Walter Cummins

Other than Julia, Russell didn’t know the people seated around the dinner table. They were her friends from the years before her divorce, and he knew he should have remembered what she had told him about them. He also knew it would be a big mistake to ask her now even if he had been able to lure her into a corner for a hurried whisper, an admission that he hadn’t paid attention. They’d only been seeing each other for a few months.

“Are you aware you do most of the talking when we’re together,” she told him once in the quiet after lovemaking, “and it’s really not about you, just stories, and I never know whether they’re true.”

“I’m a writer,” he had said. “I write stories.”

“Well, don’t write about me.” She had pressed a palm to his check, and Russell couldn’t decide if it had been a touch or a slap. In the dark he hadn’t been able to read her face.

Here at this table he kept deliberately quiet, not silent, just smiling and offering a reinforcing comment when one of the others said something interesting. The food was good and the wine even better. They were dining on a large glassed-in sun porch that Carol, the wife, kept calling an atrium. Glowing night lamps gave a soft illumination to the deep green lawn, thick leaves of tall trees shimmering in the moonlight. Russell kept looking past the others to the garden, drawn by the colors of the vegetation and the dark shadows that seemed to be creatures rushing across the lawn. They certainly lived elegantly, Carol and Jerry. Russell wished he could recall what Julia said they did, how they made their money. He’d Google Jerry at home when he learned their last name.

The other couple, Evelyn and Alan, didn’t seem to belong together, not the way Carol and Jerry matched, the two of them sandy-haired and ruddy, a bit overweight, but solid, as if they spent hours doing something physical like playing tennis. Alan sat erect on the padded chair, thin, taut, and sallow, occasionally smiling as if on a timer. When he spoke, it was extremely precise and informed. He seemed to know a lot about a lot of things. Russell understood he wasn’t the kind of man you could kid about his knowledge, the way Julia teased Carol and Jerry. Often what Julia said to them was just silly, and Russell wished she had more wit.

Evelyn puzzled Russell, reminding him of a woman from his mother’s generation, her gray dress out of style, her faint blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, her glasses in a thick pink frame. She certainly wasn’t fat, but beside her husband she looked thick, perhaps because when they all had been standing in the living room, Russell noted that she had wide hips and heavy thighs. He let her walk ahead of him to the sun porch and saw that she seemed to wobble in her low-heeled old ladies’ shoes. She had a long face, a large jaw, and spoke with what he took to be an accent, but not foreign, not British, though she reminded him of someone from a black and white postwar film, a plucky housewife making do.

Julia reached under the table to touch Russell’s hand, looking straight ahead and saying something to Jerry about a car he had owned years ago. Russell squeezed her thigh, flattened his palm against it as Jerry laughed and said, “Oh, that one. I could have made lemonade out of it.”

Carol pretended to punch his arm, and Alan and Evelyn smiled, but Julia laughed out loud, her animated face making her especially pretty. Russell told himself he didn’t want to do anything to spoil things between them, not here, not with people—Carol and Jerry—she liked very much, people he still was trying to decipher.

Evelyn and Julia helped Carol clean up the desert plates despite Carol’s pleas for them not to bother. Russell wondered if he should volunteer too, looked for a sign from Julia, but she was focused on collecting the china. When Jerry and Alan sat fixed in their chairs, he didn’t offer. Evelyn rattled cups, looking nervous as she stepped toward the kitchen, as if fearful of dropping the stack in her two hands. Russell had a thought: she’s terrified of dishes. He couldn’t write it down then and there but would tap it into his iPhone when he no one was looking.

The idea might fit into a story. He wrote stories as much as he could, trying to get up very early for a few hours before he had to drive to his work, but managing to do that only a couple of times a week. He did write weekends, though in the months since he met Julia he had decided he’d rather be with her.

Several of his stories had been published in magazines he considered respectable, clearly not any he’d feel shame about. People, friends at work and from college, said nice things about them, and he could tell they weren’t lying. In fact, some seemed impressed at his modest success, as if he were the real thing. Whatever that meant. At least he knew he wasn’t deceiving himself, wasting his time. He had been writing stories in his head all his life until he finally worked up the nerve to put the words on a computer screen before printing the pages he edited with green ink. Now, more so after the publications, he was always seeking story ideas, germs of material.

He hadn’t shown any of his stories to Julia, though she knew about them and even asked to read some, offhanded, not with what he took to be genuine eagerness. Sure, he’d tell her. I’ll bring one next time, though he always managed to forget. He often thought how odd it was that they could be so intimate in bed, so unashamed, holding back nothing, and yet he so reluctant to talk about his writing. Was that the reason she said what she did about him telling stories? Had she been teasing or testing? He didn’t want her judging the stories, judging him. Not yet.

When the women came back from the kitchen, Jerry brought out several cognac bottles. Russell was about to blurt, No cigars? But he swallowed the words, covered his mouth with a linen napkin when he coughed.