Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

He said, “How long can we keep this up, Gail?” I had to finish dragging my plastic spoon upside-down along the length of my tongue before I could answer him. I had to swallow. It was awkward. Then I said, “I don’t know how long.” What I should have said was, “We can keep this up forever. We can go on leaving things unspoken, letting them teeter in the balance, because isn’t everything perfect just the way it is?” But I didn’t.

We smiled at each other. The coffeemaker stopped burbling, but he just stood there smiling at me. So it was up to me to step forward, finally, and wrap my arms around him and press the length of my body against him and lift my face to his. After that, he was the one in charge. He drew away from me and took my hand and led me out of the kitchen, and through the foyer, and up the stairs.

Why had I, who truly loved my husband—at least in the on-again-off-again, maybe/maybe-not, semi-happy way of just about any married woman—broken apart my whole world for a man I never really knew? But maybe that was just it: I hadn’t known him. There are times when that can be the strongest draw of all.

“This is more like ‘It’s not you; it’s the me that I am when I’m with you.’ ” “What?” “I used to be…” I began. I used to be the girl who stood in a vast golden field of wheat or oats or barley while Max Baines took my face between his palms as if it were something precious. He cupped my cheeks; he traced the scar on my chin with the tip of one thumb; he blinked as if he had trouble believing anyone could be so…well, perfect. I used to be perfect.

“What I’m aiming for is that Steve and I should have a civilized friendship with each other, the way you and your ex do.” “We do?” I said. And then, “Oh. We do.” I didn’t tell her how many years of ups and downs and icy silences and hurt feelings we’d had to go through to get there.

“I appreciate the thought. But the fact is that I believe I have only one span of life allotted to me. I don’t feel I have the option of just…trying out various random ideas and giving up if they don’t work out.”

He himself, apparently, assumed he had an infinite number of lives. Someday I’d like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have said.

That’s something you forget when you’ve been on your own awhile: those married-couple conversations that continue intermittently for weeks, sometimes, branching out and doubling back and looping into earlier strands like a piece of crochet work.

I’m too young for this, I thought. Not too old, as you might expect, but too young, too inept, too uninformed. How come there weren’t any grownups around? Why did everyone just assume I knew what I was doing?

gave me the courage, finally, to step out onto the porch myself and cup his face in my hands. I studied his sweet, bristly cheeks, and the satiny skin below his brown eyes, and his forehead creased with concern, and I committed them all to memory before I kissed him.