Dorothea Deverell stared blankly. “She did? Agnes Carpenter?”
“Wasn’t that kind of her?” Colin Asch said. “Even if she was expiating a guilty conscience.”
“Yes,” Dorothea said slowly. “It was kind of her.” She added, not knowing what she meant, “Many of the most generous things in life, I suppose, are done to expiate guilty consciences. Which doesn’t make them any—”
“Any less generous.”
There was an uneasy pause. Dorothea offered her visitor a second glass of sherry, which he accepted with thanks—“It’s delicious!” She had the distinct impression that he was turning over in his mind a question of some blunt direct sort regarding Charles Carpenter, and she wanted neither to hear it nor answer it.
She said, “Ginny was telling me you’ve found a new apartment?”
Colin Asch nodded and caressed the metal clamp in his ear. “It’s called Normandy Court, do you know it? No? I’m on the eleventh floor, overlooking a little park. A friend—a new friend—is sort of helping me finance it, until I get settled in at L.L. Loomis. That’s her Porsche I’m driving too—though maybe you didn’t see me drive up in it?—a 1986 model I have an option to buy if I like it. Sweet little car, and fantastic apartment. Which is why I’m here, Miss Deverell, I mean Dorothea—I hope you’ll come to see me there, and let me make dinner for you? I was thinking some sort of celebration dinner, you know, in honor of your promotion? I’d invite Aunt Ginny and Uncle Martin too, they’re such wonderful people, and anyone else you’d like, and my friend Mrs. Hunt, Susannah Hunt, I guess you know her?—sort of?—she says she knows you. Just a small intimate dinner. Please say yes.”
“Why, yes—of course,” Dorothea said slowly. “If—that is—”
“It would mean so much to me! It would be such an honor!”
“If you don’t think it would be too much—”
“How does March fifth sound to you? A Saturday? Eight P.M.?”
“As far as I know that date is—”
“The actual reason I have to postpone the dinner so long,” Colin Asch said with a pinched, pained look, “is I can’t depend upon the furniture people to get the furniture to me before then. This beautiful glass and chrome dining room set—first they promised it in three weeks, now they’ve extended it to five, the bastards! And this beautiful Halogen lamp I bought on sale, right off the floor, marked down from $460 to $399, a real bargain, when they delivered it the base was scratched—so I refused to pay the C.O.D. charges and sent it back. But I still want it. Some items are in the apartment, like a nice off-white sofa, actually sort of resembling the one I’m sitting on, but others aren’t, so Susannah has lent me some stuff of hers in the interim. But by March fifth everything should be perfect. By March fifth everything will be perfect.”
Dorothea said weakly, “But I can’t allow you to go to any trouble, Colin. Or spend much money—”
“How can it be trouble, Dorothea,” Colin Asch asked, regarding her with hurt eyes, “if I am doing it for you?”
Dorothea was holding her sherry glass in both hands, to prevent its trembling. She thought, what does he want from me?—and why? With a pang of chagrin she remembered the Christmas present, the unexpected and, indeed, unwanted gift; and meant to mention it to Colin Asch before he left the house. And Susannah Hunt: how had this ingenuous young man become involved with her? Dorothea Deverell could claim no firsthand knowledge of the woman but had heard startling tales, over the years, revolving around her legendary rapacity for men (including young men) and her squabbles, legal and otherwise, with her former husband, a prominent local physician. Once, at a cocktail party, Dorothea had spent an anguished half hour observing, out of the corner of her eye, her beloved Charles Carpenter in a spirited, laughter-punctuated conversation with the glamorous divorcée; to her mortification she had happened to glance across the room to see Agnes Carpenter similarly observing the couple … staring at them with a Gorgon’s unwavering eye. How sisterly she’d felt toward poor Agnes in that instant! How united in their mutual helplessness!
She had never said a word about the episode to Charles Carpenter, nor had he said a word to her.
Now she said to Colin Asch, in a neutral voice, “Are you no longer seeing that young woman from the television station? What was her name?—with the lovely black hair—”
Colin Asch said vaguely, “That didn’t work out.”
