The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

About the Author

       Also by Tara Conklin

       About the Publisher

       Year 2079

      AT FIRST I believed the girl to be an apparition. A ghost. She rose from the crowd in the auditorium and walked to the microphone.

      I remained very still. For the past ninety minutes, I had been seated onstage to discuss my body of work. As much as I dread large crowds, the event had been a success. The audience was respectful, intelligent, curious. I’d even made them laugh. That joke about the frog, of all things. We heard the sirens only once, a brief wail during which I paused my reading. We all waited, the thousand here in the auditorium and the thousands more watching via satellite and DTR. We waited, and then the sirens quieted, and I resumed with my poem.

      Afterward the questions. So many questions! My first public event in twenty-five years—of course there would be questions, but I was not prepared for the intensity, the thoroughness with which these people had read my work. It still surprises me now, eighty years into this literary experiment, that my words might mean something to anyone other than myself.

      I am 102 years old and a poet of some renown. My name is Fiona Skinner.

      When the girl stepped forward, my attention was elsewhere. My energy low. I wondered what snack Henry had waiting for me backstage and hoped it was the candy with the peanut butter in the center, my favorite. My thoughts fixed on other comforts: the tall, soft bed in my house in the mountains; the river stocked with trout; the deep, cold well; the generator with its soothing hum. We never heard the sirens there, no, the nearest town was too far. It was a safe place, our house, a place beyond the reach of politics and rising oceans. At least that’s what I chose to believe. It’s possible to exist under any number of illusions, to believe so thoroughly in the presence of things you cannot see—safety, God, love—that you impose upon them physical shapes. A bed, a cross, a husband. But ideas willed into being are still ideas and just as fragile.

      The girl at the microphone was an arresting sight: slender and tall, a dark bob cut short and sharp to her chin. She looked eighteen, perhaps twenty years old. Not a girl, then, nearly a woman.

      The crowd was silent. She coughed into her hand. “Ms. Skinner,” she began. “My name is Luna.”

      “Luna?” I said, and my voice caught, my breath stilled. For a moment I traveled back all those years to a different place and time. At last, I thought. Luna has returned.

      “Yes. My mother named me after the last line of The Love Poem,” she said.

      “Oh, of course.” I smiled. Henry had told me about this, the popularity of the name. The Love Poem had that effect on some readers. They wanted to keep a piece of it. And here was one of those babies, now grown, standing before me. Another Luna.

      The girl’s face was half in shadow. I saw a mole high on her right cheek. About the size of a dime. A birthmark. A dark kiss.

      “My mother always wanted to ask you about the name,” Luna continued. “She’d memorized the last pages at school. When my brother and I were little, she’d recite them at dinner if we were feeling down.” Her face became soft with the memory. “The Love Poem meant so much to her. I want to know, for my mother. Who was your inspiration? Who was Luna?”

      The auditorium went still. Onstage the lights had become hot, but a cold spread through me, ice flooding my veins. I shivered. A sweat rose along my hairline. It was a question I’d always refused to answer publicly. And privately; even Henry didn’t know the truth. But of course I should have expected it tonight. Isn’t that why I’d agreed to speak one last time? Isn’t that why I was here? To finally tell this story.

      An old regret lodged in my throat, blocking my voice. I coughed.

      “Luna is the Spanish word for moon, of course,” I said. “In the poem itself, there are many metaphors, many symbols that mean different things. I wrote it seventy-five years ago, my dear. Your mother, you, anyone here”—I waved my palm at the audience—“you know what the poem means more than I do now.”

      The Luna standing before me shook her head in frustration. A lock of hair fell into her eyes, and she pushed it away. “No. I mean the real woman. My mother always said there was someone named Luna.”

      I straightened my spine and heard the bones crack, a minor internal disruption. I wasn’t often put on the spot. At home I had a gardener, a personal assistant, a housekeeper, a cook. I lived with my second husband, Henry, but I ran the house and gave the orders. Some might say I’m imposing. I prefer to think of it as self-assured. This girl was also self-assured, I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the purse of her lips.

      How to describe the first Luna? I met Luna Hernandez only once. On a night when the wind threw tree branches onto the road and leaves whirled in crazy circles. Decades ago, a lifetime ago. That Luna had grown and changed in my mind until I hardly saw her anymore. Were her eyes brown or gray? The mole, was it high on the right cheek or the left? Had it been remorse I saw on her face that night or merely dismissal?

      “I wrote a poem about love,” I began, addressing the crowd. “But there are certain limitations. There are certain failings. I’ve always been wary of love, you see. Its promises are too dizzy, its reasons too vague, its origins murkier than mud.” Here I heard a chuckle from the audience. “Yes, mud!” I called in the direction of the laugh. “When I was young, I tried dissecting love, setting it up on a table with a good strong light and poking, prodding, slicing. For years I believed it possible to identify the crux, the core, and that once you found this essential element you might tend it like a rose and grow something beautiful. Back then I was a romantic. I didn’t understand that there’s no stopping betrayal. If you live long enough and well enough to know love, its various permutations and shades, you will falter. You will break someone’s heart. Fairy tales don’t tell you that. Poetry doesn’t either.”

      I paused.

      “You’re not answering the question,” Luna said; her arms were now crossed against her chest, her chin down.

      “Let me tell you a story,” I said. “In these difficult times, stories are important. In a sense, stories are all we have to tell us about the future.”

      Luna moved away from the microphone. She was listening intently, everyone was, shoulders pitched just slightly forward, curious and alert.

      “Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a father and a mother and four children, three girls and one boy. They lived together in a house like any other house, in a town like many other towns, and for a time they were happy.” I paused, and all those faces in the auditorium stared down on me, all those eyes. “And then—” I stopped again, faltering. I sipped my glass of water. “And then there was the Pause. Everything started there. Our mother didn’t mean for it to happen, she didn’t, but this is a story about the failures of love, and the Pause was the first.”

PART I

       Chapter 1

      IN THE SPRING of 1981, our father died. His name was Ellis Avery Skinner, thirty-four years old, a small bald lozenge at the back of his head that he covered every morning with a few hopeful strands. We lived in the middle-class town of Bexley, Connecticut, where our father owned and operated a dental practice. At the moment his heart stopped, he was pulling on a pair of blue rubber gloves while one of his afternoon patients, a Mrs. Lipton, lay before