It should be noted: Bob had read the memoir that Lucy had written a few years earlier about her ex-husband, William. We have mentioned this before, how Bob—when Lucy had been talking about doing childhood cartwheels—remembered from that book that William had told Lucy he married her because she was filled with joy, and how could that be, coming from what she had come from?
What Bob did not remember was how toward the end of that same book, when William had shown up with his white hair cut very short and his huge mustache shaved off, Lucy felt that William had lost his authority with her. Many of us forget things we read in books, but had Bob remembered this, perhaps he would not have agreed to see Lucy. But he did not remember it, and so here they were.
—
It was the middle of June now, but the day was oddly cold, and the wind was furious, it seemed to bite at them as they walked. It was very much like an autumn day even though they passed trees with their bright green leaves swirling in the wind. Lucy had worn her spring coat, and she kept saying “I’m freezing, I’m so cold!”
“You want to go back?” Bob asked, and she shook her head.
Lucy listened while he told her about Matt going to see Katherine Caskey, and she nodded and said, “Good.” He told her that Matt was painting a portrait of him, and Lucy did glance at him then and said, “Oh nice.”
Then she told him about seeing Olive Kitteridge and telling her the story of Addie Beal.
Lucy sat beside him on the granite bench, she took her sunglasses off and then she poked his leg as he was lighting his cigarette, and he looked at her, and he was surprised to see her eyes were rimmed with red, and she said slowly, “So, Bob, here’s the thing. Olive and I have been telling each other all these stories of unrecorded lives, but what do they mean? At least Diana Beach got to be a good guidance counselor. And yet still—I don’t know. I keep thinking these days about all these people, and people we don’t even know, and their lives are unrecorded. But what does anyone’s life mean?” She added, “Please don’t laugh.”
—
The smoke he inhaled got stuck and he coughed—hard. He stood up. He turned toward her as he coughed and coughed. When he was done coughing, he said, “Did you just ask me what anyone’s life means?”
She nodded.
“Lucy.”
“What?” She squinted up at him.
“Are you ten years old?” He said it without thinking (why did he say that?), and he saw her receive this as a blow.
“Probably.” She looked down, then back up at him. “I’ve always thought I was about five.” She added, not nicely, “You’re the one who looks twelve.”
It took a moment for that to sink in, but he found her remark gratuitously mean, even though he was aware that he had offended her first.
He looked above her and then at her. “What about love? Isn’t that what life might be about?” He smoked for a moment and then he added, “And for all your worry about Addie, she had a mother who loved her. Maybe the rest of her life sucked, but she had that. I wouldn’t be so quick to say that her life meant nothing.”
Lucy stood up and put her sunglasses back on. She was shivering in the wind. “Solzhenitsyn said the point of life is the maturity of the soul. Jesus, Addie didn’t have time for her soul to mature. Oh, never mind. Can we go back now?”
He dropped his cigarette onto the ground and stepped on it and left it there—he had never done this before. “Of course,” he said, and they walked. “What about all the people getting blown up in the Ukraine right now? What do their lives mean?” He asked this with belligerence.
She said, without looking at him, “It’s Ukraine, Bob. Jesus. Not the Ukraine,” and Bob felt his face becoming hot once again.
“All right, what about the people in Ukraine getting blown up as we speak? What do their lives mean? And what about those people I saw near Portland when I came back from New York? Living in tents right there by the highway? What about the homeless here in town who live in the woods out behind Walmart? What about them?”
Lucy said, “I said never mind!”
He understood that he had insulted her. And she had insulted him back. He wanted to apologize, but he did not apologize. Without his being fully aware of it a crack of anger had begun in him, rising inside himself as he stood there. They walked back to their cars in silence. But right before they reached the parking lot Bob stopped walking, and so did she. “Lucy,” he said. He said it kindly, quietly.
“What?” Lucy did not say it kindly or quietly. “What?” she demanded when he did not answer. She took her sunglasses off once more, and he saw that her eyes were not red-rimmed, as he had somehow thought they might be.
He raised both arms and brought them down slowly. “Nothing,” he said.
They walked again, Lucy hugging herself against the wind, and when they reached the parking lot, she kept walking to her car and just said, “See you later, Bob.”
—
What had just happened?
—
Driving back to his house, he went over what he could remember of the conversation. He had been unkind about her—to his mind—immature question. And then she had been unkind to him. He thought of her telling him weeks ago that there was an arrogance to her, and he had the thought now that her response to Addie was somewhat arrogant, even as he understood that this made little sense. And yet the crack of anger inside him did not go away. And with it there was some odd sense of relief, as though he had been carrying a large burden for a long time, and perhaps did not have to carry it anymore.
*
By the time he got home, the anger had grown slightly, become larger within him. Why did she ask such a stupid question, about the meaning of life? She wasn’t a kid—except she was, as Margaret had said—and who in the world knew the meaning of life?
—
If Bob had had children, he might have recognized the incident as a kind of pulling away that an adolescent does to be free of their parent, but he had not had children and—as we know—he had always been good to his mother during his own adolescence. Also, Lucy was not his parent, nor was he hers. But the sense of strain that their relationship had put Bob under seemed unsustainable to him, although this was mostly unconscious on his part; as we have said, Bob was not a reflective fellow.
—
That night he lay in bed with Margaret’s head on his chest, her leg across his. He said, “Lucy wanted to know the meaning of anybody’s life today.”
Margaret moved her head to look at him, then put it back on his chest. “Well, that’s not a small question.”
“It’s a stupid question.”
“No, it isn’t, Bob. My heavens.”
“It seemed stupid to me, it seemed—immature.”
