
weirdness of the whole thing. I'm flooded with years of knowledge of Henry,
while he's looking at me perplexed and fearful. Henry wearing my dad's old
fishing trousers, patiently quizzing me on multiplication tables, French verbs, all
the state capitals; Henry laughing at some peculiar lunch my seven-year-old self
has brought to the Meadow; Henry wearing a tuxedo, undoing the studs of his
shirt with shaking hands on my eighteenth birthday. Here! Now! "Come and
have coffee with me, or dinner or something..." Surely he has to say yes, this
Henry who loves me in the past and the future must love me now in some
bat-squeak echo of other time. To my immense relief he does say yes. We plan to
meet tonight at a nearby Thai restaurant, all the while under the amazed gaze of
the woman behind the desk, and I leave, forgetting about Kelmscott and Chaucer
and floating down the marble stairs, through the lobby and out into the October
Chicago sun, running across the park scattering small dogs and squirrels,
whooping and rejoicing.
Henry: It's a routine day in October, sunny and crisp. I'm at work in a small
windowless humidity-controlled room on the fourth floor of the Newberry,
cataloging a collection of marbled papers that has recently been donated, The
papers are beautiful, but cataloging is dull, and I am feeling bored and sorry for
myself. In fact, I am feeling old, in the way only a twenty-eight-year-old can after
staying up half the night drinking overpriced vodka and trying, without success,
to win himself back into the good graces of Ingrid Carmichel. We spent the entire
evening fighting, and now I can't even remember what we were fighting about.
My head is throbbing. I need coffee. Leaving the marbled papers in a state of
controlled chaos, I walk through the office and past the page's desk in the
Reading Room. I am halted by Isabelle's voice saying, "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble
can help you," by which she means "Henry, you weasel, where are you slinking
off to?" And this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl turns around
and looks at me as though I am her personal Jesus. My stomach lurches.
Obviously she knows me, and I don't know her. Lord only knows what I have
said, done, or promised to this luminous creature, so I am forced to say in my
best librarianese, "Is there something I can help you with?" The girl sort of
breathes "Henry!" in this very evocative way that convinces me that at some
point in time we have a really amazing thing together. This makes it worse that I
don't know anything about her, not even her name. I say "Have we met?" and
Isabelle gives me a look that says You asshole. But the girl says, "I'm Clare
Abshire. I knew you when I was a little girl," and invites me out to dinner. I
accept, stunned. She is glowing at me, although I am unshaven and hung over
and just not at my best. We are going to meet for dinner this very evening, at the
Beau Thai, and Clare, having secured me for later, wafts out of the Reading
Room.
As I stand in the elevator, dazed, I realize that a massive winning lottery ticket
chunk of my future has somehow found me here in the present, and I start to
laugh. I cross the lobby, and as I run down the stairs to the street I see Clare
running across Washington Square, jumping and whooping, and I am near tears
and I don't know why.
Later that evening:
Henry: At 6:00 p.m. I race home from work and attempt to make myself attractive.
Home these days is a tiny but insanely expensive studio apartment on North
Dearborn; I am constantly banging parts of myself on inconvenient walls,
countertops and furniture. Step One: unlock seventeen locks on apartment door,
fling myself into the living room-which-is-also-my-bedroom and begin stripping
off clothing. Step Two: shower and shave. Step Three: stare hopelessly into the
depths of my closet, gradually becoming aware that nothing is exactly clean. I
discover one white shirt still in its dry cleaning bag. I decide to wear the black
suit, wing tips, and pale blue tie. Step Four: don all of this and realize I look like
an FBI agent. Step Five: look around and realize that the apartment is a mess. I
resolve to avoid bringing Clare to my apartment tonight even if such a thing is
possible. Step Six: look in full-length bathroom mirror and behold angular,
wild-eyed 6'1" ten-year-old Egon Schiele look-alike in clean shirt and funeral
director suit. I wonder what sorts of outfits this woman has seen me wearing,
since I am obviously not arriving from my future into her past wearing clothes of
my own. She said she was a little girl? A plethora of unanswerables runs through
my head. I stop and breathe for a minute. Okay. I grab my wallet and my keys,
and away I go: lock the thirty-seven locks, descend in the cranky little elevator,
buy roses for Clare in the shop in the lobby, walk two blocks to the restaurant in
record time but still five minutes late. Clare is already seated in a booth and she
looks relieved when she sees me. She waves at me like she's in a parade.
