Michael Thériault
The Gift of a Ring
“It is beautiful,” Tad says of the ring Lynne displays on her right hand.
She argues with herself about the charm she still finds in his accent.
He sits down to the dinner he has put on the table for them. He cuts into his pork chop. He fixes blue eyes on the ring as he chews.
She has expected something more, outrage even, questions at least. He knows all her jewelry before this. He has bought most of it. She’s had only his income as an Ironworker for the City since her return to school at his urging. They share all bank accounts and charge cards. He has checked these nightly since a hacker’s use of their card number a decade ago.
Tad must see that it was a gift.
And expensive. The opal is large. Her fingers’ movements in bringing a forkful of potato to her lips must show him the jewel’s depth and permutations of color, rays of blue, green, rose rising and receding in changing angles of refracted and reflected light.
Lynne wants Tad’s questions, even his outrage because Steven has given her the ring. Tad doesn’t know Steven. Weekdays Lynne rides the BART train between Tad’s and her San Francisco home and the University of California, across the Bay. She knows Steven from Cal.
***
She was one of the better swimmers at her high school, down the Peninsula, but not fast enough for college scholarships. Her grades gained her admission to Cal, but no scholarships, either. Her father was failing in another restaurant business, her mother’s real estate commissions were sparse and uneven, and Lynne balked at starting adulthood bent under debt. She went to work. Secretarial skills from night classes put her in a general contractor’s office, where she met Tad, foreman for a steel subcontractor.
In his office visits she remarked his accent’s curlicues, the burred R’s, the offbeat stresses of syllables, the unexpected hardening or softening of consonants, and understood that he was some sort of European. She noted his politeness, more formal and consistent than she had known in the business, and his smiles, and his blue eyes back and forth across her face. He proposed dinner and she accepted.
The restaurant was French, the table candlelit. He held her chair for her to sit. He knew the menu and wine list. The cut of his pastel blue suit emphasized wide shoulders, a barrel chest. Pomade disciplined his light brown hair. His mustache was close-trimmed. He paused eating to listen to her suburban girlhood. He nodded in recognition of what she told about her Catholic girls’ high school. Out came her acceptance to Cal, and love of English literature, and regret at setting education aside. She told him of her trepidation and thrill in leaving the ranch styles and cul-de-sacs of her girlhood to take an apartment in the City’s press and noise. “Like coming into a new country,” she said, and then considered to whom she spoke and must have blushed, because he smiled in what seemed delight.
At dinner’s end she pressed him over Armagnac – his suggestion – to speak at last of himself and learned two things: That he had left Poland very young in the mid-eighties because having papered a neighborhood with a shipyard union’s posters had come to seem life-threatening; that he loved the music of Chopin. “It is beautiful,” he said.
When she accepted a fleet kiss at the door of the taxi he had hailed for her, she believed him sophisticated, cultured, and brave. He confirmed the bravery to her a few dates later by raising a hand into the gray of a summer dusk to show his day’s workplace, a crisscross of steel at a height that dizzied her. He demonstrated the sophistication by reciting sayings not just in Polish, but in German or French. The culture…. He leapt up sometimes from their conversations in the evenings they began to spend in his apartment and played on the stereo a recording of something by Chopin, and the piano’s notes going into him and through him undid his usual tautness in an effect almost chemical.
Some years after their marriage he obtained the City job. In its certainty of employment unshackled from the vagaries of the construction industry he insisted that she leave work and resume the education she’d been denied. An accomplished two years at City College of San Francisco sent her to the University of California.
There she resumed swimming. Midday between classes she swam laps in a university pool. Something in this buttressed her notes in fixing in memory the day’s lectures and study.
She and Steven met on a poolside bench where they were both waiting for lanes to clear. He ignored another woman on the bench, unlike Lynne a blond, and younger, and Lynne thought prettier, to speak to her. Lynne was confident in what swimming had given her, the landscape of her back and shoulders, her musculature not ropy or sinewy but in sleek curves. Steven did not look at these as they chatted on the bench but at her eyes. This unnerved her; faint lines had begun at their corners, and she couldn’t imagine what he made of them. He learned her name, her major – English literature – and about her commute under the bay. He offered gossip about her professors. How he knew it he didn’t say, because a lane opened and he took it.
But first she agreed to meet for lunch the next day.