Dorothea said, “Didn’t it? I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be sorry! Really—don’t be,” Colin Asch said. He grinned, and uncrossed his long legs, and ran a hand roughly through his hair. “Hartley was too intense. She wanted too much from me. We just weren’t, you know, each other’s destiny. Also, Dorothea,” he said, lowering his voice, “she had a cocaine habit. An expensive one.”
“Cocaine!”
There was an awkward pause, and Colin set down his sherry glass and rose to his feet. He consulted the platinum watch on his wrist and said, reluctantly, “Well, I suppose I should be leaving.” Then, in virtually the same breath, he said, “Your house is so beautiful, Dorothea! Do you think I could see the rest of it?”
Dorothea heard herself say, “Of course.”
Her mind leapt ahead to the upstairs: in what condition was it? Must she show her impetuous young friend everything—even her bedroom? Her closets?
Seeing her expression Colin said, “Unless it’s too much trouble? I mean—you must be exhausted from your long day.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t too much trouble.” Dorothea laughed.
And then the telephone rang.
She excused herself and took the call in the dining room, absentmindedly watching her visitor through a mirror—in fact, through two mirrors—without his awareness. The caller was a woman friend named Merle, an intelligent, rather lonely married woman with whom Dorothea Deverell sometimes went to the ballet, and though Dorothea tried to cut the conversation short it seemed that Merle wanted to talk: wanted rather urgently to talk. “May I call you back? I have a visitor,” Dorothea said. She saw, in the living room, Colin Asch in his boxy Harris tweed moving with astonishing swiftness from place to place, like a big feral cat on its hind legs … scanning the books in her bookcase, checking the things on her fireplace mantel, lifting and setting down a little ivory box on a table … trying, with a practiced twist of his wrist, the lock of her terrace door … tiptoeing to the foot of the staircase and peering up, frowning, into the shadows. (But why? Dorothea thought, fascinated. I am not up there: I am down here.) The inside of her mouth seemed to be coated with a thin scummy fear, and it was with relief that she saw the tall blond figure pass out of the mirrors’ range. She murmured to Merle in as kindly a voice as possible, “I’ll have to call you back later. I can’t talk now.”
When she returned to the living room, however, Colin Asch was awaiting her with a quizzical, radiant smile. He held an art book of color plates by the American artist Alice Neel—“This is an original talent!” he said. He queried Dorothea Deverell about Neel, and Dorothea told him some of what she knew and offered to lend him the book—which he accepted with gratitude. He was so eager to learn, so much the ingenuous student, her suspicions of him seemed unwarranted.
Indeed, in the face of the young man’s dazzling personality it was difficult to form any negative judgment of him at all.
Dorothea was telling Colin Asch about the background of her trio of dwarf Portuguese orange trees in their green ceramic pots, arranged along the southerly wall of the dining room—the tour of the house seemed, mercifully, for the moment at least, forgotten, or held in abeyance—when the telephone rang another time. A spasm of anger ran over the young man’s face, but he clenched his jaws and said, “You’re a very popular woman, Dorothea!—or I’ve come at the wrong time.”
“I’ll tell him to call back,” Dorothea said apologetically.
But it was Charles Carpenter, with whom she did want to speak, as he wanted, it seemed quite urgently, to speak with Dorothea. Might he drop
by, Charles asked, on his way home? He was still in Boston, and he’d had a very difficult day.
“Is something wrong?” Dorothea asked, alarmed. “What is it?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you, Dorothea,” Charles Carpenter said.
Dorothea said softly, “Is it—?”
“About you, and me? Yes it is, dear,” Charles said. “And Agnes.”
Dorothea Deverell, standing in the darkened dining room, the telephone receiver pressed against her ear, could make no reply. She knows, she was thinking calmly. Now it will be all over between Charles and me.
Charles said, “Is someone there, Dorothea?—with you?”
Dorothea, staring sightlessly at the floor, pointedly not looking into the mirrors, murmured vaguely, “No, not really.”
Her lover did not register this ambiguity, or subtlety; he said, “Then I’ll be seeing you soon, Dorothea. In about an hour.”
Dorothea said, dumbly, “Tonight? Ah, yes. Of course.”
