Cliff Walk

By Jessica Treadway

“This is the most stunning place I’ve ever been to,” she told him. “I’d love to get married here.”

Stewart didn’t know what to say. Did she want to get married to him, or did she just mean married in general? He decided to play it safe. “I know. It’s something.”

“They’re so lucky,” Avery added. “The weather, this day — how come Cath is always so lucky?” She seemed to believe he might actually have an answer to this.

Stewart shrugged. “Positive thinking?”

She burst out laughing. “That’s a good one. Cath’s the least positive person I know.”

“Well, she’s your friend,” he reminded her, annoyed that she’d laughed at him. “Don’t ask me.”

Luckily, she didn’t pursue it. “Can you believe this view?” she asked, gesturing about them with the light shawl draped loosely across her shoulders.

“It’s something,” he repeated, though he knew this was not as effusive an agreement as she was looking for. He had trouble speaking superlatives; they always sounded false, and effeminate, coming out of his mouth. Words like gorgeous and spectacular — he avoided these. “It’s unbelievable,” he tried out, and felt relieved when all Avery did was nod in response.

“Someday,” she murmured, looking out over the water, and he knew better than to ask what she was referring to.

They were standing above Narragansett Bay. Around them the cliffs and mansions of Newport rose into the bluest of summer skies. It was after the wedding, and guests scattered all over the wide lawn, talking or clumped together on the dance floor next to the string quartet. That morning clouds had made the bride nervous, but by noon they’d cleared out and taken the wind with them. Earlier Stewart could have sworn that Avery had been hoping for rain, but of course he would never have told her what he suspected. Cath was not Avery’s best friend, but they had worked together for six years at the alumni magazine of a college neither of them had attended. Technically, Cath was Avery’s boss, though she was some years younger. Avery had taken the associate editor’s job to augment what she made selling the short stories she wrote. She sold two or three a year to a magazine that paid well, where she received good exposure and made a name for herself. Someday soon the stories would be collected into a book. Stewart figured that when this happened, she would move on from him. She’d be invited to parties and flown down to New York, and she’d meet new people more interesting than some guy she’d struck up a conversation with while they were both waiting for take-out Chinese.

This was how Stewart thought of himself, as “some guy.” He tried not to let on to Avery, because he knew insecurity was unattractive. He tried to act confident, but at times she saw right through him. He could tell when this happened because she got a look in her eyes that he read as I can do better. She never said anything, and in fact it was at moments like this that she acted the most tender toward him.

But the end was coming. He felt it the way you feel a cold coming on, the perversely delicious anticipation of the suffering you are about to endure.

They moved back up the hill toward the party, where Cath was getting ready to throw the bouquet. The best man invited all the single women to come to the front, and Avery said “What the hell” and went forward with mostly younger women and little girls. Cath took clear aim at Juliana, the daughter of the alumni magazine’s art director — she couldn’t have been more than eight — but just as the flowers sailed, Avery stepped in front of the child and caught them in both hands. Juliana began to cry, and around him Stewart saw people frowning at Avery and muttering disapproval. He cleared his throat in embarrassment and tried to smile as Avery rejoined him.

“I don’t know what came over me,” she whispered fiercely. She seemed aware of the discord she had created, but not how to fix it. “It was like, if I didn’t catch those flowers, something bad was going to happen.”

“To Cath and Geoffrey?”

“I don’t know. No. Probably to me. It was like a flash of obsession or something — you know, those people who have to say the Lord’s Prayer fourteen times before they get out of bed in the morning? Or skip stairs or count syllables in their head?” She handed him the bouquet, though he said, “I don’t want it,” and she moved to the line at the bar, where he watched her wait alone as other guests turned to chat with each other. He knew he should go over and stand with her, but instead he went back to their table and put the bouquet on her chair. They left the reception soon after, without the prize she had stolen, and Avery was silent on the way back to the inn.

Neither of them felt hungry for dinner, but they’d asked the innkeeper to make reservations for them, so they felt obliged to go. The restaurant was a walk-able distance, but Avery wanted to take the car. “My feet are killing me from those heels,” she told him. “Please, honey, can we drive?” His heart knocked against itself when he heard her say the word honey. Whenever she called him that, it inevitably and inexplicably followed that they had a fight.

It didn’t start right away. They parked in the public lot and, with time to kill before they were due to be seated, they lingered in front of the shops on Thames Street. (When they’d come into town the day before, Avery, who was reading the map, pronounced it “Tems,” and Stewart said, “We aren’t in London, you know,” and she said, “What do you want to bet that’s how you say it?” They wagered an ice cream cone, and a few minutes later the woman behind the desk at the inn confirmed that the street name was pronounced with a Th as in thunder and rhymed with “games.” But Avery refused to pay up. “I don’t need any ice cream; I have to fit into that dress,” she told Stewart, and he said as long as he got the cone sometime during the weekend, he’d consider the bet square.