The restaurant was farther from campus than she’d been with fellow students. Its older clientele seemed at ease with the menu prices. Steven waved away her objection to wine between classes and insisted she have a glass with her salad. This small trespass of ordering wine and then the nose of it from the glass the waitress set before her gave her a sense of lightness, of disencumbrance. So did Steven’s fingers in the wave. She did not seek comparison of their insouciance to Tad’s always measured, almost ritualistic movements; it imposed itself. The fingers waved again but somehow differently toward the steep hillsides east and their wealth, to describe where Steven lived. He did not volunteer that he was a professor of organic chemistry. She wheedled this from him by an interrogation teasing and persistent. He did confess how tiresome he found it sometimes to live so much amidst the formlessness of youth, despite its promise and brilliance. He wanted to talk about her. She did not mention her marriage, but she had not removed her wedding ring. She told how important an interest in Jane Austen had been to her return to school and her arrival at Cal. He had read three of the novels, he said, Emma, Mansfield Park, and of course Pride and Prejudice; and which of the others would she recommend? This glimpse of his knowledge as they finished eating and he snatched the check cowed her, and she was still struggling to reply when he excused himself for an off-campus meeting on a patent he held.
He asked her for her cell phone number.
She gave it, and her hand when he reached for it. He held the hand a long moment.
As he turned up the sidewalk away from campus she was left to watch his easy stride and the dip of his head that his height, several inches greater than Tad’s, necessitated to keep his short careless shag of brown hair clear of the branches of one street tree, then another.
In a birdsong-filled afternoon in the Berkeley hills house three weeks later, her bare thigh over Steven’s, the fingers of her left hand, wedding ring still on one, in the chest hair whose changing forms in the morning’s after-swim rivulets had somehow been final impetus to her acceptance of his repeated invitations, she mentioned Tad’s love of Chopin.
The mention of Chopin spurred Steven from the tranquility that had succeeded their lovemaking. He’d been listening intensely of late, he said, to Polish composers, and he didn’t understand Gorecki’s turn from his early Paneuropean dissonance to a spare tonality, nor that of the Penderecki of the St. Luke Passion or the Anaklasis or, my God, the Threnody to the lushness of the Seventh Symphony, which we would call, what? Neoromantic? He’d heard a Panufnik orchestral thing that he was sure was a tone row piece but found entirely listenable. Was Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra an hommage to Bartók? Was it derivative? But the drum pulse of its opening was irresistible, as was the – not quite fugue, was it? fugato, then – that spins out above it and returns in woodwinds at the movement’s end.
Here Steven’s excitement took him from under her thigh and to sitting at bed’s edge. He knew the linkage was facile, he said, but it had in fact worked for him: He thought sometimes of the play of subject and countersubject in a fugue when he considered the folding of proteins, the hydrophilic chains wrapping the hydrophobic chains, and of Van der Waals forces in the subtle ways a fugue’s counterpoint often implied rather than declared a chordal space. His fingers wrapped each other, unwrapped, wrapped each other another way. He’d come to the idea for one of “my molecules” – she noted the godlike grasp of the possessive – when listening to a Shostakovich fugue for piano, and the molecule had found pharmaceutical uses and been very profitable for him and for the university, and had given him this – The fingers, each proximal phalanx topped with a sparse dark tuft, fluttered free again at the house around them, at the French doors and balcony, at its view across the bay brilliant with day to San Francisco and the Golden Gate.
Pictures of Steven’s wife were here and there in the house, and some of Steven with her. They had, he said, an understanding. Lynne didn’t ask its terms. His wife was away now, she was away often and at long stretches, to lecture, to attend or speak at conferences, to consult. He was silent on her subjects of expertise. Lynne was uncomfortable knowing more of her than smiled from the walls and furniture tops and so didn’t ask these, either.
Sometimes thereafter his wife was home. The affair moved then to hotel and motel rooms and to rooms with hot tubs rented by the hour. Lynne’s lunches with him became more frequent. He invited her to dinners. She told Tad, not without truth, that she would be in Berkeley late to meet with a professor at an available hour, and she accepted. Her studies suffered, but not horribly.