They said goodbye; and like a sleepwalker Dorothea returned to her visitor, who was standing, as if at attention, in exactly the same spot he’d been standing when the telephone rang. This time, Dorothea suspected that he had been listening to her conversation. She could not recall if she had spoken her lover’s name and was too exhausted suddenly to care.
Colin Asch was examining with reverence a Chagall lithograph of sleeping lovers framed and hung prominently on Dorothea’s wall, a gift from Michel Deverell’s grandfather, on the occasion of their wedding; a mysterious and beautiful work of art at which, in truth, Dorothea Deverell rarely glanced, it had become so familiar to her with the years and was, over all, so melancholy in its associations. The artist had signed Marc Chagall in pencil, in the lower right-hand corner, and it was to this signature that Colin Asch pointed, exclaiming, with touching naïveté, “He really did sign it himself, didn’t he! This must be a real collector’s item!”
Dorothea said, “It’s only a lithograph—one of many copies.”
She told Colin that the telephone call had been an important one, and that someone was coming over that evening to see her; she was sorry to be unable to take him on a tour of her house, but another time, perhaps …?
“Yes,” said Colin. “I understand.”
Dorothea felt like a guilty wife or courtesan in a Molière farce, ushering out one male to clear the way for another: though why she should feel guilty, and why such circumstances, edged with hysteria, might be imagined as crude farce, she could not have said. God knows there was nothing amusing about it.
At the door Colin Asch said, “You won’t forget March fifth, Dorothea, will you? Eight P.M.? I’ll be sending out invitations as soon as I can, but please mark the date.”
“I will,” Dorothea promised. “I will mark the date.”
She could make out, at the curb, in the dim light of a streetlamp, Colin Asch’s borrowed sports car. Small, sleek, classy. Dorothea feared he would impulsively invite her to go for a ride in it, and that, against her will, she would hear herself accept.
On the front step Colin Asch shook her hand vigorously, clasping it just a beat or two too long. Dorothea said carefully, “What exactly do you want of me, Colin?”
It was the first time in her life she had ever spoken so, to any human being.
Colin Asch blinked at her as if she had slapped him. He said, hurt, “I don’t ‘want’ anything of you, Dorothea. It just makes me happy to think—I mean, to know—”
“Yes?”
“—that you are here. That you exist.” He spoke slowly and painfully, not meeting Dorothea’s eye. “That, you know, our lives are … parallel.”
Dorothea waited, but he said nothing further. Tears of relief sprang into her eyes. She said, squeezing his hand, “That’s very kind of you, Colin. You’re a remarkable person. I feel the same way about you—you’ve put it very gracefully.”
“Then that’s everything,” Colin Asch said gravely, backing away.
She watched him hurry to his car, knowing that, before he climbed inside, he would turn and wave to her, just once. As he did.
She was thinking shrewdly, Parallel lines never meet.
Awaiting Charles Carpenter, Dorothea Deverell changed from her gray jersey dress to a plaid woolen skirt and an oversized Shetland sweater and put on low-heeled shoes. She carried the vase of tall flame-colored gladioli out of the living room, where they were far too exclamatory, and walked from room to room before setting them down in a twilit corner of the dining room. Then she made herself a cup of strong tea and stood in the kitchen drinking it. She was too agitated to sit down; seated, she would hear her heartbeat too clearly. She was thinking that her life of nearly the past decade was coming to an end and that, for all its frustration, intermittent humiliation, and heartbreak, it had been a comfortable sort of life. She had been happy, really—less a married man’s mistress than a married man’s second, and far more companionable, wife. Her mother’s words rose to her memory. “You go on for years and years doing the same things, not even thinking how happy you are, then suddenly one day everything is ended”—this sad, stoic observation on the occasion, when Dorothea was a senior in high school, of her father’s first operation for cancer. Now Dorothea thought, Yes. But I will have to bear it.
And then, to her astonishment, within the hour Charles Carpenter brought her entirely unexpected news: “I’ve spoken to her, Dorothea. I’ve told her!”
He hadn’t yet removed his overcoat, which smelled of cold, and was slowly removing his hat, a gray fedora Dorothea Deverell thought very handsome.
He said, “Did you hear me, Dorothea? I’ve told her.”
“Told her—?”
“I mean, I’ve begun to tell her. At last!”
