Free Robbie's Wife by Russell Hill Page A

against the door jamb, tea mug in hand, saying she fancied me the afternoon I came down, hung over, into her kitchen and I could see her gliding across the floor, rising up on the balls of her feet as if she were floating, and I thought no, this is some old man’s fantasy, don’t make anything more of this than there is. Let it be a scene in a movie script you’re writing, nothing more. Don’t make a fool of yourself. I think that’s the thing I feared most at that moment. That I would say or do something and she would think of me as an aging bumbler, that I would miss all of the signals and be thought of as a stupid old man who had the arrogance to think that an attractive younger woman would suddenly want him, and I resolved to go back to the farm and pack my things and move on. But something in the back of my head told me I would not do that.
    I turned again to the wet road and began to walk, this time more slowly. A track went off the road into the trees and I walked along it and found, to my surprise, an encampment consisting of two old buses that looked as if they had been municipal coaches at one time, both with metal smokestacks, a thin greasy smoke trailing off. The windows were boarded up and there were several old cars parked, along with crude lean-tos of corrugated iron and tree limbs against the buses and there were old chairs, various kinds of junk, and in the midst of it a vintage Mercedes Benz, obviously in good condition. I stood there, taking it in, and then I realized that there was a figure just beyond the buses who was looking at me, a dark man with long hair and a beard who was motionless so that he blended in with the trees and he was watching me and I turned and went back toward the road, feeling his stare on my back.
    I went back down the road and followed the signposting into the village and on through the village, past the post office shop where two women, deep in animated conversation, stopped talking and watched me and as I passed one of them said, “Afternoon,” and I nodded and I knew they, too, were watching me as I went along the road out of the village. I was the American who was staying with Maggie and Robbie. No doubt everyone in the village knew that by now. Perhaps even the dark man at the encampment knew who I was. And how much else did they know? Did they know that I was in love with Maggie and that I had held her naked body that afternoon and she was there in the kitchen at this very moment, rising on her bare feet, waiting for me to come in out of the gathering evening?
    At that moment, walking the wet pavement in front of the post office store, nodding to the village women and trying to bring the image of Maggie back into focus, I wasn’t aware that I had chosen the perilous fork in the road. It wasn’t until much later after everything had unraveled that I would begin to understand what had happened between Maggie and me. And by then I wouldn’t be sure whether I had fallen in love with Maggie or I had fallen in love with the idea of Maggie. I often turned over in my head what she saw in me. Eventually I came to believe that Maggie was never in love with me in the same way that I was in love with her. I came at a moment in her life when she was filled with unease. Her life with Robbie had become something expected with no secrets or surprises and I was something different and I was from far away. I don’t think she ever believed that I would fall in love with her and I know she had no idea I would threaten her very existence. Oh, I don’t mean Maggie and I weren’t in love. I think she loved me on some level that was fraught with peril as if she wanted to walk a tightrope, see if she could tiptoe across a chasm that was opening in her life. It was easier for me. I was flattered by her attention, drawn into her eroticism, swept away by passion that I had forgotten I ever had. She had awakened me from my sleepwalk, and still in the midst of a dream I did terrible