It had been a subject of laughter, the kind of thing she was doing, among the Ironworkers at their table at a union picnic some summers before. It had seemed a cliché for them that an Ironworker would pay for his wife’s return to school, and some college boy would catch her eye, and when it turned back to the Ironworker it would see him differently, and divorce would result. The table had laughed because the same ill, but with genders reversed, had just afflicted one of the local’s few women.
Lynne began to wonder why Tad, knowing the cliché, had encouraged her college education, and was disappointed in herself for living it and for seeing Tad differently.
She gave him an opportunity through music to show himself equal. He had made dinner -- his recent routine because he arrived home now before she did – and when she sat to sausage and steamed new potatoes and red cabbage braised with onions in red wine vinegar and brown sugar, and to a chardonnay she liked, fortunately inexpensive, she told him she had heard at Cal of recent Polish composers, and did he know Lutoslawski?
“Know?” he said.
“I mean, have you heard of,” she said.
A small shrug, a smile like a small boy’s in a small happiness.
Penderecki? Panufnik? Gorecki?
He added to smiles and shrugs a vigorous headshaking. “I will see if I can find recordings,” he said, ‘if you want to listen to them.”
She wondered then if his professed love for Chopin had simply been calculated to impress her, to give an impression of culture and intelligence in Polish red and white.
Some days later she came quietly into the house while he cooked, and from speakers that amplified the quiet of the piano enough to mask her entry came the final cadence of a Chopin Prélude – the fourth, in E minor, she later determined. “Tad,” she said on entering the kitchen. He turned in apparent surprise. Tears descended his cheeks. Some had spotted his shirt.
So, if it had been a calculation, it had not been simple, she decided. She concluded that he had found this beautiful thing beyond his supposed tradesman’s station and taken it to heart, and then brought it to her.
She felt she should make a comparable gesture, even if her affair with Steven made her uncertain what it meant. She gave Tad Pride and Prejudice.
Three evenings, after he had cleared away and washed the dinner dishes, he sat with the novel in a chair across the bedroom from her desk. The occasional movement of his lips and mustache evinced to Lynne’s glances the efforts the Regency English, little antique as it was, demanded of him.
Not long into the fourth evening he stopped his reading early and slapped the book down on her desk.
“A private is flogged,” he said.
She looked at the book, at him.
“What,” she said, “are you talking about?”
He opened the book, searched, put his finger on a passage.
Lynne read,
Much had been done, and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Foster was going to be married.
Tad must have read inquiry in the eyes she raised. “This poor man, he is whipped. Do you know how this is, whipping?”
His blue eyes told her that he might.
“And these … people,” he continued, “because he is, what? Not rich like them? They think his pain is for little talk, like dinner.”
Her impulse was to say, “I hope that would not have been how they thought,” but now she believed it might have been, and so from another impulse said, “I hope you won’t hate me for loving her.”
One of his broad shoulders went up and down, then the other, and he lifted a foot and lowered it, and the blue eyes went everywhere but to her. He shook his head. He shook it again. “No,” he said, and “No,” and he crossed back to his chair and stared at it, as though he might find someone or something else there. Finding nothing, he left the room. She heard him washing something – his face? – vigorously in the bathroom down the hall.
This exchange gnawed her when she sat to lunch with Steven the next day. “You’ve told me,” she said, “that you’ve read Jane Austen, but reading even as many as three novels can be the consequence of intellectual appetite, or of some string of ancient assignments. You haven’t told me what you thought of her.” She knew even as she said this that she wanted to know what he felt more than what he thought; somehow the question had changed as she looked across the table at him.
He held up a hand as he chewed and swallowed the prosciutto that had wrapped his forkful of melon. “I really don’t know her as you do,” he said when the hand dropped. “What could my notions be worth?”
She decided not to permit him evasion, if this was an attempt at it. She sat back and folded her hands. “No, I want to know. Fire away.”
He sipped wine, chewed his lip. “She wrote,” he said, “for her place and time. I mean to say, in a way that she expected to be understood by a certain social set in an island nation. Even the descriptions, they go often not to physical detail, but to things like “elegant,” say, or “handsome,” things that have a social meaning. The drama centers around a social code shared by, I recall, an aristocracy and a rural upper middle class. ‘Miss’ and ‘Mister’ have specific and limited application and requirement, for example, and not to use them in that way is itself an element of drama. Plots can have more than a little contrivance. Lizzy’s aunt and uncle decide not to go to the Lakes on vacation, but somewhere closer, and of course this takes them by Pemberley, and of course they’ll stop for a tour, and of course Darcy will arrive unexpectedly.”