The incident made him remember how pretentious she could be, though. He tried to forget it again when the woman at the desk said, politely, that a lot of people made the same mistake.)

After they had been seated for dinner, the waiter came over with a plate of sliced tomatoes, a basket of rolls, a cruet of oil, and a small tray filled with white circles. “Compliments of the chef,” he told them.

“What is that?” Stewart asked Avery, pointing at the plate after the waiter had gone.

She raised her eyebrows to show it was a silly question. “Mozzarella,” she told him, as if educating a child. She spooned one of the white circles onto a tomato slice and lifted it to her mouth. “Mm, try it,” she said.

Stewart followed her example and swallowed, but something seemed off, and then he realized what it was. “Does that taste like cheese to you?” he said, pointing to what they both, now, understood were round pats of butter for their rolls. Surreptitiously, Avery spit out the rest of the tomato mix onto her plate.

“Goddammit,” she said.

Stewart tried, but found it impossible to stop laughing. “Do you mind,” Avery said, as people from the next table looked over and smiled at his mirth.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said, hoping his use of the endearment would mitigate her desire to find fault with him. “But don’t you think that’s hilarious? You can dress us up, but…” He nodded toward the chef’s treat now lying desecrated on the plate between them.

“Speak for yourself,” Avery said. She stood and walked out of the restaurant. Stewart let her get a head start, as if she had just gone to the ladies’ room; then he reached into his wallet for cash which he left on the table, got up and, slowly so as not to attract attention, followed her out to the car.

He found her pulling desperately on the locked passenger door. “Avery, Al,” he said soothingly, putting the key into the lock. “It’s been a long day. Let’s just go back and go to bed.”

“I feel like such an idiot,” she said.

“Because of the butter? Anyone could make that mistake.”

“No, not because of the butter.” She spit the word as if it were the last thing she wanted to have in her mouth. “Because of the way I acted with the bouquet.”

“But you had an urge,” he reminded her. “A sudden impulse, a scare. You thought something bad would happen — “

“ — if I didn’t catch it. I know.” She motioned for him to start the car. “But I should have been able to control myself. I mean, did I really believe that anything actually depended on whether I caught a bunch of flowers somebody tossed through the air? How stupid is that?”

“It’s not stupid. Superstitious, maybe, but not — “

“And I stole it straight out from under a child! In front of everyone. Oh, I can’t stand myself.” She put her forehead into her hands as they pulled up behind the inn. She made no move to get out, so Stewart didn’t, either. They sat in the warm dark, listening to noise emanating from the bar down the street.

After a while he said, “Tomorrow, do you still want to go on the Cliff Walk?” The innkeeper had told them about one of Newport’s foremost attractions, a path next to the bay that wound by many of the old-money mansions.

“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see how we feel when we get up.” Finally she opened the door of the car and stepped out.

“I’d like to see it,” Stewart said, but she was already at the top of the steps waiting for him to catch up and open the door, and he knew she hadn’t heard him.

In bed, everything was quiet — the sex, and the murmured exchange after it, before sleep. Always, Stewart felt genuine affection in Avery’s touch, and he did his best to remember this when they weren’t touching and when he felt he was boring her, or when he sensed that no matter what he said or did at any given moment, it would not be enough to dislodge whatever already occupied her attention and her thoughts. Trying to find a comfortable position on the pillow, the name of an old girlfriend came to him suddenly, and he wondered what had happened to her. Then Avery threw her arm across his chest and, feeling guilty, he stroked it until she made noises of contentment and fell asleep.

In the morning he woke at six — his usual time — and waited for Avery, which usually took an hour. But today she didn’t begin stirring until seven-thirty, so he remained quiet on his side of the bed. She was a light sleeper, so he tried not to rise before she was awake. It meant that he had time, every morning after they’d spent the night together, to think; sometimes he didn’t have an hour’s worth of things to think about, but luckily today wasn’t one of those days. He remembered the wedding and the reception and the abbreviated dinner of the evening before, and he thought about Avery’s compulsion to catch the bouquet. It was something they had in common, he realized only now. He’d had moments like that, when he felt that something had to be a particular way, or the consequences might be dire. Once he’d been on a road trip with an old girlfriend — the one he’d thought about, the previous night — and as they were about to enter the Burger King in a rest area, he had a sudden bad feeling about what might happen if they went through the restaurant’s front doors. Instead he took the girlfriend’s elbow and steered her around to the side. The whole time they were eating their Whoppers she looked at him as if he were crazy, and she ended their relationship soon after that.

It was a kind of crazy, Stewart supposed, but that didn’t mean it didn’t feel real. Who knew that a bus wouldn’t have come crashing in through the plate glass at that moment, if he had ignored the signal and just gone through the front? So he understood why Avery had stepped forward to catch the bouquet. For all she knew she might not be alive, this morning, if she hadn’t.

