COUNTERPARTS

A) You see her entering her car, disappearing from sight, smooth skin and golden hair caught gossamer by the sunlight, and behind her the weedy fields leading down to Marconi Station beach (which even at that moment you surmise might be the location of a future tryst). You’ve got foresight, or you feel it in your bones, a kind of light-headed vision of a masculine kind; not the soothsaying know-it-all manner in which fortune-tellers ply their trade, spreading their open palms over the crystal ball, gathering voices from the ether, speaking in firm, resolute voices. Later, you’ll swear you remember seeing a sprinkle of freckles—the lightly salted, barely visible type that bring out the whiteness of her skin—along the underside of her arms.

B) In a long line at the doughnut shop with the same crew you see each morning: permanent gentry mixing it up with the hotel and rental folk. Bikes line the curbside, their fat tires resting assuredly on the pavement. She stands four or five places ahead, dressed in a wraparound of some synthetic silk—dark brown and black paisley swirls—that faintly shows the outline of her bikini. You chalk up meeting her again to deeper, celestial, cosmological influences. The smell of fat cut by dark brewing coffee, mixed with the cool salt-dew air, and, even more, the flaccid stink of salt marsh, all make you aware that, if need be, you could place blame on conspiring elements, the landscape, sea foam, and plunging, hungry gulls. Flutter flutter, the heart goes. (Not long ago you were diagnosed with an overactive heart. The inflated pressure under your ribs.)

C) When she glances back, you exchange a brief pleasantry, a hello, or a head nod, but nothing more than that, because to breach the wall between you (ah, the delicate wall of the self and the private inner life along with the natural bubble of personal space) would perhaps shatter something perfect. (Isaac Bashevis Singer called it ESP.) You misread a lift of her hand, flattened into a kind of salute, and begin to wave back at her until you notice just in time that she is only sweeping away a stray strand of hair from her brow. You linger long enough—sadly, creepily—to note that she orders a sourdough doughnut and coffee, black, and buys a New York Times from the kid outside.

D) Attempt to exchange viewpoints, to become this woman getting into her car. You’ve begged a few hours away from Ron and the kids:

—I just want a little bit of time alone, not much, I just need to decompress. Not even a day, just a few hours alone with an old bedspread and a copy of Proust. You’ve been trying to read Remembrance for months, and you did read, for a moment, on the beach, with Marconi Station behind you, about the wind sweeping across the fields of corn near Champieu, reading slowly, testing the language, attempting to understand exactly what Proust was saying about the nature of memory and time, not to mention the way the wind acts as a tutelary genius. You agree: perhaps the movement of things is only mental, and getting into your car, looking up, you see a very handsome man—he could be a year or two your senior. He looks up and you exchange not what one would call a knowing look, but a look that does contain a pulse of recognition, primal, slightly fearful. He has a fine Romanesque nose and (but how could you see this!) very gentle lips, full lips, the lips of a folk singer, the lips of a man who can transpose the grief of the world into tight but paradoxically loose songs.