The River House by Margaret Leroy

party where a stranger comes up behind you and runs his hands down your
     sides. Or in an afternoon office, where a man who smells of smoky rooms holds your eyes for a little too long and pushes up
     his shirtsleeves. Yes, especially that: just thinking of it.
    And then Greg had said, “Ginnie’s ever so tired, aren’t you, darling? Bringing up the girls—she has her hands full. You know,
     life’s very busy. …”
    And the counselor said yes, that it would probably all change when our daughters were older. I felt a kind of despair then,
     as they both insisted that our problem was not such an issue really and perfectly predictable. I knew such bleakness, in the
     room with the African violet and the toothpaste walls. Feeling that this was beyond repair, that we’d reached the end of the
     line.
    After that she retreated to safer ground—to our relationship history and the story of how we’d met. She sat back in her chair
     now; she seemed to be more at ease. I understood what she was seeking to do—to unearth or recover whatever had originally
     drawn us together. I might well have done the same in her place. Though I didn’t see how this could help us. You can’t go
     back there.
    I told her how we’d met at a dinner party—just giving the outline of the evening. It was a Burns Night dinner, held by some
     friends of Max’s, to which Max had wangled me an invite. We were all told to bring a song or a poem, and I fell in love with
     Greg when he was reading aloud.
    It was done with panache—a long refectory table, a proper damask tablecloth, the whole place shimmering with candles. The
     men wore dinner jackets; the women were in long dresses. I remember one woman who had a dress of some slippery cloth that
     was tight across her breasts, and a mass of blond hair pinned high up on her head. There was whiskey that tasted wonderfully
     of woodsmoke.
    But even after the whiskey, most of us were a little embarrassed reading the poems we’d brought. Mostly we chose comic poems,
     keeping the emotional temperature down so as not to seem pretentious. Max read something by Craig Raine. I read a poem by
     Wendy Cope, which was short and a little poignant. The blond woman didn’t read anything, though toward the end of the evening
     she pulled out her hair clip and let down all her hair, shaking her head a little as it fell, so it rippled and gleamed in
     the candlelight. Max watched intently. Someone took out a guitar and sang a Tom Lehrer song.
    I didn’t really notice Greg ’til he started to read. He was rather too thin for my taste, and was seated far away from me,
     up at the other end of the table. But he had a beguiling speaking voice—a subtle, cultured baritone. He read something obscure
     and Celtic, a strange tale of enchantment, of four companions who were walking in their lands when a mist fell; and when it
     lifted the land was bright, but everything they knew had disappeared, all their flocks and herds and houses and the people
     who were with them; there was no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling, so only the four of them remained alone.
     The narrative was disjointed, dreamlike, as though the storyteller had stitched together many different strands. There were
     curses and metamorphoses and one thing becoming another, and magical objects and animals—a shining white boar, a golden bowl.
     Greg read with complete confidence, expecting to be listened to. It was a bold thing to do, to read something so rich and
     elusive. We heard him in attentive silence. Afterward, before we clapped, there was a little collective sigh of pleasure.
    At the end of the evening, as people started to drift away, I went to him and asked about the story. I was warm with the whiskey,
     fluid, more forthcoming than usual. It was from
The Mabinogion
, a collection of medieval Welsh stories, he said. He lent me his copy, wrote his phone number in it, insisted that I had
     to give it back when I’d finished. I