"Hello," I say. Clare is wearing a wine-colored velvet dress and pearls. She
looks like a Botticelli by way of John Graham: huge gray eyes, long nose, tiny
delicate mouth like a geisha. She has long red hair that covers her shoulders and
falls to the middle of her back. Clare is so pale she looks like a waxwork in the
candlelight. I thrust the roses at her. "For you."
"Thank you," says Clare, absurdly pleased. She looks at me and realizes that I
am confused by her response. "You've never given me flowers before."
I slide into the booth opposite her. I'm fascinated. This woman knows me; this
isn't some passing acquaintance of my future hejiras. The waitress appears and
hands us menus.
"Tell me," I demand.
"What?"
"Everything. I mean, do you understand why I don't know you? I'm terribly
sorry about that-"
"Oh, no, you shouldn't be. I mean, I know.. .why that is." Clare lowers her
voice. "It's because for you none of it has happened yet, but for me, well, I've
known you for a long time."
"How long?"
"About fourteen years. I first saw you when I was six."
"Jesus. Have you seen me very often? Or just a few times?"
"The last time I saw you, you told me to bring this to dinner when we met
again," Clare shows me a pale blue child's diary, "so here,"-she hands it to
me-"you can have this." I open it to the place marked with a piece of newspaper.
The page, which has two cocker spaniel puppies lurking in the upper right-hand
corner, is a list of dates. It begins with September 23, 1977, and ends sixteen
small, blue, puppied pages later on May 24, 1989. I count. There are 152 dates,
written with great care in the large open Palmer Method blue ball point pen of a
six-year-old.
"You made the list? These are all accurate?"
"Actually, you dictated this to me. You told me a few years ago that you
memorized the dates from this list. So I don't know how exactly this exists; I
mean, it seems sort of like a Mobius strip. But they are accurate. I used them to
know when to go down to the Meadow to meet you." The waitress reappears and
we order: Tom Kha Kai for me and Gang Mussaman for Clare. A waiter brings
tea and I pour us each a cup.
"What is the Meadow?" I am practically hopping with excitement. I have
never met anyone from my future before, much less a Botticelli who has
encountered me 152 times.
"The Meadow is a part of my parents' place up in Michigan. There's woods at
one edge of it, and the house on the opposite end. More or less in the middle is a
clearing about ten feet in diameter with a big rock in it, and if you're in the
clearing no one at the house can see you because the land swells up and then
dips in the clearing. I used to play there because I liked to play by myself and I
thought no one knew I was there. One day when I was in first grade I came home
from school and went out to the clearing and there you were."
"Stark naked and probably throwing up."
"Actually, you seemed pretty self-possessed. I remember you knew my name,
and I remember you vanishing quite spectacularly. In retrospect, it's obvious that
you had been there before. I think the first time for you was in 1981; I was ten.
You kept saying 'Oh my god,' and staring at me. Also, you seemed pretty freaked
out about the nudity, and by then I just kind of took it for granted that this old
nude guy was going to magically appear from the future and demand clothing."
Clare smiles. "And food."
"What's funny?"
"I made you some pretty weird meals over the years. Peanut butter and
anchovy sandwiches. Pate and beets on Ritz crackers. I think partly I wanted to
see if there was anything you wouldn't eat and partly I was trying to impress you
with my culinary wizardry."
"How old was I?"
"I think the oldest I have seen you was forty-something. I'm not sure about
youngest; maybe about thirty? How old are you now?"
"Twenty-eight."
"You look very young to me now. The last few years you were mostly in your
early forties, and you seemed to be having kind of a rough life... It's hard to say.
When you're little all adults seem big, and old."
"So what did we do? In the Meadow? That's a lot of time, there."
Clare smiles. "We did lots of things. It changed depending on my age, and the
weather. You spent a lot of time helping me do my homework. We played
games. Mostly we just talked about stuff. When I was really young I thought you
were an angel; I asked you a lot of questions about God. When I was a teenager I
tried to get you to make love to me, and you never would, which of course made
me much more determined about it. I think you thought you were going to warp
me sexually, somehow. In some ways you were very parental."
"Oh. That's probably good news but somehow at the moment I don't seem to
be wanting to be thought of as parental." Our eyes meet. We both smile and we
are conspirators. "What about winter? Mi