The Last Time They Met - Hardcover

Shreve, Anita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316781142 ISBN 13: 9780316781145

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2001

Synopsis

From the last time Linda and Thomas meet, at a charmless hotel in a distant city, to the moment, thirty-five years earlier, when a chance encounter on a rocky beach binds them fatefully together, this hypnotically compelling novel unfolds a tale of intense passion, drama, and suspense. The Last Time They Met is a singularly ambitious and accomplished work by one of today's most widely celebrated novelists.

About this title

About the Author

Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of more than fifteen novels, including Testimony; The Pilot's Wife, which was a selection of Oprah's Book Club; and The Weight of Water, which was a finalist for England's Orange prize. She lives in Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt

She had come from the plane and was even now forgettingthe ride from the airport. As she stepped from the car, sheemerged to an audience of a doorman in uniform and anotherman in a dark coat moving through the revolving door of the hotel.The man in the dark coat hesitated, taking a moment to open anumbrella that immediately, in one fluid motion, blew itself insideout. He looked abashed and then purposefully amused?for nowshe was his audience?as he tossed the useless appendage into abin and moved on.

She wished the doorman wouldn't take her suitcase, and if ithadn't been for the ornate gold leaf of the canopy and the perfectlypolished brass of the entryway, she might have told him it wasn'tnecessary. She hadn't expected the tall columns that rose to a ceilingshe couldn't see clearly without squinting, or the rose carpetthrough those columns that was long enough for a coronation.The doorman wordlessly gave her suitcase?inadequate in thisgrandeur?to a bellman, as if handing off a secret. She moved pastempty groupings of costly furniture to the reception desk.

Linda, who had once minded the commonness of her name, gaveher credit card when asked, wrote her signature on a piece of paper,and accepted a pair of keys, one plastic, the other reassuringly real,the metal key for the minibar, for a drink if it came to that. She followeddirections to a bank of elevators, noting on a mahogany tablea bouquet of hydrangeas and daylilies as tall as a ten-year-old boy.Despite the elegance of the hotel, the music in the elevator was cloyingand banal, and she wondered how it was this detail had beenoverlooked. She followed signs and arrows along a wide, hushedcorridor built during an era when space was not a luxury.

The white paneled door of her room was heavy and opened witha soft click. There was a mirrored entryway that seemed to double asa bar, a sitting room with heavily draped windows and French doorsveiled with sheers that led to a bedroom larger than her living roomat home. The weight of unwanted obligation was, for the moment,replaced with wary acceptance of being pampered. But then shelooked at the ivory linen pillows on the massive bed and thought ofthe waste that it was only herself who would sleep there?she whomight have been satisfied with a narrow bed in a narrow room, whono longer thought of beds as places where love or sex was offered orreceived.

She sat for a moment in her wet raincoat, waiting for the bellmanto bring her suitcase to her. She closed her eyes and tried to relax, anactivity for which she had no talent. She had never been to a yogaclass, never meditated, unable to escape the notion that such strategiesconstituted a surrender, an admission that she could no longerbear to touch the skin of reality, her old lover. As if she would turnher back against a baffled husband, when once she had been sogreedy.

She answered the door to a young bellman, overtipping the manto compensate for her pathetically small suitcase. She was aware ofscrutiny on his part, impartial scrutiny simply because she was awoman and not entirely old. She crossed to the windows and drewback the drapes, and even the dim light of a rainy day was a shock tothe gloom of the room. There were blurred buildings, the gleam ofwet streets, glimpses of gray lake between skyscrapers. Two nightsin one hotel room. Perhaps by Sunday morning she would know thenumber, would not have to ask at the front desk, as she so often hadto do. Her confusion, she was convinced (as the desk clerks clearlywere not), a product simply of physics: she had too much to thinkabout and too little time in which to think it. She had long agoaccepted her need for extravagant amounts of time for contemplation(more, she had observed, than others seemed to need or want).And for years she had let herself believe that this was a product ofher profession, her art, when it was much the other way around.The spirit sought and found the work, and discontent began when itcould not.

