they later admitted, they cast covert looks at each other’s families. They thought they were invisible, that no one could see what had happened between them. They thought their families would not remember how they had stepped off the boat and stood, for an instant, together.
On that boat, sitting dumb and miserable in the litter of nets and equipment, they had each pretended to be resigned to going home. Each foresaw (or so they later told each other) the hysterical phone calls and the frenzied, secret meetings. Neither foresaw how much the sight of each other’s family would hurt. “Sweetie,” Jonathan remembers Ruby’s husband saying. “You’ve lost so much weight.” Ruby remembers staring over her husband’s shoulder and watching Jessie butt her head like a dog under Jonathan’s hand.
For the first twelve days on the island, Jonathan and Ruby were so busy that they hardly noticed each other. For the next few days, after their conversation on the ledge, they sat near each other during faculty lectures and student presentations. These were held in the library, a ramshackle building separated from the bunkhouse and the dining hall by a stretch of wild roses and poison ivy.
Jonathan had talked about algae in there, holding up samples of Fucus and Hildenbrandtia. Ruby had talked about the littoral zone, that space between high and low watermarks where organisms struggled to adapt to the daily rhythm of immersion and exposure. They had drawn on the blackboard in colored chalk while the students, itchy and hot and tired, scratched their arms and legs and feigned attention.
Neither of them, they admitted much later, had focused fully on the other’s lecture. “It was before,” Ruby has said ruefully. “I didn’t know that I was going to want to have listened.” And Jonathan has laughed and confessed that he was studying the shells and skulls on the walls while Ruby was drawing on the board.
The library was exceedingly hot, they agreed, and the chairs remarkably uncomfortable; the only good spot was the sofa in front of the fireplace. That was the spot they commandeered on the evening after their first conversation, when dinner led to a walk and then the walk led them into the library a few minutes before the scheduled lecture.
Erika Moorhead, Ruby remembers. Talking about the tensile strength of byssus threads.
Walter Schank, Jonathan remembers. Something to do with hydrozoans.
They both remember feeling comfortable for the first time since their arrival. And for the next few days—three by Ruby’s accounting; four by Jonathan’s—one of them came early for every lecture and saved a seat on the sofa for the other.
They giggled at Frank Kenary’s slides, which he’d arranged like a creepy fashion show: abyssal fish sporting varied blobs of luminescent flesh. When Gunnar talked for two hours about subduction zones and the calcium carbonate cycle, they amused themselves exchanging doodles. They can’t remember, now, whether Gunnar’s endless lecture came before Carol Dagliesh’s filmstrip on the herring gulls, or which of the students tipped over the dissecting scope and sent the dish of copepods to their deaths. But both of them remember those days and nights as being almost purely happy. They swam in that odd, indefinite zone where they were more than friends, not yet lovers, still able to deny to themselves that they were headed where they were headed.
Ruby made the first phone call, a week after they left the island. At eleven o’clock on a Sunday night, she told her husband she’d left something in her office that she needed to prepare the next day’s class. She drove to campus, unlocked her door, picked up the phone and called Jonathan at his house. One of his children—Jessie, she thinks—answered the phone. Ruby remembers how, even through the turmoil of her emotions, she’d been shocked at the idea of a child staying up so late.
There was a horrible moment while Jessie went to find her father; another when Jonathan, hearing Ruby’s voice, said, “Wait, hang on, I’ll just be a minute,” and then negotiated Jessie into bed. Ruby waited, dreading his anger, knowing she’d been wrong to call him at home. But Jonathan, when he finally returned, said, “Ruby. You got my letter.”
“What letter?” she asked. He wrote to tell me good-bye, she remembers thinking.
“My letter,” he said. “I wrote you, I have to see you. I can’t stand this.”
Ruby released the breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
“You didn’t get it?” he said. “You just called?” It wasn’t only me, he remembers thinking. She feels it too.
“I had to hear your voice,” she said.
Ruby called, but Jonathan wrote. And so when Jonathan’s youngest daughter, Cora, later fell in love and confided in Ruby, and then asked her, “Was it like this with you two? Who started it—you or Dad?” all Ruby could say was, “It happened to both of us.”
Sometimes, when Ruby and Jonathan sit on the patio looking out at the hills above Palmyra, they will turn and see their children watching them through the kitchen window. Before the children went off to college, the house bulged with them on weekends and holidays and seemed empty in between; Jonathan’s wife had custody of Jessie and Gordon and Cora, and Ruby’s husband took her sons, Mickey and Ryan, when he remarried. Now that the children are old enough to come and go as they please, the house is silent almost all the time.
Jessie is twenty-four, and Gordon is twenty-two; Mickey is twenty-one, and Cora and Ryan are both nineteen. When they visit Jonathan and Ruby they spend an unhealthy amount of time talking about their past. In their conversations they seem to split their lives into three epochs: the years when what they think of as their real families were whole; the years right after Jonathan and Ruby met, when their parents were coming and going, fighting and making up, separating and divorcing; and the years since Jonathan and Ruby’s marriage, when they were forced into a reconstituted family. Which epoch they decide to explore depends on who’s visiting and who’s getting along with whom.
“But we were happy,” Mickey may say to Ruby, if he and Ryan are visiting and Jonathan’s children are absent. “We were, we were fine.”
“It wasn’t like you and Mom ever fought,” Cora may say to Jonathan, if Ruby’s sons aren’t around. “You could have worked it out if you’d tried.”
When they are all together, they tend to avoid the first two epochs and to talk about their first strained weekends and holidays together. They’ve learned to tolerate each other, despite their forced introductions; Cora and Ryan, whose birthdays are less than three months apart, seem especially close. Ruby and Jonathan know that much of what draws their youngest children together is shared speculation about what happened on that island.
They look old to their children, they know. Both of them are nearing fifty. Jonathan has grown quite heavy and has lost much of his hair; Ruby’s fine-boned figure has gone gaunt and stringy. They know their children can’t imagine them young and strong and wrung by passion. The children can’t think—can’t stand to think—about what happened on the island, but they can’t stop themselves from asking questions.
“Did you have other girlfriends?” Cora asks Jonathan. “Were you so unhappy with Mom?”
“Did you know him before?” Ryan asks Ruby. “Did you go there to be with him?”
“We met there,” Jonathan and Ruby say. “We had never seen each other before. We fell in love.” That is all they will say, they never give details, they say “yes” or “no” to the easy questions and evade the hard ones. They worry that even the little they offer may be too much.
Jonathan and Ruby tell each other the stories of their talk by the tidal pool, their walks and meals, the sagging sofa, the moment in the parking lot, and the evening Ruby made her call. They tell these to console themselves when their children chide them or when, alone in the house, they sit quietly near each other and struggle to conceal their disappointments.
Of course they have expected some of these. Mickey and Gordon