THE LAST ROMANTICS by Elizabeth Malin

THE LAST ROMANTICS by Elizabeth Malin: Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

MOST OF ALL, I wanted them to be happy. In the past few years, this wish has focused almost exclusively on her—she with the perfect lips and Arden face, the honey-gold hair that clouded around those rosebud cheeks, the tight little girl's body and the slim ankles. How could you not love her, especially when she was androgynous as Puck, sensual as Venus?

It was easy to assume that all their unhappiness originated with him, so self-absorbed, such an artiste, so cruelly ambivalent to her deepest yearnings. And then, of course, there was that other woman, in whose arms he sought comfort in the sunset of his too-short life.

Oh, there was a time when I despised him, when I believed all his fortune was undeserved, and all his misfortune brought on himself by his reckless disregard for those who loved him. But that followed the time when I thought he made the world spin with his tales of love and reckless girls who broke men's hearts.

As years went by...and stories unfolded, page after page of stories...one saw the entire tale. They were as ordinary as any folk, despite his gussying up their stories with drama and light. They loved. They fought. They irritated each other in the small ways we all do when the idea of something gets populated with the reality of it, the scent and sound and feel of it. Their ideas were harder than most to live up to, too, since he'd done such a fine job of making them shimmer and dance. The march of time has a way of dulling the glow. They couldn't help that.

There were no saints here. And since her happiness was so entwined with his, one had to wish they'd both just get on with it and decide they'd order a dish of it to share.

So few have that chance. Why couldn't they?

***

The corners on the papers in her lap ruffled in the breeze, struggling to fly away. She should go in. But she'd wanted to catch at least some of the March warmth on her shoulders while it lasted. It would be gone soon enough.

She shivered. The air was bright, the sky blue, but the grass beneath the old swing in the yard was brown and icy. Wispy X-ray image clouds portended the return of cold air. Easter was coming soon, yet she knew no one would be dressed in spring finery, and there was a chance of snow flurries in the forecast. Ah, Vermont.

She wanted to move. South, back below the Mason-Dixon line, where spring meant teasing warm days followed by cool, dreary ones, the season winking at you with impish delight, forcing a smile to your lips even as you raised your fist to cloud-dampened heavens. People smiled at you there, for no reason, said hello, nodded in acknowledgement of your existence.

The first year Kate and Jim lived in Vermont, she'd always been wondering if she'd done something wrong. Had she said something rude to the book store owner to cause him to look so dour? Taken too long at the library counter to have the librarian seem so grim? Placed sixteen items in the fifteen-item lane at the grocery store to cause the cashier to scowl? No "how you doin', hon?" here. No, "you have a good day, ya hear?" Just stony stares until business was transacted. Taciturn New England.

She snapped a rubber band around the pages and got off of the garden swing. Jim had put it in for her, and she'd hardly used it. The joke, "there are two seasons in Vermont, winter and the Fourth of July," turned out to be no joke. Jim loved it. Loved the cold, the skiing, the endless, cocooning snow. And for a long while, she'd loved it, too. Loved the sense of settling in when the first flakes began to fall in late November. Loved the soft hush of the snow followed by the comforting crunch of the plows up and down, up and down the town roads. Loved the safety—she didn't even know where her house key was anymore—the solitude, the sense of escape. And, yes, the soaring mountains that turned a velvet green she couldn't adequately describe in summer, the brilliant hues that painted them in autumn, an autumn that began the last weeks of August.