Lynne interrupted. “Pure chance plays a role in any pairing of lives, as in our first meeting.”
“Causality does have limits,” he said, laughing. “You’d think – instance of causal limits – that I couldn’t be so critical of Austen and so attracted to someone she thrills. Just the opposite is true. That you’re so deeply fond of her, that’s one of the things that draws me to you. The opposition makes me afraid even to ask why you are.”
Lynne, too, laughed. “I suppose I should keep the mystery going. But I’ll say this.” She gestured back and forth between herself and Steven. “I know we are living a different social code, or even beyond one, and that her work was of her time and place. But it … it is beautiful. It has a lapidary quality.” She laughed at herself now. “Fixed and turned and cut in a way that is full of changing colors.” She felt she had to add something. “And its human sensitivities are for any time,” she said.
He made as full and formal a bow as was extractable from the restraints of his chair and of the table of food and wine before him.
That afternoon they had the house. He asked to look at her wedding ring when they undressed. She removed it for him and left it on the nightstand while they made love. It was there still when she went to use the restroom before dressing. His expression as he watched her replace it on her finger intrigued her, but she asked nothing.
It was the next week when he put before her at dinner the velvet case, and she opened it to find the ring with its large opal.
“The colors!” she said, turning it back and forth before the flame of the table’s candle.
“I recalled what you said: Austen, lapidary quality. And” – he dropped his head, he raised it, flame of the candle in each eye – “it’s something to remember me by.”
“Are you saying this is the end of things?”
“No, no, no, not if I have my way. But I’m trying to be realistic. What will bring you across the bay after you graduate? How often will I break free from here long enough to meet in the City?”
***
Now, in revealing the ring to Tad, she knows that the affair with Steven may have a term and that she does not want it to. The decision to wear it has been a moment’s, unconsidered, almost her finger’s.
Only later, when meal and dishes and studying are done, and she finds Tad sunk by the anchor of his day’s work into slumber, when she feels his warmth beside her and the subtle movement his breathing imparts to the top sheet, does she examine the decision. She sees no direct purpose in it, certainly not to pursue the Ironworker cliché to its ultimate, in divorce, nor – this would have been so far beyond reason – to seek an “understanding” with Tad such as Steven claims with his wife.
She had wanted, it comes to her, an argument.
She had wanted the chaos in her to burst into the physical, into shouting, maybe into things broken.
None of this had happened.
Wonder augments the chaos.
It leaves her little sleep.
Tad still takes her out to dinner monthly, twice monthly if he has worked some overtime and is more relaxed about bank accounts. He dresses for these dinners as he did for their first, in a recent iteration of the pale blue suit. She changes from her daily jeans and sweater into a dress.
At the start of the next of these evenings, as they prepare for it in their bedroom and she drops the dress over her head, he pauses knotting his tie to look at her raised hands.
“Where is the ring?” he says. “You should wear the ring.”
“It is beautiful,” he says again.
When he has helped her button the back of her dress, she takes the ring from her jewelry box and puts it on. She holds it up.
He responds with a nod, simple and serious.
Any fear of the cliché evanesces as the fabric of the dress shapes itself to her swimmer’s shoulders, back, and waist. She understands: That this man whose callused hands have fastened its buttons has happened sometimes in turning from his toil to glimpse things he finds beautiful; that his enthusiasms for these things are few and potent; that the music of Chopin is one; that the ring is now one; that she is one; that Steven sees her enthusiasm for Jane Austen in some such way. And this: That Tad grasps the ring’s origins and has decided not to take issue with them, so long as she is with him, so long as she seems happy.
A quiet brief laugh escapes her.
The blue eyes are startled. “You are laughing!”
“I am thinking,” she says, “that I love you.”
All tautness goes from him, as though it has flowed out through his feet into the carpet, and his head cocks right, and his smile seems to her again a young boy’s, from a place she has never seen, half a world away.
She does not recall the Austen passage exactly, and so when they return from dinner, and Tad has helped her from her coat and hung it up for her, she goes to search the bookshelf for it. She finds no concern for how long it will serve:
I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice.
She argues with herself about the charm she still finds in his accent.
