The Promise of Elsewhere by Brad Leithauser

Author:Brad Leithauser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

“Your feet’ll be okay?”

“My feet?”

“It’ll be a fair amount of walking.”

“Oh, these are great. Super comfy.”

Shelley’s legs are crossed. She dangles an ankle to show off what are actually quite attractive tan-and-red woven sandals. Louie has already noticed the bigness of her feet, but her ankles’ slender shapeliness comes as a surprise. They’re seated side by side on a new train that looks less like a train than a subway car. Her toenails are polished bubble-gum pink. The sandals look deliciously overstuffed. She’s quite a captivating sight this morning.

They’re on the 9:25 express to Cambridge, having met at 9:00 at King’s Cross. Shelley’s wearing cuffed khaki slacks, a white cotton turtleneck, a plaid windbreaker. She looks sporty and scrubbed, and the joy he’d felt as she came solidly bouncing toward him across the station was hearteningly unambivalent.

He’d admired the cool, chaste set of her cheek as they kissed, her wordlessly communicating a wish to overlook all that frenzied necking in last night’s taxi. Those had been hot, pulsing, sloppy, tooth-tapping, lovely kisses. But this was a new morning, and intricate proprieties have blossomed overnight. Louie’s amenable. Whatever approach she wants, it’s all fine, all playable. Here is a boon, a pure bounty: on his vacation, a graying forty-three-year-old Louie Hake winds up sightseeing with a pretty girl who is still—for another month yet—in her twenties. And the skittish English sun is shining boldly, racily.

He admires, too, her mature directness in confronting his tangled personal issues. She says, “Ja look at your email, Louie?” And when he says, “I had eighteen emails,” she says, “Anything important?” And when he says, “What do you mean important?” she says, sweetly zeroing in, “Anything from Florence? Or Lizzie?”

“No, nothing more from Florence,” Louie says. “Though I’m not expecting anything. And sort of hoping I don’t. Don’t get anything. I wrote her such a nutty crazy letter, I’m praying things’ll just calm down. I’m hoping she’ll ignore me.”

“And Lizzie?” Shelley presses.

“No, nothing yet, though I’d like to hear from her.”

“To hear what, Louie? What is it you want?”

What is it he wants?

Their train bundles along. It takes longer these days to tug free of London’s exurbs into farmers’ fields and traditional countryside. Meanwhile, he reveals to Shelley the contents of his lightweight nylon sack: two water bottles and two chocolate croissants. “Yum,” she says, and adds, “Aren’t you the clever professor…”

The sky is full of loose, baggy clouds that Constable might have painted, silver-gray, silky gray. In Italy, on a sweat-thickened afternoon that now seems quite faraway, Louie rode a train back from Florence to Rome through landscapes Raphael might have painted.

What is it he wants? Louie’s grateful for her question. Though a stranger, or a relative stranger, Shelley is (he must keep in mind) offering almost the finest gift a stranger can offer you: a heartfelt interest in the twists and turnings of your life. It’s the highest of compliments: a patient and painstaking listener.

According her question the solemnity it deserves, then, Louie takes his time.

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