And, of course, it was a con, this art. Which was why shecouldn't help but approach a podium, any podium, with a mantle ofslight chagrin that she could never quite manage to hide, her shouldershunched inside her jacket or blouse, her eyes not meeting thosein the audience, as if the men and women in front of her might challengeher, accuse her of fraud?which, in the end, only sheappeared to understand she was guilty of. There was nothing easiernor more agonizing than writing the long narrative verses that herpublisher put in print?easy in that they were simply daydreamswritten in ink; agonizing the moment she returned to consciousness(the telephone rang, the heat kicked on in the basement) and lookedat the words on the blue-lined page and saw, for the first time, thedishonest images, the manipulation and the conniving wordplay,all of which, when it had been a good day, worked well for her.She wrote poetry, she had been told, that was accessible, a fabulousand slippery word that could be used in the service of both scathingcriticism and excessive praise, neither of which she thought shedeserved. Her greatest wish was to write anonymously, though sheno longer mentioned this to her publishers, for they seemed slightlywounded at these mentions, at the apparent ingratitude for thelong?and tedious??investment they had made in her that wasfinally, after all these years, beginning to pay off. Some of her collectionswere selling now (and one of them was selling very wellindeed) for reasons no one had predicted and no one seemed tounderstand, the unexpected sales attributable to that vague andunsettling phenomenon called "word of mouth."

She covered the chintz bedspread with her belongings: the olivesuitcase (slim and soft for the new stingy overheads); the detachablecomputer briefcase (the detaching a necessity for the security checks);and her microfiber purse with its eight compartments for her cellphone, notebook, pen, driver's license, credit cards, hand cream, lipstick,and sunglasses. She used the bathroom with her coat still on andthen searched for her contact lens case so that she could remove themiraculous plastic irritants from her eyes, the lenses soiled with airplaneair and smoke from a concourse bar, a four-hour layover inDallas ending in capitulation to a plate of nachos and a Diet Coke.And seeping around the edges, she began to feel the relief that hotelrooms always provided: a place where no one could get to her.

She sat again on the enormous bed, two pillows propped behindher. Across from her was a gilded mirror that took in the entire bed,and she could not look into such a mirror without thinking of variousspeakable and unspeakable acts that had almost certainly beenperformed in front of that mirror. (She thought of men as beingparticularly susceptible to mirrors in hotel rooms.) Her speculationled inevitably to consideration of substances that had spilled orfallen onto that very bedspread (how many times? thousands oftimes?) and the room was immediately filled with stories: a marriedman who loved his wife but could make love to her but once a monthbecause he was addicted to fantasizing about her in front of hotelmirrors on his frequent business trips, her body the sole object ofhis sexual imaginings; a man cajoling a colleague into performingone of the speakable acts upon him, enjoying the image of hersubservient head bobbing in the mirror over the dresser and then, whenhe had collapsed into a sitting position, confessing, in a moment thatwould ultimately cost him his job, that he had herpes (why were herthoughts about men today so hostile?); a woman who was not beautiful,but was dancing naked in front of the mirror, as she wouldnever do at home, might never do again (there, that was better). Shetook her glasses off so that she could not see across the room. Sheleaned against the headboard and closed her eyes.

She had nothing to say. She had said it all. She had written all thepoems she would ever write. Though something large and subter-raneanhad fueled her images, she was a minor poet only. She was,possibly, an overachiever. She would coast tonight, segue early intothe Q&A, let the audience dictate the tenor of the event. Mercifully,it would be short. She appreciated literary festivals for precisely thatreason: she would be but one of many novelists and poets (morenovelists than poets), most of whom were better known than she.She knew she ought to examine the program before she went to thecocktail party on the theory that it sometimes helped to find anacquaintance early on so that one was not left stranded, lookingboth unpopular and easy prey; but if she glanced at the program, itwould pull her too early into the evening, and she resisted this invasion.How protective she had recently grown of herself, as if therewere something tender and vulnerable in need of defense.

From the street, twelve floors below, there was a clanging of alarge machine. In the corridor there were voices, those of a man anda woman, clearly upset.

It was pure self-indulgence, the writing. She could still remember(an antidote to the chagrin?) the exquisite pleasure, the texture,so early on, of her first penciled letters on their stout lines, the practicedslant of the blue-inked cursive on her first copybook (the lavishF of Frugality, the elegant E of Envy). She collected them now,old copybooks, small repositories of beautiful handwriting. It wasart, found art, of that she was convinced. She had framed some of theindividual pages, had lined the walls of her study at home withthe prints. She supposed the copybooks (mere schoolwork ofanonymous women, long dead) were virtually worthless?she hadhardly ever paid more than five or ten dollars for one in a secondhandbook store?but they pleased her nevertheless. She was convincedthat for her the writing was all about the act of writing itself,even though her own penmanship had deteriorated to an appallinglevel, nearly code.

She stood up from the bed and put her glasses on. She peeredinto the mirror. Tonight she would wear long earrings of pinkLucite. She would put her lenses back in and use a lipstick that didn'tclash with the Lucite, and that would be that. Seen from a certainangle, she might simply disappear.

Copyright © 2001 Anita Shreve. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-78114-2

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0316781142
• ISBN 13: 9780316781145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320