He sits down to the dinner he has put on the table for them. He cuts into his pork chop. He fixes blue eyes on the ring as he chews.
She has expected something more, outrage even, questions at least. He knows all her jewelry before this. He has bought most of it. She’s had only his income as an Ironworker for the City since her return to school at his urging. They share all bank accounts and charge cards. He has checked these nightly since a hacker’s use of their card number a decade ago.
Tad must see that it was a gift.
And expensive. The opal is large. Her fingers’ movements in bringing a forkful of potato to her lips must show him the jewel’s depth and permutations of color, rays of blue, green, rose rising and receding in changing angles of refracted and reflected light.
Lynne wants Tad’s questions, even his outrage because Steven has given her the ring. Tad doesn’t know Steven. Weekdays Lynne rides the BART train between Tad’s and her San Francisco home and the University of California, across the Bay. She knows Steven from Cal.
***
She was one of the better swimmers at her high school, down the Peninsula, but not fast enough for college scholarships. Her grades gained her admission to Cal, but no scholarships, either. Her father was failing in another restaurant business, her mother’s real estate commissions were sparse and uneven, and Lynne balked at starting adulthood bent under debt. She went to work. Secretarial skills from night classes put her in a general contractor’s office, where she met Tad, foreman for a steel subcontractor.
In his office visits she remarked his accent’s curlicues, the burred R’s, the offbeat stresses of syllables, the unexpected hardening or softening of consonants, and understood that he was some sort of European. She noted his politeness, more formal and consistent than she had known in the business, and his smiles, and his blue eyes back and forth across her face. He proposed dinner and she accepted.
The restaurant was French, the table candlelit. He held her chair for her to sit. He knew the menu and wine list. The cut of his pastel blue suit emphasized wide shoulders, a barrel chest. Pomade disciplined his light brown hair. His mustache was close-trimmed. He paused eating to listen to her suburban girlhood. He nodded in recognition of what she told about her Catholic girls’ high school. Out came her acceptance to Cal, and love of English literature, and regret at setting education aside. She told him of her trepidation and thrill in leaving the ranch styles and cul-de-sacs of her girlhood to take an apartment in the City’s press and noise. “Like coming into a new country,” she said, and then considered to whom she spoke and must have blushed, because he smiled in what seemed delight.
At dinner’s end she pressed him over Armagnac – his suggestion – to speak at last of himself and learned two things: That he had left Poland very young in the mid-eighties because having papered a neighborhood with a shipyard union’s posters had come to seem life-threatening; that he loved the music of Chopin. “It is beautiful,” he said.
When she accepted a fleet kiss at the door of the taxi he had hailed for her, she believed him sophisticated, cultured, and brave. He confirmed the bravery to her a few dates later by raising a hand into the gray of a summer dusk to show his day’s workplace, a crisscross of steel at a height that dizzied her. He demonstrated the sophistication by reciting sayings not just in Polish, but in German or French. The culture…. He leapt up sometimes from their conversations in the evenings they began to spend in his apartment and played on the stereo a recording of something by Chopin, and the piano’s notes going into him and through him undid his usual tautness in an effect almost chemical.
Some years after their marriage he obtained the City job. In its certainty of employment unshackled from the vagaries of the construction industry he insisted that she leave work and resume the education she’d been denied. An accomplished two years at City College of San Francisco sent her to the University of California.
There she resumed swimming. Midday between classes she swam laps in a university pool. Something in this buttressed her notes in fixing in memory the day’s lectures and study.
She and Steven met on a poolside bench where they were both waiting for lanes to clear. He ignored another woman on the bench, unlike Lynne a blond, and younger, and Lynne thought prettier, to speak to her. Lynne was confident in what swimming had given her, the landscape of her back and shoulders, her musculature not ropy or sinewy but in sleek curves. Steven did not look at these as they chatted on the bench but at her eyes. This unnerved her; faint lines had begun at their corners, and she couldn’t imagine what he made of them. He learned her name, her major – English literature – and about her commute under the bay. He offered gossip about her professors. How he knew it he didn’t say, because a lane opened and he took it.
But first she agreed to meet for lunch the next day.
