laughed. “I’ve never put it quite that way, but I avoid them.”
She inclined an inch more forward. “When do you get up in the morning?”
“Seven. Exactly.”
“Sundays, too,” she filled in. “And go to bed?”
“When I am finished. Ideally before seven. Not always.”
“When did you get up as a child? Say, twelve, thirteen?”
It was wonderful. His eyes whetted. “Five.”
She nodded victoriously. “But when did you go to school?”
“Not until 7:30. Why?”
“It was still dark,” said Estrin. “No one else was up. The house was yours. Most of the time you worked, read, wrote. But some mornings you got up only to think. For hours, watching the light gray out the windows. The birds here are exotic. And you still believed in God.”
“Did you, at thirteen?”
“No, by then I was a violent agnostic. But my father was a minister, so that speeded things up. My most remarkable precocity was early disaffection.”
“I meant, get up at five?”
“Naturally,” she dismissed. “But I’m not finished. Exercise?”
His face clouded. “I don’t have time now. I used to run—”
“All weather. All winter. Rain. In fact, you liked it when it rained. Other people were agog, when secretly the problem is keeping cool. The mizzle felt good on your face.”
Farrell did look amused. “And how far did I go?”
She licked her lips. “Ten miles. Every day.”
He laughed. “Only eight, and every odd. Still, you’re very good!”
“I’m very like you.”
The eyes unexpectedly brambled. “You know,” he said, attacking his lettuce with no dressing at all, “I think it’s time we had an ordinary conversation.”
So what are you doing here?”
“You asked me to dinner.”
He would not dignify her with a response.
“All right.” She put her hands flat on the table. “I travel. For the last ten years, I must have been out of the States for eight. I used to go back between trips; not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was living a fairy tale: that my real life was in the U.S. Every time I flew into Philadelphia late afternoon, I knew better by nightfall. The best safeguard against the rude news that you can’t go home again is to stop trying.”
“Don’t you miss your family?”
“Not precisely, though I am frightened my parents will die. Or get old, for that matter. I travel with an illusion of reverse relativity. I move at the speed of light and I age while everyone back home stays the same. In my head Philadelphia remains an impeccable diorama I can enter at will. But you know how you can leave for two weeks and come back and the furniture’s re-arranged, the mailboxes are repainted on your street? Try leaving for two years. Or twenty.”
“So now it’s twenty, is it?”
“Why not? I haven’t been back for three. And my parents will die; I’ll be in Pakistan. I’ll have to decide whether to go to the funeral, and it will cost a lot of money.”
“Would you? From Pakistan?”
“Right away,” said Estrin, with a lack of hesitation that surprised her. “Burning my way though a dozen Glenfiddiches and staying horribly sober anyway and hating myself, continent after continent, coming back too late. Years too late, not just a few days. Because if I had any integrity I’d book Lufthansa tomorrow and throw myself into my mother’s arms while I still have the chance.”
“You get along with your mother?”
“I don’t anything with my mother; we never see each other, thanks to me. She writes much more than I do. Chatty stuff, though sometimes— Well, my parents are liberal, urban, educated, but lately I get the same feeling from my mother that I would if she came from Dunmurry, you know? She’s sad like any mother, in an ordinary way. I’m not married. I have no children. I don’t even have a career. I have stories. Mothers don’t care about stories. She feels sorry for me. And maybe she should.”
“Meaning you feel sorry for yourself.”
“Sometimes,” she said defiantly. “Why not? Who else is going to?”
He tsk-tsked and leaned back. “Self-pity is indulgent.”
“I can stand some indulgence. I’m a good enough little soldier. I’m hardly frolicking across the continents with Daddy’s Visa card. It hasn’t been easy.”
Farrell gently flaked a forkful of sole and glanced up at her with a dance of a smile. “No, I’m sure it hasn’t been. How have you managed to support yourself now?”
Estrin smoothed her napkin in her lap. “No, the work hasn’t been that hard, or that’s not what’s been hard … I just keep going and going and I’m getting—”
“Tired.”
“Yes,” she said gratefully.
“I’d think you were beginning to run out of countries.”
“There’s something else you run out of well before countries,” she warned. “Though it’s been a good life. I’ve picked grapes in Champagne, lemons in Greece. I’ve made plastic ashtrays in Amsterdam, done interior carpentry in Ylivieska. I’ve bused trays in the Philippines under Marcos, manufactured waterproof boots in Israel, and counseled in a German drug-abuse clinic in West Berlin. Now I’m at the Green Door, and that’s just a sampling— I swear I’m not off target and it could be the best of lives forever if I were perfect, but I’m not and something is going wrong …”
As she drifted off, he touched her hand, and the question was intent: “How old are you?”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you before. I’m thirty-two.”
“That is—incredible.”
“I know.”
“Then you’re past thumbing around Europe in patched jeans. What are you doing?”
“You mean, when am I going to settle down and do something? Product is slag. The only difference between my life and a foreign correspondent’s is I don’t write it down. Does that matter? Someone’s sure to cover the fall of Marcos without my help. I am my product.”
“You don’t want to accomplish anything?”
Estrin
