew even wider. It’s an image I’ll always treasure. “Charlie Fish, I sure have missed your smile.”
“Brenda, I have missed your everything.”
We stood a minute, feeling it, pleasure and pain at the same time. I was twenty years old, thousands of miles from home, standing with the boy I’d come all that way to see. I wondered if we were about to kiss. Would it be like before? Or would Chris ruin it?
Instead Charlie chuckled. “You know, you look just like Brenda.”
I pressed my forehead to his chest. “I’m her. I’m really her.”
After a minute we started along again. “The fact is,” he said, “I do like it. I use my whole brain, it’s wonderfully rewarding.”
“Lucky you.”
He’d been about to speak, but caught himself. “Your job’s no conservatory, is it?”
I shook my head. “At least one of us is doing work we like. That’s not bad for wartime, right?”
“Perhaps. But I dislike the pressure of my work, and the haste, and especially how the things I make might be used.”