The restaurant was farther from campus than she’d been with fellow students. Its older clientele seemed at ease with the menu prices. Steven waved away her objection to wine between classes and insisted she have a glass with her salad. This small trespass of ordering wine and then the nose of it from the glass the waitress set before her gave her a sense of lightness, of disencumbrance. So did Steven’s fingers in the wave. She did not seek comparison of their insouciance to Tad’s always measured, almost ritualistic movements; it imposed itself. The fingers waved again but somehow differently toward the steep hillsides east and their wealth, to describe where Steven lived. He did not volunteer that he was a professor of organic chemistry. She wheedled this from him by an interrogation teasing and persistent. He did confess how tiresome he found it sometimes to live so much amidst the formlessness of youth, despite its promise and brilliance. He wanted to talk about her. She did not mention her marriage, but she had not removed her wedding ring. She told how important an interest in Jane Austen had been to her return to school and her arrival at Cal. He had read three of the novels, he said, Emma, Mansfield Park, and of course Pride and Prejudice; and which of the others would she recommend? This glimpse of his knowledge as they finished eating and he snatched the check cowed her, and she was still struggling to reply when he excused himself for an off-campus meeting on a patent he held.
He asked her for her cell phone number.
She gave it, and her hand when he reached for it. He held the hand a long moment.
As he turned up the sidewalk away from campus she was left to watch his easy stride and the dip of his head that his height, several inches greater than Tad’s, necessitated to keep his short careless shag of brown hair clear of the branches of one street tree, then another.
In a birdsong-filled afternoon in the Berkeley hills house three weeks later, her bare thigh over Steven’s, the fingers of her left hand, wedding ring still on one, in the chest hair whose changing forms in the morning’s after-swim rivulets had somehow been final impetus to her acceptance of his repeated invitations, she mentioned Tad’s love of Chopin.
The mention of Chopin spurred Steven from the tranquility that had succeeded their lovemaking. He’d been listening intensely of late, he said, to Polish composers, and he didn’t understand Gorecki’s turn from his early Paneuropean dissonance to a spare tonality, nor that of the Penderecki of the St. Luke Passion or the Anaklasis or, my God, the Threnody to the lushness of the Seventh Symphony, which we would call, what? Neoromantic? He’d heard a Panufnik orchestral thing that he was sure was a tone row piece but found entirely listenable. Was Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra an hommage to Bartók? Was it derivative? But the drum pulse of its opening was irresistible, as was the – not quite fugue, was it? fugato, then – that spins out above it and returns in woodwinds at the movement’s end.
Here Steven’s excitement took him from under her thigh and to sitting at bed’s edge. He knew the linkage was facile, he said, but it had in fact worked for him: He thought sometimes of the play of subject and countersubject in a fugue when he considered the folding of proteins, the hydrophilic chains wrapping the hydrophobic chains, and of Van der Waals forces in the subtle ways a fugue’s counterpoint often implied rather than declared a chordal space. His fingers wrapped each other, unwrapped, wrapped each other another way. He’d come to the idea for one of “my molecules” – she noted the godlike grasp of the possessive – when listening to a Shostakovich fugue for piano, and the molecule had found pharmaceutical uses and been very profitable for him and for the university, and had given him this – The fingers, each proximal phalanx topped with a sparse dark tuft, fluttered free again at the house around them, at the French doors and balcony, at its view across the bay brilliant with day to San Francisco and the Golden Gate.
Pictures of Steven’s wife were here and there in the house, and some of Steven with her. They had, he said, an understanding. Lynne didn’t ask its terms. His wife was away now, she was away often and at long stretches, to lecture, to attend or speak at conferences, to consult. He was silent on her subjects of expertise. Lynne was uncomfortable knowing more of her than smiled from the walls and furniture tops and so didn’t ask these, either.
Sometimes thereafter his wife was home. The affair moved then to hotel and motel rooms and to rooms with hot tubs rented by the hour. Lynne’s lunches with him became more frequent. He invited her to dinners. She told Tad, not without truth, that she would be in Berkeley late to meet with a professor at an available hour, and she accepted. Her studies suffered, but not horribly.
It had been a subject of laughter, the kind of thing she was doing, among the Ironworkers at their table at a union picnic some summers before. It had seemed a cliché for them that an Ironworker would pay for his wife’s return to school, and some college boy would catch her eye, and when it turned back to the Ironworker it would see him differently, and divorce would result. The table had laughed because the same ill, but with genders reversed, had just afflicted one of the local’s few women.
