She might say this or she might say that. If she heard herself speak, she might be able to determine what she actually felt. She thought of saying this: Well, that’s good, or she might say, Oh well, too bad, then, for each of you—Anna’s tone might be either blithe or sarcastic. What she really wanted to know, of course, was had there been God in it, but this question seemed much more personal than any she might ask about their specific sexual customs and/or practices.
There were gas lamps on the corner and there was hokey Czech folk music tumbling from a staticky speaker and an old Michael Jackson song blasting from the open door of the disco across the cobbled street. This was the New Czech Republic, Anna struggled to remember. All the old names of the same old countries had gone away into the Dark Zone behind the Iron Curtain but now were coming back, just as heroin was back and crack cocaine was back—she’d just read this news in one of her several trashy magazines. Whole countries were rematerializing with the New Nationalism—some had been submerged for generations—yet a blanding was happening in Europe so the countries now seemed to her to have been transported from the different parts of Disneyland.
Anna was having trouble listening. She was thinking of swimming in Sand Pond during summers when she was little and how she had always known beneath knowing that her mother took Anna and her brother Davis up there sometimes to punish their father for things he’d done. She also knew without knowing that it had to do with sex.
Sex was the Dark Zone, was buried in the layers of what was known and what was not known and what was spoken and was not spoken and in this was like the distinct layers of temperature of the water in the pond. The water was meant to remain cold, the dark and secret place. The warm layer was clear; through it the shallows displayed their golden pebbles, and that was where the reeds grew and the babies sat.
The warm layer of water was never more than a foot deep even in August at the peak of summer. The X-shaped insects skated, balanced their infinitesimal weight, the bubbled X’s haloed, echoed, on the sand below, held aloft by pods of surface tension—because of waterbugs, X was still one of Anna’s favorite letters. Through the clear water the exaggerated shadows of the water-skaters bumped and abruptly moved. It was easy knowledge that lay in the shallows, and this easiness lay atop the deeper water of the quarry. The deeper things were cold, were dangerous. Sex was dangerous, was singular, was why you learned to swim, why you were frightened, why you jumped off the raft and why you disappeared into blackness as you went off and into it.
She was thinking how very much she now wanted to take her own baby daughter and go home to East Eden, except that Anna was ashamed to have made so little evolutionary progress and to do so would mark her forever as her own mother’s girl.
She was ashamed of herself, also ashamed of Charlie for being unable to keep his word. He’d promised to change when Maggie was born—she more than half believed him. She forgot the most basic truth of what it meant to grow older: one does not change except to become more intensely what one has always been.
“You’re not angry then?” someone asked. It was Charlie. He was here. She’d forgotten all about him.
Angry? Anna wondered. She turned the word over and over, counted its various letters, rubbed it until it became as polished as a river rock. What was he talking about again? She was remembering something else. This was a huge man, both tall and fat, who once danced with her at a roadhouse. This man was maybe forty or even fifty—Anna was not yet seventeen. It was upstate near the border of Canada. She and her mother driving north in her Grandmother Rutherford’s big old-fashioned boat of an American car, having left Rhinebeck abruptly. Neither Davis nor Anna’s father was with them. They’d been driving aimlessly, heading toward the border, flying northward as if it was as “up” as the way it lay on the flat of the map, having lost all sense of internal gyroscope and with it the natural horizon.
The big man spoke to Anna in French as they danced, spoke suggestively of the things he’d like to do to her. He could not have known how completely she understood him. They danced and Anna was beautiful to him, no longer the tall shy girl with the frizzy hair, no longer awkward in speech or tripping on her size-ten feet. Dancing with that elegant man was like being danced with by the ocean.
Had he simply led her away with him, she would have gone. She would have gone anywhere that night to escape getting back into the car again with her mother’s desolation.
“Well, good,” Anna told Charlie. She heard the word recede in reverb, going good! good! good! This might be a kind of echolocation, she guessed, like the system of sonar used by bats.
She reached over to borrow his reading glasses to look again at dessert—the waiter had taken her plate and she was suddenly starving. “Good,” she said again. “That’s settled then.”
She squinted, looking for a list of pastries—she wanted something gross, something that came served mit Schlag. Some unspoken cue caused her to look up. She peered over the readers to look at her husband. Was there something wrong with him? There in the Weinstube in Prague was the first time Anna could remember ever seeing Charlie look actually frightened.
There was more, evidently , that needed to be said: Charlie hadn’t brought this up in order to hurt Anna or cause her distress but because she was going to find out anyway. The girl told her parents, who had threatened Mills with a lawsuit. Mills was arranging her admission at another school, one that was, Charlie said, really firstrate, one she probably wouldn’t otherwise have been admitted to.
Anna positioned her tongue and lips. She breathed. She was experiencing a moment of hesitation. She needed to spend a couple of moments organizing herself, her internal pacing, commas, periods, and the question marks, how they might pose what kinds of expectations. She was also deconstructing this last part: this current girl’s various chances and hopes for advancement and future happiness. And the strange twist of her good fortune. The bend this girl’s life road took there when it came to Charlie, that there was this small thing back then that her parents made into this big legalistic deal—though not serious in that it barely mattered since no one’s heart was broken, the one small irony being that what wrecked her professor’s marriage turned out to be her trampoline.
Charlie was going on. The lawyers for Mills were talking to the parents’ lawyers and both were talking to those of Charlie’s parents. It was Charlie’s parents who came up with the idea of the cash settlement for the girl and endowing Mills with the practice rooms.
Anna’s mother was a handsome woman, an accomplished pianist and a sophisticated milliner. Margaret wasn’t beautiful but was tall and thin and she carried herself well. She had a kind of wry solemnity, Anna thought, as if she had secret value.
Anna was thinking of her mother, how each seemed somehow fated to stand in the rising damp of a cabin in a logged-off hardwood forest picking men who turned out to be as useless as this one. Men like this were nothing special, men like this were a dime a dozen. Anna felt very close to her mother then.
Anna quietly gathered herself, as her mother might have, and stood up from the table. The night was warm. She remembered to take along the cardigan she’d hung on the back of her chair. This sweater had been crocheted by her mother. It was a creamy white and had tiny buttons made of pearls.
Charlie began hurriedly throwing money down on the table. He threw down great bunches of large bills printed in blue on pale pink, and green on pale blue. The paper was as crinkly and thin as the tissue used to wrap Italian almond cookies. These were made of egg white and air and sugar, weighed next to nothing; these, with Jordan almonds, were Anna’s mother’s favorite sweets. The look and feel of money was simply better in Europe, Anna thought. There were so many kinds of currencies, so many shapes and weights, bills printed so beautifully on so many kinds of paper, yet the global commerce was soon to convert it all to MouskaDollars.
Anna—tall, proud, chin up, back straight—stumbled slightly on the uneven cobblestones. She had gone a ways