Bedford, midway between her home in D.C. and his in Pittsburgh, served as the usual rendezvous point. They ate the first dinner of their weekends in the Jean Bonnet, a stone tavern at the junction of what had been two trails and then two post roads, centuries before the turnpike. Friday night locals crowded the bar for darts and beer; Joy and Daniel preferred the dining room downstairs. The thick stone walls and heavy beams muffled the din of the juke box above.
Arriving first, Joy settled into their favorite table by the fireplace. The hearth’s warmth relaxed her from the drive and the hectic week at school. A high school physics teacher, Joy had a briefcase full of problem sets to grade in the car. Now that she and Daniel met more often, she was falling behind in her work. Teaching required so much prep and clean up time. She should work until he came but, instead, Joy ordered a glass of red wine and the artichoke dip.
They had met four years before; stranded in an ice storm in the Atlanta airport, respective connections cancelled. During the delay, over tepid coffee in paper cups, he told her about his wife Selma.
Selma always had been healthy, except for one life-threatening episode of eclampsia fifteen years earlier at their daughter Monica’s birth. The doctors warned against more children; she took up running and kept blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight low. Approaching forty, she trained for her first marathon—a challenge in celebration of the milestone birthday. Every morning Selma ran the steep hills of their neighborhood. One morning, cooling down from her run, she collapsed in the driveway: a massive cardiac event.
Unknowing, Daniel sat inside over breakfast, reading the paper until a neighbor pounded on the door. Daniel began CPR learnt years before to qualify as a chaperone for their daughter’s scout trips. The paramedics arrived; Selma never regained consciousness. He blamed himself for not finding her sooner. He blamed himself for not taking up running fifteen years ago. He should have been with her.
The doctors suggested disconnecting life support. Daniel deferred, neither he nor Monica was ready to give up hope. Besides, he felt uncertain of Selma’s wishes. To his surprise, she hadn’t listed herself as an organ donor on her driver’s license. They’d never executed advance directives: that sloppiness his fault, too. Dodging the bullet when Monica was born should have warned him.
Insurance for acute hospitalization ended. At this point in recounting the story in the airport, he crumpled the empty Starbucks cup in beautiful hands—large hands, with long fingers. He wore a wedding ring.
Sounding angry, Daniel continued. I caved in and gave permission to pull the plug.
He arrived for the last shift of vigil alone; prepared to lie to Monica, to say her mother had slipped away. But Selma—blessed or cursed by her runner’s constitution—breathed on, on her own, neither waking nor dying. She had hovered in limbo for almost six months by the night Joy met Daniel.
Snow and ice socked in the airport; delays became cancellations. They rode the shuttle bus to the airport hotel and drank snifters of brandy in the bar; the Muzak system played a terrible canned version of Norwegian Wood. They boarded the elevator, each with a key card for a room. At her floor, she picked up his suitcase. “Come with me,” she said, shocking herself. Forty-six years old, a confirmed solitary, Joy lived carefully by scientific method: recognizing a problem, collecting data, testing her hypothesis. All experiments and evidence so far had proved relationships required more heat energy than she could spare. She considered herself deficient in some way, her own name an ironic misnomer.
In the dark anonymous room, lying beneath the synthetic beige blanket, they warmed the antiseptic sheets. She had almost forgotten, almost forsworn the genuine, reciprocal delight of using another body, and being used—passionately used, tenderly used.
The next morning she awoke disoriented in the suffocating artificial darkness. While Daniel spoke softly on the phone with his daughter, Joy showered—to give him privacy, and reclaim her own.
They embraced in the airport departures lounge. “I don’t know when I can see you again, but I want to,” he said. “It’s not right, to drag you into my situation. I can’t promise anything, offer anything.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m quite self-sufficient. Famous for it, actually.”
On the flight home she thought about him. She tried to dissect what had prompted her uncharacteristic boldness the night before. Instinct? Perhaps, but something more complicated than simple desire: a yearning to offer solace. Joy held the secret of him like a piece of gold in her pocket as she resumed routine.
He left a message while she was out the following Friday night, at the concert series she attended with a colleague.
“This is a singing telegram,” he said and sang—not badly—all the verses of Norwegian Wood. He made her laugh and want to call him back.
She waited until morning and savored their first long conversation, curled in bed beneath her white duvet, luxuriating in her light-drenched room—with him and alone, at the same time.
Joy never considered it an affair. That implied deceit and hurt. She betrayed no one. Nor did he, by any reasonable standard, although Selma still slumbered in her netherworld and Daniel wore his ring.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not fair to you that I’m not free.”
Joy wouldn’t have respected him if he could easily shrug off his wife. She appreciated his loyalty to Selma, or rather to the idea of Selma, her memory.
And she suspected, from past experiments, she would not have wanted him if he had been free.
The space between them—temporal, geographic and emotional—suited Joy. By familiar paradox, she found it easier to be intimate when protected by distance. Separation fostered closeness as it had with her childhood pen pal. Free from the pressure of daily interactions, Joy had confided on the page. The other girl wrote her family was coming East to see Washington D.C. Joy’s mother invited them to dinner. Meeting face-to-face, the pen pals turned shy. Afterward, the correspondence petered out.
Until recently, Daniel and Joy could meet only at occasional, irregular intervals. He visited Selma’s nursing home bedside almost every day. And the more urgent problem requiring his vigilance was Monica’s unsettled, extended adolescence: dangerous exploits with drugs, drinking, and sex. Daniel attributed the acting out to losing her mother and reproached himself.
Joy had never met the girl but suspected Monica might be wild by temperament, one of those incorrigibles who go off the rails even with both parents fully present. She thought Daniel could have practiced tougher love with Monica: pulled her out of public school, placed her in a school like her own Sacred Heart Academy. A lay teacher, not a Catholic herself, Joy held no illusions that a single-sex parochial school constituted safe haven. Plenty of her students found trouble, too, but at least it required more effort.
Last year, nineteen-year-old Monica dropped out of college and had a baby. One more disaster it seemed at first, but she proved a conscientious mother. She married the father, an electrician. Daniel liked him, as well as the union health benefits for his daughter and granddaughter.
And turning over the worry, he really liked that. And being able to see Joy twice a month: he left work early on alternate Fridays, dropped in at the nursing home, and headed out of town.
Joy found the more frequent reunions disconcerting. The new rhythm required adjustment. Fatigued, fragmented, she lacked her usual home weekend quota of quiet time alone. Her spacious, sparely furnished apartment looked untidy and neglected. Last night she’d almost called to cancel. But she neither wanted to lie nor tell him the truth. She could not disappoint him.
Now Daniel entered the tavern. Relieved, Joy observed her response to his physical presence: a rush of pleasure. Stop overthinking, she chided herself.
He kissed her and then slid into the seat across