Lynne began to wonder why Tad, knowing the cliché, had encouraged her college education, and was disappointed in herself for living it and for seeing Tad differently.
She gave him an opportunity through music to show himself equal. He had made dinner -- his recent routine because he arrived home now before she did – and when she sat to sausage and steamed new potatoes and red cabbage braised with onions in red wine vinegar and brown sugar, and to a chardonnay she liked, fortunately inexpensive, she told him she had heard at Cal of recent Polish composers, and did he know Lutoslawski?
“Know?” he said.
“I mean, have you heard of,” she said.
A small shrug, a smile like a small boy’s in a small happiness.
Penderecki? Panufnik? Gorecki?
He added to smiles and shrugs a vigorous headshaking. “I will see if I can find recordings,” he said, ‘if you want to listen to them.”
She wondered then if his professed love for Chopin had simply been calculated to impress her, to give an impression of culture and intelligence in Polish red and white.
Some days later she came quietly into the house while he cooked, and from speakers that amplified the quiet of the piano enough to mask her entry came the final cadence of a Chopin Prélude – the fourth, in E minor, she later determined. “Tad,” she said on entering the kitchen. He turned in apparent surprise. Tears descended his cheeks. Some had spotted his shirt.
So, if it had been a calculation, it had not been simple, she decided. She concluded that he had found this beautiful thing beyond his supposed tradesman’s station and taken it to heart, and then brought it to her.
She felt she should make a comparable gesture, even if her affair with Steven made her uncertain what it meant. She gave Tad Pride and Prejudice.
Three evenings, after he had cleared away and washed the dinner dishes, he sat with the novel in a chair across the bedroom from her desk. The occasional movement of his lips and mustache evinced to Lynne’s glances the efforts the Regency English, little antique as it was, demanded of him.
Not long into the fourth evening he stopped his reading early and slapped the book down on her desk.
“A private is flogged,” he said.
She looked at the book, at him.
“What,” she said, “are you talking about?”
He opened the book, searched, put his finger on a passage.
Lynne read,
Much had been done, and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Foster was going to be married.
Tad must have read inquiry in the eyes she raised. “This poor man, he is whipped. Do you know how this is, whipping?”
His blue eyes told her that he might.
“And these … people,” he continued, “because he is, what? Not rich like them? They think his pain is for little talk, like dinner.”
Her impulse was to say, “I hope that would not have been how they thought,” but now she believed it might have been, and so from another impulse said, “I hope you won’t hate me for loving her.”
One of his broad shoulders went up and down, then the other, and he lifted a foot and lowered it, and the blue eyes went everywhere but to her. He shook his head. He shook it again. “No,” he said, and “No,” and he crossed back to his chair and stared at it, as though he might find someone or something else there. Finding nothing, he left the room. She heard him washing something – his face? – vigorously in the bathroom down the hall.
This exchange gnawed her when she sat to lunch with Steven the next day. “You’ve told me,” she said, “that you’ve read Jane Austen, but reading even as many as three novels can be the consequence of intellectual appetite, or of some string of ancient assignments. You haven’t told me what you thought of her.” She knew even as she said this that she wanted to know what he felt more than what he thought; somehow the question had changed as she looked across the table at him.
He held up a hand as he chewed and swallowed the prosciutto that had wrapped his forkful of melon. “I really don’t know her as you do,” he said when the hand dropped. “What could my notions be worth?”
She decided not to permit him evasion, if this was an attempt at it. She sat back and folded her hands. “No, I want to know. Fire away.”
He sipped wine, chewed his lip. “She wrote,” he said, “for her place and time. I mean to say, in a way that she expected to be understood by a certain social set in an island nation. Even the descriptions, they go often not to physical detail, but to things like “elegant,” say, or “handsome,” things that have a social meaning. The drama centers around a social code shared by, I recall, an aristocracy and a rural upper middle class. ‘Miss’ and ‘Mister’ have specific and limited application and requirement, for example, and not to use them in that way is itself an element of drama. Plots can have more than a little contrivance. Lizzy’s aunt and uncle decide not to go to the Lakes on vacation, but somewhere closer, and of course this takes them by Pemberley, and of course they’ll stop for a tour, and of course Darcy will arrive unexpectedly.”
Lynne interrupted. “Pure chance plays a role in any pairing of lives, as in our first meeting.”