They got up together and put on tee-shirts and shorts; the weather called for a sunny day, with the temperature near eighty. Avery was in a much better mood. She seemed to have forgotten that she’d been iffy about the trip to the Cliff Walk, and said she was excited that they were on their way. Stewart warned himself not to get his hopes up, but it proved difficult; he’d had a fantasy of what this wedding weekend near the ocean could be like, and for the first time it seemed as if reality might be edging toward the image he’d been holding in his mind since Avery had shown him the invitation from the bride and groom.

In high spirits they ate breakfast at the inn, then stopped at a mom-and-pop store for bottles of water. “I could write a story about this town,” Avery said, as they made their way along streets they had toured on their way to the wedding.

“What would it be about?” He was always afraid he was asking dumb questions when they talked about writing, even though writing was what he wanted to do, himself. When they’d met that night at the Chinese restaurant, he was sitting with a book of stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness; it was what Avery noticed first. “He’s one of my favorites,” she said. When she mentioned the magazine she wrote for, Stewart felt a hot stone of jealousy lodge in his chest. He’d never had anything published, but Avery assured him that someday he would. Her encouragement was what kept him coming back to his legal pad in the early mornings, before he left for his job as a programmer.

“Oh, I don’t know yet,” Avery said, in response to his question about the plot she might be envisioning. “Maybe a wedding. Maybe I can do something with the whole ‘Tems/Thames’ thing. I’ll have to see.” She smiled, and he realized she meant him to understand that she was mocking herself.

The Avery who wrote her stories — about people who were ordinary and vulnerable, and in such ways that Stewart found it easy to inhabit them all, including elderly women and young girls and men who cheated — was the woman he loved, and the one he sometimes found it difficult to locate in the woman who seemed so often to have little use for him. The real Avery, he believed, was the one who excavated those fictional souls and psyches, because she knew and cared so much about the way people felt; for some reason, the face and demeanor she presented to the world did not match what she was, inside. He felt confident about this but had no idea how to express to her how much better it would be for everyone — herself included, herself first — if in real life (to use a phrase she had told him she considered redundant) she could show who she really was.

It had something to do with the snatching of the bouquet, her insistence on hiding. Didn’t it? With the fear of being stripped as bare as the characters she created and then exposed. If she took control — even in ways that felt a little out of control — it meant she could manipulate what other people discovered about her, and what they didn’t.

Wasn’t he right? He felt that if he could understand it, he could help her undo it, because surely she must wish it to be undone. And if he wasn’t right, he didn’t want to know this, because it meant that the Avery who wrote the stories was the false one.

It was still early, only a little after nine, when they drove down Narragansett Avenue. People were already jogging or strolling along the Walk. Stewart and Avery got out of the car and approached a sign that said “Forty Steps.”

From the brochure they’d been given at the inn, Stewart read the item describing the way servants from nearby mansions used to gather at this stone staircase, during Newport’s Golden Age, to dance and play the Irish music that reminded them of home.

“This says it’s especially dramatic just after a storm,” he continued, “when the waves crash into the rocks.” He turned to Avery. “Want to go down?”

She shrugged. “If there’d just been a big storm, maybe. But it doesn’t look like much now. Forty steps? Big deal. Let’s just keep walking. This way looks nice.” She started off toward the right.

“Wait,” Stewart said. He was aware that he was beginning to panic, though he knew that revealing this to Avery would be a mistake. “Please, honey? Can we just go down once and see what’s there?”

“I really don’t want to,” she said. “Stewart? Come on, let’s go.”

But he couldn’t make himself move from where he was standing. There was too much at stake. “Just do me this favor,” he said quietly. “Please?”

But she would not do so, even though (he saw) she understood what was making him beg her. She enjoyed denying him this; he could see that, too. As she started walking along the cliff by herself, he thought about running after her and confessing. If you don’t do this, something bad will happen. And he knew what it would be.

But she had already moved on ahead of him. She picked up a little stone and threw it into the water, where it drowned without making a sound.

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Jessica Treadway is a native of Albany, New York, currently living in Boston. She received her bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany before working as a news and feature reporter for United Press International. After studying for her master’s degree in the creative writing program at Boston University, she held a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and taught at Tufts University before joining the faculty at Emerson College, where she is a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing.

Her story collection Please Come Back To Me received the Flannery O’Connor Award For Short Fiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2010. Her other books are Absent Without Leave, a collection of stories (Delphinium Books/ Simon & Schuster, 1992), and And Give You Peace, a novel (Graywolf Press, 2001). Her fiction has been published in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Glimmer Train, AGNI, Five Points, and other journals, and has been cited multiple times in The Best American Short Stories annual anthology.

In addition to her fiction, Jessica has published essays and book reviews for publications including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Glamour, and The Huffington Post. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A former member of the Board of Directors of PEN-New England, where she served as co-chair of the Freedom to Write Committee, she lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with her husband, Philip Holland.