Before She Knew Him(3)
They eventually moved to the dining room, where the food had been set up on warming plates on a sideboard: mashed potatoes, drumsticks in a bright yellow sauce, a green salad.
“This was how my grandparents used to serve food,” Hen said. “On a sideboard.”
“Where are they from?” Mira asked.
Hen explained that her father was British and her mother American and how they’d moved back and forth between Bath in England and Albany in New York during her childhood.
“I thought you had an accent,” Mira said.
“Really? I thought I didn’t.”
“It’s mild.”
“Are you from . . . ?”
“I’m from California, but my parents were both from the north of England, by way of Pakistan, and they acted very British. All our meals, including breakfast, were served from a sideboard in the dining room.”
“I like it,” Hen said.
Conversation at dinner was fine but never really kicked into anything lively. It was a lot of talk about their respective jobs, the neighborhood, the ridiculously overpriced housing market. Whenever Matthew spoke it was to ask more questions, usually of Hen. She realized, after he’d asked her if she’d survived the block party, that he was fairly perceptive. Lloyd, hoping to turn the conversation to sports, asked Matthew if he did any coaching at Sussex Hall. Matthew said he didn’t (“the only sport I was ever good at was badminton”). Hen, who, right out of college, had spent a disastrous three months trying to teach a preschool art class, asked him if he found teaching to be emotionally draining, and he said that the first two years were hard. “But now I love it. I love the students, learning about their lives, watching them change so much from freshman year to senior year.” Hen could sense Lloyd, steadily working his way through several glasses of wine, stifling yawns.
After dessert—a warm rice pudding with raisins and cardamom—Hen said that they should be going, that they were driving the next morning to Lloyd’s parents’ house. True, but they weren’t leaving until late morning, at the earliest.
The two couples stood in the front hallway, Hen saying again how much she loved the way they’d decorated the house.
“Oh, we should give you a tour,” Mira said. “We should’ve done it earlier.”
Surprisingly, Lloyd agreed, and Mira took them through the renovated kitchen, showed them the deck they’d added off the back of the house, and then brought them both into Matthew’s downstairs office. It was a room so different from the light colors and clean lines of the rest of the house that Hen felt it was like walking into an entirely different house, maybe even a different time. The walls were papered in a dark green with a faint crosshatch pattern, the floor was covered in a well-worn Persian, and the room was dominated by an enormous glass-fronted cabinet filled with books and framed photographs. There was one small desk in the study, with a leather-padded chair; the only other place to sit was a corduroy sofa. Nothing in the room seemed remotely modern, and every available space was taken up by knickknacks or framed pictures, all in black and white. Hen, drawn to small objects and anything old, took two steps into the room and couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Oh.”
“This is all Matthew,” Mira said.
Hen turned back and smiled, noticing that Matthew, who’d been doing the dishes through most of the tour, now stood nervously in the doorway. Hen felt awkward, like they were being shown something far more private than a study. “I love it,” she said. “So many interesting things.”
“I’m a collector,” Matthew said. “Mira is the . . . what’s the opposite of collector? A thrower-outer?”
There was a fireplace, and Lloyd was asking if it worked, as Hen scanned the objects along the mantel. It was an odd assortment—a small brass snake, wooden candlesticks, a miniature portrait of a dog, an illuminated globe, and, in the middle, a trophy, the figure of a fencer in mid-lunge on top of its silver pedestal. For one terrible moment Hen thought she might faint. Her vision blurred, and her legs felt as though water were rushing through them, then she gathered herself. It’s probably just a coincidence, she said to herself, stepping forward to look at the inscription on the base of the trophy. third place epee, she read, then, in smaller script, it looked like junior olympics and a date she couldn’t make out. She didn’t want to get too close to it. She turned and, in what she hoped was a normal voice, asked Matthew, “Do you fence?”
“God, no,” he said. “I just liked the trophy. I bought it from a yard sale.”
“You okay, Hen?” Lloyd asked, looking with alarm at her face. “You look kind of pale.”
“Oh, yes, I’m fine. Tired, I think.”
The two couples congregated again in the front hall to say their good-byes. Hen could feel the blood moving back into her face. It was just a fencing trophy—there must be thousands of them, she told herself, as she praised the dinner again and thanked them for the tour, all while Lloyd had one hand on the doorknob, trying to escape. Mira swept in and kissed Hen on the cheek, while Matthew, behind her, smiled and said good-bye. She might have been imagining it, but Hen thought he seemed to be intently watching her.
Back outside in the cold damp air, after the Dolamores’ door had clicked shut, Lloyd turned to Hen and said, “You okay? What was that about?”