“Causality does have limits,” he said, laughing. “You’d think – instance of causal limits – that I couldn’t be so critical of Austen and so attracted to someone she thrills. Just the opposite is true. That you’re so deeply fond of her, that’s one of the things that draws me to you. The opposition makes me afraid even to ask why you are.”
Lynne, too, laughed. “I suppose I should keep the mystery going. But I’ll say this.” She gestured back and forth between herself and Steven. “I know we are living a different social code, or even beyond one, and that her work was of her time and place. But it … it is beautiful. It has a lapidary quality.” She laughed at herself now. “Fixed and turned and cut in a way that is full of changing colors.” She felt she had to add something. “And its human sensitivities are for any time,” she said.
He made as full and formal a bow as was extractable from the restraints of his chair and of the table of food and wine before him.
That afternoon they had the house. He asked to look at her wedding ring when they undressed. She removed it for him and left it on the nightstand while they made love. It was there still when she went to use the restroom before dressing. His expression as he watched her replace it on her finger intrigued her, but she asked nothing.
It was the next week when he put before her at dinner the velvet case, and she opened it to find the ring with its large opal.
“The colors!” she said, turning it back and forth before the flame of the table’s candle.
“I recalled what you said: Austen, lapidary quality. And” – he dropped his head, he raised it, flame of the candle in each eye – “it’s something to remember me by.”
“Are you saying this is the end of things?”
“No, no, no, not if I have my way. But I’m trying to be realistic. What will bring you across the bay after you graduate? How often will I break free from here long enough to meet in the City?”
***
Now, in revealing the ring to Tad, she knows that the affair with Steven may have a term and that she does not want it to. The decision to wear it has been a moment’s, unconsidered, almost her finger’s.
Only later, when meal and dishes and studying are done, and she finds Tad sunk by the anchor of his day’s work into slumber, when she feels his warmth beside her and the subtle movement his breathing imparts to the top sheet, does she examine the decision. She sees no direct purpose in it, certainly not to pursue the Ironworker cliché to its ultimate, in divorce, nor – this would have been so far beyond reason – to seek an “understanding” with Tad such as Steven claims with his wife.
She had wanted, it comes to her, an argument.
She had wanted the chaos in her to burst into the physical, into shouting, maybe into things broken.
None of this had happened.
Wonder augments the chaos.
It leaves her little sleep.
Tad still takes her out to dinner monthly, twice monthly if he has worked some overtime and is more relaxed about bank accounts. He dresses for these dinners as he did for their first, in a recent iteration of the pale blue suit. She changes from her daily jeans and sweater into a dress.
At the start of the next of these evenings, as they prepare for it in their bedroom and she drops the dress over her head, he pauses knotting his tie to look at her raised hands.
“Where is the ring?” he says. “You should wear the ring.”
“It is beautiful,” he says again.
When he has helped her button the back of her dress, she takes the ring from her jewelry box and puts it on. She holds it up.
He responds with a nod, simple and serious.
Any fear of the cliché evanesces as the fabric of the dress shapes itself to her swimmer’s shoulders, back, and waist. She understands: That this man whose callused hands have fastened its buttons has happened sometimes in turning from his toil to glimpse things he finds beautiful; that his enthusiasms for these things are few and potent; that the music of Chopin is one; that the ring is now one; that she is one; that Steven sees her enthusiasm for Jane Austen in some such way. And this: That Tad grasps the ring’s origins and has decided not to take issue with them, so long as she is with him, so long as she seems happy.
A quiet brief laugh escapes her.
The blue eyes are startled. “You are laughing!”
“I am thinking,” she says, “that I love you.”
All tautness goes from him, as though it has flowed out through his feet into the carpet, and his head cocks right, and his smile seems to her again a young boy’s, from a place she has never seen, half a world away.
She does not recall the Austen passage exactly, and so when they return from dinner, and Tad has helped her from her coat and hung it up for her, she goes to search the bookshelf for it. She finds no concern for how long it will serve:
I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice.
Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, six stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In his recent return, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by more than three dozen publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and New World Writing. His story “An Invitation to the Gulls” was shortlisted lately for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration. Popula.com has published his brief memoir of Ironworker organizing. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.
Bluesky: @mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Instagram: @mtheriaultsf
Bluesky: @mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Instagram: @mtheriaultsf
