The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

next, building to building, with a sort of good-natured bafflement, as though he were as surprised as anyone to find himself here, amid the ivy-covered walls and straight-A students.

      As Renee carefully released the parking brake and eased away from the house, I saw Joe freeze: a thin smile, a hand in mid-wave, a length of tan, strong arm.

      “Good luck!” I called. This seemed the right thing to say, although I considered Joe already the luckiest, the most charmed. It seemed inevitable that all he wanted would line up before him like the balls that long ago Ace would pitch, pulling them one by one from his bulging pockets as we watched breathless from the stands.

       Crack, crack, crack, crack!

      Each hit was followed by a startling, whole silence as we watched the ball travel up into air and then breathlessly down, down, down, until it would land with a final dull thump in the grassy field.

PART II

       Year 2079

      THE LIGHTS IN the auditorium flickered once, then again. The microphone cut out and I stopped speaking. Henry, dear Henry, stood up from the front row and made his way onstage. He was only eighty-four, but his knees were bad from riding horses all those years, and so he limped a bit, winced as he climbed the steps. There was an empty chair beside me, vacated hastily by the venue organizer, and Henry took it and then took hold of my hand and brought it to his lips. In the second row, a young man and woman watched us. She had vivid red hair, the color of a flag, and the man’s arm circled her shoulders. Her hair fell across his chest. They, too, were holding hands. Entwined, I thought. Knotted, woven, linked.

      And that was the moment the room plunged into darkness. I felt the pressure of Henry’s palm. There was one short, sharp scream from the balcony, but otherwise the crowd remained calm. No rush for the exits, no hysteria. This kind of thing happened too frequently now for it to rouse much of a panic. Still, I felt the heightened tension in the room. The shallow breathing, hands squeezing hands, sweat rising on palms, eyes staring into nothing. Whispers of confusion and comfort.

      We waited in darkness for one minute, three, five. My thoughts turned to Luna, the young Luna here in the room and the other Luna out there somewhere. Was that Luna still alive? Did she ever wonder about me, too? Did she wear a diamond ring on her finger? On a chain around her neck? Or was it hidden away in a drawer, unworn and forgotten?

      My eyes adjusted. A few exit signs glowed orange. The greenish hue of screens flickered like fireflies on a summer night. I remembered the security check: DEVICES STRICTLY FORBIDDEN INSIDE THE AUDITORIUM! But of course there are always people who will find a way to break the rules.

      “The whole city is out!” one woman declared, reading from a bright light.

      This information provoked more agitation, groans, and some hurried, hushed conversations. Who cares if the city is out? I thought. Perhaps it was one of those megastorms, or a tremor deep underground, or a hurricane off the coast of Borneo. The news exhausted me. The news bored me. What did it matter? Here we sat, the proverbial ducks. We might as well just reach for the chocolate candy in our pockets, hold the hand of the one we love best, and smile.

      Backstage I heard the rustle and hurried footfalls of venue staff doing their best to turn the lights on again.

      “We’ve got it,” a voice called, “the generator.” There was the thump of a heavy lever being pulled and dim yellow lights emerged along the base of the walls and along the rows between seats.

      Suddenly the space was transformed. It was no longer dark and menacing, nor was it a grand auditorium divided between stage and audience. It was now simply a room, a large, cozy room with an arched ceiling and many, many chairs. Oh, this is something, I thought. Now we can have a proper chat. Now we can get down to the things that matter.

      The young woman Luna had been perched on a folding chair. Now she again stood. She tapped the microphone gently, but it was dead, of course, and so she called out, “Ms. Skinner?”

      I felt a surge of great affection for her, irrational in its intensity. That mole, high on her right cheek. I struggled to recall the other Luna, the Luna from a lifetime ago.

      “Yes, dear,” I said. “Please go ahead.” I wanted to scoop her up and protect her, to ferry her out of here and back to my house in the woods with its fence and bunker and generator and fresh-spring well. There I might convince myself that we were safe.

      “When did the unraveling begin?” Luna asked.

      “The unraveling?” I repeated.

      “You said this was a story about the failures of love,” said Luna, her tone accusatory. “That’s what you said.”

      “Yes. I did say that.”

      “You repeat the word unraveling several times in The Love Poem. You said there was happiness in your family, and then—” Luna did not finish the sentence. She left the question hanging over me, over us all.

      “And then,” I repeated. I cleared my throat. I glanced at Henry, and he winked, nodded for me to continue. If there is one thing I have succeeded at in life, I thought then, it’s choosing husbands.

      When did Joe’s unraveling begin? I considered how to answer Luna’s question. When he met Sandrine? Or took the job at Morgan Capital? Or was it when his baseball career ended with one slide into home? Maybe it began even earlier, when he was still a child who looked like a man, tall and golden, watched and worshipped in Bexley like the local god of any small village. Later, when I asked my sisters, Caroline believed that it began during the Pause, when the ways in which love might disappear first became known to us. We were too young, Caroline said, for that kind of wisdom.

      Renee said no, the Pause didn’t do that to Joe. Look at the day of our father’s funeral when he raged and howled. Renee believed that the unraveling began then, in the yellow house, Joe with the fireplace poker, surrounded by all those who loved him and no one, not one of us, able to help. From that moment, she believed, it was written across his skin, embedded within the veins.

      To unravel is to unknit, disconnect, untangle, separate. To fall apart.

      “I will tell you this,” I replied. “The love of your life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.” I was speaking directly to Luna now, not to the woman with the red hair and her partner, not to Henry, not to the faceless masses here in the hall who had paid money to see me speak. Only to Luna. “The unraveling began—” I said, but then stopped myself, tilted my head. “I don’t know when it began, I’m afraid. But I do remember when I first became aware that it was happening.”

       Chapter 5

      IT WAS AUTUMN 2004. An election year, long enough after 9/11 that we no longer spoke of it every day but close enough that the Manhattan skyline still looked broken. I had agreed to help Caroline clean out her new rental house in the small town of Hamden, Connecticut. I’d seen Caroline and her family infrequently since she and Nathan had left Bexley. In twelve years they’d moved four times, from one university town to the next in search of Nathan’s Ph.D. in biology and a permanent teaching position. The Skinner-Duffys now numbered five: Nathan, Caroline, ten-year-old Louis, and the twins, six-year-old Lily and Beatrix. Their most recent moves had been to cities where one of Nathan’s siblings lived—his brother Terry in Columbus, his sister Maddy in Austin. We’d assumed they’d settle there in Texas, the kids growing up with drawls and a fondness for BBQ, but last month Nathan had received a tenure-track offer from Hamden College, a cozy liberal-arts school located thirty minutes from Noni