“We must have spent three hours there, wandering from one work to the next.”
“It was more like five hours.”
“And yet you wanted to leave,” she says reproachfully.
“I was hungry,” I reply. “We didn’t have lunch.”
“How could you even think of food when we were seeing such things?” she asks. “When we had the chance to talk to such amazing artists?”
“I couldn’t understand a thing you said to them. You and the artists were speaking a foreign language. You would talk about intensity and self-denial, while throwing around words like Futurism, Bauhaus, and synthetic Cubism. To a man who sold suits for a living, these words were gibberish.”
“Even after my father explained it to you?” Ruth seems exasperated.
“Your father tried to explain it to me. There’s a difference.”
She smiles. “Then why did you not force me to leave? Why did you not take my arm and steer me to the car?”
This is a question she has wondered about before, whose answer she has never fully understood.
“Because,” I reply as always, “I knew that staying was important to you.”
Unsatisfied, she nonetheless presses on. “Do you recall who we met that first day?” she asks.
“Elaine,” I say automatically. I may not have understood art, but people and faces were within my grasp. “And, of course, we met her husband, too, though we didn’t know then that he would later teach at the college. And then later in the afternoon, we met Ken and Ray and Robert. They were students – or, in Robert’s case, later would be – but you spent a lot of time with them as well.”
By her expression, I know she’s pleased. “They taught me many things that day. I was much better able to understand their primary influences after speaking with them, and it helped me to understand much more about where art would be headed in the future.”
“But you liked them as people, too.”
“Of course. They were fascinating. And each of them was a genius in his own right.”
“Which is why we continued to go back, day after day, until the exhibition closed.”
“I could not let this remarkable opportunity pass. I felt lucky to be in their presence.”
In hindsight, I see that she was right, but at the time all that mattered to me was that her honeymoon be as memorable and fulfilling as I could make it.
“You were very popular with them as well,” I point out. “Elaine and her husband enjoyed having dinner with us. And on the final night of the show, we were invited to that private cocktail party at the lake.”
Ruth, replaying these treasured memories, says nothing for a moment. Her gaze is earnest when she finally meets my eyes.
“It was the best week of my life,” she says.
“Because of the artists?”
“No,” she answers with a tiny shake of her head. “Because of you.”
On the fifth and final day of the exhibition, Ruth and I spent little time together. Not because of any tension between us, but because Ruth was eager to meet even more faculty members, while I was content to wander among the works and chat with the artists we’d already had the chance to get to know.
And then it was over. With the exhibition closed, we devoted the next few days to activities more typical of newlyweds. In the mornings we walked the nature trails, and in the afternoons we read by the pool and went swimming. We ate in different restaurants every evening, and on our last day, after I made a phone call and loaded our suitcases in the trunk, Ruth and I got into the car, both of us feeling more relaxed than we had in years.
Our return trip would bring us past Black Mountain one last time, and as we approached the turnoff on the highway, I glanced over at Ruth. I could sense her desire to return. Deliberately, I took the exit, heading toward the college. Ruth looked at me, her eyebrows raised, obviously wondering what I was doing.
“Just a quick stop,” I said. “I want to show you something.”
I wound through the town and again made a turn she recognized. And just as she’d done back then, Ruth begins to smile.
“You were bringing me back to the lake by the main building,” she says. “Where we attended the cocktail party on the last night of the exhibition. Lake Eden.”
“The view was so pretty. I wanted to see it again.”
“Yes.” She nods. “That is what you said to me back then, and I believed you. But you were not telling the truth.”
“You didn’t like the view?” I ask innocently.