Dorothea stared at Charles Carpenter, whom she had rarely seen so excited; so agitated. She backed off, rather frightened—then stepped forward into the man’s hard, clumsy embrace—they grasped each other like guilty children and staggered together in Dorothea’s little foyer.
Charles was saying triumphantly, “Last night—and this afternoon, over the telephone! I’ve made a beginning, at last! Now there is no turning back!”
As if yoked together they moved blunderingly into Dorothea’s kitchen, where, uninvited, Charles Carpenter located a bottle of Irish whiskey in one of the cupboards and poured himself and Dorothea drinks. In the living room they sat on the sofa amid the scattered pillows, clasping hands as Charles Carpenter talked and Dorothea Deverell listened wide-eyed and disbelieving.
“Out of nowhere suddenly—we weren’t arguing; our silences are far, far worse than speech—I simply said to her, ‘We don’t love each other, Agnes, why do we remain together?’ and she cast me a look of absolute loathing as if I’d violated a sort of secret between us, and when I tried to continue she got up and left the room, as she has left at other times, simply walking away—as if I didn’t exist. But I followed her, and insisted we talk, and we did, or I did. I mentioned the possibility of a separation, and she screamed at me, ‘I’ll never consent. I’ll kill us both first!’ Later, she accused me of wanting to kill her; I knew she wasn’t well, she said; and what would my parents—‘your precious parents’—say; and my business partners—‘those fellow hypocrites.’ She slammed out of the room, and I didn’t follow her for a while; then I went upstairs where she was waiting but she’d locked the door, and—and so it went. For hours! Literally for hours!” He stared at Dorothea, smiling strangely; he was grasping her hand in his so hard she winced in pain. Several times he said, wonderingly, “But I’ve made a beginning, at last. I’ve made a beginning—at last.”
Dorothea said faintly, “I’m so glad, Charles.”
“My parents will be very upset, and I dread telling them, but it can’t be helped. They’ve tyrannized me—us—with their good, sweet, uncomplaining, exemplary natures for too long. Being good, you know, is a kind of blackmail, it holds the rest of us in thrall. Agnes has always known this—known she could rely upon my �
�good’ nature, my fidelity, my absurd sense of conscience. Ah, yes, she has known! She has capitalized! Now she can enjoy a sort of martyr’s pleasure, a mean bitter pleasure, casting me as the villain, a ‘typical middle-aged asshole’—those were her words—and reaping sympathy and pity, or so she thinks. As if any of our friends are hers, any longer! As if anyone but her husband has been able to tolerate her, for years!”
So Charles Carpenter talked; and Dorothea Deverell, in a trance of amazement, listened. Could she believe what she was hearing? But what was she hearing? In the midst of a passionate tirade on the subject of Agnes’ excessive drinking, Dorothea interrupted to ask if the word “divorce” had been uttered, and if Agnes had said anything about consulting a lawyer—and Charles Carpenter stared at her, as if unhearing.
He said, passing a hand over his eyes, “She will retain a lawyer who’s an enemy of mine—I know it.”
Dorothea said, “Our relationship should be kept a secret for the time being, shouldn’t it?”
“Dorothea, I don’t see how it can,” Charles said. He had removed his suit coat; now he tugged irritably at his tie. A fine film of perspiration glistened on his face. “I thought, you know, that that was the point of—all this: my speaking to her, bringing things out into the open. Perhaps, in terms of timing, with your appointment and all at the Institute, it isn’t ideal, but as I said I hadn’t planned it—just suddenly out of nowhere, out of our damned glacial silence, I began talking and haven’t been able to stop. You know I love you, and I want to marry you; surely you don’t expect me to deny you? To Agnes or to anyone?”
Dorothea had to resist the childlike impulse to shut her eyes tight. She said, “But have you told her, Charles? About—?”
“One of the things she screamed at me was, ‘There’s another woman, isn’t there?’—and I didn’t answer; I managed somehow to deflect the question, but a while later she returned to it, and said, ‘Is it Dorothea Deverell?’ and I’m afraid, Dorothea, under the pressure of the moment I said ‘No.’ I went on to say, ‘The deadness in our marriage has nothing to do with any third party, as you certainly know,’ and that distracted her enough to—Dorothea? Are you all right?”
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